As many in my same situation will remember, an excitement over space and rocketry instilled by the 1960’s space launches and movies of the period motivated me into trying to build rockets of my own.  Around age nine or ten, I succeeded in launching a rocket I'd built powered by baking soda and vinegar to a breathtaking height of three feet.  Considering that technology mature (and running out of Mother’s vinegar supply) caused me to look to other reactive chemistries.

In 1971, ten bucks (list price!) would get you started in model rocketry with the Latest and Greatest.  Special "photo-flash" batteries  were supposed to dump a higher current pulse through an ignition circuit than conventional carbon batteries.  The downside was that these batteries didn't last long at all!  Alkaline batteries, just coming available in the early 1970's, made photo flash batteries obsolete and forgotten.
(Images from Sven Knudson's fantastic Ninfinger Productions rockets website)

This thing just looked better on paper.

It should be mentioned here that my rocketry pursuits were done largely in secret at this point.  In other posts, I’ve mentioned that our mother did not particularly care for our participation in any model building activities, and I assumed she would feel the same way about my desires to build my own flying rocket.  For the most part, my methods to hide my clandestine rocketry activities were probably similar to those you’d find today in so-called “rogue regimes.”

Brudder Dick caught this photo of the first model rocket flying that any of us had ever seen.  A Centuri Astro-1 takes to the sky on a 1/2A6-2 motor, also sold by Centuri.  To get that Servo launcher to work, I had to use both hands to get a good seal on the air-plunger.

From school lessons (and TV), I knew that the Saturn V was powered by kerosene and LOX.  I figured those materials should work well for my next rocket.  Finding the kerosene was easy, as we had a kerosene lamp in the house.  The LOX was a different story.  At a friend’s house, I saw some “LUX” dishwashing soap, and mistook that for the all-important oxidizer component of rocket fuel.  It wasn’t long before I realized my mistake; Lux dish soap in no way helped kerosene to burn.   And tin cans make a horrible combustion chamber.
 
About this time, our oldest sister’s boyfriend knew of my foundering rocketry development program.  He told me about a catalog he had with model rockets, engines, launchers, and everything I’d need to fly rockets.  He said he’d give it to me, and I was overjoyed when I learned that such a thing existed.  I hadn’t considered outsourcing the engineering of my own rocket program.  However, he kept forgetting to bring the catalog over, and then, horror of horrors, he and my sister broke up.

Not long after launching the Astro (spring, 1972), I finished my own Estes Big Bertha.  It's flying here on a B6-4.  I almost learned the hard way that the 18" parachute that comes with the kit might be a tad big on a breezy day.  Fortunately, I got the rocket back even though it landed outside field boundaries.

During the winter of 1971-72, I seriously messed up my leg skiing.  My parents saved all kinds of money buying me a pair of thrift-store skis, but one of the seriously antiqued bindings didn’t release when it should have, which put me in a non-discounted full-length leg cast for some time.  This brought my clandestine rocketry program to a screeching halt as it was a lot easier for my parents to know what I was doing.  By this time, I was getting into areas of incendiary chemistry that would have been very dangerous.  My skiing injury perhaps saved me from an even worse injury which also might have included burning down the house.
 
One day as I was near getting the cast off, my mother came home carrying a large sack.  She pulled out a big poly bag, and said it was going to be the present I’d give my cousin Milton, who had recently begun launching model rockets.
 
As you’d imagine, I was fully intrigued!  My cousin Milton did everything better than me.  His Hot Wheels cars always beat mine, he was better at every game, he got better grades, and he liked better movies and TV shows than I did.   

The rocket I was to give my cousin was no less than an Estes Big Bertha!  I recall the first time I beheld the shiny paper towel tube-like body and balsa nose cone and fin stock.

​The lightweight materials and modularized motors suddenly made perfect sense.  I knew that if my mother approved of Milton flying rockets, then I certainly could do it!  I sometimes got the impression that she wanted me to be just like him since it was well known that he went to his principal’s office far less than me.
 
