Rocketry Planet

A Revolution in the Hobby

Over the next ten years, between 1996 and 2006, high-power rocketry mushroomed and grew, spreading to almost every state in the country and several nations overseas. Commercial motor selection expanded, as new motor makers brought dozens of new products onto the market, from H motors up through O power. Altimeters, timers, GPS and other rocketry-related electronics became simpler to use—and incredibly inexpensive. And reliable experimental or research motors—in propellant sizes up through P and Q motors—transformed all aspects of the hobby and made almost anything seem possible:  If high-power rocketry has its own history, this was its Industrial Revolution.

As a result of these and other changes, high-power rockets were becoming more reliable, they were going higher, and they were getting bigger.  Much, much bigger.

At Tripoli's annual experimental launch at the Black Rock Desert in 2004, there were not one—but two—seven-hundred-pound projects that took to the air.  One of those rockets was powered by three P motors. Over the next few years, Q motors began to appear regularly at Black Rock.  And in 2006 one such rocket—powered by a research Q motor—reached an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet.

Currently, it is believed that the credit for the largest rocket ever flown in high-power rocketry belongs to The Liberty Project, a massive vehicle built by members of the Maryland Delaware Rocketry Association and flown in mid-2004.  The Liberty Project was twenty-four inches in diameter, twenty-four feet tall, and tipped the scales at the astonishing weight of more than 1,300 pounds. Powered by an array of research motors—a central P, two Os and two Ns—the rocket cleared 3,000 feet.

Steve Eves witnessed none of these events.  Nor was he even aware of them—or the changes that had transformed high-power rocketry in the years after he sold off all of his rocket supplies.  But ten years after he had left the hobby, he was about to find out that the incredible developments that had occurred in his absence had now made it possible to power the rocket that he had only dreamed of in 1995.

In early 2007, Steve Eves got a telephone call from a friend who was involved in radio controlled airplanes.  Earlier that day, his friend had been standing in a small warehouse in Ohio that was "chock full of rocket parts."  The contents of the warehouse were for sale, and the friend asked Steve if he was interested in taking a look. It had been more than ten years since Eves had flown a rocket.  But he decided to take a chance.

That trip may have changed his life forever.

"I went and looked at the warehouse and could not believe what was there," said Eves. "There were more than 230 cases of launch equipment and rocket kits!"  And the best part?  The owner of the warehouse wanted only $1,000 for everything inside, said Eves.

Eves made the purchase and it took him two trips with a twenty-four-foot trailer to haul his prize away.  "I kept some of the parts," said Eves, "but the majority of the equipment was sold to a rocket manufacturer—allowing me to make some extra money and get involved in rocketry again."

It was time to build the Saturn V.

The Dream is Realized: Building the Saturn V

Eves had kept the plans he had drawn up in the mid-1990s for his one-tenth scale version of the rocket, and he dug them up, did some additional research, and began planning for the build. Construction started in May of 2007.

Eves had remarried in the ten years since he had left the hobby. And rocketry was new to his wife, Waneda, a retail manager also from Ohio. "When Steve told me he was going to build a Saturn V, I said "Okay, dear—whatever you want," not really thinking for a minute that he was going to do it," she said. "Then one day he came home with a whole truck load of wood, and with a smile he told me that he had two years to get it done!"

Eves anticipated the build taking two years, but by the fall of 2008 he was ahead of schedule—the rocket was nearly complete—and launch in 2009 was almost certain.

The Saturn V would be powered by a cluster of nine, solid-fuel, ammonium perchlorate (AP) motors: A central P motor and eight N motors, all produced by Jeff Taylor of Loki Research of Pennsylvania.  "This project has personally inspired me," said Taylor, who is a commercial manufacturer of high-power rocket motors. "The Saturn V is a great choice to model as it will help this project connect to all Americans as a symbol of not only our national pride, but also our achievements in space engineering."

The Loki P motor case—made of aluminum—is six inches in diameter and the AP propellant inside that case will weigh eighty pounds.  Each N motor is four inches in diameter and the propellant within each of the N motor cases will weigh sixteen pounds each. That's almost 210 pounds of propellant alone. 

Placed together side by side in the aft end of the forty-inch wide rocket, the motor tubes that will house all of these rocket engines look small and insignificant.  But these nine motors will provide more than 8,000 pounds of thrust—enough power to pick up a Volkswagen Beetle and throw it a half mile through the air. This motor combination will ensure a thrust-to-weight ratio at takeoff of nearly five to one, said Eves, critical to achieving and maintaining a stable flight.

Steve Eves stands at the business end of his Saturn V, where nine motors will go to provide the necessary propulsion to lift this beast from Earth's gravity.

The total cost of the propellant is not cheap: The fuel price alone, including the motor cases, will exceed $13,000. The ammonium perchlorate in those cases will burn up in less than ten seconds.  These nine motors must lift the Saturn V—now expected to weigh more than 1,700 pounds—safely off the pad.  "The motor combination of eight N motors and a central P motor dwarfs the power plant of the Liberty Project," said Neil McGilvray, a member of the 2004 Liberty Project team. "This will be the most impressive display of raw power ever witnessed on an amateur rocket—the visceral impact to the senses is going to be overwhelming."

