Confessions of a Former Rocket Boy

The continuing allure of that Buck Rogers stuff

On Saturday, I went for a walk on Cherokee Boulevard.  The Boulevard (as it’s called around these parts) runs through Sequoyah Park by the river.  It’s a 6.2 mile long trail, much of which is bordered by a lakefront park, and the rest of which is bordered by large, expensive houses.  It’s a nice place to go for a run or a walk on a nice day.  I had just trained legs, so it was a walk for me.

As I walked, I heard a familiar hissing-roaring sound, looked up ahead, and saw a small rocket climbing on a trail of faint smoke, watched it coast a bit as it went quiet, and saw a small parachute pop out as it reached the apex.  It then floated to the ground, to be caught by a boy of around eight or nine, who seemed quite excited.  His father sat in a camp chair nearby, cheering him on.

It was, of course, a small Estes rocket – I believe it was this Mars Colonizer model – and it brought back memories.  When I was just a little older than that boy – I think I was 9 or 10 – I started fooling around (my friends and I called it “experimenting”) with Estes rockets, and rockets from their “we try harder” competitor Centuri, and continued to do so for several years, into high school.  (Centuri, I see, could never really compete with Estes and shut down in 1983).

(Photo licensed via Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Original work by Wikimedia user Glosome.)

We flew a variety of models, from starter rockets like the above, to the Big Bertha, to various multistage D-engine rockets, to the “Tall Tail Ten,” a ten foot tall rocket which I think was built from plans in a magazine, and had three D engines clustered in its first stage.  (For those of you unfamiliar with model rockets, here’s a Wikipedia article.)

Some of those rockets could go very high; most only actually went up a few hundred feet, though it seemed like more – as I saw when I watched the kid’s rocket in the park, they don’t look like they’re going up nearly as high when you see them from a distance, as they do when you look straight up at them as they disappear into the sky.

We had a lot of fun with them, and learned some things.  I recall being a bit salty when I read in some model rocket book or another that “the mere firing of a rocket, in itself, has no scientific value.”  This was, of course, true, as I even admitted to myself at the time, after a bit of thought.  But it felt scientific.  And while it may not have made us into scientists, it made some of us into engineers:  Two of my friend group became aerospace engineers, one at NASA.

And even for those of us, like me, who were dilletantes, it was a learning experience.  Model rockets weren’t particularly dangerous – the modern model rocket engine and concept were invented by Orville and Robert Carlisle in response to a Popular Mechanics article by G. Harry Stine about how young people were blowing themselves up left and right attempting to build homemade rockets.  This made for an excellent book by Homer Hickam, The Rocket Boys, which became a good movie under the name October Sky.  It also led to a number of deaths and injuries.  As I’ve mentioned, one of my space friends was missing some fingers, and had some damage to an eye, when a rocket he and a friend were trying to make out of a scuba tank packed with matchheads exploded.  The friend was killed, and much of the house was wrecked.  (Many kids in that era managed to wound or kill themselves by packing CO2 cartridges for seltzer bottles with matches; the explosion from the scuba tank must have been horrific.)

The model rocket engines were designed to be – and were – quite safe.  Nonetheless, they were pyrotechnics, and they produced a projectile that moved quite fast.  It was good practice at being careful to launch a rocket powered by one, using electrical igniters and a sort of detonator, complete with safety key, to set them off.  (And of course, being boys, we violated various parts of the “Model Rocketeer’s Code,” which forbade adding explosive warheads, launching rockets at targets on the ground, etc.  It didn’t specifically forbid making a sort of Bazooka out of a length of pipe and a  naked B-6-6 engine with a nose cone glued on, but it probably should have.  But we violated those rules carefully.)

No one was hurt, and no property was seriously damaged.  But we got a lot out of the process and still have good memories.  More, I suspect, than if we’d spent a comparable amount of time on iPads.

Which is why when I saw that kid chasing after his returning Estes rocket it made me happy.  They still sell Estes rockets today, but I don’t know how popular they are.  Perhaps the success of SpaceX, et al., is driving a renewed interest in model rocketry, as the Apollo program drove my interest.  I hope so.  Ad Astra, per Aspera!

[As always, if you like these essays, please consider subscribing to my Substack.]