Be forewarned this a FOFOF story, so take it with a grain of salt.
Twenty years ago, my friend Kevin told me a story that had been past on by a friend of his of story-approaching-American-mythological yarn. No date was cited, but giving the specifics implied it happened between 1960-1975.
As the story goes…a 707 was flying through the Montana or Idaho near the Canadian border, and saw a missile appear in front of it. It took a evasive maneuvers and they watch it sail west out over the state of Washington. The location of the missile and the airplane was about 10 miles apart, but still it was pretty upsettingThe pilots reported the event to FAA who of course would be pretty incensed over violation of the FAR and airspace, etc. The military too, was interested in this event, because they were doing tracking of events on their radar at Vandenberg AFB and saw the object heading out to the Pacific. In fact, the rocket was emitting (I would assume telemetry) radio signals which allow the receiver to lock onto the transmitter radio. In addition, it was a solid fueled rocket. So the FAA and Air Force went to investigate and eventually locate the launch site in the middle of a farmer’s field. The group of officials meet with the police and go out to the field owned by the farmer and ask him all sorts of questions, and find out he’s got an alibi along with anyone else on the farm. The farmer does however make a comment that he saw a couple of teenagers who were in the area a few days before the alleged event. The officials are kind of confuse at this point, because this was not something a couple of teenagers could put together. On a hunch a couple of officials went to the local high school and talk to a couple of teachers. One of them was a high school science teacher and he said he had a couple of very bright students. The officials asked to look at the chemistry laboratory. In a cabinet, they found some mislabeled ingredients which form the core of the solid rocket fuel. As it turned out, they were making small batches of the fuel and sneaking home in the their launch boxes. The officials quickly find the two and start talking to them and find out that they indeed are the culprits. To make it short, the judge orders them to never launch a rocket again and to attend a university in order to channel there energies into something more positive.
Having designed, build, and test various pieces of satellite gear, the story is just barely plausible. About two years later while in college, I spoke to a Navy officer who had expertise in the solid fuel, and said it would have been possible, but extremely dangerous if their were any voids in the actual packing of the material. (The fuel would start burning in an asymmetrical way and cause the fuel start spalling off of the inside walls among other things).
Okay, this sounds like an elaborate fairy tale. Has anyone heard about this? Or is it based on a simple story that took on a life of its own and became more elaborate as it was told from generation to generation? I remember hearing the rocket car slamming into a cliff in az, only to find that it was based on an even funnier story
Why would a rocket flying 10 miles up be such a big deal to construct. It’s just (I would think) an overgrown model rocket.
In any case, the added story detail that they went to the trouble of puttiing a radio transponder on the rocket is what makes the BSometer needle edge into the red zone for me. It sounds cool and it allows the existence of the rocket to be verified (for the story) but telemetry electronics in the 60’s and early 70’s were a lot bigger, much more expensive, and harder to manage than today, and they have no particular reason to be installed on the rocket if they are blasting it out into the ocean.
The telemetry angle is just a little to convenient and improbable.
I believe that weather balloons back in the sixties carried cheap telemetry packages. Is it possible that one could cannibilize one and stick a 10 W xmitter on the output? I remember people showing me these things back in those days.
While the story itself may be baloney, it’s not too technically improbable. Lots of people make model rockets, and even the small ones can go up a couple thousand feet. I’m pretty sure I saw an article in Smithsonian magazine a year or so back about a rocketry ‘meet’ in the west or midwest. Some of those ‘models’ were several feet long and maybe 4-6 inches diameter; they looked more like surface-to-air missiles then ‘toys’. Most model rocketry enthusiasts, to my knowledge, limit their trajectory height to locally applicable regulations, but who’s to say what a couple teenagers might do, with or without knowledge of the regulations.
There is a model rocket group in Utah which has an Airspace Waiver from the FAA witch allows them to go higher than 10,000’. One of their annual competitions includes a contest to see who can get a rocket to come the closest to 15,000’. This years winner reached an elevation of 15,316’. This upcoming summer they will have a rocket which they hope will reach 24,000’. And all of this is done with commercially availible model rocket engines. You can check the club out here http://www.uroc.org .
While the OP’s story may not be true it is technically feasable.
Before Estes Co. arose, model rocket hobbyists had to make their own fuel. There’s an old Scientific American column on a home-built rocket which used zinc and sulfur powder. If I recall, it was a couple of inches in diameter and several feet tall. The fuselage was a steel pipe with a lathe-turned exhaust orfice, brass shim rupture diaphragm, and a load of burning road-flare material in a chamber at the nose for visual tracking. The things would go supersonic. One of the problems they had was that the metal guide fins would burn down because of air friction. They also had problems with misfires, so the builders would observe launches from a trench behind an earth berm. And the fuel was so dangerous to transport that they had to mix it on site. Not a project built by kids.
However, as with things like science fair particle accelerators, x-ray machines, CO2 lasers, once the ‘plans’ had appeared in SciAm magazine, any resourceful high school student could make a copy.
I once saw a picture of one of the founders of NASA (Robt. Goddard?) standing by one of his early home-built rockets. It was an odd looking thing, and it stood taller than he did. It’s not really implausible that someone built and launched a rocket like that in the OP. It does seem silly that “officials” would stifle such talent rather than introduce them to grownup rocket scientists. The fact that it’s so silly makes it more plausible, though.
–Nott, who once blew the windows out of a '58 Cadillac with a homemade bomb
