Rocketry Planet

On April 25, 2009, history was made. At Higgs Farm in Price, Maryland, Steve Eves entered the history books as the person who flew the largest model rocket in history. The rocket weighed over 1,600 pounds, it stood over 36 feet tall and it was powered by a massive array of nine motors: eight 13,000ns N-Class motors and a 77,000ns P-Class motor. The altitude of the flight was 4,441 feet and the project fully recovered. In a special to Rocketry Planet, author Mark B. Canepa and ROCKETS Magazine wish to share Steve Eve's story with the readers here.

In the 1989 baseball film, Field of Dreams, farmer Ray Kinsella—portrayed by Kevin Costner—is walking his property one evening when he suddenly has a vision of a lighted baseball diamond in the middle of his Iowa corn field. Along with this vision, he hears an unfamiliar and ghostly voice, reaching out to him from the past:

"If you build it, they will come."

There stood in the middle of a corn field a perfect replica of the Apollo 11 spaceship, weighing nearly 1,650 pounds and towering almost four stories in the air, anchored to a giant red gantry.

His neighbors think he is crazy. But soon, Kinsella has cut a baseball field into his crop, filling it with close-clipped grass, an infield, a backstop, four bases, wooden bleachers and a set of bright white light towers that can be seen for miles.

"If you build it, they will come."

Steve Eves, a 51-year-old auto body collision specialist from Lake Township, Ohio, had a vision more than ten years ago to build and launch the biggest model rocket in history: a one-tenth-scale Saturn V, to honor the Apollo Space Program, and to be flown on an array of high-power rocket motors thousands of feet into the air.

That vision remained dormant until two years ago, when Eves embarked on a construction project that many people thought was crazy.

But on the morning of April 25, 2009, at the Higgs Farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, there stood in the middle of a corn field a perfect replica of the Apollo 11 spaceship, weighing nearly 1,650 pounds and towering almost four stories in the air, anchored to a giant red gantry.

And in the early afternoon on that spring day, in front of thousands of spectators who came from all over the country, Eves would push a launch button to bring his vision to life—not only recreating a big piece of history, but also making some of his own.

This is a little piece of that weekend and the story of Steve Eves's dream.