Model Rocketry

What is this hobby?

In the 1950’s there was a lot of interest in young people in the possibilities of space travel, and many of them started experimenting with building their own rockets and making their own rocket fuel, without training.  Many were injured or maimed, and a few were killed in these experiments.  The military had limited success in channeling a few into some sort of training program. The popular movie “October Sky” in the 1990’s presented one somewhat successful scenario. 

Model Rocketry, as we mean it, started in 1954 when Orville Carlisle, a pyrotechnics hobbyist, developed a small rocket airframe made of paper and balsa, which used an expendable motor that had the novel feature of a time delay and a charge to eject a parachute so that the rocket could return safely to be used again.  For the next few years, he struggled to find a way to market the rockets.

In 1957 Carlisle read an article in Mechanix Illustrated by G. Harry Stine, a civilian safety officer at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.  Stine was concerned about the injuries and deaths of rocket experimenters. He urged them to use a set of safety practices that professional rocketeers used.

Carlisle wrote Stine about his rocket system, and sent Stine some samples.  Stine was astonished that the rockets worked so well and reliably.  He and Carlisle soon went into business producing the first commercially available model rocket kit and single use motors through a company called Model Missiles.  

Model Missiles could not produce enough motors to meet their needs and reached out to a young engineer/contractor named Vern Estes, who designed a machine to produce  motors reliably and quickly.  He found he could make many more motors than Model Missiles could use, so he went into business for himself, and created Estes Industries, which is to this day the largest model rocket company in the world.

Meanwhile, G. Harry Stine formed the National Association of Rocketry to support the new hobby, promote the formation of clubs, and create a consistent legal framework across the country allowing anyone to fly model rockets, even in states with restrictive fireworks laws.

Still, for the first twenty five years of the hobby, power and size of rockets were restricted by law to only one pound in mass and a few pounds of thrust, but enterprising people figured out loopholes to allow the manufacture and use of much larger rockets, which still utilized the design principles of the smaller rockets.  As the NAR was hesitant about approving the new rockets, another organization, the Tripoli Rocketry Association (TRA), originally a high school model rocket and science club, was adapted in the mid 80’s to support this new version of the hobby. 

In the 1990’s the TRA and NAR worked together to extend the existing Model Rocketry legal frameworks to the new High Power rocket hobby, and collectively we often refer to the hobby as Sport Rocketry.

At SoAR, all rockets are flown according to the safety codes of the NAR and of the Tripoli Rocketry Association (TRA). These codes have allowed over half a billion safe model rocket launches by hobbyists since the late 1950’s.