Castle becomes first Durham college to go to space after student sends up a teddy bear

University College, better known by Durham students as Castle, has made history by becoming the first college of a UK university to send an item all the way to space.

Benjamin Kolicic, a third-year mathematics student at Castle, has been planning this fantastic achievement for approximately two years. Benjamin invested hundreds from his savings and received approximately £700 in funding, with the total cost of the project coming to just over £1,200.

After finally launching the teddy bear from the iconic Observatory Hill, the teddy bear (and with it the GPS system), went slightly off track and ended up in the North Yorkshire moors. Because of this, Benjamin initially lost hope that he would be able to recover the footage – thankfully, the teddy bear ended up safely on the edge of a farmer’s field, who contacted the crew and reunited them with their project. Benjamin drove down with fellow Castle student, and contributor to the project, Xander Spencer-Jones to complete it all.

Benjamin Kolicic

The process of starting the project

This is something Benjamin has wanted to do for some time, but actually launching the project was challenging – the helium alone cost £350, and there was some red tape to get through.

“I set up a whole team of people to look over the maths and logistics, a mixture of STEM and non-STEM students.

“The main thing that they discovered for me was where to buy everything, and the software to use to generate our launch location – if you launched it as we speak, it would end up in the sea, so you have to be quite precise.

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“We got ratified as a society in Epiphany term, two years ago, so it’s taken me a while to get the funding – we’ve also been delayed twice, because every time you launch you have to contact the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for approval to make sure there are no pilots flying in your path.

Being the first college in space

Out of the five collegiate UK universities (Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, York and Lancaster), Castle became the first college to make it to space. Ben told The Tab: “While we have a Durham Space Flight team who have been to space, that is an intercollegiate set-up.

“I wanted to do it, and the idea of taking Castle with me really appealed to me – the whole idea was to be the first Durham college to get to space.

“After we got it back and did some talking around, we found out that we were the first uni college in the UK to do it.”

Deciding when and where to launch

Being located close to the coast, Durham is obviously a difficult place to launch from due to strong wind approaching. Benjamin said: “The plan was to launch it, everything was sorted, and then the day before I find out the GPS is broken.

“I called up the Durham Space Flight people and asked if I could use their GPS, they said absolutely, we’ll sort you out.

“We take it up to Observatory Hill, it took about two hours to get ready – we would’ve liked to launch from Palace Green, but I was a bit worried about it getting caught on a historical site, a single gust of wind would’ve been a disaster.

“Because of the strong easternly winds, the best we could hope for was for it to come back to land.”

Recovering the footage

While better than ending up in the sea, ending up a short distance away in North Yorkshire was far from ideal.

Until the farmer saved the day, Benjamin didn’t think that things weren’t looking fantastic, commenting: “We were able to predict a rough location, and spent about two days looking round the moors – I destroyed two pairs of shoes.

“The moors are very hilly, lots of valleys, which made it hard to find – we thought we’d lost it, but later it turned out we were only about two kilometres off.

“If it landed anywhere in the trees and forests, there’s no way we would have found it. We launched on a Thursday, and the farmer called us on the next Wednesday.

“We were incredibly lucky, looking at the video.”

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