Rocket Hobby Things

Playing With Rockets

Sometimes one may get a little, um, "disturbed" over these things.

Edmonds Aerospace
Ecee rocket glider

Never Say Die

Sure, okay. So I never grew up. Who wants to? I first started building model rockets when I was eleven years old. After a few years I became interested in other things, so rocketry sorta fell by the wayside.

There were a few times I flew rockets during my twenties, but I spent most of that decade building and racing cars. Between the ages of 21 and 30 I had five Camaros, two Novas, a Chevy Monza, a Fiero GT, and a pile of other cars. Not much time for rockets.

I picked the hobby up again breifly in my early thirties when I was looking for something cheap and easy to do for fun. Then I had an assignment where the client's son liked rockets. Somehow we started talking about model rocketry and it all came back to me. I got my hands on a flyer from NIRA, the Northern Illinois Rocketry Association (see below). I attended one of their meetings expecting to find a room full of propellor beanies and assorted geeks. I was not disappointed.

Some years went by and I ended up becoming the Secretary/Treasurer of NIRA, a post I held for a few years. I currently act as NIRA's webmaster for the club site.

For a while I was interested in high power (HPR) rockets, but the costs involved and the ongoing legal limbo status of HPR propellents sorta dampened my enthusiasm for the whole mess. I have a couple of built HPR rockets and parts to build a few more. I have flown HPR enough to become certified, but I let my Level 1 cert expire twice now. Meh. It's just not worth pursuing with the costs involved.

So now I build and fly model rockets on a regular basis. It is still a lot of fun, it's fairly inexpensive if you take it easy, and the smarts level of the people involved in this sport is amongst the highest of any hobby I've ever seen. Yes, Virginia, it is Rocket Science.

My favorite rockets to build and fly are still the low power boost gliders. A couple of years ago I uncovered some boost glider designs I had made when I was 11 and 12 years old. I tried building some of these, and was shocked to discover that they worked the first time. I even tried to outsmart myself in building some of this junk the first time around and was really surprised that it needed to be built according to the original plans I drew as a twelve year old. Somehow as a kid I had a certain inherent design sense about what would fly that I seem to have lost over the years. Now I'm getting it back -- yee, hah!

I even thought about creating a new rocket company, Controlled Kinetics, but realized that I didn't have the start-up capital required to make it fly, <ahem> so to speak. Also, I have been following the rise and fall of several other small rocket kit companies and realize that there needs to be some serious marketing and distribution power behind a brand before it has a chance of succeeding in today's competitive market.

More About NIRA

We are using East Branch in Glendale Heights as the default, since it is the only forest preserve in all of DuPage county that we can get. So, NIRA is always looking for places to fly. If you can think of some flying field in DuPage, Lake, or Kane counties then please let me or some NIRA officer know about 'em.

Public Missiles
Explorer

Green Eggs and
Ham with a Slug

Just Plain Rocket
with Really Elaborate Booster

For a while I was winning NIRA's Model of the Month award (a pat on the head) because nobody else bothered to bring a rocket to the club meetings. This is a rocket club meeting. You'd think these folks could be bothered to bring in models they have built? Well, that problem has been cured, but good. We usually have a good turnout for Model of the Month at our meetings now. The October 2007 meeting was the first time in over two years that I've won, and even that was a tie with a duct tape-covered stock Big Daddy. How embarassing.

Anyway, here are a few of my Model of the Month winners (these are not all of the rockets with which I have won):