Disney World, Sea World, Bargain World, Credit World. Orlando is not content being just a Town. MGM and Universal Studios, Gatorland, Wet `n Wild, especially Wet `n Wild, the Peabody Hotel, and any restaurant near it. Orlando wants your money. I refused, mostly.
I went to the Kennedy Space Center instead. You just head east from Orlando and turn left at the sign that says SHRIMP SHRIMP SHRIMP. Costs a big $7 for the deluxe tour. The historic facility, and the attractions therein, caused me to pause and reflect on the work and sacrifice of all those wonderful Americans who have contributed to the past and present accomplishments of the greatest Space Program in the solar system. It also caused me to pause and reflect on my own family’s important, though little known, contribution to the advancement of American rocket science. It is a story that must be told.
Rockets have been an important part of my life since, oh, maybe 7th grade. One day that landmark year our very first Astron Alpha blasted off from the the big field by the local elementary school in Montana, streaked into the sky, and was never seen again, mostly because it landed on the roof of the Jr. High next door. Undaunted, my brother and I, rocketry pioneers that we were, moved on later that same year to the Original Groundbreaking Performance Trials involving a modified Astron Streak with oversized engine. It was also, unfortunately, never seen again. It simply went up and never came down. This second disaster of the year brought testing to a temporary halt due to funding. The Space Program had to be reassessed.
(This was, incidentally, the same period during which balsa airplanes with rubber band power propellers, gas-powered planes launched free of the confining tethers of their control strings, and kites of all variety also had a tendency to disappear unexplainedly, leading me to believe, in retrospect, that a little known lobe of the Bermuda Triangle may have been operating in the vicinity of our town at the time.)
Fortunately, the High Velocity Wind Rocketry Experiment, held a few years later in Spokane, WA, on neutral ground far away from the rogue Triangle lobe, was far more successful. The Astron Apogee spacecraft was recovered after a hike of a mere five miles or so in a howling wind through treacherous, critter infested sand dunes.
In the meantime our neighborhood friend had joined the rocket team, and flushed with the heady success of Spokane, the East Side Rocketeers were soon back to the elementary school big field proving grounds, with the inaugural Two Stage Aquatic Live Payload event. In retrospect, the guppy involved probably would have lived, except for the fact that his special environmental needs caused the balsa nose cone plug of the second stage to swell and stick in the rocket body tube, preventing the parachute from deploying properly, ultimately resulting in a rather harsh landing and another unfortunate space flight disaster. On a positive note, both stages of the rocket had performed admirably. Once again, the program had to be reassessed.
Still not beaten, though, we moved on to the ultimate phase of the Early Rocketry Experiments. This occurred in later junior high days, with the initiation of the highly controversial Cherry-Bombs-for-Parachutes test series, with a different friend, held in the big field out back of the local orphanage. Not unexpectedly, few of the craft survived these tests, which were deemed rousing successes anyhow, at least by those with some sense of humor. But for some time after that further tests were suspended, by edict of local and domestic authorities who lacked senses of humor. The East Side Space Program was laid low.
Many years later I was visiting with my brother in a different Montana town, and had only been at his house a few days (and we’d hardly drank any beers yet that particular day) before he suggested we take the boys and go down to the big field past the convenience store to shoot off rockets. I quickly agreed, having been too long away from the sweet science. We repaired to the secret locked basement room where he keeps the good fishin’ stuff, the 138 guns which the Constitution of the State of Montana says every adult male resident therein must keep on the premises, and sundry other items best kept under lock and key, which included, of course, the model rockets. What a treasure trove of brightly painted cardboard and balsa! This was going to be a day to remember, and I was going to savor every second.
From my brother’s and nephews’ selection of up to three rather generic and, upon closer inspection, hastily and somewhat sloppily assembled space vehicles, we chose two that looked as though the crashes they’d already suffered had not made them totally unflightworthy. I expressed some surprise at the seemingly low standards of rocketry workmanship manifested in these particular craft, and wondered aloud about their airworthiness. I was assured that the boys had done the best work they could during lulls in Nintendo, and that the rockets had already proved worthy, based upon the fact that even though they’d only been flown two or three times each, they still looked as good as any rocket that had crashed four or five times. My concerns were laid to rest. We then rummaged through a brown paper bag containing a somewhat motley collection of model rocket engines, and selected a couple that looked as though they might at least fit the rockets’ engine mounts, even if they weren’t proper for those craft. Finally, eschewing fanciness in the fine tradition of the Montana model rocketry community, we bent a coat hanger straight for a launch rod, pulled the fuses out of a few Black Cat firecrackers for later use in the engines, and were on our way, almost. First we had to wait for my brother’s friend.
