Swan song of the Skylark

A news piece written for The Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine on the occasion of the 441st and last flight of a Skylark rocket. Britain's space engineering history is not well known even in the UK. Skylark is our most numerous, most sucessful space vehicle,i t started as a low cost test rocket for the Blue Streak ballistic missile programme in the mid fifties, but went on to be a workhorse suborbital sounding rocket for fifty years.