This past October 20-22, 2006, rocketeers from all over the East Coast descended on the Higgs Dairy Farm in Price, Maryland to attend the event called “Red Glare,” gleaned from a phrase in “The Star-Spangled Banner” and now one of the nation’s largest regional high power rocketry events.

The Black Rock Desert is home to the premiere experimental launch in North America, the Tripoli Rocketry Association's BALLS launch.  Liberty Launch Systems and ROCKETS Magazine was there once again to capture the magic that is now in the history books as BALLS 15.

Giant Leap Rocketry leads the industry in innovative new products.  Their latest kit, the Elipse, has taken their design paradigm to a new level.  According to Ed at Giant Leap, “this design was inspired by the lines of the famous Jaguar XKE. I wanted to create a kit with curves that depart from the same old straight lines found in other rockets.” 

February is the dead of Winter in Butte, Montana and that's the perfect opportunity to seek warmer climates.  Steve Shannon did just that, by planning a family get-away in the sunnier South, just in time for the Arizona Rocket Gathering.  While there, he grabbed a Polecat Aerospace 5.5" Nike Smoke kit for a Winter project and this is its story.

A strange thing happens on "The Astronaut Farmer's" mad dash for mediocrity: reality comes crashing into his happy story of make-believe and shakes things up. A fantasy about a dreamer who refuses to concede his quest to fly one day into space—going so far as to build a towering rocket ship in his barn—the new film from the Polish brothers (the same pair who brought us "Twin Falls Idaho" and "Northfork") is a fairy-tale for the terrorism age.

One of the greatest things about enjoying hobby rocketry today is the advancements that have been made in multimedia.  If you so desire, you can surround yourself with a myriad of information about the sport from a wide variety of sources.  If you are eager to learn about a certain subject, there's information about it available in numerous formats to meet your need.

How many different ways can you spell W-O-W!  If the first issue is any indication of what we can expect from LAUNCH Magazine, then not only does publisher Mark Mayfield have a hit on his hands, so does the hobby rocketry community. When the premiere issue appeared in my mailbox, I couldn't wait to get a look at the latest hobby rocketry publication.