Sad - A Model Rocket Fatality

[pdub]

This one hits close to home. When I was a kid. I was a science nerd. We assembled Estes model rockets. Cardboard tubes and bought the solid boosters that made them go. Fins, aerodynamics. And we painted them. If the wind was blowing at all with a C engine, you'd never see that thing again. Lost downrange when the parachute deployed. Lost....well, that was fun.

Apparently these kids were trying to do something themselves, as far as the "Go." It's a shame, I hate it.

[DanStokes]

We tried to make match head rockets - cut the heads off of kitchen matches and pack them into a tube with one open end (we usually used plumbing pipe and a cap). I was watching from a basement doorway when 2 of the match heads evidently rubbed together as the other kid worked away on the basement workbench vise. While neither of us were seriously hurt (Mom always said that the Lord looks after drunks and idiots and we had NOT been drinking) neither of us could hear properly for a week or more. And of course we couldn't tell our mothers what we had done so we faked it for that week - I'll bet Deaf Bob can relate. I have a lovely ringing in my ears today and I'll wager that at least some of that relates back to this incident.

So I can see how a kid could get killed doing unauthorized rocketry. My heart goes out to his loved ones.

Dan

[Matt Cramer]

That's truly tragic. My first thought was, "How do you kill yourself with a model rocket?" Then I saw they were talking about a "small propane cylinder" - whether he was trying to build a propane fueled rocket or had something that generated enough pressure that he thought he needed a metal cylinder to contain it - either way, pretty scary. I feel bad for his family.

[pdub]

"How do you kill yourself with a model rocket?" .

Well, I don't know how bad an "approved" one will hurt you, but I came close to finding out. I built one from scratch, using the parts you could order. I designed a two-stage rocket, that's exotic. My lack of fabrication skills started early, mind you. I put the launch lug on the BOTTOM stage, and I used a drinking straw for the launch lug instead of buying a real lug, much sturdier, and they cost about 50 cents at the time.

The launch pad has a little round metal rod 36 inches long. The rod lets the rocket gain enough speed at ignition for the fins to guide it straight upward. The launch lug slides on the rod, and away the rocket goes. The drinking straw didn't work, it stuck on the launch rod.

Ignition. The bottom stage burned its guts, sitting right there on the launch pad. This is not good....The top stage lit and the rocket fell over and came straight for my head. Fast kid reflexes, I moved out of the way just enough for the rocket to go through the space where my head was a millisecond ago.

Rockets and hotrods, things can go wrong in the wrong hands.

[Loren]

Rocket stories...

As a kid we used to camp in the desert a couple times a year where I would sometimes find dropped live 12-gauge cartridges to disassemble and "experiment" with, but gunpowder burns too fast to make a good rocket. So I tried match heads as mentioned above, but all I got was some flame shooting out the back of my little wrapped-foil engine fastened to a Hot Wheels car and not much thrust (I think it moved two inches). Encouraging at-least, but not enough to pursue...I just didn't have that many matches (and they must have been different than those mentioned).

In eighth grade the teacher/principal actually bought an Estes kit for the pets/good-boys to assemble, this would be where I watch from the sidelines. None of these guys knew crap about mechanical, aero, etc. and just blindly followed instructions, then brought it to the ball field on the windiest day of the year. I give 'em credit for at-least attempting to launch into the wind but it was never seen again and that was that. With my interest in rockets re-upped (and realizing these things were actually legal) I went up to the hobby shop myself and bought all the Estes stuff and of-course a pack of C6-5 motors, none of this pansy A or B stuff. Really I wanted this to go into a rocket-car, but believed it would get going too fast and probably just flip over and crash in any of the rough-surfaced parking lots I had access to. So the sky it was. Fortunately after painting-up my pretty new rocket (black, w/ orange flame job) I also wrote my phone number on the side, and it was the guys at the parts department of the local Chevy dealer a couple miles away who called a while after launch, telling me to hop on my bike and come get it. That was actually my first time at a car dealer (I would be back to collect brochures, etc.). After that I got better about judging that d*mn wind, then went up and bought a pack of D's, which were a larger diameter. For this I went the fuel-altered route and built the tiniest, lightest, and most un-stable possible fuselage, then sat that in my room and stared at it for a couple weeks as kind-of a intuitive-vetting process prior to actual flight attempt. No. I wasn't sure why but just knew that thing wasn't going to fly right. I never launched it and don't know what happened to those motors.

One day a few years later as a teen visiting friends, one of them brought out his old Estes rocket wondering what interesting thing we might do with it. I knew he was into firecrackers and had a brick of them somewhere, and suggested we put effort that way. For an hour or two we unwrapped firecrackers, collecting little bits of silver powder to pack into the back of the motor, retaining the "delay" layer but replacing the chute ejection charge. The idea was that very fast burning "high" explosive would build pressure against the thick cardboard rocket-motor cartridge, enhancing the shock just like in a firecracker only more so. When I had the space available mostly filled we capped it off with epoxy and let it set up, then brought it out to the driveway to launch. Keep in mind this was in a very nice neighborhood in the Glendale CA hills, not out in the desert. Up it went a thousand feet or so and then just disappeared, replaced by hundreds of tiny little bits of paper fluttering down. Totally silent. Until the "BOOM" hit us. Then people up-and-down the street were coming out of their houses, looking around..."What just happened?!" Being quick-thinking little BS liars, we said that we were wondering too, we had just come outside to see. Never mind the rocket-launch rod and pad behind us in the driveway... This, it sort-of occurred to me, was probably not legal, and possibly a good way to damage something and we didn't do it again.

