GRANTSBORO, North Carolina USA — Lionel Overton is a truck driver by trade, a rocketeer by choice.

He and several dozen fellow amateur rocket builders will gather Saturday and Sunday in a large farm field off N.C. 306 to ply their hobby.

The Tripoli Rocket[ry] Association show is open to the public on Paul Farm Road, from 10 a.m. until late afternoon.

He said the group has members from throughout North Carolina, along with South Carolina and Virginia.

Overton got interested in rockets a few years ago after another aviation hobby didn’t fly.

“I was into radio controlled airplanes for a long time, but I kept crashing them,” he said. “I told my wife I needed to find something different to do.”

He found the rocket club surfing the Internet looking for a new hobby.

“A lot of people don’t know that they can go and buy these rocket kits, and go out and shoot a rocket off,” he said. “You can build a small one for probably 15 or 20 dollars,” he said. Large ones range to several hundred dollars.

He said the rockets vary in height from one to 14 feet, and the larger rockets will go upwards of 8,000 feet.

After a rockets reaches its maximum altitude, an altimeter controls the release of a parachute.

“The rocket will fall a couple of thousand feet and then the altimeter, by pressure, releases a charge inside the rocket that blows out the parachute and then they float back down to the ground,” he said. The maximum altitude is recorded on the altimeter.

Overton said this would be the third rocket show in Pamlico County this year. Previously, the club launched from farmlands in Whitakers and Battleboro, both near Rocky Mount.

He estimated the Paul Farm Road site at several thousand acres.

He said the sport was safe and during a decade of launches, none had ever caused a fire.

“A rocket motor burns for about three or four seconds,” he said. “When they come down, they are coming down in a dirt field.”

He said spectators are kept several hundred feet away from the launch areas.

“When we look at a place to launch rockets, we take into consideration everything that is around us,” he said. “If we think the woods are too close, we limit the size rockets.”

Overton said the association gets permission to use the air space. In this case, an FAA spokesman in Greensboro said the rocket group would call Cherry Point Marine Air Station control when it planned to launch.

Copyright © 2007, Sun Journal.