cecil
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I just read the above thread and agreed with most of it. I'm older than most writers; my rocketry projects started in the late '50's and continued through high school. I was isolated on a farm, didn't have transportation to club events, never met a fellow rocket enthusiast, but I did have open fields, an abandoned dairy barn which became my chemistry lab, and I could order anything through magazines as long as I had a parent's signature. (The latter was a cause of great anxiety as my chemical stockpiles were reduced. Fortunately, my mother, who was always solicitous about my health, never refused to sign because, as I learned decades later, she didn't want to thwart my enthusiasms as hers had been thwarted by the Great Depression.) Anyway, as warped as this may translate, what really interested me was not so much a rocket as a missile. I didn't just want altitude; I wanted range, so I never stuffed a parachute into a single rocket that I built from scratch. The engines were made of pressure laminated paper much like an Estee's motor tube now. I formulated my own propellants, experienced explosions on the static test stand I made from a coffee can covered with tracer paper rotating at a known rate to record the movements of a stylus. No felt pens available. I guess the point I'm getting at is that model rocketry, while it has saved some body parts, simply does not have enough testosterone in it to interest the average boy (and if not the boy, probably not the girls either). I used that realization as I created an organic chemistry course in a high school which met two hours every school day, covered most of the material of a first and second semester university course and required a lot of hard out-of-class study if the student were to receive any grade higher than a C. But the students who took the course planned on taking it years in advance. They endured CP chemistry, AP chemistry, and physics so they could finally qualify for that course. I think the main reason they wanted in is that I made sure they synthesized a few compounds of enticing interest: ethanol, fractionally distilled with a challenge to produce the highest purity of all the lab groups (determined by a gas chromatograph), at least one explosive, an amount that could be detonated on top of the lab bench and filmed for their future (source of great delight), flavorings, medicines, inverted stereo isomers and so on. Without that element in the course I'm convinced it would have died very quickly, but instead year by year PARENTS met to either provide funding or organize lobbying efforts aimed at administrators. I suppose I could have played it safe, never used vacuum distillation or any other technique that just might go wrong (we did use explosion proof shields at every station when risks did get scary even to me) and put out students who had no patience for molecular diagrams and multistep syntheses and, certainly, no interests in becoming Ph.D. research chemists or chemical engineers, which is what did happen over a period of 20 years in a school district noted for its backwardness in a state second from the bottom in academic achievement. I realize it's probably too late and the times so different politically and internationally for rocket societies to allow for more than assembly by instruction, followed by a gratifying lift off, and hopefully a parachute pop out. I would never have re-entered the hobby if I thought this were the limit for where I can go with whatever time is left. Or could they? Actually it was the advent of APCP and Tripoli's fight to keep it available that caused me to at least have a look at what the field is doing now.
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