As the 90-kilogram Saturn V replica rocket climbed thousands of metres into the southern Alberta sky, Shane Weatherill was thinking about the hundreds of hours it took him and his team to make the flight a reality.
“When the motor finally lit and the rocket took off, it was just really, really rewarding to see all that work doing exactly what we had planned it to do,” he said from the launch site Sunday.
Weatherill and three other Calgarians, David Buhler, Ian Stephens and John Glasswick, worked on the 5.5 metre rocket, dubbed the ‘Kronos Pente,’ for about 18 months. They wanted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that first brought man to the moon in 1969.
“The Saturn V is kind of the poster rocket of the space program,” said Weatherill. “It may be a 50-year-old rocket, but it’s still the largest rocket that has ever been built by mankind.”
The team built the high-powered replica in a garage in the community of Beddington, spending hours nearly every Sunday to design, build and assemble the model. On Saturday afternoon, at a launch site south of Lethbridge, the five motors on the ‘Kronos Pente’ propelled it into the sky before parachuting back down to earth.
Mission accomplished, though exactly how high it went is still being determined.
“We had a number of flight computers on it and each of them record how high the rocket had gone. Several of them recorded 4,000 feet (1,219 metres),” Weatherill explained. “Another set of them recorded 8,000 feet (2,438 metres), so we need to pull all of the data together and find out which one was accurate.”
It’s not the first blast off for members of the team.
Buhler and Stephens helped build the ‘Dauphin Rocket’ in 2003. The type-O rocket was the largest amateur rocket in Canada at the time and soared 1,600 metres into the air. It now lives at Calgary’s Hangar Museum.
The team doesn’t plan on stopping its rocket building now.
“Certainly we’re already about coming up with something else."
