The sight of a lorry transporting a giant missile stunned motorists on the M60 this month, but they needn't have been alarmed.
It was just Steve Bennett, Greater Manchester's answer to Elon Musk, transporting an eight metre-long rocket named Skybolt 2. Bennett is the CEO of Starchaser Industries, an aerospace company based in Hyde.
And while it was real, the rocket had been stripped and did not contain any fuel. The space travel mogul said he was returning from a visit to a school at the time.
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As well as carrying out research and development, the firm regularly makes educational visits to schools to encourage children to study science. After starting space tourism company Starchaser Industries in 1998, Bennett and his company have come a long way since his early homemade experiments.
Since he was a boy, Bennett, who comes from Dukinfield, has been building and launching his own rockets. Inspired by NASA's Apollo moon landings and the TV show Thunderbirds, he had built his own home chemistry lab by 13, putting together small rockets and launching them for friends and relatives.
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After leaving school he started work as a laboratory technician before joining the Army in 1983. After working his way up to Lance Corporal he trained as a petroleum operator.
After a three year tour of duty, Bennett left the Army and went back to work as a lab technician. Soon after he became a lecturer in the Physics Department of Salford University.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper in 2019, Bennett spoke about his time working as a lab technician which was when he started dabbling in building rockets again. "I was building them all over the house," he remembered.
"Living room, dining room. I've got a great picture of a rocket going all the way up the stairs, with my son Max, who’s about three or four, standing next to it completely oblivious."
In an interview with The Sunday People in 1995, the rocket scientist is quoted as saying: "Some people want to conquer Everest, others journey to the North Pole. I want more than that. By the turn of the century I want to launch a shuttle into space."
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He launched the Starchaser business in 1992 with the ambitious vision of taking visitors into space. The company was sponsored by Tate & Lyle as the first rockets were powered by cane sugar and a secret 'vital ingredient'.
Speaking in 1997, the British space pioneer made another bold claim that seems to have been somewhat realised. He told the Manchester Evening News: "Space tourism will be with us within 25 years, and I will be one of the main people responsible for developing it."
Launching his homemade rockets with varying successes and failures, in the mid-1990s, he had his sights on a £6.5 million prize put up by a US group for the first person to launch a spacecraft with passengers to an altitude of 62 miles. A milestone was reached in 1996 when he successfully launched Europe's biggest homemade rocket, Starchaser 2.
Cheers rang out as the rocket soared into the sky on flaming jets over the Otterburn Army range in Northumberland, leaving a long trail of smoke. In the early Noughties, Bennett would turn Morecambe Bay into the north of England's own Cape Canaveral [NASA's favoured launch site in Florida] with a string of successful launches.
This included a successful test flight of Discovery - the world's first privately funded fully re-usable two stage research rocket - in July 2000. Another landmark was the successful solo flight of NOVA, the largest rocket ever to be launched from British soil in November 2001.
In 2017, Starchaser launched the 8.3-metre-tall Skybolt 2 from the back of a converted truck in Northumberland, making it the largest rocket operational in the UK at that time. Since Bennett founded Starchaser in the '90s, a number of high-profile billionaires and their deep pockets have entered the private space-travel industry.
Sir Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004. While the two richest men in the world, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, have entered the space race launching SpaceX and Blue Origin respectively.
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According to the 2019 interview with The Guardian, Starchaser, has had to rely on cash sponsors, material donations, and support from the universities of Salford and Chester. Frustrated by the lack of funding, Bennett said in the interview: "I'll tell you what hurts, I'm of the opinion that if we had more money, we'd get there faster."
Bennett has also set up Starchaser's educational programme Space4Schools, touring rockets around the UK's schools. Not only are the school visits a source of funding, Bennett has stressed its importance in inspiring the next generation of rocket scientists.
He told The Guardian: "The first person to land on Mars is alive right now and they’re probably at school. If that person turned around and said: 'I was inspired to do this because this crazy bloke came into my school with a rocket,' well, that would be fantastic."
According to the Starchaser website, the next big step for Bennett and his crew is developing Astra-X, a nine metre , 1.25 metre diameter fully reusable rocket weighing around 800kg. More information on Astra-X and other projects can be found on their website.