This friend and my brother had a long history of later-life rocket tests in which I had not participated, dating back to when they’d both found themselves a long way from home after high school, alone in this big cold city. They soon became fast friends and found they shared a common love for balsa, cardboard, Elmer’s, and cherry bombs, emphasis on the latter. However, where my brother is content to let his sons assemble rockets while playing video games (probably that’s when he did his own, too, judging by its appearance), the friend is a fanatic for precision and detail. His latest project was a beautifully executed Space Shuttle which represented some twenty-five hours work. At Montana labor rates, that comes out to about $19.95. Today was to be its maiden voyage, and it turned out that was the real reason we were going rocketing. The friend was excited, my brother was semi-excited, the boys were excited, and so of course was I excited. I had never witnessed the flight of a model of this type, that is to say, well-built. I looked at my brother’s comparatively poverty-stricken craft and felt ashamed.
We all piled in the big blue `69 Galaxy 500 and headed down the street to the big empty field. When we arrived, we staked out a spot in the quadrant of the field generally agreed to be “upwind”, and I launched the kite which was to serve as our weathervane and windsock. Never let it be said that Montana Rocketeers proceed unscientifical! I tethered the kite to a handy rock. Then I turned to help my brother and his friend set up the launch area.
Now the art of sticking a hanger in the ground, putting an engine and fuse in a rocket, sticking the rocket on the hanger, and lighting it (fuse not hanger) is, of course, much too complicated for children, so we had to keep shooing the (younger) boys out of the way. The idea is to shoot the rocket into the wind at precisely the right angle so that when the parachute pops the rocket will float gently down to the original launch spot. Anyhow, that’s the plan. We decided to launch one of my brother’s rockets, a four fin model, first, so as to gauge the wind at higher altitudes, as we expected the wind to be a major factor in the anticipated graceful gliding descent of the friend’s Space Shuttle. The four fin rockets will not “lean into” the wind, and thus make good indicators of the actual ferocity of any given Montana breeze.
We then proceeded to compute the angle of the hanger, based upon the behavior and direction of our weathervane, the kite. The kite, however, was nowhere to be seen. At least it wasn’t where I left it. “Isn’t that it way down there?”, asked the friend. Sure enough, there it was, half a mile away, going down fast, about to crash into the freeway on the other side of the big field. The boys, bored, had decided to let out some line and “accidentally” let all the string come off the roll. I took off after the kite, muttering under my breath, imagining tomorrow’s headlines in the local paper, “Three Pickups and a Trailer of Steers Demolished in Freeway Mishap, Kite Faulted. Gunracks and Fishin’ Tackle Saved”. I told my brother I’d go get it and wait down at the end of the field, just in case our estimation of the flight angle was off, and that he should launch after I’d retrieved the kite.
From my vantage point the launch was flawless. The rocket quickly gained altitude in the powered ascent stage, arched ever higher over my head until it was directly above me in the coasting stage, and finally popped its parachute somewhere downrange, way downrange, past the freeway, and most likely on the other side of the river. Surely, I thought, there’s another in the Rockets Lost In Space series. My brother, however, did not share in this view and jumped in the big blue ’69 Galaxy 500 to give chase. Kite and I headed back to the launchpad.
Meanwhile, the friend had seen enough to judge the proper angle into the wind for his Space Shuttle on its maiden voyage. I expressed my concern that 45 degrees was rather more steep than I had ever seen a rocket inclined before, but the friend assured me it was okay. I relaunched the kite and retethered it, with a stern uncle’s word to the boys, and turned to assist.
The Space Shuttle was supposed to work as follows: After the boost phase, and after the coast phase, the ejection charge would blow, separating the Shuttle from its boosters. The Shuttle would then glide gently to the ground, while the boosters descended by parachute. That was the theory. The friend inserted the firecracker fuse and prepared to launch.
PFFFFFFFSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTT! The Space Shuttle leaped off the pad, rolled over on its back at an altitude of about eight feet, and took off like a bugrabbit horizontally toward an irrigation ditch about 200 feet away. Luckily, rockets are not designed to fly horizontal, so it crashed into the dirt just this side of the barb wire fence along the ditch. POP! The Shuttle separated from the boosters and the parachute deployed, just as designed, there in the dirt. The friend was not amused. I was, heartily.
Meanwhile, my brother had returned from his trip to a cow pasture on the other side of the river, and I was surprised to see the rocket in hand. It had, however, sustained some damage, apparently as the result of being stepped upon by a cow. We decided perhaps it was time to launch his other rocket while the friend performed emergency repairs to the Shuttle. This one was a three fin model, which will lean into the wind (or in the words of the Estes Rocket Company, Estes Park, Colorado, “cheat” into the wind, which is to say fly upwind). So we were not concerned with having to chase this one across the river. We looked for the kite to gauge the proper wind angle, and once again it was gone. Or was it? High in the sky, way out over the freeway, was a tiny kite shape. The boys had succeeded in keeping the line on the roll this time, mainly `cause I had tied it to the spindle before. I muttered again, not so quietly, as I started reeling it in.
Once again, the launch was flawless. The powered ascent pushed the rocket strongly into the wind, and the coast phase took it high into the airspace over the subdivision upwind from our field. We had estimated this perfectly. The parachute would carry it right back to us. We were quite pleased with ourselves. The Rocket Gods have their own ways of dealing with smugness, however, and we watched helplessly as the rocket fell somewhere in the subdivision. Something had gone haywire, and the parachute had not deployed. My brother started for the big blue `69 Galaxy 500. I went with him.
Now this was just the sort of a situation that would have resulted in Rockets Lost in Space in the earlier years. But we didn’t have the big blue `69 Galaxy 500 search and rescue vehicle back then. After an amazingly short stretch of driving around, we found the rocket in the middle of a subdivision street. I hopped out the 500 to retrieve it. It was mostly not broke too bad, except for a couple of crumples, and the engine mount had been bent back when the engine had blown out of the rocket. The pressure that was supposed to deploy the parachute had to go somewhere, and the spent engine casing had been ejected out somewhere over the subdivision. As I stood in the street examining the rocket, I heard a male voice from one of the neighboring back yards, “You need a goddamn hard hat around here!”. We decided maybe to leave and see how the friend was getting on.
Not totally unexpectedly, I guess, the kite had “Accidentally” crashed in the field downwind once again, and the line was a hopeless tangled mess. I decided to let it Rest In Peace and bag the weather reports. The friend had straightened out the structural damage that had been done to the Shuttle external fuel tank and boosters as a result of the crash, and thought probably it was just about ready to fly again. First, however, he decided to make some adjustments to the angle of the wings and fins to “make the dang thing fly more straight upper this time”. That accomplished, we were ready to launch.
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSST! The Space Shuttle leaped off the pad, and the wing angle adjustments were an obvious great success, as the vehicle did not roll over on its back and begin flying horizontally until it was about fifteen feet in the air this time. Once again it took off like a bugrabbit, straight for the irrigation ditch. POP! The Shuttle separated from the boosters and the parachute deployed, just before the whole contraption crossed the top strand of the barb wire fence. The fence saved the boosters, as the parachute caught and self- destructed on the barb wire. The orbiter vehicle was not so lucky however, and continued past the fence and down into the ditch. The last thing I saw, as I bent over laughing, was one of the nephews going over the fence and into the water, trying to catch the unfortunate Shuttle before it went down a culvert.
The wet, dusty, tired boys and the wet, dusty, crumpled rockets headed back to the house in the big blue `69 Galaxy 500, looking forward to some hard-earned refreshments, the rockets in particular lobbying for a stop at the convenience store for a sixer of Lucky Draft. I thought back on those test series, suspended so long ago, and decided that this day was, indeed, a worthy continuation of the Two Stage Aquatic Live Payload events. I was proud indeed that my family had played, and continues to play, such a vital role in America’s Space Program.
Author/Copyright: Tiger, of tigerwhip.com fame Date written: 09/20/1994