Welcome to the Deepsky Rocket Shop. This is our story.
Andy Little was the founder of this business. He ran it for three or four years quite successfully flogging model rocket kits and bits to all and sundry from his Lancashire fastness. But then he got bitten by a lawn mower. It turned septic and now he spends those few hours when he is not in The Day Job tinkering with racing lawn mowers if not actually racing them. His wife notes that the back garden could usually do with a few quick laps. Andy remains involved with Deepsky as the Business Development Manager and stays in touch with our customers on The Rocketry Forum , runs the Topica news service and stirs a bit on the uk.tech.rocketry newsgroup. Jo Little, Andy's right hand person, lends a hand in the admin area and strives to maintain order.
Along came Paul Lavin in late 2003, a man who had been badly bitten by rocketry and needed something to fill his otherwise empty hours when he wasn't posting an armed guard on his teenage daughters or chivvying them into building rockets for the British Space Modelling Team, junior division. He has now achieved his life's dream of having more rockets than anybody else in Europe.
Paul is a Level 2 High Power Rocket flyer and a UKRA RSO. He is chairman of Blast Off for Britain, an organisation that seeks to inflame secondary school students with the glories of physics, chemistry and maths using, you guessed it, rockets. Paul is a SETPOINT Science and Engineering Ambassador and preaches the serious fun of rocketry to secondary school age yoof. When a spare moment presents itself, he is tinkering on his Level 3 project, the Mother Of All Tetrahedrons, that will fly (someday) on a HyperTEK M.
The Deepsky business was changed from Deepsky Rocket Supplies into Deepsky Rocket Shop with the launch of the new web site. To keep our learned friends at bay should one of our less careful customers impale themselves on one of our rockets, the business was organised as a limited company, Hesperis Technology Limited.
Other members of the Deepsky team are Catherine Lavin, the mildly bemused keeper of the Deepsky numbers and Snitch fleet. Catherine is head of any Deepsky mission that departs this sceptred isle as she fluent in French and Russian and can gesticulate appropriately in most other European languages.---->
<--- Gaby Lavin is holder of two British rocketry competition records. She lead the team in the European Space Modelling Championships in Serbia in 2003 with top times in S4A boost gliders and S9A helicopter duration. Gaby, an Exscitec Masterclass alumni, is now at Brunel University to study medical biology and sky diving (sometimes without the "di"). She is a wizard with a balsa razor plane, speaks fluent French and Spanish.
Genni Lavin is the youngest UK Level 2 and the only Level 2 flyer to achieved her certification with an experimental solid motor. Genni is holder of two British rocketry competition records and has a shelf full of egg lofting trophies. She is a member of the British Interplanetary Society, the Mars Society and NAGTY. She is an alumni of Space Camp in California, Space School at the University of Leicester and Rocket Camp in Wyoming. She has a GCSE in Astronomy and will sit her other subjects next year. Her favourite DuPont products are Mylar, Kapton and Nomex. --->