Hello All,

When I watched Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom" television program (hosted by Marlin Perkins and featuring Jim Fowler) in the early 1970s, there were two installments of the show in which rockets were used.

One involved a rocket-lofted net that was used to capture monkeys by suddenly pulling the net over their tree. The rockets were rather short, squat cylinders fitted with short sticks, and they appeared to be made of metal tubing. They used paper-cased rocket motors (they looked like Estes "D" motors but didn't look like they were labeled), and the bottom ends of their sticks were attached to the edge of the net. Messrs. Perkins and Fowler set up perhaps 12 - 15 or more of the rockets around the tree, and they had small angled metal frames for launchers. When fired, the rockets sounded like model rocket motors and left smoke trails that looked like black powder motor exhaust. If they were model rocket motors, they were plugged in front, as they had no ejection charges. The monkeys were, of course, very surprised by the sudden turn of events!

The other involved a simulated bomb (a training target for one or more U.S. Navy dolphins) that was launched from a ship by a short-range (perhaps 20 - 30 miles) three-stage rocket. All I remember about the rocket (besides the on-air comment that it had three stages) were that it was red in color, its first stage exhaust plume looked like what I now know to be the exhaust plume of a double-base propellant motor, and that it was launched at about a 45 degree angle. The simulated bomb payload, which divers photographed after the dolphin(s) found it on the ocean bottom, had an elongated teardrop-shaped body with four clipped delta tail fins. It was sitting on its nose, its tail end angled upward at 30 to 45 degrees to the sea floor, resting on a deployed frame of metal tubing that had either telescoped backward out of the nose or folded outward away from the device's body.

Do either or both of these rockets ring a bell with anyone here? If scale data on them could be found, they would certainly make quite unusual scale model rockets (the "monkey net rockets" could easily be built at 1:1 scale).

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
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