The construction of the rocket has taken place in an inconspicuous garage, thirty feet wide by sixty feet long, adjacent to Eves' home in the small community of Lake Township—not far from Akron, Ohio.

The home sits on a narrow, tree-lined street on a deep, three-quarter-acre lot filled with large maple trees that shade both the house and the garage. The well-kept garage is a home mechanic's dream: There are rocket parts and machine tools everywhere, and more than a dozen high-power rockets hang in a crate-like box in the middle of the twelve-foot-tall ceiling. The floor of the garage is smooth concrete, and there are oversize doors at either end of the building. A twenty-four-foot-long work bench sits against one wall; nearby and pinned to white pegboard on the wall are several more rockets, as well as articles from local newspapers that have been following the Saturn V project since its unveiling in the summer of 2008. There are also two poster-size photos of Steve and his friends Mark Rogers and Jamie Stark in 1994—with the Iroc rocket that started it all.

In the middle of the garage, on special stands with wheels that allow the rocket to be moved easily, sits the booster section of the Saturn V.  It is more than twenty feet long and weighs more than six hundred pounds, empty. The forward, open end of the booster looks large enough to swallow a full grown man—or several men. Nearby, the upper section of the Saturn V stands upright on its own, barely fitting under the garage roof.  The massive scale of the rocket takes one by surprise when seen in person—it looks like a static display, museum piece—it seems too big to be a real high-power rocket.

The booster section of the Saturn V contains eleven centering rings from top to bottom. Each of the top nine of these rings is three-eighth-inches thick. Running between each pair of rings are sixteen three-eighths-inch thick, one-inch-wide stringers that create the interior skeleton to which the outer skin of the rocket is attached. Every stringer is attached to the centering rings with epoxy and nails. Every joint is then reinforced with fiberglass cloth. The bottom two rings at the aft end of the rocket—where the motors are—are each three-quarters-of-an-inch thick.  All of the wood used in the centering rings and the skeleton is seven-ply- aircraft-grade plywood, imported from Sweden.

The 10,000 Nails

The tubular "skin" or airframe of the Saturn V is actually three different parts melded together: the innermost skin, or foundation of the airframe, is one-eighth-inch-thick Luan plywood.  Luan comes in thin sheets that are three by seven feet in size—it is easily bendable and can be form fitted around a skeletal structure.  "I stumbled across Luan at Home Depot one day," said Eves.  "I knew I needed an outer skin to attach to the stringers and centering rings, and I toyed with the idea of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, but the Luan worked perfectly."

Working slowly with only nails and glue—like Noah building his great Ark—Eves carefully wrapped the thin Luan sheets around the centering rings and stringers. It was painstaking and laborious work, made even more so by the fact that Eves used an old-fashioned hammer to apply each of the 10,000 tiny nails needed to attach the Luan to the rocket skeleton. "I did not use a nail gun because the head of the nail you would use with a gun would not catch on the Luan wood," said Eves. "The nails used in the gun are made to go into trim and be invisible—you do not see the nail.  I did not want that.  I wanted the head of the nail to catch on the skin—to hold it down firm.  So I had to use a hammer for all of the nails."

It took more than fourteen sheets of Luan—almost three hundred square feet of material—to cover the rocket. That's enough wood to encapsulate more than a dozen one-hundred-pound high-power rockets.  The results were outstanding.

"Before the skin of the rocket was applied there was no strength in the structure," he said. "The entire booster—centering rings, stringers and all—would not stay rigid or straight and I had to install rollers under the rocket as it lay on the rotisserie I built for construction."  However, after the Luan skin was complete, the structural integrity of the rocket improved markedly, said Eves. The supporting rollers under the rocket were no longer necessary, and there was no bending or twisting or sagging along the entire length of the booster's massive airframe.

Eves next turned to fiberglass cloth to add strength—and a base for the finish and the paint—to the rocket's outer skin.  He enlisted the help of a friend, and the pair applied one complete layer of sixteen-ounce fiberglass cloth directly to the Luan, followed by an immediate, additional layer of eight-ounce glass.

"We applied all of the fiberglass cloth at the same time to avoid any possibility of lamination problems whereby the second layer of cloth would not stick or adhere to the first layer," said Eves. "If you allow the first coat to completely dry, the possibility exists that the second layer of cloth will not bond properly to the first layer.  By doing it all when the cloth and epoxy are still wet, you avoid this problem. It all bonds—no question about it." 

It took Eves and his friend—both of them well experienced in the art and science of fiberglass—more than six full hours to apply the fiberglass cloth to the booster.  Eves said that to apply all of the cloth to the entire rocket required more than forty-five square yards of material and at least fourteen gallons of fiberglass resin.