Fly me to the Moon

Build a Rocket Boys

In the first year at Hartnell Comprehensive, David's performance was above average, especially in the science subjects, and also in the craft subjects, woodwork and metalwork.

David thought that it was called woodwork to cater for all those pupils who struggled to spell carpentry correctly. To begin with, the whole class was required to make the same thing, a pencil case. The design featured bevelled edges and a swivel lid. The overall appearance seemed vaguely familiar to David. If ever he needed to manufacture a coffin with a swivel lid, then all he needed to do was scale up his pencil box to produce an acceptable, functional, substitute.

Later, all the boys who liked fishing made themselves tackle boxes that doubled up as seats. David had no interest in fishing, but built a box anyway thinking it would come in useful, and he learnt how to make dovetail joints which looked really smart.

In metalwork, to begin with, they each had to make a coat-hook, and then the anglers set about making rod rests which David by-passed, seeing no other practical use for such a simple one trick pony. It was in the workshop that David first encountered lathes, mills, and drilling machines. Whilst the freshwater fishermen were trying to think of more angling related products to make, David was producing better components for his rockets and improving their release mechanisms.

At home, he had free run of the shed, and providing that he used the lawnmower reasonably frequently, his mother had little reason to venture there, although he doubted that she would even recognise the several models of rocket present for what they were. The lawnmower was manual, and cutting the lawn was a heavy task for an eleven going on twelve-year-old of his stature. Electric mowers couldn't come fast enough for him. For his efforts though, he received pocket money that augmented the money that he received for his recently acquired paper round.

The shed was large compared to those of the neighbours, and before his father had disappeared when he was seven (his mother never did say where, or why, just that he would not be back and David never learnt any more than that), he had put up a large workbench and equipped it with various tools, many hung upon the walls on a shadow-board, which in his haste to leave he had left behind. David had cleaned the rust and the spider's webs from them and put them to good use. His dad had run electricity to the shed to power his tools and installed a pair of strip lights in the ceiling.

The spiders that had moved in during the interim were of less use than the tools, although one of the larger arachnids had become the first astronaut to fly in one of David's rockets. Whether the spider had abandoned the rocket when the parachute was deployed, or made a break for it after the controlled landing to avoid further persecution, David was never to know.

Amongst the paraphernalia that David found in the shed was a small gas bottle about eighteen inches long which was similar to the oxygen bottles seen in hospitals. As well as space travel David had other adventures in mind, one of which was to sail around the world like Francis Chichester and explore the oceans like the Frenchman, Jacques Cousteau, whom he had seen on the television. The real intrigue of Cousteau was the underwater breathing apparatus that he used.

There had been much talk in the aftermath of the moon-landing about humanity knowing less about the ocean depths than outer space. Many people thought that the money spent sending men to the moon could have been better spent furthering our understanding of the planet on which we lived. David could see no reason not to pursuit both adventures. Star Trek boldly went where no man had gone before, and David thought that this could be done equally well both on Earth as well as in outer space

He also noticed that there was a similarity between the empty gas cylinder in the shed and that which Jacques Cousteau used to explore the ocean depths, albeit that David's was only about half the size. He knew what he wanted to do, but didn't know how to do it.