Rocket enthusiasts converge on Rochester to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a model rocket launch that made international news.

INTERACTIVE: A rocket blasts off into the air in Maple Island, Minn., as part of the National Association of Rocketry's National Convention in Rochester, Minnesota, Saturday. Photo: BEN GARVIN, Pioneer Press

ROCHESTER, Minnesota USA — As a matter of fact, they are rocket scientists.

The National Association of Rocketry is in Rochester this weekend for its 50th annual convention, and some of its members will be marking the 50th anniversary of one of their hobby's milestones: the world-famous Austin Rocket Society's first launch.

In 1957, teen rocketeers, mostly from Austin's Pacelli High School, made news by designing, building and launching rockets at a time when the nation's nascent space program was having trouble launching something that didn't explode.

"The thrill of watching a rocket go up is something you never get used to," said O'Dean Judd, one of the society's members.

Judd would know. Born in Austin, he is retired and living in Los Alamos, N.M., where he was chief scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

But in an age long before space shuttles and Mars rovers, rockets were exotic. The club's first launch was on Jan. 5, 1957, and over the course of the next couple of years, the club received national and international media attention. Even Radio Moscow talked about it.

A historical marker now notes the launch site in Mower County. The pad, in Red Rock Township, was called "the Red Rock Proving Grounds."

Like many things in the early days of rocketry, not everything was "nominal," as rocket scientists say. Some rockets didn't launch. The teens accidentally set fire to a farmer's field.

And they found themselves facing a judge when a local humane society went to court to stop them from launching live mice after one of their "Mouseniks" didn't survive a landing.

The Mouseniks — the word was a play on the Soviet Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, launched in October 1957 — were launched atop a series of rockets made out of pipe and fueled by various substances the teens would mix and brew in their basements.

"Mousenik I" achieved an altitude of 1,642 feet, while "Mousenik II," launched in 1958, traveled nearly twice as high.

When things worked according to plan, a spring-loaded mechanism ejected the mouse from the rocket. The mouse descended on a parachute, said Gordon Cassidy, an Austin Rocket Society member.

"The humane society thought that was being cruel to mice to put them in there, because they thought they suffered," said Cassidy, who still lives in Austin. "We had tried to put them under before we put them in the rocket, and we put cushions in there so the acceleration wouldn't be so hard. And we had a parachute in there."

A state district judge dismissed the humane society's complaint. "He said 'If we stop them, we'd have to do away with mousetraps, too,' " Cassidy said of the judge.

"A lot of people were calling in and saying, 'If they want the mice in my garage, they can have them,' " Judd said.

"Today, most of the safety codes would dictate that launching animals is not apropos," said David Donovan, a computer software engineer at Rochester's Mayo Clinic who heads Tripoli Southern Minnesota, a state rocketry group.

"There are lots of rules and guidelines, and one of them is don't launch your kid brother," Donovan said. "Some of our rockets will go up to 10,000 feet at 10 or 15 G's. (One "G" is the force of gravity.) That's a little too much to withstand. We're a kinder and gentler group these days."

Donovan said that these days, hobby rocket scientists are launching rockets that contain barometric sensors, radio tracking devices, GPS systems and cameras that transmit a real-time video of the flight to a laptop computer at the launch site.

Donovan's club maintains the 600-acre launch area near Maple Island that some of the 150 or so people attending the rocketry convention used to launch about 40 rockets Saturday.

He said the rocketry association and the parent group of his club, the Tripoli Rocketry Association, owe their origins to groups like the Austin Rocket Society.

"I guess 50 years ago, things were a lot more difficult than they were today for accomplishing something like this," he said. "Most everything was fabricated by hand, while today, we can purchase motors and parts. There's a market for hobby rocketry that exists today that was founded by people who did what they did."

The National Association of Rocketry has about 4,500 members nationwide in 110 chapters. It is limited to rockets with commercially available motors, while the Tripoli group is considered the domain of more powerful rockets.

The two associations used to be competitive, but they've been working together the past few years to fight the government's post-Sept. 11 efforts to severely limit the availability of materials they use for fuel.

Former Austin Rocket Society member Gary Solyst remembers the days of fabricating rockets and fuels. Now retired from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — where he was a patent examiner dealing with nuclear-reactor fuel elements — he said the club loved to experiment.

"That's what drove us. We were experimenting, and we were kids," he said. "Now, they'd never allow you to make rockets like back then. You were basically making them out of gunpowder and stainless steel pipe. If it blows up, it's a bomb. If it goes up in the air, it's a rocket."

He said they originally tried using gunpowder for fuel.

"That wasn't very successful," he said. "Then we read an article in Scientific American about making rocket fuel out of zinc and sulfur, so we tried that."

"Frankly, when I look back at it, it was probably a little more dangerous than one would like to think about," Judd recalled.

When he worked with the Austin Rocket Society, he was a student in college and served as an adviser.

"I advised them more on how to build these things and how they worked," he said. "They would go down and get some stainless steel pipe. The rockets were about three to four feet long. They'd machine a nozzle and mix up a propellant and put it in an electric fry pan and keep the temperature at a certain level and then pour it in."

Rocketry grew as a hobby when companies were able to mass-produce solid-fuel rocket motors. But the Internet has helped rekindle the age of the home-brew motor, said Ted Cochran, a rocketry association board member who lives in Minneapolis.

"Because the Internet is out there and people can learn from each other and share safety practices and so forth, there is a larger trend these days toward people mixing their own propellants," said Cochran, who works in Honeywell's research-and-development laboratories.

Jim Budd, of Austin, who manages ABC Electronics and TV Service, also served as a college-age adviser to the club, and he remembers the lessons they tried to instill in the rocket club members.

"They learned to be very specific and document everything and do a lot of studying," he said. "They also learned safety. One of the times, one of the rockets came down and started part of a field on fire, so they learned about emergency conditions."

Judd said his work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory — and the three years he spent as chief scientist for the Strategic Defense Initiative — kept him close to rocketry after his start in Austin.

"Rocketry hasn't been my big field of study throughout my career, but I never seem to be able to escape it," he said. "No matter what I do, something goes up on a rocket, or it involves a rocket or a jet engine."

Copyright © 2007, Pioneer Press, MediaNew Group

03-11-2007 03:29 PM  #1
Raider Rocketry Low Power Enthusiast   Joined: Mar 2007 Posts: 128	It's amazing to see how far we've come. I wonder what the next 50 years will bring?