Rocketry Planet

OF LATE I HAVE BEEN PONDERING the state of our art: the building of sport rockets. The future of the hobby is on our minds a lot, what with the regulatory battles and the NARAM waiver being denied. This opinion is not about that, but concerns something we all hold much closer to our hearts, namely, how we construct our rockets.

There is no doubt that hobby rockets are much bigger, heavier, and faster. Flights worth hundreds of dollars are commonplace. Speeds over Mach 1 are regularly achieved. I've seen paint jobs that would do a custom Harley credit. But are these rockets really any better? Have we progressed from Orville and Harry's Roc-a-chute?

Take my own Level 3 rocket, "Photon", for an example. Made from the best fiberglass parts, sophisticated electronics, professional-quality parachutes, with a video camcorder payload. Pretty easy to refer to it with that tired phrase, "state of the art". But, other than size, how much does it differ from an ordinary model rocket?

The fins are laboriously glued in place, with fillets. The airframes are joined with slip-fit coupler tubes. Recovery is via a black powder charge. The payload sits in what amounts to an oversized nose cone, almost added as an afterthought.

What have we accomplished here? Have we improved upon the lowly model rocket, or have we just scaled it up? Think of how many times you've seen a giant rocket flown off a 1" diameter launch rod. There are better ways to do this, but we seem stuck on scaling up even tiny details like the launch lugs of model rockets. The lineage from the rubber-band shock cord to bungee seems clear to me, too. When in doubt, make it bigger or stronger, but don't think of a better way!

Well, obviously many of us are thinking of a better way to do things. The hobby is progressing, slowly though it seems. Innovators are among us. I'm talking about people like Scott Bartel, whose rail guides and aluminum fins seemed way out at first, but are common now. Gary Rosenfield convinced nearly all of us to switch to reloadable motors. Ky Michealson taught us that deployment bags are the only way to fly.

And I'm not just talking about businessmen, either. Every hobbyist has something to contribute. I thought my own in-flight video was terrific, until Kurt Gugisberg flew his new video rocket. Similar in many ways to my "Photon", Kurt's "Big Purple" had a simple difference that made his video an order of magnitude better. He put his camera under the parachute compartment, and hung the rocket from 3 separately attached chutes, resulting in an upright, stable platform.

The thing is, if I did not know Kurt personally I would never have heard of this trick, and make plans to steal it for my own, ha, ha. You've got to publish! Get out there and take some photos, draw a diagram, and write it down. Shoot, Extreme Rocketry magazine is paying for articles. If you don't want to deal with a magazine then ship it off to the web. Darrell would be glad to post it here. There really is no excuse for not sharing.

The title of this opinion, "Thinking outside the box", is intended to mean that we should not let history dictate what we do. I worry, though, that we are not even coming up level with "history". We sometimes forget that, 50 years ago or more, JPL and the US Army were out there trying the same things we are doing now. That engineering knowledge represents an enormous resource that our hobby has rarely touched. I bet the guys at White Sands never glued on their fins, and I'm sure the nose cone of an Aerobee is not held on with a slip-fit coupler. I don't know how to begin to tap this resource, but maybe one of my readers does. I'm asking, for all of us, right now.

Somewhere out there, some rocketeer is sitting on an idea that will change the hobby. Maybe you think it's no big deal. Maybe you showed it off to your friends and left it at that. Could be that everyone in your club does it your way and it just never went any further. If you know something, and it works, you need to stand up and shout it out. Make your mark on rocketry today!