During my usual perusal of the web today came upon two things about model rocketry in unexpected places.

The first occurred this morning when reading the comics. Seems over at FoxTrot classics, the boys were into rocketry. And how rocket recovery was easier in the good ole days.
https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrotclassics/2022/02/26

The next surprise came from the website of Adafruit. If you are not familiar, they tend to sell a lot of electronic components for use with the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, as well as make their own boards, etc. They often have articles/tutorials on 3D printing, robotics, general and space science. They cater to the Maker scene. This evening their blog has a nice article on the 2022 Estes catalog. The author does some reminiscing about his childhood and rocketry and just how far the hobby has come.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/02/2...g-estesrockets/

Enjoy

Interesting. Bill Amend clearly has had model rocketry experience as when it shows up in FoxTrot (and it does from time to time) the elements are right, even if the situations aren't always (but then, Jason Fox tends to push things a bit....).

Another cartoon that has model rocketry right when it shows up is "Red and Rover" by Brian Bassett.

On the Adafruit guy's comments. I don't think the Alpha is homely at all! But then, his, with two of the three fins broken, has certainly looked better....

And related to that, one of the presentations at the recent NARCON was about building, using bits from Adafruit, an Arduino-based altimeter. And what did the creators of that (and those of us who followed along) fly it in? An Estes Green Eggs! (but no ham)

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There are a handful of auto countdown launch systems using the Arduino/Raspberry Pi for those that are interested in crossing over to the world of Linux and cheap computing.

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My wife bought me an Arduino starter set for my birthday back in October. I had like zero knowledge of electronics - the closest I got was building computers back years ago. Boy have I learned a lot in the past few months. I am now working on two Arduino projects. One is an altimeter payload that stores the data on a Micro SD card. The second project is a launch controller that provides a clock, humidity, temperature and pressure and of course a 10 second countdown! Been a lot of fun.