during 1965 (from Woomera), a total of 198 flights took place between 1957 and 1978 alone. During the mid-1960s, a key improvement in the form of the stabilised payload system was introduced; as Skylark was designed as a fin-stabilised rocket, there was no guidance once outside of the atmosphere, causing the vehicle to tumble and spin. The new stabilisation system used a pair of gyroscopes connected to thermionic amplifiers to appropriately actuate a series of control valves; it was first deployed in 1961 and became routine by the end of the decade. One rejected enhancement around this time was the construction of a second launch platform at Woomera. By February 1967, the tenth anniversary of the Skylark's first launch, 157 launches had been performed, carrying in excess of 300 scientific experiments. The first X-ray surveys of the sky in the Southern Hemisphere were provided by Skylark launches. Multiple Skylarks were used with atypically high precision during September and October 1972 in an effort to locate the optical counterpart of X-ray source GX3+1 by lunar occultation. As early as June 1965, Australia made informal requests to have use of several Skylark launches; these requests were complicated by their informal nature and a lack of budget for such endeavours. Occasionally, Australian scientific experiments were flown on Skylarks being used for RAE tests, as these did not typically make much use of the payload capability. During 1975, the Federal Republic of Germany through the DFVLR (now German Aerospace Center or DLR) agreed with Australia to cooperate on the launch of a Skylark rocket at Woomera for scientific purposes. This launch took place on 14 March 1975. This was followed by three more, launched on 22 February, 13 March 1979, and 24 August 1987. Skylarks were constructed in quantity into the late 1970s, up until the British government decided to terminate the programme in 1977, having concluded that future "low weight" research would be carried out using NASA's Space Shuttle instead. Furthermore, by the 1970s, sounding rockets in general were facing increasing competition from scientific satellites, which could conduct missions for far longer terms and across a greater geographical range. The Skylark programme was transferred to British Aerospace, who subsequently sold it to Matra Marconi Space. While the number of launches declined substantially during the late 1970s and the 1980s, the scientific payloads being carried by Skylarks were becoming increasingly complex and ambitious. During