It wasn't long before I had built a number of Estes and Centuri kits including a two stage payload rocket.  I even ended up scratch building some rockets after reading an article in Boys Life magazine that detailed how to build a rocket from rolled paper body tubes and nose cones that used expended engines as formers.

A number of moves and many, many years later, I have no clue where my rockets are.  Probably garage saled, or sent to Goodwill, or in the trash. 

In the fall of 1999, I went on a business trip to Chicago.  With a flight schedule dictated in part by airfare prices, we arrived a couple of days early, and ended up spending an afternoon with a number of paintball business folks at a high powered rocket launch.  Dave Zupan and Tom Kaye of Airgun Designs are both into high power rocketry.  That's Dave in the picture above, and it's his rocket that is on the background of this page.  High power rockets are a bit beefier than the models I'd flown.  They fly high enough that they need flight clearance to route airplanes around them and burn as much as $300 or more worth of fuel per flight.  While it got me excited about rocketry again, High power is a bit more pricey than I wanted to get into.

In talking with Dave, I learned that recovery was a big deal with rockets flying this high.  Model rockets have parachutes or other recovery devices deployed by an explosive ejection charge in the engine when they reach the top of their flight.  With high powered rockets, the would drift away if a parachute were released that high.  Instead the ejection charge typically splits them in half where they fall with a streamer, and an electronic altimeter triggers the release of a parachute as they are a few hundred feet from the ground.  It was the electronic aspect that got me very interested in jumping back into rocketry, and undertaking Project Icarus.

So, after I got home, I started building rockets again, and am looking for areas to launch in South Florida.