On Monday the 23rd June 2025 I set out on the longest drive of my life, a 12 hour long expedition from Leeds to the northern tip of Scotland. Now 12 hours is a really long drive, but it pales in comparison to the rest of the journey that took us there. The Gryphon II project had taken 2 years of work, hundreds of collective hours of engineering, manufacturing, programming, and two previous test flights.

The goal, from the beginning, has been singular. To break the UK amateur rocketry altitude record.

To do this, we built Gryphon II. A 3 metre tall carbon fibre supersonic sounding rocket designed to fly to 45,000ft at speeds of up to Mach 2.5. Higher than a Boeing 737 at cruising altitude, faster than Concorde.

To clarify, when I say “we” built Gryphon II, this rocket is a product of an extremely transient team. No singular person worked on this project from beginning to end. By and large, the team that designed it was different from the team that built it which was different from the team that upgraded it and prepared it for flight. This is perhaps the hardest part of student engineering. I had the privilege of joining the project during the middle of the manufacturing phase, but more on that later.

Gryphon II is an incredibly cool rocket. I think even our friendly competition at other rocketry teams would appreciate that. A fully modular rocket, using a system of tightening manacle rings inspired by the British Skylark sounding rocket. An absurdly aerodynamic rocket with an accompanying custom launch system to fit. It had previously sucessfully launched to 3000ft in April 2024, and (mostly succesffully) to 20,000ft in April 2025.

Working on rockets is always a high stress environment, things go wrong, but we fix them and we launch. Building rockets is a fantastic way to learn about aerodynamics, aerostructures, electronics, programming, etc. But it’s an even better way to learn how to work under pressure, solve problems, work in a team, and (to quote one of LURA’s 5 key values) get shit done.

My main contributions to this rocket was design and programming (not manufacture, that was left to the real electrical engineers) of our custom Hamilton Flight Computer, as well as creating Helios, our custom ground station program for viewing live telemetry data off the rocket during flight.

Now, if you have ever been involved in high power amateur rocketry you know exactly what happens the day before every launch. No matter how prepared you are, how many years you work on a rocket, you will encounter some kind of fatal issue the day before launch. It is an inevitability. Our issue? During some last minute vacuum chamber tests one of our flight computers started firing off the parachutes early. This meant that the avionics team (including lucky ol me) had to stay behind and pull a 14 hour shift to get our issues sorted then immediately hop in the car and drive 12 hours north. This is what we typically call “Type 2 fun”.

It’s hard to overstate just how much of an anomaly this flight attempt was. Due to legal and land restrictions, the previous record (set by the University of Sheffield’s HELEN rocket in 2019) flew from Spaceport America in New Mexico, USA. We wanted to take a different path, the goal from the beginning has been to launch Gryphon II from UK soil. This motiviation, partly fuelled by national pride but mostly due to not wanting to hand our engineering budget to BA, creates some facinatingly annoying legal and technical hurdles.

To put this into perspective, the previous highest launch from UK soil was to 21,000ft, there is just vanishingly little precedent for a launch of this scale by amateurs in the UK. Despite this, our team managed to become the first to both find a suitable launch site and gain airspace permission from the CAA for the flight.

The site was Cape Wrath. The most northwesterly point of Britain. This alone was worth the trip, we stayed in the (apparently famous amongst hiking people) 2 story bothy! I was stationed up at CLIFFCOM overlooking the launch site, the views were stunning.

We launched, it was awesome, 0-2000mph in 3.6 seconds.

Sadly, the launch was not to be. We had a structural failure at burnout and the rocket basically disintegrated into a million pieces and scattered across the Scottish highlands.

Despite this, I’m still incredibly proud of what this team has done. It was an honour to be a part of this launch and the skills I’ve learned being part of this project have been invaluable.

Oh well! Sometimes that’s the way it goes. On to Gryphon III 🫡