My mother said I’d have to wait until my birthday, a couple months away, in order to get a rocketry starter set with rocket, engines, and launch pad.  In the interim, she picked me up a Centuri model rocket company catalog from our local drug store.  I didn’t know it, but the local drug store had just started carrying Estes and Centuri rocket kits and engines!  Recall that model rocketry was still a fairly new hobby in those days.  In many areas, the only way to participate was through mail order.  My guess is that many retail stores and even hobby shops didn’t begin stocking model rockets until the early 1970’s and it was kind of hard to learn about them otherwise!  Boy’s Life magazine was full of model rocket advertisements, but I didn’t subscribe to that magazine until after I knew about model rockets.

Fast forward two of the longest months of my life to the time when I could finally get my model rocketry starter set!  Still hobbled and recovering from my leg injury, I used the time waiting to study long and hard about the perfect launch set, and I decided to ask for the latest and greatest technology available!
 
Those of you who owned Centuri’s Servo Launch system will sympathize with me.  The idea was much better than its application.  The Servo Launcher first appeared in the Centuri catalog in 1971.   While most other launch pads were wood, the Servo Launcher was molded in red-orange plastic and looked just like a full-size sounding rocket launcher.  You could use it to display your rockets when not flying, it was that cool, according to the catalog text. 
 
Other launchers of the day had controllers requiring a lantern battery or large pile of “D” batteries, but the Servo launcher was designed to take only two photo-flash D-batteries.  Being a three-volt system, a voltage drop across twenty feet of wire would have been unacceptable to light any igniter, even with the "special batteries," so the ignition switch had to be inside the launcher, close to the igniter.  

Prepping an Estes X-Ray for its first flight.  As I recall, we flew it with a payload of bees recruited from a blossoming cherry tree in the neighborhood.  This explains the interest of the onlookers.

To do this, Centuri devised a thin spring-contact that would be actuated by pressing a pneumatic plunger at the end of a thin rubber hose.   Theoretically, this would inflate a balloon inside the launcher, placed near the internal contact switch (this part of it was the “servo”).  A new igniter-type called the “Sure-Shot” was designed to work on three volts.  That was the theory, anyway.  The practical application was a little different and the Servo Launcher wasn’t in Centuri’s catalog all that long.  It was just a finicky system.

Getting all this to work right was way beyond me, and thank goodness, older brudder Dick, who had recently graduated from high school, was willing to assist me to get the system put together and functioning.
 
I was very excited for my first launch.  The rocket that came with the $10 set was the Astro-1.  I did an awful job on its assembly, hacking the fins from the balsa sheet with my dull Cub Scout pocketknife.  Die-cut balsa was still on the horizon and laser-cut wood was science fiction circa 1972.
 
Finally, the rocket was on the pad and ready to go!  It wouldn’t fire!  We tried again!  And again!  It was hard to tell if the balloon was inflating enough to actuate the launch switch.  The safety key was actually on the launcher itself with a light bulb built-in and hard to see in full sunlight.  You had to make sure your thumb was making a good seal by tightly covering the vent-hole on the danged plunger.  Both Dick and I invented some new swear words before we got the bright idea to put the micro clips as close to the engine as we could.

An Estes X-Ray at or near ignition.

The first igniter misfired.  I didn’t think to bring a spare, having left the rest of them at home.  The things you learn as a new rocketeer!  Dick was irritated that we had to head home for another igniter, but he took me home and then back to the launch field, and we set everything up a second time.
 
With a swoosh, my Astro-1 lofted on its maiden flight, leaping skyward a small amount on its 1/2A6-2 motor.  The parachute didn’t deploy.  The nose cone came out, but the wadding and parachute must have been packed too tightly.  The rocket came back a little bent, but flyable again.  My first flight wasn’t quite perfect, but I beat my previous three-foot vinegar-powered flight by about 47 feet with that 1/2A6-2 engine!  If the flight wasn’t perfect, Dick got a picture that was nearly so with the rocket off the pad only a foot or two.
 
