| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Backyard Rocketry Gets Rocket Scientists’ Attention | This Week In Space History
by michael shinabery
The Soviet Union’s Sputnik successes in October and November of 1957 not only ignited the capitalism-versus-communism Space Race, but also the model rocketry craze. “Despite deaths and injuries – and probably more to come – the ‘backyard rocketry’ craze among U.S. teenagers continues to grow,” Alamogordo Daily News writer Allan Wegemer reported on Dec. 23, 1957. “That booming project seems to promise nothing but death and injury for the nation’s ‘future scientists.’ ”
Among the casualties were James McQuillan, 14, of Jacksonville, Fla. While making “a rocket in his ‘garage workshop’ ” he “was killed when a container of chemicals exploded.”
A Texas chemistry teacher died as well…during class.
Larry Larson, 14, of Detroit, “received a broken left leg when he tried to ‘launch’ a ‘tiny Vanguard’ rocket in an alley. The leg was broken by a piece of the exploding rocket,” Wegemer said.
Such stories were not new. In his 1990 oral history, Lt Col Wayne Mattson, the volunteer archivist at the New Mexico Museum of Space History (who recently died in 2012), said that as a teenager he “inadvertently” launched a rocket inside his parents’ home.
“We took a glass tube, filled it full of (black gunpowder), set it up at an angle, ignited another mixture of the propellant on the outside because we didn’t know anything about fuses,” Mattson said, “and lo and behold, it ignited the fuel on the inside of the tube and the tube took off across the room.”
A teenage Wernher von Braun built home-made rockets, with calamitous results. Michael Neufeld, in “Von Braun: Dreamer of Space/ Engineer of War” (Knopf/2008), quoted von Braun’s older brother, Sigismund, describing one launch: “Before we knew it, it had flown out of our hands and crashed through our greenhouse window; the cauliflower was literally covered with broken glass.”
Von Braun once strapped rockets to a child’s wagon, and lit them on a Berlin thoroughfare. Neufeld quoted von Braun recalling: “I yelled a warning and men and women fled in all directions. I was ecstatic. The wagon was wholly out of control and trailing a comet’s tail of fire.”
In the late 1950s, Von Braun, who would build the Saturn V rocket that boosted Apollo astronauts toward the Moon, discouraged such experimentation. He proposed instead a campaign to educate youth. Erik Bergaust wrote in “Wernher von Braun” (National Space Institute/1976), that von Braun remembered “only too well putting a gasoline torch to an experimental rocket motor at the age of eighteen, so intent upon the outcome of the test that he was altogether oblivious to the hazard.” He was thus “strongly inclined to discourage teenagers from risking their necks as he once did.”
Right around the same time that von Braun proposed his campaign, G. Harry Stine set about creating the standard for model rocket safety. Stine was only 29 when shoe salesman Orville Carlisle, 30, of Norfolk, Neb., contacted him.
“In 1957, (Carlisle) sent a sample of his second model (rocket), the Carlisle Mark II Rock-A-Chute, to (Stine), then a rocket engineer at White Sands Proving Ground,” a display at the NM Museum of Space History documented. While Carlisle is considered the inventor of the modern model rocket, Stine is known as the Father of Model Rocketry. Fans lovingly called him “The Old Rocketeer.”
Orville Carlisle’s model-rocket prototype, the Mark II Rock-A-Chute, is on display at the New Mexico Museum of Space History. – Michael Shinabery/NMMSH /// CLICK TO ENLARGE
“I began to get a lot of mail from youngsters who wanted to build their own rockets,” Stine said in an interview posted on the website launchmagazineonline.com. “Well, the White Sands Public Affairs Office used to be deluged with these letters. ‘Dear White Sands: Tell me everything you know about rockets and guided missiles.’ The White Sand Public Affairs Office discovered I would happily answer these letters, so I was saddled with the job. I knew what was going on out there in the minds of the teenagers.”
It was in 1957 that Stine also founded the National Association of Rocketry (NAR). Eight years later he published “The Handbook of Model Rocketry.” The 1994 edition characterized him as “probably the person most responsible for starting model rocketry and guiding it through its early years as it grew into a highly respected worldwide aerospace hobby and sport.”
During construction of the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, Stine was interim director and consulting curator.
A prolific science-fiction author, Stine also penned science columns for sci-fi magazines. In the April 1960 Astounding he wrote that he’d been creating standardized model-rocket engines.
“Not for myself, and not for the government, but for hobbyists and teen-agers,” he said.
He pointed out that students, and even their science teachers, were making their own engines, which were often unstable. He called the concoctions the “nastiest, dirtiest, most unpredictable, and most powerful of all demons: fire.” In addition, he said, “newspapers have been full of the unsuccessful results of their experiments. Full of enthusiasm … they plunge ahead. … Some of them discover the hard way that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. They learn right quick that what they don’t know will hurt them. … I don’t know how many kids still have their eyes and hands who wouldn’t have had them if we hadn’t gotten in there and pitched, giving them the word on what to do and what not to do and why.”
In the article, Stine listed his 15-point NAR Safety Code, admonishing: “You must follow the ritual exactly. That goes for the safety rules always.”
A sidebar of what not to do was titled: “How To Commit Suicide With A Rocket.”
Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and Humanities Scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at [email protected].
Moonandback
reports on spaceflight daily and our documentary project interviews \”the people who are making space happen\”.
2012-12-23 14:47:52
Source:
