The late 50's find youngsters all across the nation looking up to the sky, first to see satellites, then to see their rockets streak across the sky.  This article from the September 1958 issue of Popular Mechanics covers the activities of the Reaction Research Society and the hobby of amateur rocketry.

"These Rocketeers Play Safe" follows the RRS as they conduct a launch, covering the basic safety rules that the society adopted to address the safety issues that could result from amateurs experimenting with rocketry.  Since early amateur rockets dealt with unique propellant combinations, such as zinc-sulphur, potential mishandling of these components could have spelled problems. 

The article has been captured and converted to Adobe PDF format to share with the readers. Six pages in length, the article is 4,219K in size. To view the article, click here. You will need Adobe Reader to view the article. If you do not have Adobe Reader, a copy may be downloaded for free from the Adobe website at http://www.adobe.com/.

Part of the challenge we face in the hobby is the archival and preservation of these old sources of information useful to our hobby. Adobe PDF format makes a great medium for the collection and storage of these types of documents because of its portability and cross-platform approach.

If you have something you'd like to share with the readers, send email to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it  with details on the document you have to share. Previous submissions have consisted of submitting magazines or documents in whole, which were be returned upon completion of the scanning process.  While this approach is still acceptable, the preference is toward user-generated submissions scanned by the users themselves.