"Too many Trees, Airports, Cities, and too much air-traffic," etcetera..... That may all be true in some places, but don't forget the real reason for our shrinking waivers: the growing "Nanny State."
I've been with Quad Cities Rocket Club since its founding way back in the middle 90's. I was the founding prefect and the one who got and kept our first waiver for quite some years. We had a standing waiver of 25K AGL at both our Illinois and Iowa launch sites. We even had the same waiver ceiling for our NIGHT LAUNCHES! Imagine that, 25K Foot AGL waiver for a night launch east of the Mississippi river. The only requirement was that every rocket had to have lights that could be clearly seen as far horizontally as the rocket flew vertically. Ah, the wonders of xenon-strobe lights.
Fast forward to 2021..... there are no more cities, no more airports, no more air-traffic, and certainly fewer trees, all for 100 miles around our launch site, than there were back in the middle 90's. And still our waiver has been cut to 15K for one reason and one reason only....
...........the ever growing Nanny State.
Sad.
Brad