In a grass-covered ammunition bunker on a former rocket test site in the heart of England, I am handed a push-button igniter for an experimental rocket motor.

The man in charge, the flamboyantly mustachioed rocketeer Daniel Jubb, voices the countdown and I press the firing button – almost on time – and I'm left momentarily speechless as a rocket in the unmanned bunker next door fires with a howling whoosh and a dazzling white flash on the mission control screen in front of us.

This was not, however, just a bit of fun set up for BBC Future's benefit: this test firing is a genuine one, in which a novel rocket propellant formula is fired for only the third time. Such tests allow Jubb, founder of rocket maker Falcon Project, to use high-speed video to scrutinise the way the fuel burns.

Falcon Project makes research rockets and specialist fuels for the UK and US militaries but is perhaps best known for prototyping a hybrid rocket motor for the Bloodhound Supersonic Car, which is being built in the hope of setting a 1,000mph (1,600km/h) land speed record on a South African lake bed sometime in the next couple of years.

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Falcon Project is far from alone here at Westcott Venture Park in Buckinghamshire, the former site of Britain's Cold War rocket development efforts. The firm is just one of those in a surprising British rocketry renaissance, in which a clutch of rocket firms are setting up in business at Westcott to try and put British rocket engineering back on the map after many decades of decline.

These pioneering companies include Reaction Engines. It will be testing Sabre, its revolutionary air-breathing rocket engine for future spaceplanes, plus the "precooler" that lets it scavenge liquid oxygen from the air as it powers through the atmosphere.