From The Advertiser, Saturday, 27 May 1995, p.7:

Up, Up and Away ... At Last

By Rick Holden
in Woomera

  Five, four, three... whispered the onlookers as the electronic timer echoed
across the rocket range.
  Two... no one spoke, as though the slightest noise would shatter the dream
which was about to unfold before them.
  One... for a brief moment - which felt like an eternity - the rocket lingered
motionless on its gantry, flames licking around its base.
  Slowly at first, more than $100,000 worth of rocket and 2 1/2 years of 
dedicated work lifted itself off the Woomera launch pad.
  Ausroc II-2 lurched momentarily in mid-air, its motor spewing smoke and fire.
Then with a burst of blue flame it thundered upwards and outwards and vanished
into the cloudy sky.
  The whole process took less than seven seconds.
  Rapturous applause erupted from the observation deck of the Instrumentation
Building, where for the past three days disappointed supporters and the media
had watched strong winds and cloud postpone the launch.
  The nervousness of the morning, as the weather again threatened to close in,
had well and truly evaporated.
  As Ausroc II-2 soared away from the windswept Woomera site, it also shot into
history as the world's largest independently built liquid-fuelled rocket to be
launched successfully, as well as the biggest liquid-fuelled rocket built by
Australia.
  "It's just fantastic," said a delighted Mr Grant Waldram, who with his Ausroc
colleagues had spent the past few days mentally reliving the 1992 destruction
of Ausroc II.
  "If you can imagine the tension that has been building up over the past few 
days, to watch it take off like that was just a big rush."
  Even suggestions that the Ausroc II-2's parachute system had failed and the
craft may have buried itself 5m underground on landing, could not dampen the
euphoria which swept through the building.
  But no one was happier than the team leader and chairman of the Australian
Space Research Institute, Mr Mark Blair, who announced that his organisation
now had the credibility to attract larger Government and corporate sponsorship
for rocket development.
  "To me personally it was probably one of the greatest achievements of my 
life," he declared.
  "The wind obviously affected the trajectory and it didn't go as high or as
far as we wanted, but the engine performance looked excellent."

Data analysis
-------------
  The exact height and distance travelled by Ausroc II-2 is not expected to be
known for some time, although it was designed to reach an altitude of about
10km, 25km down range at around 1800km/h - 1 1/2 times the speed of sound.
  The crew planned to recover the fuselage late yesterday and will spend the
next few days analysing data from the rocket's on-board computers which was
transmitted during the five minutes the rocket was airborne.
  The information will be used in the development of the much larger Ausroc 
III, a guided vehicle with a peak altitude of about 500km.
  The ultimate aim is to design and build a commercially viable launch vehicle
capable of placing small satellites into orbit.
  The immediate future of Ausroc II-2 is uncertain. ASRI spokesman Mr Michael
O'Donnel said several museums had expressed an interest in taking the rocket,
but a decision had not yet been made.