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Talk about "go"! My 50th anniversary in model rocketry [1]

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Date: 2023-11-30  

Today is 50th anniversary of my 13th birthday and getting into model rocketry. I was a flight-crazed tween fascinated by flying from biplanes to the moon landings and Skylab. I was going on thirteen and looking forward to being a teenager, which gets a lot of hype and hucking in this culture as sold in wacky comic book romps, a zillion Pop and Rock ditties, sitcoms, and Saturday morning cartoons where teens even solved spooky mysteries. And I was looking forward to flying planes and rockets after seeing them in Hyde’s Hobby Shop in Denison, Iowa. I had plans of flying from a pretend airfield based in a terrace in a small pasture behind the farmhouse.

Right when I got in. Attribution: Estes Industries.

Model Rocketry is a great hobby for armchair rocket scientists and pasture astronauts. It was a futuristic hobby for youth back then. You could even have your own cargo cult space program while waiting for a Captain Kirk to come along. The hobby was a response to the Space Race and as a kid-safe alternative to the explosive metal projectiles of amateur rocketry. Amateur rocketry had too many clueless newbies accidentally making pipe bombs. It could be made less unsafe, but that took a club with deep enough resources to build fueling stations and bunkers with sand bags, cinder blocks, and bridge-plank roofs. Model rockets by contrast had the safety of pre-manufactured motors that were electrically ignited from a small safe distance and being built from lightweight materials that crumpled easy enough. Being accidentally hit by a crumply balsa and cardboard projectile can’t be much worse than the common summertime fun of some poor little leaguer getting beaned by a ball or a bat. Estes in its Moon Race prime had the slogan “Safe, Scientific, Sure”.

Excerpt from Centuri Rocket times with one of the saw horse type launch racks.

Model rocketry offers fun and challenges if one hangs around to do more than rocket goes up and rocket comes down. It can be a builder’s hobby, taking care in the craftsmanship and finish of the rockets. This can extend into making museum quality models of real rockets with accuracy and the documentation to show it. One can design their original rockets picking up on aeronautics in miniature. One can pick up some electronics making their launch controllers, payloads, and telemetry. There’s carpentry or fabrication making your own launch pads or other field equipment. Or one could get into something really challenging with black arts like helicopter or glide recovery. Glide recovery can be tricky finding the compromise between model rockets like being build stubby and sturdy while gliders like being light with long wingspans. Like the warning in Fat Albert, you might learn something if you’re not careful.

Right where I got in. Excerpt from the Estes catalog.

Mom and Dad gave me presents of the Estes Alpha III starter set and a Testors control line P-51 Mustang with a .049 glow plug engine on my 13th birthday. The model paint company was briefly in the bargain and chain store model aviation business. The Estes set had the Alpha III kit, the plastic launch Porta-Pad and basic controller, three engines and igniters, and a quickie introductory guide called the Alpha Book of Model Rocketry. I nursed building that Alpha III for a good chunk of the evening. I can build its equivalent, the Generic E2X in minutes all these years later. (a Generic E2X makes a better Astrocam carrier than the one that comes in the Astrocam set.) Dad and I could never get the plane to run right. The chrome plating peeling off during the first exposure to fuel said a lot about the quality of the thing. But the rocket did fly, leading me to chase down that avenue. I sometimes wondered what it would be like if it worked out if the plane worked and the rocket didn’t.

Typical flight profile. Excerpt from the Alpha Book of Model Rocketry.

The first launch happened on a too windy of a day because this kid couldn’t wait. There was problem of early model rocketry with the Estes igniters of that period. These were a short length of nichrome wire, not far removed from the element in a toaster, dipped with a wad of pyrogen, and rumored to have been black powder dissolved in lacquer thinner. These took a good connection and a lot of amps from the battery of Mom’s LTD, Dad’s C-10, the ’58 chore pickup, or later my F-250. Estes had a cure of lightbulb filament-like premium priced add-on Solar Ignitors. Once the igniter worked, the rocket down high up in a tree. It took no less than a few bamboo fishing poles masking taped end to end to knock the poor Alpha III back down. The poles with the dry rotted tape and adhesive remained in the rafters of the family garage until a few weeks ago when the acreage was cleaned out and sold off.

“Just watch where you’re stickin’ that thang!” From the ol’ sketchbook.

I got into the hobby a little late. Most of the original old timers started young at the ages of eight to ten and did so during the ‘60s Space Race to the Moon. The biggest sales and national meet were during the year following the Apollo 11 moon landing. Sales and interest lagged after Apollo and Skylab wound down. There was still inertia, plus a Science Fiction boom and the forth coming Space Shuttle, to keep many interesting things going on in the hobby.







