The Dream of Flight
May. 23rd, 2023 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerA few months ago, I stopped in at last to a hobby shop that I’d been passing for a while. Noticing it sold flying model rockets among other things to assemble, I took a closer look at what was available, then started thinking about just perhaps getting back to one more pastime.
All the way back in high school, I spent part of one summer travelling to a “space campus” (not the Space Camp; this one was in Algonquin Provincial Park near a large radio telescope). Although I spent a perhaps unbalanced amount of time indoors in a “computer room” offering a space race simulation (and later managed to buy the small-press board game it had been adapted from, supposing the computer game wouldn’t get ported to even my family’s new computer), I did get around to assembling and launching an Estes model rocket as part of a group. We just happened to use lettuce stuffed into the fuselage tubes rather than flameproof “recovery wadding.” Coming back home, I eventually got around to acquiring a rocket starter kit of my own. Then, I got an “Astrocam” rocket that loaded a camera film cartridge, promising aerial photographs. I launched it four times from the expansive lawn of my family home in the countryside, but then, the recovery wadding not filling the wider fuselage, the rocket came down with a hole burned in its plastic parachute. A few thoughts of making a new parachute from a plastic bag or something never quite turned into accomplishment, and my rockets and their launch hardware wound up stashed in the family basement.
Getting back to this year, I had happened on a new “Astrocam” with a miniature video camera rubber-banded into its nose cone. The thought of trying it out and just perhaps seeing the aerial perspective I’d never got around to having developed before built up in a hurry. As I bought the rocket and some engines, though, the thought of at least trying to find my old launch pad and engine igniter box in the family basement was also in my mind.
The rocket assembled without needing glue, and I brought it home at Easter. Down in the basement, though, the cardboard box I recalled the starter kit had been packed into wasn’t apparent at once. (I did get distracted finding an intriguing computer catalogue.) With my parents pitching in, we wound up having to move things away from an old cabinet before we could get its doors open. At that point, the launch pad pieces and my old rockets, some of their glued-on fins now broken off, started turning up. The only real problem was that I’d forgotten to take the batteries out of the igniter box, and they’d corroded into a real mess. With my father showing more determination than I could think to muster, we eventually dismantled the box and sanded the corroded contacts down to clean metal, then had to stick some washers in to make up for a broken piece.
It took more cleaning to get reliable engine lighting, but I did get the new rocket into the air, and got the videos off the camera via its USB interface. That did, though, also require fishing the rocket out of a tree and off the edge of the roof with long sticks. I’d thought about putting a frame grab in a post, but never quite got around to it until I had a chance to head home again for the long weekend and use up the more powerful engines I’d bought.
With the rocket going higher, I had more interesting frame grabs to work with. It also meant it was blowing further away while descending, past a line of trees along the property boundary and out of sight. The first time that happened I did a lot of tramping through big tufts of grass wondering if the rocket had just happened to fall out of sight among them, and then, taking another look at the trees, managed to spot the red plastic at last almost lost among the fresh leaves. This time, we needed to carry out a ladder and use longer sticks to get everything free, then tie the parachute back on. I don’t know how many more launches the rocket will last for, and buying the most powerful engines recommended by Estes is starting to feel risky in terms of not spotting it coming down at all. Still, I do have some aerial shots at last.
All the way back in high school, I spent part of one summer travelling to a “space campus” (not the Space Camp; this one was in Algonquin Provincial Park near a large radio telescope). Although I spent a perhaps unbalanced amount of time indoors in a “computer room” offering a space race simulation (and later managed to buy the small-press board game it had been adapted from, supposing the computer game wouldn’t get ported to even my family’s new computer), I did get around to assembling and launching an Estes model rocket as part of a group. We just happened to use lettuce stuffed into the fuselage tubes rather than flameproof “recovery wadding.” Coming back home, I eventually got around to acquiring a rocket starter kit of my own. Then, I got an “Astrocam” rocket that loaded a camera film cartridge, promising aerial photographs. I launched it four times from the expansive lawn of my family home in the countryside, but then, the recovery wadding not filling the wider fuselage, the rocket came down with a hole burned in its plastic parachute. A few thoughts of making a new parachute from a plastic bag or something never quite turned into accomplishment, and my rockets and their launch hardware wound up stashed in the family basement.
Getting back to this year, I had happened on a new “Astrocam” with a miniature video camera rubber-banded into its nose cone. The thought of trying it out and just perhaps seeing the aerial perspective I’d never got around to having developed before built up in a hurry. As I bought the rocket and some engines, though, the thought of at least trying to find my old launch pad and engine igniter box in the family basement was also in my mind.
The rocket assembled without needing glue, and I brought it home at Easter. Down in the basement, though, the cardboard box I recalled the starter kit had been packed into wasn’t apparent at once. (I did get distracted finding an intriguing computer catalogue.) With my parents pitching in, we wound up having to move things away from an old cabinet before we could get its doors open. At that point, the launch pad pieces and my old rockets, some of their glued-on fins now broken off, started turning up. The only real problem was that I’d forgotten to take the batteries out of the igniter box, and they’d corroded into a real mess. With my father showing more determination than I could think to muster, we eventually dismantled the box and sanded the corroded contacts down to clean metal, then had to stick some washers in to make up for a broken piece.
It took more cleaning to get reliable engine lighting, but I did get the new rocket into the air, and got the videos off the camera via its USB interface. That did, though, also require fishing the rocket out of a tree and off the edge of the roof with long sticks. I’d thought about putting a frame grab in a post, but never quite got around to it until I had a chance to head home again for the long weekend and use up the more powerful engines I’d bought.
With the rocket going higher, I had more interesting frame grabs to work with. It also meant it was blowing further away while descending, past a line of trees along the property boundary and out of sight. The first time that happened I did a lot of tramping through big tufts of grass wondering if the rocket had just happened to fall out of sight among them, and then, taking another look at the trees, managed to spot the red plastic at last almost lost among the fresh leaves. This time, we needed to carry out a ladder and use longer sticks to get everything free, then tie the parachute back on. I don’t know how many more launches the rocket will last for, and buying the most powerful engines recommended by Estes is starting to feel risky in terms of not spotting it coming down at all. Still, I do have some aerial shots at last.