I made plenty of launches with my Electro-Launch pad back in the '60's. (All of them, actually. ) And I never lost a rocket. I never ever felt taken advantage of by Estes Industries when Vern ran it. In fact, I felt that it was possibly the most honest and ethical company that I had ever dealt with. I always felt that the company in Penrose was my ally, friend and teacher.

Where I lived, mail order was the only way to go. The hobby shops in the area had never heard of model rocketry, or at least that's what they told me. The first time that I saw model rocket kits in a hobby shop was several years after I had hung the hobby up "temporarily." (Sometime around the mid-'70's.)

MarkII

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SAM # 0011

I was pretty lucky - we had a hobby shop here that had a whole endcap full of Estes and Centuri rockets for sale (and a huge selection of motors on the wall behind the counter). I got into rocketry when we formed a model rocket club at my high school (I was a junior at the time - this was 1973). My first bird was an Alpha. First launch was at a club launch in the infield of the high school track. Launched it on an A8-3 and the flight was perfect! (or nominal, as we used to say - this was 1973 and the tail end of the Apollo program after all - we had to be professional rocket men!)

Greg

I still say "nominal." It just seems to fit. Call me a space race geek; I don't care.

If you really wanted to go retro, you could describe your launch as "A-OK."

MarkII


(But you probably should be launching a Mercury-Redstone in that case...)

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SAM # 0011

Oh, so do I. It's just that calling a good flight "nominal" has always sounded like the flight was minimally OK but could have been better. But in my flight logs, all my successful launches are listed as "Nominal".

Greg

I first got into the hobby when I was 7 years old. My father and I built a Citation Quasar and Citation Patriot one saturday afternoon and launched the Quasar the same day in our backyard on an A8-3 and a B6-4. The Patriot launched the next weekend on a B4-2 and a C6-5. That was one year before I got involved in R/C aircraft at the age of 8.
My first R/C plane was a foamie-ARF Cox Cessna 210 Centurion powered by the Cox QRC .049. I remembered thinking that the thing would never fly with that engine as it was about 3 times the size of my Cox and Testors .049 powered control-line airplanes. Boy was I wrong. Way too fast for a decent trainer but I thought it was great because NOBODY my age had any R/C planes, just control-line. I did not realize what a lousy plane it really was until my dad and I started building R/C aircraft from kits with real "man-sized" engines in the .40 to .60 size range. I got very heavily involved in R/C after that, but continued involvement with rockets as well. I think my basement hobby room is more well stocked with R/C kits and engines than a lot of samll hobby SHOPS much to my wife's dismay. My involvement with R/C has deeply waned over the past 8 years I have been married, but have gotten much more involved with rocketry than I ever was in youth. It all has to do with ease of the hobby. I can fly rockets in my back yard up through at least "G" power as it borders a 500+ acre farm, but have zero room for a R/C runway on my land. My R/C club is 15 miles from my house and often have zero time on the weekends for that.

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, and HAVOC !

Well I guess its time for a youngster to get into the act now. I got my bug on Christmas day 1989. I was 10 and the Alpha III starter kit I got was a gift from my aunt and uncle. I had to wait until March in order to break it out and build it. My dad said we would launch it in the lot across the street from our house. I told my dad it wasn't a large enough field, but he said these won't go that high. LOL I loved the look on his face when the A8-3 went off. Luckily it came back down on the field. Then my dad not knowing the engine nomenclature put a B engine into it, and it sailed off into the next county.

I was so hooked I had my accelerated education class build rockets. We built several Vikings and we went out to the local park. My teacher took us to a place surrounded by trees. I again told the adult supervisor that it wasn't big enough, did they listen, nooooooo, and whoosh it flew well beyond the vision field within the trees. Because of my family moving constantly after that, I had to stop flying, but it was never too far from my mind. I got back into it after college and I haven't stopped flying since. I still have that 1/2A from my original kit.

now that I'm much older I have the choice to fly any time work and the wife permits. Which is almost every other weekend.

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She said, "Don't make me release the flying monkeys!"

Too late, I'm here......

And five years to the day after that build ... April 11, 1975 ... I flew my first model rocket, an Estes Alpha. It was an individual project I'd grabbed from the gifted program offerings. While I don't remember the motor type, I do remember being really annoyed with keeping the igniter in the motor. Masking tape squares were so fiddly.

It was a clear day, with some wind, and I flew during school hours from the playground (with the program teacher on-hand to supervise). It was a good flight, but it hung on some phone lines at the far edge of the property. Never got it back, and had to watch it dangle there and slowly disintegrate over the course of the following two seasons. If someone had pointed me at all the juicy science and math inside rocketry then, I probably would have been much more interested in keeping on flying.

(The date's easy for me to remember, apart from the Apollo association. It was my tenth birthday.)

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