A recreation of the Omega rocket and Cineroc nose cone. The recreated nose used the Astrocam TF card thumb-cam instead of Super-8. Also a 3D printed knockoff of the old Centuri display stand.

Estes Industries is the perpetual 900-pound gorilla in this hobby. They were and are the rockets most commonly found in hobby shops. Verne Estes was the company founder and leader in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He sold the company to the pharmaceutical maker, Damon, but he still had a leadership role and wrote the introductions in the ‘70s catalogs. Estes made black powder motors and a varied kit line ranging from that long running Alpha III starter set to the popular Big Bertha to many halo and prestige items like “Mighty” D Engines and Mars Landers. Having a big corporate war chest meant that Estes could develop products like the TransRoc telemetry systems or the Cineroc. The Cineroc was a nosecone payload of a Super-8 camera that took a small specialty film cartridge to take movies during a rocket flight. This device was the basis of lot of kid’s daydreams but was out of reach of most kids’ allowances.

Orion Recreated Orion from a couple of carcasses from the ‘70s.

A few days after my first launch, an older kid gave me a hand-me-down old catalog of a company called Centuri Engineering. They were the spunky underdog company next to Estes. They weren’t in as many hobby shops as Estes, but they did do a lot of mail order. While Centuri did not have anything quite like the Cineroc or D engines at the time, many people considered them to be a little more stylish and a little higher quality alternative, like using pristine white kraft-paper body tubes compared to Estes’ brown. While Damon buying out Centuri as their also ran rocket company was the beginning of the end of them, you couldn’t tell for years when they made nifty stuff like the Super Fleet, the Fighter Fleet, and the Alien Scout Ship, (aka: Flying Saucer or UFO). My all time favorite rocket is their Orion. While being taken for granted during its run, the Orion has since been cloned many times by companies like Semroc and Apogee.

Excerpt from the ‘72 Enerjet catalog with their rockets and a better view of a saw horse type launch rack.

Centuri had a daughter company called Enerjet that made what is now called Mid Power Rocketry. Their business was E and F composite engines and the kits to go with then. Centuri was closing out the company around the time I got in the hobby. Many of their items are no longer available. What were still around happened to be expensive and out of my allowance even at closeout prices. The cheapest engine cost $4.00 for a single when a three-pack of C6-s engines cost around $1.35.

Excerpt from the MPC catalog including the kitschy Moon-Go and the oddball Mars Patrol with fluttering saucers.

A company that I tripped over in the back of mechanic’s magazine was AVI Astroport, with the AVI meaning Aerospace Vehicles Incorporated. The Astroport was probably daydreaming out loud. This company started out as MRI, Model Rocket Industries, as an Estes’ competitor. It then became part of MPC, the manufacturer of many popular car and plane kits, to cash in on the Space Race. The company popularized plastic for parts like nosecones and fin-cans and briefly had a department store presence. The rockets were packaged in boxes like car and plane kits or in blister packs instead of the usual bags on pegs. They also revived and popularized 13mm mini-engines. AVI went independent again after the post Neil Armstrong sales slump and MPC lost interest in rocketry. AVI continued on selling off old and new engines and old surplus MPC kits. The engines included a precision line for competition. The orders included little freebee day-glow orange mini-stickers with ‘70s rocket geek humor in ‘70s funky and futuristic fonts. The company then fell off the map circa ’77. But their carcass made things interesting when it popped up again in the early ‘90s. Sometimes I regretted not ordering some of their interesting 18mm diameter partial D engines.

The National Association of Rocketry magazine at the time.

I look back and wish that I had joined NAR, the National Association of Rocketry, back then. The main reasons that I didn’t were that I could be a bit of a cheapskate piker and that the nearest rocket club was in Des Moines. That was a three-hour drive in the Double Nickel days to a strange city for a kid who didn’t have his license yet. I didn’t think about getting the NAR magazine with all the cool articles and advertisements or photojournalism from the regional and national meets that I could only daydream of attending. The ads could have introduced me to a lot of cool companies and products that I otherwise missed back then like FSI, Cox, MITS, and more.

FSI extremes with the F-7 and F-100. Attribution: The Rocketry Forum.

