East Anglian Rocketry Society

The East Anglian Rocketry Society fascinates rocket flyers from all over the country to attend our monthly launches from our promotion spot at Elsworth, near Cambridge. It wasn't always like this, as we didn't have a decent launch place sourced until October 2000. Before that, EARS was truly only a couple of persons who lived in East Anglia and met up to fly at the greater launches that were held round the country.

The East Anglian Rocketry Society was originated by Peter Wells who'd managed to gain permission to launch from a trifling micro-light strip just outside Cottenham near Cambridge. The site wasn't ideal due to its thinness & close proximity to a very dense orchard. It wasn't until the Midlands based club Thrust lost its flying site in the early half of 2000 that EARS started in serious to try and find an appropriate promotion site in East Anglia.

A few people got together & had a meeting to try & plan a strategy for finding a site, & managed to find a suitable site to the East of Cambridge on an old airstrip. Inopportunely the landowners weren't so keen and we were refused permission to launch from their terrestrial. Temporarily, a Milton Keynes based flyer was trying to source a site near to him, but happened to send letters to a number of agriculturalists in the Cambridgeshire area.

One of these agriculturalists got back in touch very rapidly as he already had some land set aside for a friend of his to launch rockets from. The site was in abandoned airspace, which was a bonus & it was quite large with a number of parking places off the single track street which circles all the way round it. Without further ado, we got the farmers consent to hold out first launch on the 5th of November2000 and we have since had over 200 launch meetings.