I thought it was a lovely idea and maybe it would inspire me to get some of the amazing stories my Dad has written into cyber space! Someday I'd like to take each story and load them into a publishing program and get a whole book made. Perhaps, by blogging these 2012 will be that year. If I think I can swing the time, perhaps I'll get little Grandma in the mix and see if she can provide photos that will aid with illustrating. Or perhaps they will be just recorded here for me!
Anyhow, here is the story for today. It's one I specially requested that corresponds with something that my son was exploring the other day with his Dad. They made a home made potato gun and had raided my spuds. They have further plans though and I can only be glad they are doing these projects together.
Rocket Man
By Bruce H. Mero
It was in Mr. Leland’s seventh grade science class that my
adolescent interest in space exploration and particularly in rockets became
obsessive. It was the time of the first
American Astronauts, the first orbital missions and a growing space race
between America and the Soviet Union.
Each time a manned-rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, the PA
system in our school carried the live radio broadcasts and we school kids
listened and I always imagined I was going along for the ride. I paid rapt attention to everything Mr.
Leland had to say about these first trips into space, especially when he
detailed in color chalk on the blackboard how rocket ships were constructed and
how solid and liquid fuels burned.
At the same time, four of my friends and I founded an
after-school Astronaut club and collected newspaper and magazine clippings of
everything to do with the planets, the moon and space ships. We plastered the walls of an attic room in
Craig Denning’s house with these clippings and talked endlessly about space
travel and we all made plans to become Astronauts some day. Billy Marks found an ad in a comic book and
talked his mother into buying a package of rocket motors and an ignition kit,
and complete directions for making and launching cardboard-tube rockets. We occupied hours making these rockets and
talked Mr. Leland into launching them on the school grounds, during school
hours with all three classes in the middle school allowed to attend each
launch. We of the Astronaut club took
turns setting the rockets on their launch pads and running the wire ignition
cord to the ignition switch. With each
rocket launch, one of us was selected as mission controller and directed the
set-up operation. Once the rocket was
readied, we waved to the crowd of gathered kids and swaggered back to the
launch control center and took up our positions. The school principal, a special teacher or a
special girlfriend then stepped forward and accompanied by a chorus of kids
loudly chanting the countdown: ten...nine...eight............three
...two...one...zero, flipped the switch and sent nine volts of electricity
surging through ignition wires, to the rocket motor which, most times, ignited
and sent our cardboard rockets skyward in a whoosh and cloud of smoke and wild
clapping from our schoolmates. We
repeated this exercise several times each Thursday in May, with Fridays
available in case of a rain delay, until the package of a dozen rocket motors
was gone. The five of us were school
heroes that spring, and we each vowed that we would get our parents to buy more
rocket motors and continue our launches after school let out for the summer in
mid-June.
Summer vacation started with daily gatherings of our club,
but our enthusiasm begin to wane as none of us was successful in talking our
parents into buying more rocket motors.
Family vacations began to take club members away for weeks at a time and
by mid-July we had disbanded, by default, for the summer.
My enthusiasm for rockets remained high, however. I had pestered my dad to buy rocket motors so
much that his responses to my solicitations were becoming dangerous and I
decided to take another approach to slake my appetite. I had taken meticulous notes during Mr.
Leland’s descriptions of rocket motors and decided to construct my own. I had heard that solid rocket fuel was
similar to the stuff that matches were made from and had determined that a
rocket motor made from match heads would perform the same as the store bought
ones I didn’t dare talk to my father about any longer. Coincidentally, I learned a bit about making
black powder from a friend, and had purchased a small can of saltpeter and
mixed it with ground charcoal, and carefully ground match heads and made a
substance which burned with enough vigor to set my tree house on fire.... but
that is another story. I now had rocket
fuel. I needed a good missile to put it
in.
I had started spending my free time hanging around my
grandfather’s machine shop, which was located adjacent to the house, we were
living in. Grandpa Curt was a self-
employed machinist, an inventor and innovator.
I told of my idea to make a rocket from scratch, and after listening to
the research I had done on the subject, he agreed to let me use his shop to
build my rocket, provided I stayed out of his way. He found a piece of aluminum pipe, about a
foot long and an inch in diameter and set me up at an anvil, pounding one end
of the pipe into a point to make the rocket’s nose cone. Several times he looked at my project and
offered advice. After a couple of hours,
I had pounded the end of the pipe into a perfect nose cone. He helped me cut the nose cone off the pipe
on his band saw, and I set to work pounding on it again to make the cone fit
into the pipe, so it could be removed to fill the missile with fuel, then
reattached. This took another couple of
hours, but the resulting fit was perfect.
Half of my rocket was finished.
