Yukon@K-9 Rocket Tech
Student, Drone and Rockets, Aspiring Engineer
Hello everyone. I'm curious about everyone's story on how they got into rocketry
Thank you! I should've looked harder in the search cause I sure missed that [emoji23]. Eh I guess this post isn't that neccesary then. I just wanted to read about everyone's journeyHere's a bunch to get you started.
https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/your-story.149177/#post-1830514
Some folks have already shared, but this is a good theeqd for newer members whos story time is come
Wow awesome! Well I think it's quite amazing how much inspiration a movie can give. I guess it's almost been a lifelong hobby for you sir despite the short pause in high schoolMy dad got me started in the hobby when I was 5. We built our first rocket together and launched it in our backyard. I was instantly hooked. I looked forward to going to the Ben Franklin shop and seeing the Estes display. I collected the catalogs and was inspired to build and fly rockets. I left the hobby in high school and then discovered high power rocketry after my mom turned me on to the movie October Sky!
I'm a Boomer ( I'm old enough to remember Sputnik ) and when in high school some friends & I started building & flying Estes rockets. When I went to college my rocketry quit until about 20 years ago. Some of my friends from high school saw some Estes kits in a store and it said on the kit "for ages 12 & older" so they decided they still qualified.
So we started launching again. Every year we get together at a friend's cabin here in NW Wisconsin in mid-February and launch from a frozen lake. Been doing this now for 20 years or so.
A few years ago the Tribal College I worked at (I retired this past summer) was invited to the First Nations Launch Competition and so I was asked to be a mentor. This is a HPR competion and there were maybe 28 Tribal colleges participating. In the process I built my own HPR and got my Tripoli Level 1 cert. HPR is kind of spendy so I don't do as much of it as I'd like to. But I have started MPR. Any rocket launch is fun.
Here's some info on the FNL. https://spacegrant.carthage.edu/first-nations-launch/
Here's the first launch team.
We participated last year & are participating this year too.
I was always a space need, got my first decent telescope when I was 9.
Got into rockets when I was maybe 11. My dad would take my friend and I down to the school yard to launch.
My launch kit need 12 volts from a car battery.
Just go back into it 5 years ago when seeing some folks during the daytime at a starparty launching
My 14 yr old son.
I flew a few Estes rockets when I was young but I just saw it as a toy and didn't find it exciting enough to continue.
More important things on my mind, like the 3 P's.
Up until very recently, as far as I knew, little model rockets made out of cardboard tubes was the end-all/be-all of this kids hobby.
It never would have crossed my mind again. Too silly for a grown man to care about.
My son, who is heavily involved in STEM (he's much smarter than I ever was at his age) has been enamored all of 2019 with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
He has his mind set on joining the Air Force and becoming an aerospace engineer. Much of what he talks about goes over my head but I always show interest.
He asked about model rockets so I brought him to Hobby Lobby to pick out a few kits and pick up a launch pad. He was kinda impressed. Not much though.
Then he found some YouTube vids of LDRS! I felt bad telling him that was out of reach for the average person. He kept at me though.
He showed me the Apogee Components website. I dove in and realized, holly **** this is real!!! I had no idea this was going on.
So now we're off to the races. We're both getting L1 certified together next month and all we talk about are rockets. We study and build our rockets together.
I've told him about you Yukon and have shown him your website.
He thinks that somebody in his age range doing what you're doing is about the coolest thing.
Now I have to learn what all the hype is with 3D printing because of you!
Yukon, that was a 1/2 scale AMMRAM 120. So it's half as big as the real thing.Ohhhh a frozen lake launch sounds cool! Also that video of the first team is awesome! Wow if that was mounted on a fighter jet I would never be able to tell the difference!
PXR5, I'm an amateur astronomer too. I also make telescope mirrors as a hobby.I was always a space need, got my first decent telescope when I was 9.
Got into rockets when I was maybe 11. My dad would take my friend and I down to the school yard to launch.
My launch kit need 12 volts from a car battery.
Just go back into it 5 years ago when seeing some folks during the daytime at a starparty launching
It's quite amazing how tiny missiles look until you go up close to one. Also thank you! I also like your license plate! Will be pretty awesome to drive around town with that as your license plate and a few rockets strapped on the roof rackYukon, that was a 1/2 scale AMMRAM 120. So it's half as big as the real thing.
Also, I've had Huskies & Malamutes for many years so I like your avatar.
I love the story! Also, you look really similar since you were younger! The smile is identical too! It will be so cool to make a book about everyone's stories on here and that picture would be perfectPoking around Al's Hobby Shop in Elmhurst, IL, September 1995, dad and I saw a LOC Precision Bruiser hanging from the ceiling. My dad and I asked the resident rocket guy at the time (Dustin S. IIRC) about where those are flown. First Bong launch we attended was October of 1995, and the rest is history.
I miss rocket trips with dad something fierce.
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Very interesting! Seems like the Apollo 50th anniversary surely inspired a lot of people! Also Arduino and raspberry pi on rockets sound very interesting! I Love flight computers!I started as a very small child in the pre-Internet suburbs some years back. My brother told me that I once forgot to put wadding in one of my rockets and the parachute deployed in flames and burned up in a second or two. I also remember my brother's scissor wing being launched. Instead of retracting, the wing flew straight off the airfoil and the remaining parts lawn-darted only about 100 feet from us. I can still hear the intense "woosh!" as it entered the ground. A replay of "The Sword and the Stone" followed as my father and brother tried to extract the thing from the ground. I don't remember at all why we stopped launching, but we did and rockets never came up again.
Then I took a few decades off. I moved to the city, forgot completely about rocketry and have lived mostly in condos ever since, which aren't exactly conducive to rocketry. The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 revived my interest in spaceflight and I read a few books and went to the local hobby shop out of curiosity. I wanted to try rockets again, but I had no idea where to launch them. Then I discovered the local rocket clubs and realized that I could build rockets at home and launch them at big sod farms or parks outside of the city. And NAR membership even included insurance. I built about 5 LPR rockets in rapid succession and began launching them with a local club just last summer.
I made a deal with myself: I would only pursue HPR if I could build and launch these LPRs first. Having done so, I'm now looking into building an HPR and seeing what happens. Being a computer programmer and having fiddled a lot with microcontrollers such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, I'd like to eventually mix those two interests and see what happens. I guess we will see.
Like I said, I have to now since he's seen your website. He won't stop talking about it now.Maybe you and your son should get into 3d printing and CAD design!
That's awesome! Is he going to learn Fusion 360 or Solid works?Like I said, I have to now since he's seen your website. He won't stop talking about it now.
He's taking CAD as one of his electives next year.
It's fast, it has fire, it flies... Rockets!I got a rocket kit for my 8th or 9th birthday and was my first real introduction to science. I got into pyrotechnics too, but made my way back to rocketry as the proper safety measures and laws are much easier to comply with after having our son. In the end, I just like rockets and things that fly in most forms.
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