THE NORTH Galway town of Tuam has laid claim to being the launchpad for the largest rocket to leave Irish soil.
The five metre rocket was built by American Erick Stenzel, who hosted the first meeting of the Tripoli Rocketry Association of Ireland in Tuam at the weekend.
Some 50 rockets were launched at the event under licence from the Department of Justice, using rocket fuel imported from Canada.
Mr Stenzel is preparing an entry for next year’s Young Scientist Exhibition with secondary school students from St Jarlath’s College in Tuam, Co Galway.
“The fuel used to power the rockets is the same as what is used for the space shuttle, and when the motor hit it with 400 pounds of force it pushed it up into the sky,” said Mr Stenzel, from California, who is married and living in Tuam.
For the past 12 months he has been teaching model rocketry to pupils in primary and secondary schools around Ireland.
His rocket soared to a height of almost 1,000 feet before the parachute was activated and it safely came back to Earth at the launching site at Cloonkeen, near Tuam.
Some of the smaller rockets launched by others reached even greater heights, with one sent up by Colin Fitzsimons from Dublin soaring as high as 4,000 feet – which is understood to be the highest ever for a rocket launched in Ireland.
Mr Stenzel imports the balsa wood and other parts for the rockets from the US and assembles them at his home. A computer engineer, he trained in model rocketry in his native California and last Easter introduced it to pupils at St Patrick’s NS Tuam, which his children attend.
Of the Young Scientist exhibition entry, he said: “While our planning is in early days, they [students] will be tasked with putting together a rocket mission. They will have to design experiments as payload for inclusion in an electronics bay of a rocket [which] they then must design and build to carry their payload to the desired altitude.”
He said they must recover their rocket, download and analyse all its data, and generate reports.