Grandpa Curt had limited patience with kids and at this point he had had
enough of me. My work in his shop was terminated for a couple of days. I used the time to prepare the solid fuel for
my rocket, carefully scraping match heads off the wooden parts of kitchen
matches and filling a mustard jar with the red and white powder. I burned sticks in the old cobblestone
fireplace next to Grandpa’s shop and ground the charcoal which resulted into
powder that I saved in a coffee can. I
had most of the saltpeter left, also.
A couple of days passed.
I had the ingredients for my rocket motor ready and it was time to
approach Grandpa again about finishing my missile. He agreed to let me work in his shop with the
same conditions as before, to stay out of his way. However, it wasn’t long before he had the
aluminum tube in his hands and had inserted and brazed a steel washer in the
bottom of the tube for the rocket motor’s exhaust gasses to exit the pipe. I
was ready, almost, to fuel the rocket, but I had to figure out a way to ignite
the motor. The ignition set-up we had
used to launch the rockets in school belonged to Billy Marks and he was away on
vacation until August. This was a
dilemma. I had no way to launch my
rocket until Billy got back from vacation and then I remembered a package of
firecrackers I had been given by my cousin Mike. I could use one of the fuses from a
firecracker to light my rocket. While
grandpa was occupied in the bathroom, I drilled a small hole near the base of
the missile for a fuse and I was in business.
Rocket fueling operations were conducted in my tree house. Carefully, I mixed the components together,
the match-head powder, the charcoal powder and the saltpeter, and I poured the
concoction into the missile tube. When
all of my ingredients had been used up, I had only filled the aluminum tube
about one-half full. I had more space in
my tube and could make a more powerful rocket, I thought, and decided to fill
the rest of the tube with match heads and the black powder from the
firecrackers cousin Mike had given me.
The fuel mixture for the second stage of my rocket filled the next three
inches in my tube. There was still
space. I was out of materials for more
fuel, and getting impatient to launch. I
had been working on this project for long enough. Frustrated, I stuffed Kleenex tissue into the
remaining space in the tube and then soaked the stuffing with cigarette lighter
fluid, and connected the nose cone. I
now had a three-stage rocket, much bigger and more powerful than anything we
had launched in seventh grade. I
inserted a firecracker fuse into the little hole at the base of the tube and I
was ready for launch.
I had decided earlier to use the cobblestone fireplace as my
launch pad, and had everything set to go, when I heard my Grandpa shuffle up
behind me and ask, “What are you doing, boy?”
“I’m going to launch my rocket, Grandpa. Do you want to watch?” Grandpa Curt looked over my rocket and launch
set-up. He asked me where I got my fuse
when I told him about the firecrackers my cousin Mike had given me. He suggested that the fuse needed to be a little
longer. I scrambled up the ladder to my
tree house and returned with a couple more, inch-long firecracker fuses. This was all that I had left from the package
of firecrackers I had emptied into the second stage of my rocket. The rest of the fuses had been stuffed in the
missile tube between the stage two match heads and black powder mix and the
stage three lighter fluid-soaked Kleenex wadding. Grandpa carefully twisted the fuses together,
forming a single strand about three inches long. He stepped back and looked things over, then
readjusted the rocket on the stand. He
was ready and took the pack of matches out of my hand. He had taken over my rocket launch, but I was
afraid to say anything to him, so I stepped back a few yards and watched him light
a match. I ceremoniously started a
countdown: ten...nine...he lit the fuse before I hit eight. It fizzled, smoked and then the sparks ran
quickly down the fuse. Grandpa took a
few steps back.
The aluminum tube shook and fell off of the launch platform.
There was a brilliant flash. The explosion that followed rocked the
neighborhood. Leaves from a nearby apple tree fluttered into the air and
hundreds of green apples fell to the ground.
Parts of my tree house thumped on the dirt at the base of its tree. Some
of the windows in Grandpa’s shop nearest to the fireplace shattered. My rocket
launcher had disappeared. The top third of the cobblestone fireplace lay on the
ground in a cloud of cement dust and ashes.
Every dog within a quarter mile was barking. My rocket was gone, and all around us shreds
of flaming Kleenex and smoking firecracker fuses rained down. Neither of us was hurt, fortunately. Grandpa Curt was still standing up but
rocking back and forth a little, smiling and shaking his head. I was on my back on the lawn. Some of the
chimney stones and cement dust had landed on me.
Grandpa Curt teetered over to where I had fallen and handed
me back my matches. He straightened his cap and said,
“It didn’t work,
boy,” he said as he shuffled away. We’ll work on a second version next week.
See if you can get any more of those firecrackers from your cousin Mike.”
testing
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