Rocketry Planet

"The tremendous interest in rocket development by high school and college students has been the source of much gratification to those who are most interesting in the future of rockets and guided missiles. We foresee great benefit to our Nation as a consequence of this scientific curiosity on the part of the generation which will soon bear the responsibility for our scientific progress. The United States Army desires to extend the maximum degree of assistance to, and to cooperate fully with, these budding scientists in their experiments."

This is wording of the preface, written by Major General Charles P. Brown, Commandant of the U.S. Army Field Artillery School in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in the booklet A Guide To Amateur Rocketry. The Army created this booklet to help guide the new wave of rocket scientists that emerged in the early Sixties. The booklet, written in January of 1963, was designed to help these individuals safely participate in rocketry in an era when there was a lot of experimenting but very few commercially available rocketry products.

The booklet has been captured and converted to Adobe PDF format to share with the readers. Fifty two pages in length, the article is 5,925K 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/.

This segment of From The Archive was made possible by Bill Spadafora, whose content contribution allowed Rocketry Planet to share this booklet with you. 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.