FSI, Flight Systems Inc., was one of the companies that I failed to notice to my regret. While other rocket companies were remembered for their kits, these guys were known for their engines ranging from minis to some especially insane big ones. While Estes was bragging that their Mighty D was the factory hot rod big block of rocket engines, FSI had full-blown E and F total impulse engines. These were at the extremes of average thrust. The legendary E60 and F100 engines could leave one wondering why the rocket didn’t leave behind its fins, skin, or even a trail of true blue pure Cherenkov radiation. At their other end were their super long burning low average thrust E5 and F7 engines. These were known as “Steam Machines” or as “a few seconds of terror”. The thrust curve goes through the Tartaglia flight arc continuing too long with the possibility of closing with the ground and doing what’s described as a land shark while still under power.

Excerpt from the Cox catalog including their version of a futuristic ‘80s space shuttle.

Cox, the popular brand name of model airplane glow plug engines and sometimes the planes wrapped around them got in and out of the model rocket business shortly before I got in. Their product line was plastic, ready to fly rockets. The line also had a faux-realistic launch pad, a plastic pistol theodolite, and in-house engines which included another intriguing 18mm partial D. This was another company that got in and out of the rocket business during the moon race boom and bust plus the lethal tragedy of their engine manufacturing machine exploding. The rocket line was absorbed by Estes and models occasionally rebranded and rereleased over the decades. The theodolite lives on to this day as the Estes Altitrak.

I did score an intriguing 18mm D engine AVI years later. But it’s rare, 50 years later and only one, so I’m not going to fly it.

I’ll just daydream out loud with little hope of this actually happening of Estes someday making their own intriguing 18mm partial D engine. Or less likely to manufacture a 13mm partial B. I’ll just grin and call them D-lites and B-lites.

Well, it doesn’t look like much, but it really started something. And then some…. Detail of the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover.

An interesting tangent off of model rocketry was M.I.T.S., Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. a manufacturer of electronic kits. The company started out as producing telemetry kits for model rocketry. Realizing you could barely make beer money from such an esoteric niche market, the company branched out into digital electronic kits. Their halo product called the Altair 8800 was the first commercially successful home computer. It inspired a lot of people to get their first computers. It inspired others from Gates and Allchin to Jobs and Wozniak to find ways to do it better. So you’re online wasting time reading this diary it’s because of an offshoot of model rocketry.

A recreation of the Stars & Stripes which was a MIT competition design showing its Spirit of 1976. The Bicentennial kitsch coloration even was part of the plans in the old MIT Pulse Journal! It also has a misplaced elevator and rudder because I haven't figured out how to put new electronics in an old actuator design and I've been sidetracked by newer projects. The Caliby is one of the newer projects. This is the third version of my design and is sort of a 21st century sport flyer country cousin to the Stars & Stripes. Although there is a bit of Arcie 2 and Holverson Designs influence in there.

One group that I didn’t know about at the time was the MIT Rocket Society. But what they were doing was over my head, out of my expertize and allowance, and literally over a thousand miles away. The group was big time competitors and researchers and produced many BTCs, big time competitors, in the hobby. An activity that fascinates me decades later is their early work in radio controlled boost gliders. The gang there was even making their own miniature homebrew superheterodyne receivers and actuators back when brand name RC companies like Kraft were making brick-like receivers and servos. I’ve recreated some of their glider designs and those were influential on my own designs in progress like the Caliby.

The bestest tractor color ever for the bestest tractors ever. Hip in the ‘70s and high visibility in both sky and ground for your rockets.

Even though I wasn’t near a club and was doing this mostly alone and isolated in the country, I was almost like a one-man rocket club. I could get a friend or a cousin interested long enough to build a couple of models, but that was about it. Rockets weren’t 4H, hunting, a new Camaro, or the mostest importantest thing that the world revolves around and school doubly revolves around: almighty sports! So who cares? Family ranged from tolerant to sometime indulgent with kits and motors for birthday or Christmas and sometimes in between. Grandpa Skow had the world’s bestest little Allis-Chalmers and New Holland dealership and I bummed or bought black, crème, aluminum, and Persian orange spray paint from him, but oddly no red or yellow. (I suppose that grinders and balers don’t get the brand boosterism like tractors.) I bought stuff at hobby stores and mail order. I learned that anything that’s available in a hobby store is usually cheaper if it’s available in a hardware or chain store. I built model rockets in the basement while listening to AM Top 40 on my Panapet R-70 radio back when Pop Music was going through its Seasons in the Sun. I had a couple pastures to launch from while growing up on the farm and a dirt back road that was between two pastures. I daydreamed about having my own model rocket company, unaware about how the American dream can turn into a nightmare. A family vacation in Texas included a stop at the LBJ Space Center during the summer of Apollo-Soyuz. I sometimes went off on an autistic kid tangent and got more fascinated with the launch equipment than I was with the rockets. I build launch controllers from Radio Shack parts and stuff salvaged from junked ‘50s long distance telephone equipment. I build launch pads and launch racks from scrap wood including those shipping crates that tractor cabs came in. I did use all that stuff put on a big show on the last day of school going into the big Bicentennial summer.

