Model Rocketry

I spent the night reading launch reports and other postings about model rocketry on the internet. NAR (National Association of Rocketry, remember them?) members were posting their experiences. While some call the Internet "the network of a thousand lies", these people listed their NAR membership numbers, titles, email addresses and phone numbers in their reports, so presumably they are reasonable truthful. One convention report from a New England gathering said that on the average, they had a launch every two minutes for two long days. One dealer brought a trailer filled with two tons of rocket engines and sold them all at that meeting! (I thought it was illegal to move that much explosive material in one vehicle!) After over three hours of reading, I thought I smelled the sulpher of spent rocket engines, and I could almost see the trampled grass fields full of people at the larger launches we went to so many years ago. Thanks, Dad, for all those wonderful times!

In my mind, I saw so many of my model rockets, how they looked and what I was trying to find out when I designed them that way.

There was The First Launch, using a toilet tube rocket body, cardboard fins, a red plastic nose cone from a water rocket, and one of Grandpa's medicine tubes to hold the engine in place against the nose cone. Since toss testing a model airplane is different from toss testing a rocket, I find myself surprised that these early rockets were stable!

Early cardboard fin disposables with turned hardwood noses, and learning to use Mr. U's lathe with Glen.

The yellow Astron Space Plane glider, my second launch?

An orange rocket with an odd +O+ fin configuration, showing fins need not be radial.

An H fin rocket also proving non-radial fins work well, And can be stronger and easier to build!

[Disposable] Formed aluminum foil nose cones, and that simple forming tool.

Night launches with flashing lights.

Elastic rubber ejector ("Eject-O-Launch") assisted launches.

A "Polaris" underwater launch that misfired, launching only the fuel.

The three stage one with the fins at the ends of sticks so staged engines would eject without true "stages".

Cluster rockets that looped when one or two engines did not ignite, including one that looped with a mouse. (He took a bit longer getting through the maze after that one...)

Mice, mazes, that orange rocket sled on the string, and more!

Most memorable, was the huge rocket we photographed taking off in our back yard at night. It was five inches in diameter, six(?) feet tall, and had control flaps on the masonite fins. The nose cone was a red auto taillight. Remember that one? I took a flash picture as it reached about a foot off the pad. It peaked a foot or so later, then fell over, it's "puny" C engine spent and it's "be photographed" mission accomplished. And remember the phony G or H engines we made for it, the cardboard tubes filled with sand, a wine glass molded Devcon epoxy "nozzle", and red dental plastic "igniter"? I learned a lot about trust and industrial espionage from that episode!

[We wanted to see who blabbed about what they saw.]

Contrast that huge fake rocket with the foot and a half orange and yellow E engine rocket that we launched at Bantam Lake one the winter. It was real! It reached it's peak and nose over, at what, a thousand two hundred feet up? The ejection charge blew the capsule off the front of the rocket, breaking the shock cord with a shock that knocked off the nose cone, and spilled the smoked plastic accelerometer into the air. The charge also ejected the spent engine casing so hard that it shattered the tapered balsa wood bottail cone at the other end, shattering the attached fins, ripping them from the body tube, and scattering it all to the wind. We found most of the parts, but the empty payload capsule was last seen hanging under the parachute, rising on a thermal over the lake.

The mighty F engine rocket was small potatoes compared to the much lighter E rocket. Not to mention the white color being absolutely the wrong color for a rocket! Black or Orange, please!

Today, Estes is still the largest, most visible model rocket company in business. Although true model rockets end somewhere around the E or F thrust range, and Estes now makes "E" angines; so called "High Performance" engines go up to "K", and perhaps higher. Prices reach over $65 per engine, while reloads for the larger re-loadables range between $8 and $20. The rules for those big ones are rather different, often requiring FAA clearance, certification, etc. Some rockets now break the sound barrier, the record is around Mach 2.8 for a light weight quasi- model rocket. Aerodynamic shredding is a big problem at that speed, so Fiberglas and carbon composite body tubes and other strong components are used. One person mentioned a 9,000 plus altitude as his best so far, others mentioned altitudes in the 20,000's. Some wrote of a serious attempt to reach low earth orbit, "only" 50 miles up, using commercial engines and a ten pound electronic payload. 50 miles is real space, folks. That's why some X-15 pilots are said to have been the first astronauts.

Many of today's larger rockets have telemetry systems, tracking radio, electronic altimeters and even computers. They say that with the larger engines, you have to use some kind of tracking radio unless you are out in a desert or on one of those salt lakes; and even then, it helps. Some use altimeters to deploy larger secondary parachutes when the rocket descends closer to the ground.

With the popularity of model rocketry, you can buy rocket engines in hobby stores and even Toys-R-Us today. And with that, rocket engines are used for less savory applications. With four percent of today's crimminal bombing incidents use model rocket engines, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is watching model rocketry carefully and considering regulation. Serious HPR rocketeers say this is simply because the bombers don't know what they are doing, as black powder is unregulated and easy to make. Black powder is used in about 40% of the bombings, but the ingredients are much harder to control.

There is a Bay Area model rocket association, and a group at one of the local colleges.

Will I go? Will I launch my own rockets again? Probably not. So much for love! Why?

Too many other interesting things to do!
• Standing in a hot, sunny launch field is mind numbing BORING!
• It attracts modelers, sticklers for accuracy, not new ideas
• Launch a rocket, and you have memories and a rocket.
• Write a program, and you have a program, maybe a product.
• Rocketry challenges mechanical skills more than anything.
• Programming is a true and pure INTELLECTUAL challenge!

What did I learn from rocketry? Today's perspective is broader, and so the words are more sophisticated. I started out as a foolish young boy, perhaps a little brighter than most, but still lost in a world I did not understand very well. At first, it was simply the excitement of seeing a rocket go up that attracted me. That drive for excitement drew me out, prompted me to learn more. I learned how to think through what I wanted to do and balance that off against what I had at hand, in inventory, as I would now say. I learned how to structure a series of experiments, how to manage an inventory of parts and supplies vs. a budget fed by irregular gifts and "grade wages". (I must have been the only student in the high school who looked forward to quizzes and the smaller tests, as I'd get money for B's and A's.) There was the patience and skill of building things, but I was always marginal in the mechanical skills, probably due to my growing eye problems.

Later on, I even learned about writing proposals, though perhaps not enough about that. I came close to forming a real model rocketry team in college, a team that would compete in national meetings. But for my eyes... and the bureaucracy that made it so hard to form new clubs at the University. Seeing the fire as rockets leaped skyward, some of the less technical members of the University Outing Club became afraid of liability problems stemming from the launch activities of some of its members, and so withdrew support. We were not even allowed to talk about rocketry activities in the club meeting room for the appearance of it being a sanctioned activity. Without that club, we couldn't get legal launch sites. To form another club, quite aside from all the University paperwork, we found that we would have to post bond, incorporate, and buy liability insurance. Without a common meeting place on campus, we drifted apart, and it ended. Although it did not often make the general press, other Universities did have teams and did compete in regional and national meets.

My biggest regret, knowing what I know now? That I did not build a real wind tunnel. I would have learned a lot more from that, but most of all, it would have been a facility, no matter how crude, that would have attracted a few kids from several surrounding towns who were interested in more intellectual challenges and experimentation.

(I vaguely recall some kind of very crude wind tunnel like thing may have been concocted, likely by Bob M. or possibly Allan and Randy, using an ordinary fan. I do not recall it ever being used. The books said you had to have a section of pipes to stabilize the air flow, and an appropriate window and a mount, preferably connected to a scale, such as a postal scale, to measure drag. An optional smoke tube was also mentioned to let one see the effects fo turbulence. I recall no pipes, no window, no mount. All I seem to recall, was part of a crude wooden box, a mention of a Al's mother's cigarettes, and some comment about it not being very useful due to turbulence. That's why the plans Estes published had a section of body tubes stacked up to bring order to the air flow.)

