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Video: Horsforth School pupils win rocket competiton
America may have seen off the might of the old Soviet Union in the race to put the first man on the Moon...but Uncle Sam's modern-day space cadets didn't fare so well in a rocket-building competition against four teenagers from Horsforth.
Horsforth School pupils Ben Rayner, Robin Turnbull, Leo Nicholls and Ashley Smith won out against a student side from North Carolina in the competition, held at the Farnborough International Airshow.
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Both teams had to send a three-foot-high rocket at least 750 feet into the air – and then bring it safely back to earth within 45 seconds.
The youngsters also had to pull off the landing without breaking a hen's egg which had been stowed inside their gunpowder-powered craft.
Penalty points were given for every foot the teams were away from the target height and for every second they were away from the target time.
Horsforth's purpose-built rocket reached a height of 758ft and touched down only fractionally outside the 45-second target.
The school's head of science, David Mulvaney, said the victory was just reward for months of work by his pupils.
They qualified for the showdown by taking top spot in a UK rocket-building competition at Charterhouse independent school in Surrey.
Their opponents at Farnborough had won a similar contest in the US.
Mr Mulvaney said: "I feel very proud of what the boys have done. The Americans have been doing it for longer than us and their competition is much bigger.
"At the start of the project I was overlooking what the boys were doing.
"Within weeks, though, they were becoming the experts and I was having to go to them for help when I was building a rocket with the year seven and eight classes!"
Mr Mulvaney also paid tribute to the support the boys received from Andy Willis, who works with the Yorkshire Forward-backed Space Connections education programme which helped to organise the UK competition.
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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