The instructions on the Estes stuff always made it sound like if you got into this, you might really actually wind up working on real rockets someday. What a bunch of crap, is what I thought at the time, nobody would ever really be able to do that. Much (much) later, doing plumbing and bracketry work on the quad-pod mounting for a Delta IV RS-68 motor for the fab company building it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV , I remembered that bit of self-defeatist childhood-angst ponderment and wished I could go back and smack myself. Shoulda maybe stuck with it more.

[pdub]

HHAAHAHAHAHH!!!! Loren, the B14-5 was the one that didn't make any sense. What do you DO with that?!? HHAAHAHAHAHAH!!!

[Loren]

HHAAHAHAHAHH!!!! Loren, the B14-5 was the one that didn't make any sense. What do you DO with that?!? HHAAHAHAHAHAH!!!

"D"14-5? Should go in a much-larger rocket, and would've been fine although maybe residential areas are not the place for that. I know at-least the motors didn't get tossed into the fireplace...that'd have been a whole 'nother story then...

[pdub]

"D"14-5? Should go in a much-larger rocket, and would've been fine although maybe residential areas are not the place for that. I know at-least the motors didn't get tossed into the fireplace...that'd have been a whole 'nother story then...

The D motor....that was at the end of my run doing it, they invented that one late in my rocketry career...had one D rocket. Lost that one on its first launch, gave it all up and turned my attention to chasing girls, or something. Or beer, I don't remember.

[Huskinhano]

It's down right scary looking back at some of the stuff we use to do and lived. Even if we were smart enough to realize how close we came, the fact that we didn't get hurt or killed was as good as if it never happened. Some of the stuff I did for some reason I had the profound thought that if something happened to me, no one would find me. I get goosebumps looking back.

I remember a day or so after I graduated from middle school a kid got decapitated around twilight in the school parking lot. He was riding his go kart up the driveway at a good clip and must not of seen the chain.

[pdub]

It's down right scary looking back at some of the stuff we use to do and lived. .

I liked to climb power towers. Climbed to the top of one of those REAL big powerline things, at night, you could see 30 miles from there, and you could hear the power humming. And shared a pint of vodka with my partner in crime. And I don't even like vodka.

[Loren]

Yeah, we climbed up microwave/radio transmission towers on the top of the mountains on Friday nights carrying six-packs of beer. And I had a classmate seriously injured, riding his go-kart around and around a loop until a delivery truck pulled in and stopped behind the bushes. Bad deal.

There must be a reason we all wound up here on the same website...

[pdub]

There's a guy at work, he told me one time....we were talking about this same subject...."The only reason I survived is because God had big plans for my kids."

[Whelk]

I have a buddy that likes to do the model rocketry. He uses mostly J and K rocket motors (they go up to "O"). Some of the stuff is fairly impressive. I went to a few launches with him where they have to get FAA approval to fly because of the altitudes they reach. I took some photos years ago of some of the launches.

[Deaf Bob]

Yeah, we climbed up microwave/radio transmission towers on the top of the mountains on Friday nights carrying six-packs of beer. And I had a classmate seriously injured, riding his go-kart around and around a loop until a delivery truck pulled in and stopped behind the bushes. Bad deal.

There must be a reason we all wound up here on the same website...

I used to build the microwave towers!

[Loren]

Maybe you can tell me if climbing around live microwave equipment is the reason (...one of the reasons) my brains are so scrambled up now.

One night I went up a tower under construction. Presumably it was designed for guy wires but there weren't any, yet. While I'm up there an old buddy gets the idea to start shaking that thing from the ground, making it flex back and forth at-first softly then soon what I would have to call violently, working with it's resonance. I believe I was making it pretty clear through verbal means that it was necessary to stop that but he kept going. It took all I had to give to stay on that tower and not be thrown off that thing, up in the air, there was little chance to get a better grip and I had to keep with what I started with. Damn if I didn't come that close. When he finally stopped he was laughing, laughing. So anyhow I took one of those precious bottles of beer I'd carried up there with me, opened it, and turned it straight upside-down. I'll never forget the sight, it was like a column of beer glug-glugging down away from me into space. Then it hit the guy, right on his head (I could not have made a better shot) and it kept hitting him as the extent of the column continued to pour down. BTW, this was a guy who didn't drink, hated the smell of beer and it was damn-near freezing up there on that mountain.

We had probably forgiven each other by the next weekend, I suppose.

If you went up there now, there'd be three layers of fencing you'd have to get through before you touched a tower and set off some kind of alarm. Days have changed.