Al could have used a real wind tunnel in his experiments on the effects of using various shapes of nose cones at various speeds. I remember Al ended up learning about advanced calculus and computers while trying to calculate the effects of speed on drag and maximum altitudes during his senior year of High School.

Once, he took several of us, possibly including Vance T., Jr., to the local University Branch to use the time sharing computer terminal. I understood almost nothing from his explanation of the programs he wrote and the math involved. (This was after I had used a computer at Syracuse University to plot the distortion effects of varying the exponent in the equation of a circle.) All I remember was that he iterated those calculations over and over in steps of a fraction of a second. I was puzzled by the reliance on the results of previous calculations, when many of the initial values boiled down to mere assumptions. I had recently read that even if one used identical engines from the same manufacturing lot, the total impulse (thrust) typicaly varied over 20%; and thrust curve shapes varied not just in the height of the peak, but also how broad and even when the spike occured during the burn. The old thrust charts were made using mechanical guages, and were smooth. However, I had seen a few charts made using electrical load cells, and those thrust curves were NOT smooth, and varied all over the place. Some looked as thought they had been made by several explosions.

Today, I would say we didn't have a clue as to how fast the rocket flew and were only guessing at how high they went. We were using crude pendulums hanging against protractors for triangulation. (I made several of those from masonite.) Al's best flight only reached "near 40%" of the calculated altitude. While I would now say there were too many variables, my frame of mind at that meeting over twenty six years ago was more of a feeling that there was just too much "undefined vagueness". With the thrust variations, initial launch rod drag, etc., how can you assume that the results of any step is reasonable? Then you feed that wrong result into the next step? For lacking any better ideas, I simply doubted the value of his whole approach and kept my mough shut. What I did not understand then, was that it was a major victory just to have worked out the calculations, not to mention learning to put them into the form of a program and getting access to a multi-million dollar computer to run them! I just kind of felt left out session despite Al's efforts at helping me to understand what I secretly thought was a dismal and confusing failure.

Little did I know that I would end up more or less in charge of that same time sharing computer system a few years later, teaching others to use it and writing remarkably large programs to help manage it! And of course, all the calculus, computer modeling, etc. that I would do time and time again in other fields

Oh, if we had only had today's "precision" 555 oscillators and LED's! We could have learned SO MUCH analyzing the dashed streaks those precision flashes left on photographs of night launches!!! Or by using today's advanced camcorders to play launches back in still and slow motion! Those techniques could have proven Al's math to me experimentaly, and let us really refine those calculations to take all kinds of things into account. How our tools have advanced!

Yet looking back, the tools were really secondary. In our youthful ignorance, we had seen so little in comparison to all the ideas we have run across in the intervening years! We could have approached the problem with a high speed strobe light and a camera, but "living in the valley" of our youthful isolation, we hadn't yet played with "the right toys" to suggest an approach to us. We hadn't learned to become good at connecting what we did know. (Perhaps at that age, back in those days, most kids didn't even realize they should connect things!) We hadn't learned that the real value of asking questions was to broaden our experiences and stretch our intellect, or that those experiences were extremely valuable as the tokens and guideposts of thoughts. We were just kids without anyone to help us ask the right interesting questions. We were just drifting through a sea of time, hanging on to the few examples we saw around us.

With a fighter pilot for a father, it is small wonder that aerodynamics and the need to know what one got for the fuel one put in, would have repeatedly come up in AL's conversations at home. With the not very warm chaos I saw visiting his house, there is small wonder he would have grasped at such ideas as ways of justification and escape. I am not surprised Al is still single, though I am surprised that I am.

