Amateur Rockets that Roar By Daniel Sorid Staff Writer posted: 11:00 am ET 03 May 2000 ET
amateur_rocketlaunch
Cape Canaveral, Baikonur and Kourou have nothing to fear. The rockets that blasted off in southern New Jersey last week never made it into space. In fact, they hardly made it to the clouds.
But if you watched carefully when one of these homemade rockets lifted off from its stand and, riding a trail of smoke, roared into the sky, you could see something else going into orbit: the spirits of these amateur rocketeers.
"It's the thrill of flight itself," says Damian Russo, a local farmer who helped start a rocket organization in 1994 that has now hosted about a dozen rocket-launching events. "The ability of all of them to build their own rocket and power it with commercially made motors, and enjoying flying for what it is."
Around 300 high-powered rockets flew at this particular event, called Roar at the Shore, during the last weekend in April. Each rocket was individually assembled and decorated by these extraordinarily devoted rocket fans. The event was held at a vegetable farm in Cedarville, New Jersey.
SPACE.com attended the event and caught the action on video.
VIDEO CLIPS
Damian Russo is a local farmer who helps lead Garden State Tripoli -- the local prefecture of Tripoli, the national high-powered rocketry organization. Russo was a radio-controlled helicopter hobbyist who "
had to get involved" with high-powered rockets when he saw them in 1993. Russo says his group is very safety-conscious: adults and children could get injured by these launches, so safety is number one, he says.
The rockets that go.
Launching high-powered rockets involves hundreds of dollars and many hours of work. But the thrill of the launch lasts only a few minutes. The rockets are set up by their owners, launched, then they parachute down. The longest part of the launch process is hiking across the farm to recover the rocket, which can be loaded with a new motor and launched again.
Nelson Wallace, a retired schoolteacher from Maryland, discusses his plans to put a video camera on the end of his rocket to watch its flight through the sky.
"I like flying the big, heavy rockets," he says. He had planned to launch his shiny red rocket, but didn't, because he worried that it would be damaged by wind.
For the kids: Rockets that only weigh a few ounces are put together and launched by kids. They carry their tiny rockets while their parents piece together their mammoth models. One brand, the Estes rocket, was particularly popular at this event. Here, a
Ed Abbott Jr., a consummaterocket aficionado, was hooked by the
"road and the thunder" of high-powered rockets in 1997. He also describes how the rockets can be scaled up larger and larger as the owners become more experienced. Ed's own rocket, one of the more impressive models launched during the event, was equipped with special aerodynamic features that kept it steady in flight, even in winds exceeding 20 m.p.h. (32 kilometers per hour).
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