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Old 11-21-2022, 02:31 PM
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BEC BEC is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Auburn, Washington
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Quote:
Originally Posted by georgegassaway
By selling direct, Estes does not have to do the DEEP discount they have to give to dealers.

Although, I thought I saw some mention of rocket dealers who ware supposed to carry it.

As for Musk and model rockets, I am pretty sure I read about, long ago, that he took his kids out to fly some models at one of the well known lakebed launch sites in California or otherwise out West.

And of course, for a few years, SpaceX directly sold their own Falcon-9 kits, made by a "Grade B" kitmaker (tube not so great, I heard. Never got one).

They weren't that bad, really. The first Falcon 9/Dragon was a little difficult in that you had to apply a full length body wrap to a rather thicker-than-necessary body tube. That version was later re-released with a thinner BT that was already wrapped. This was a simple-to-build and decently performing model.

The later one, with the big payload section, was better, and had a 24mm mount.

From some of the details in the kits (the second version of the Falcon-9/Dragon, which was the only one I've built) I'm quite certain the supplier is modelrockets.us. Some parts of their kits are pretty distinctive: a very nicely-made motor hook, parachutes of a thicker-than-usual plastic sheet with very bright colors and a unique shroud line material, for example. The Falcon-9/Dragon that I built clearly shared those parts with other modelrockets.us releases.
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