This week in 1957: The Skylark project

With the government last week announcing a review of space exploration, this article, reporting on the birth of one of the UK's longest-running rocketry programmes serves as a timely reminder that in the early days of the space race we weren't far behind the US and Russia.

Over its 50-year lifetime the Skylark programme, which ran until a few years ago, launched hundreds of rockets into the Earth's upper atmosphere and gave countless engineers the opportunity to cut their teeth in the aerospace industry.

Reporting on the launch of the first 'Skylark' rocket from Woomera in Australia in 1957, the article explains how the scientists involved hoped to advance understanding of the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere through a range of studies that would use sound ranging techniques to measure the temperature, pressure and density of the atmosphere.

'The speed of sound in the air is proportional to the square root of the air temperature, so that from the observed variation with the height of the speed of sound that of the temperature may be obtained,' wrote