The last launch was like this except for two different rockets that weren’t the Orion

My last launch of my first time around was on October 4, 1977 on the 20th anniversary of Sputnik. The price of a three pack of C6-3 engines was now up around $1.85 after Nixon inflation became Ford inflation became Carter ‘flation. I set up the three-shooter rack in a terrace in the pasture behind the farmhouse. I squeezed off the Orion and a couple of others. I had been in the hobby for the middle four years of the ‘70s.

One of the many things that could distract a teenybopper boy. Also great for hauling rockets and launch equipment out to the middle of pastures or dirt roads between two pastures.

That was never intended to be a last launch, I was distracted by cars with my own F-250, friends’ and family vehicles, and “the bestest cars they don’t make no more!”, the Chinon misadventure, college, and other misadventures. The next decade is promising a big space renaissance with the Space Shuttle and Prog Rockin’ follow-ons like space planes, space stations, and power-sats. A counterculture offshoot called the Libertarians were saying that if pesky government bureaucrats got out of the way then the magic of the marketplace could give us a space station at L5 by ’95! And I obviously was heading greater things once I didn’t have my stupid school holding me back. Either I was either going to be an engineer showing Detroit in general and Dearborn in particular how it should be done or my cartoons would lead to my own animated comedy variety show and an epic sci-fi spoof movie after that.

Centuri club goodies from the Rocket Times newsletter.

One thing that I didn’t notice until recently while perusing digital copies of old catalogs was the arc this hobby took. The early ‘70s Estes and Centuri catalogs still coming out of the Moon Race ‘60s and had things like C-channel launch rails, rrotory switches and panel mount indicator lights, and slide rules with log-log graph paper to go with them. The early Centuri Rocket Times club newsletter had the company burning off the Stellar Line kits from the days of trying to have a department store presence, and with goodie boxes and bargain boxes of leftover and blemished items. All this stuff dried up was the ‘70s wore on and the hobby sagged in the dry spell between Skylab and the Shuttle. Even a sea-change Sci-Fi boom with Moonbase Alpha, Darth Vader, V’ger, and even little beady Twiki could only prop it up so much.

The Super Fleet, an excerpt from one of Centuri’s later newsletters.

There’s a grocery list of things that I’d like to do different. I wouldn’t have built so much stuff quick and dirty and thinking it was awesome craftsmanship, especially the rare and special stuff like the Mars Lander and Orbital Transport. I would have maybe gotten more into boost gliders, but I probably didn’t have the skills yet. If I had just known what I was looking at and that it wouldn’t be around forever I would have bought all the Stellar Fleet, plus all the Point and Quasar type kits that Centuri was burning off. Plus I’d get Centuri Sci-Fi (aka Fantasy) Fleet and the Mini-Fleet. I’d buy some of those intriguing AVI 18mm D-engines. I wouldn’t have gotten that white elephant Chinon Super 8 sound system if I had known how much my school would have dumped on my aspirations, but instead I would have gotten the Centuri Super Fleet and Fighter Fleet, Strike Force, a Alien Scout Ship, and a bunch of their other fantasy kits with change left over to buy a survivor Bullet-Nose or Silver Hawk. I wouldn’t have dropped out of the hobby. Or at t at least I would have hung around until the end of the Centuri.

The proud Studebaker Bullet-Nose. It even looks like a rocket. Well, at least to an overly excitable kid. And I mean it even has a nose cone!

In a cleanup before going to college, my rockets and equipment were packed away in an old toy box and slid under a bench in the basement to be forgotten. And waiting rediscovered in a whole different decade….

An excerpt from a Centuri catalog listing that inspired the title of this diary.

The second part of this diary is planned for next summer for the ’30 anniversary of getting back into the hobby.

July 4, 1994 with the six-shooter round rack and three rockets from the ‘70s.

Mopping up on a few random items. I’d love to bounce this off my bestest ever rocket buddy and sometimes Holverson Designs coconspirator, but he passed away two and a half years ago. The farm acreage with the old farmhouse and the pasture with terraces behind it were sold off a few weeks before this 50th anniversary.

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