THE turning point in the life of a rocket scientist came in a model shop on Deansgate, Manchester, 15 years ago.
Daniel Jubb and his grandfather Sid Guy had been messing about with chemistry sets and rocket-making for years. Along the way, there had been rockets made out of baking soda and vinegar, a McDonald’s straw and a lightbulb-holder. Then when Daniel was 10, he bought an Estes model rocket from a shop in Manchester city centre, and set it soaring 200 feet above farmland near his home in Astley.
"It’s an all-functioning mini-rocket," Jubb recalls. "The motors are gunpowder, so they are a reusable firework, if you like. It goes up, deploys a parachute and comes down and you reuse it."
Naturally, the message from mum Glynis was ‘Please be careful’. But young Daniel was hooked. There were more and bigger rockets. The obsession grew and grew, just like the flamboyant whiskers which make Jubb now resemble a raffish wartime fighter pilot – a heroic moustache for a very unusual young man.
"I eat, live and breathe rockets," Jubb states simply.
Tonight – appropriately enough, Bonfire Night – Jubb gives a talk about his extraordinary career to Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society at the Royal Northern College of Music. It’s stranger than fiction.
Jubb’s firm The Falcon Project now employs 11 people in the UK and US, and does hush-hush rocket work for the US military. He is involved in efforts to develop a sub-orbital space plane, to take passengers 70 miles above Earth.
He also wants to develop rockets to launch satellites more cheaply. But before all that, there is the small matter of the world land speed record.
The Bloodhound Super Sonic Car is the latest record-breaking attempt by Richard Noble, whose Thrust SSC car, driven by Wing Commander Andy Green, already holds the land speed record at 763mph. Powered by a combination of a jet engine and a rocket developed by Jubb, Bloodhound is expected, in spring 2011, to reach 1,000mph in spring 2011 with Green at the controls. Two possible sites are being considered – one in South Africa, the other in Utah.
"From a standing start, It is operates purely on the jet engine up to 300mph, then they put the jet engine onto full afterburner and ignite the rocket," says Jubb. "Those two in tandem provide 45,000lbs of thrust. It takes around 20 seconds to get from a standing start to 300mph, and then just a further 20 seconds to get from 300mph to 1,000mph."
Green will endure 3g during acceleration and negative 3g on deceleration – equivalent to the forces exerted on astronauts during a Space Shuttle launch. Two possible sites are considered for the attempt – one in South Africa, the other on salt flats in Utah - though researchers at Swansea University also did a global survey using satellite data to see if there may be another remote location in the world with a 12-mile stretch of absolutely flat landscape.
Jubb’s hybrid rocket for Bloodhound was given its first test-firing in California just days ago. He says this is ‘ground breaking science which will have applications in all areas of rocketry’."
All of which is a long way from a boy and his grandad playing with rockets in a field in Astley.
By the time he was 12, Daniel and Sid were making custom rockets which the Army let them launch from training ranges at Otterburn in Northumberland. The first soared to 1,000 feet.
But as the designs grew more sophisticated, they needed more space, and were beset by more regulations. So Sid put up the money to found a facility in the Mojave desert in California. Daniel was still only 13, but was ready to leave Fred Longworth High School, Tyldesley.
"I left school at 13, probably not legitimately," he says. "I was given some home tuition, but I never sat any GCSEs."
But for customers of The Falcon Project, actions spoke louder than qualifications. His rocket exploits brought men in uniform calling, asking Jubb to make rockets for applications he is not able to discuss.
He can say, though, that he has already launched rockets into space sub-orbitally, and would like to do the same again, but without having to make a secret of it.
Sid died, aged 86, in 2005, just after Richard Noble had made an initial approached them about the land speed record.
"He never got to see what the project was, but he guessed it combined cars and rockets – his two favourite things," says Jubb wistfully.
Jubb now divides his time between various bases here and in the in the UK and US, where time zone differences mean he can be answering calls and emails into the night. When the British working day is done, it is just starting on the west coast of America, so he can be answering calls and emails into the night. Profits have been ploughed back into rocket research. Single and aged 25, Jubb has no time for anything but rockets and is not living the life of a rich man.
"I’m living pretty much the same life that I was at home with my parents when I started the amateur rocket project," he says.
And that heroic moustache?
"I had a bum fluff moustache from when I was 12 or 13," he says. "I left it there and it became a trademark. It’s a flying officer, General Kitchener-type moustache."
