There was an incident in Lawrenceville on June 30 — five acres burned after a fire started by a model rocket — that got into the news. The person arrested (a dad flying a rocket for his two kids) is not known by SoAR.

Please be aware how easy it can be to start a fire when the ground is this dry, and don’t be fooled by primarily green looking grass. There can be a lot of dead grass underneath that is dry and ready to burn.  It doesn’t take much: a still-hot igniter falling from the rocket, improper recovery wadding, a rocket that goes unstable and falls to the ground before the ejection charge goes off.

If you must fly, use a proper launch pad with blast deflector, and set it on a small tarp or blanket to cover the underlying grass.

If you fly those popular “flying saucers,” cubes, spools, or pyramids that use drag recovery, use ONLY booster motors (i.e. dash-zero motors), so that any pyrotechnic events occur while the rocket is still in the air, not when it reaches the ground.

Better yet, wait until one of our launches and fly rockets with us! We have extinguishers!!