Kettering Grammar School

One of its early seats was a small building on Gold Street that was demolished during the 1960s "anything goes" era of town centre planning.

The final incarnation of the school was on Windmill Avenue, to the east of the town north of Wicksteed Park. Up to 1964, the school had shared a purpose-built premises on Bowling Green Road (A6003) with its girls' equivalent - Kettering High School. After the move to Windmill Avenue (A6098), the Bowling Green Road building was taken over by Kettering Borough Council as its headquarters office, a function it still performs.

In the 1960s, Geoffrey Perry, head of the school Physics department experimented with using satellite signals and the Doppler effect as an aid to teaching. The activity soon grew into regular monitoring of Soviet launched satellites and expanded into an international collaboration that became known as the Kettering Group. The group was headed by Geoffrey Perry, who by then had become Head of Science Teaching. On the technical front Geoff was partnered by the head of the Chemistry department, Derek Slater - a Radio Amateur, G3FOZ.[3]

Work of the group involved tracking satellites with radios, and eavesdropping on communications to cosmonauts, as well as analysing orbits in an attempt to identify different subsets. In 1966, the fledgling group discovered the location of a new secret Soviet launch station in north Russia, Plesetsk, before the American military or intelligence services had released details.

In 1957 Aviation Week magazine revealed that the U.S. had been tracking Russian missile launches from advanced long-range radar units in Turkey. The article caused a furore, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's special assistant for National Security Affairs, Robert Cutler, referring to the article as "treasonable". It turned out that the story started out with Geoffrey Perry and his students. Perry had passed along to a writer at the magazine that a radar in Turkey was doing important space intel tracking, so the writer dug deeper into the story.[4] Unfortunately, this account is complete fiction, given that the school's first attempt at satellite tracking was in 1962, and it was not until 1964 that the Satellite Tracking Group started to publish any of its findings.

In 1966 the project went international when Swedish student Sven Grahn contacted the group with a recording of the signals from Kosmos 104.[5][6] The same year it discovered Soviet launches from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, officially unacknowledged until 1983.

In 1969, a group used simple radio equipment to monitor the Apollo 11 mission and calculated its orbits.[7][8] According to the group, in December 1972 a member "pick[ed] up Apollo 17 on its way to the Moon".[9]

In 1973 the group tracked Skylab[10] and in July 1975, the team calculated that the Soyuz - Apollo link up would take place 140 miles over Bognor Regis on 17 July 1975 and that the space craft would be traveling at five miles per second.

In 1978 the group predicted the crash of Kosmos 954 spacecraft,[11] before it was confirmed by other agencies.

In May 1985, Geoffrey Perry talked about the project in the Radio 4 programme The Kettering Project. In March 1987, Channel 4 featured the Group in the programme Sputniks, Bleeps & Mr Perry.

Pictures of the school's space tracking team, originally published in The Times newspaper, would later find their way onto record covers of The Wonder Stuff for their album, Construction for the Modern Idiot.

• Ian Hope - Chair British Dam Society 2013 to 2015
• Sir Kenneth Parker, High Court Judge

• Satellite watching
• British space programme

• Kettering Old Grammar School Foundation
• Kettering Grammar School Satellite Tracking Group
• Satellite Tracking Group - a personal experience
• History of the Kettering Group
• Satellite tracking
• The Old Cytringanians
• Jones, Sam (20 November 2015). "Satellite wars". Financial Times. Online. Retrieved 20 November 2015.