Looking back at it all from the perspective of what I have done with my life, I see the single most important thing I learned was how to organize and run meetings. With that skill, I've enjoyed participating in and running more than a few business meetings over the years. Yet I see many others become very uncomfortable when such responsibilities fall upon them, and many meetings wasted for lack of organization and focus.

Oddly enough, it was during this youthful period that I first learned what it is like to be called in and don the mantle of a consultant. Even though it was very informal, I really enjoyed that; though more for the ability to see how others were doing things, than for being looked up at. There was that 4-H club, then two other rocket clubs invited me to help them expand. (More properly put, to help them keep from falling apart.) Looking back, I see that I really failed them, failed to recognize, or even look for, the real causes behind their problems. Although I saw the contrasts between their way and the ways I had seen elsewere, I failed to understand the value of drawing them out, of a "comparative analysis", as I now call it. Yet there was a glimmer of something within me then, something to do with what I now label organizational psychology and politics. What I learned in the rocket clubs went far beyond the simplistic teamwork they tried to teach the better athletes in Physical Education class at school. The real failing of our school, was that that was the only place they really tried to teach those things, for those are at the core of successful entrepreneurship.

Had we known a little bit more in those days, had we been a little more persistent in trying to challenge ourselves, it is hard to guess what we would have gotten ourselves into. Yes, there was that letter from "To Tell The Truth", but they would likely have taken me off into some left field of ego and "recognition". Remember this all occured back in the unsophisticated 60's. Compare what we had then, to what I did this evening. I read notes posted as recently as this evening from Hawaii, Connecticut, Utah, Arizona, all over the country, really. Rocketeers were writing, "talking", about experiences and sharing tips and ideas about launch problems, helping fourth graders build their own rockets in school, even how to appease the Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Back then, all I had was G. Harry Stien's "Handbook of Model Rocketry" and a bi-monthly(?) four page newsletter from Estes Industries. (By the way, the handbook is now it its sixth edition, and G. Harry Stein writes for a rather interesting column, "The Alternate View", every other issue or so of Analog Magazine. I urge you to scan that column it in a book store!)

Rocketry even taught me about the danger of witch hunts and mob psychology when that first huge Model Rocketry club in our town split up, spinning off Research Rocketeers. Had I really understood what was happening, had I had more moral fiber, I might have stopped "The Trials" by taking a stand and formally resigning, rather than waiting till many no longer came. It would likely have saved that club, and maybe strengthened my part in it. And yet, given our holding meetings in club member's homes, that club was too large. But that too, was part of the many lessons I learned in the laboratory of youthful endeavors.

Thanks, Dad! It was a lot of fun, but more important, I learned an awful lot from it all, about things they never would, never COULD teach me in school. It was worth it!

Yes, Dad, you may now suspect you could have asked me some interesting questions; but no one else's parents seem to have, and those questions might have distracted me from the non-technical aspects of leadership, maintaining connections, and group politics that are so relevant to my present occupation. (Out here in technology land, they talk of technical leadership, but what's relevant seems more like 50% connections, 30% having impressed the right people in the past, and 20% having the right buzz-words on your resume. Without the connections, it's 95% buzz-words. For me, doing the work is almost never the problem.) They say "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree." With bright children, it's seems more like "where there's a little traction, so veers the skidding car." Growing older gains us more traction; only later do we learn to steer, and half the time it doesn't seem to make any difference. Few learn the strategy of choosing where to go, we just go where we find the most traction -- money.

It's late. I see I've been dreaming with my eyes open again, reminiscing of a past long gone, a past I have no one to pass on to. I think it wasn't just those hills in the pictures I bought that called me here; it's the kinds of "technologicaly not shy" people out here that could have made a larger difference in my life, had I just come out here in the seventies as others recommended. Al, brighter and more capable than I had been so long ago, now designs power supplies and other "simple electrical things". At least I occasionaly get to do more interesting things out here. Sad how we are so often hired simply because we seem the kind to do as we are told, when that's the last thing society, or the company, really needs.