According to a report monitored by BBC, a team of engineering students from the University of Leeds is currently combing the waters off Scotland’s coast, searching for a rocket that vanished after what should have been a triumphant launch.
For nine months, members of the Leeds University Rocketry Association (LURA) put in long hours to design and build a 13-foot rocket they christened Gryphon II (G2), with hopes of sending it 50,000 feet — about 15,240 metres — into the sky and into the record books.
The launch itself went off without hitch. G2 roared off from a military training ground at Cape Wrath, in the remote northern tip of Scotland, last Friday. But things took an unexpected turn afterwards — instead of splashing down at the location the team had calculated, the rocket disappeared without trace.
Now, the engineering students are working with a local fisherman to try and locate their missing creation somewhere along Scotland’s rugged coastline.
Speaking on the search efforts, team member Seb Bull described the experience as frustrating.
“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s a large area of sea,” he said.
The stakes are high for the team. They had set their sights on breaking the existing UK amateur altitude record of 45,000 feet, but without recovering the rocket — and crucially, the flight data stored in its onboard computers — the UK Rocketry Association cannot verify whether they actually pulled it off.
Bull, alongside teammates Toby Thomson and Manon Kerr, has appealed to members of the public to keep an eye out, believing G2 may have drifted onto the north Highland coastline near Durness, or been carried further out to the Orkney or Shetland islands.
According to the students, contact with the rocket’s GPS tracker was lost shortly after liftoff. Worse still, G2 failed to deploy on its parachute into the sea as planned, where a recovery boat had been positioned and waiting.
“We expect it’s had a successful flight and is sat out there floating on the sea,” Bull said, still hopeful that the mission wasn’t a total loss.
Thomson, describing what searchers should look out for, said the rocket is hard to miss.
“It’s bright orange, it says the University of Leeds on it, so it’s pretty distinctive,” he said, urging anyone who comes across it to reach out to the team directly.
Before the launch, the engineering students had done everything by the book — securing all necessary clearances from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), since Cape Wrath doubles as a weapons training zone for the British military.
LURA is a student-run rocketry outfit at the University of Leeds, known for designing, building and flying small sub-orbital rockets. The group says its broader mission is to groom a new generation of engineers, astronauts and technicians — the kind who might one day be part of missions to Mars.
This isn’t G2’s first outing either. The carbon fibre rocket had previously flown at supersonic speed, reaching 20,000 feet above ground level during a test at the Fairlie Moor Rocket Site in Largs.
For now, the rocket remains missing, somewhere between the Scottish mainland and the Northern Isles, while a group of determined engineering students hold on to hope that it will eventually wash up — bright orange and unmistakable — on a beach somewhere, with its precious data still intact,