The next of three engines that came with the starter set was a B6-4, as I recall.  Our second flight occurred a few days later.  Another Centuri recovery device innovation that was supposed to be better than the Estes version was a foil stick-on thing to attach the shock cord inside the rocket body.  It seemed much more high-tech than  the Estes paper slop ‘n glue shock cord mount (that persists to this day).

The B6-4 provided a much bigger kick than that wimpy 1/2A6-2, and the Astro-1 made some serious altitude flying on this engine.  However, at apogee, the foil shock cord mount shirked its duty in the worst way, and the parachute and nose cone separated from the rocket body.  It dove straight into the dirt, crumpling at the front end.  I still hadn’t mastered the art of parachute folding, and this turned out to be a good thing as the partially-opened parachute put the nose cone down within the launch field.
 
I wasn’t really sure how to deal with the crunched body tube on my Astro-1, but Dick managed to cut off the crumpled portion, which was only about an inch or so. Thanks to him, my first rocket was ready for its third flight albeit an inch shorter.  I had built my second rocket, a Big Bertha, by this time, and used the same paper slop-and-glue method learned there to re-mount the shock cord in my Astro-1.

On a Friday night not long before school got out in 1972, our dad wanted to see a rocket fly.  He came with Dick and me to my school launch field to witness the Astro-1 fly with the last engine that came with the launch set—a C6-5!  I knew that we had to do everything right to get the rocket back in one piece on this engine.  We had somewhat mastered the finicky Servo Launcher.  It was a gorgeous night.  The sun was setting, and the sky was perfectly clear.  The field was wind-free.  I recall the sound of that C6-5 like thunder compared to its smaller 18mm brethren. 
 
The rocket shot skyward on a long tongue of flame that endured until the rocket was nearly out of sight!   Jaws agape, the three of us watched the smoke trail from that five-second delay, and we heard an almost imperceptible pop as the parachute presumably deployed.  We could see nothing.  The rocket had flown out of sight.

I helped my pal build a Centuri Vector V, just out of camera view in this picture taken by Dick.  As I recall, the glue was still wet when we flew it and the fins fell off like autumn leaves during the flight.

After what seemed like minutes of scanning an empty sky, we could finally identify a tiny dot against the blue; it was round and steady, and we knew we’d had a full ‘chute deployment.  The dot lingered in the sky, finally becoming perceptibly bigger, and after what seemed like a few more minutes, I could see a fully-intact rocket hanging under a perfectly symmetrical parachute canopy. I drew a final sigh of relief when it became apparent that the rocket would land inside the field.  As a matter of fact, it gently floated down not far from the launch pad.  Dick and I were ecstatic, and our dad said he was impressed!  With the confidence and experience from this perfect fight, we pursued countless more launches that summer and in subsequent years.

Maybe it sounds sappy, but I recall that my trips to the principal’s office ended abruptly with the beginning of my participation in the model rocketry hobby.  After that time, my interest in science skyrocketed (sorry, bad pun but I couldn’t resist).  Soon after I mastered the basics, I began to design my own rockets and had to contend with such realities as centers of pressure and gravity, coefficients of drag, and engine parameters such as newton-seconds and so on.  The Servo launcher was quickly replaced with a  reliable unit I built myself from our leftover basement-remodel mahogany supply.

Bill (L) and Dick (R), both seriously pants-challenged,  prep the Servo Launcher for a flight of Dick's Centuri Mach-10 rocket plane.  This model had truly spectacular flights which, as often as not, finished with equally spectacular crashes.

Instead of causing trouble in school, I focused on physics, chemistry, and electronics and eventually took a career path in all those directions.  In the 1980’s, and 1990’s, I put my knowledge to work helping the big rockets fly, working under contract on Martin Marietta’s Titan Rocket program and Thiokol’s Space Shuttle SRB’s.  

Going to work in those days was fun, as you can imagine.  In later years, I helped advance science and did my bit helping humanity through my laboratory and biomed work.
 
Some question the worth of the expense of space exploration programs.  For my life, their value is priceless.  Our rockets are small.  We cannot ride inside them, but by and large, I think they take us good places.