My Rocketry Projects
This set of pages will follow my adventures in rocketry. A neighbor friend of mine re-introduced me to the hobby and, wow, has it changed in the roughy 20 years since I last built my small rockets. I’m fortunate that in my little part of SE Utah that there is plenty of readily accessible open space (mostly BLM) for me to easily launch my rockets. I’ve also been surprised by the size of the rocketry hobby in terms of both the substantial number of participants and the many vendors.
My friend has been building rockets for a bit and has a number constructed. I’ve learned a lot from his experiences and it has helped me to avoid some crucial mistakes. Below are some classic resources that I’ve been consulting.
The book by Stine and Stine is an introduction model rocketry. Harry Stine is one of the founders of the National Association of Rocketry. I found the introductory chapters to be a bit slow but the reading picks up as the authors start to discuss rocket performance and aerodynamics. Its got pretty much everything that you need to know about basic rocketry. The high-powered rocketry book is a more of a condensed read and, as I’ve read in reviews, a bit out-of-date (it was written in 2005), but it certainly has given me an idea of what modern rocketry is about and the potential. Of course, there are many Web resources but these are a great place to start.
The above photo is of my Der Red Max just lifting off. It’s capable of flying to 600 ft. on a C5 engine. It will also take B engines. It’s a relatively small rocket: 16 in. tall, 1.6 in. in diameter and 2.4 oz. I’ve had three flights and they have all been successful. I built a lot of model airplanes when I was still in high school and the entry-level rockets are decidedly easier to build than are the simplest balsa airplanes. (This rocket is considered to be an intermediate build.) I learned quite a bit on this build and I think that Der Red Max is a good first rocket to build and fly. Model rockets experience substantial inertial forces during the flight so it’s imperative to build the rockets to withstand these G-forces. An amazing application for assessing rocket performance is OpenRocket (https://openrocket.info/). It’s free and provides an enormous amount of flexibility in providing rocket information.
Each post, below, is for a different rocket project.
Der Red Max. For some reason I can’t find the photos that I took during the building process so this link is just to a couple of photos of flights.
Great Goblin. My second build.