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Happy Birthday, Vern Estes
Vern Estes, founder of Estes Industries and grandfather of model rocketry, is 95 today.
(Incidentally, the Estes website catalog has 30% off all rocket kits today in celebration. Get yourself a gift!)
In 1959, I answered a tiny ad in Popular Science: “Real Flying Rockets! Send 10¢ for catalog!” I still have the catalog, which was run off on a mimeograph.
As the Sixties went by, I built and flew everything Estes offered. I knew how long it would take to get my order back if I got it to the post office before noon, and I would start pestering the nice ladies behind the desk for my package after 10 days. It got to where they put it in a window in the side of the building, so I would see that it was there and stop asking.
Estes understood that a lot of their customers didn’t have anything like a hobby shop nearby where you could buy stuff. They had single bottles of Testor paint, single sheets of sandpaper, and single paintbrushes in the catalog. One thing I always admired was their sanding sealer, a brush-on paint that you could use to fill the grain in the balsa fins and nose cone for a smooth finish. Vern got SIG Manufacturing, a model airplane manufacturer, to sell him bottles of clear dope with no SIG label attached and only three-quarters full. He filled them with balsa dust from his machines, mixed the goop, and pasted an Estes label on it. Presto, sanding sealer!
Millions of kids have participated in “The Educational Space-Age Hobby,” through school programs, Scout merit badges, or on their own. Vern didn’t create model rocketry, but he perfected it. His mass-produced solid fuel rocket motors, ignited electrically from a distance of at least 15 feet, were the key to an amazingly safe sport. I used to say that more people were drowned in aquarium tanks than were injured by model rockets, and it’s true. Paper, balsa and light plastic, with no metal components other than a paperclip-like engine retainer spring, meant there was just no way to hurt yourself with model rockets unless you dropped an X-Acto knife on your foot. Vern worked with the nascent National Association of Rocketry to promote the Safety Code that drilled safety into our young heads. When I got involved with model aircraft, I was shocked by the fact that the kids with the rockets were a lot more safety conscious. We were also having a lot more fun.
Vern sold his company in the early Seventies, a move he often regretted. In 2018 the Langford family bought the company. John Langford was a model rocket kid who went to MIT, started a drone company, and sold it to Boeing. Now Estes Industries is run by an extended family that is steeped in rocketry, brothers and sisters who competed on an international level. And Vern is on the board of directors. All is well that ends well, especially when it starts again in exciting new directions.
Sadly, Vern’s wife Gleda passed in 2023. She was a full partner in everything he did, and was also on the Estes board when the Langfords took over.
I know of four astronauts who are enthusiastic rocketeers, from meeting them at contests and sport launches and conversing through ModelNet, the forum I ran on CompuServe in the Eighties and Nineties. There are millions more kids like me that didn’t make a career out of it, but it was a great positive factor in their lives. As for me, I ain’t no engineer, but the first of my nine books was a model rocket handbook, and Vern was one of the people I dedicated it to. A good man, and a life well spent.
Published in General
I’ve been getting my Estes stuff mostly online, from auction sites etc, mostly new-in-box, and like with telescopes that means I can afford to buy maybe 3 or more, for what I would have paid to get ONE fully new. And someone did buy them before I did, so Estes did get their money, in the past.
So far I’ve only launched once, at the new place (“new” for 4.5 years actually) because it tends to be at least breezy around here, and I also didn’t have recovery wadding. But I recently was able to buy something like 20 packages of that, “new-old-stock” or something. Still need to stock up on igniters.
I do miss Centuri rockets though.
I built and flew model rockets back in the day. Good to know Vern Estes is still around.
Exciting to see Cineroc footage on YouTube! (I never saw it otherwise. No Camroc stills, either. But I could dream!)
I never knew that there was a man behind Estes, or any of the other details! Thank you so much for posting this.
I did, however, build a few Estes rockets. First for Cub Scouts and later because I thought it was fun. Then, over time, I graduated to plans from the SIG catalog. I kind of wanted to do RC planes, but at the time they were just to expensive and hard to fly. So I did control-line planes and balsa free-flight kits.
Getting a SIG catalog was always a highlight, even if I only ever built a couple kits. It’s so neat to find out they had a hand in my rockets as well.
Finally, FWIW, I was at a difficult job with a difficult software engineer who was in his 20s. We never gelled, it made everything harder, but I mentioned something, somehow about flying a model rocket and he got excited, saying “I’d be down for getting an Estes rocket and building it.” I was stunned … and happy that he, despite his youth, still got a chance to experience the fun of launching one of those things.
Excellent post! Even though I’ve never played with model rockets, I love posts like this, where members share the things they are enthusiastic about.
Estes rockets were always my choice, Centuri a distant second. My favorite one was a half-finished two-stage lightweight. I felt disagreeable for some reason one afternoon so I launched it in the front yard. Put a 1/2 A in the lower and a B12 in the upper, as that’s what I had at the time. I probably don’t recall the engine nomenclature correctly. Anyway, it all worked perfectly, fft-ffffffttt!, including the parachute. Little sucker drifted over a half mile, lost it in the trees.
I remember his catalogs of rocket offerings and how I would circle the ones I dreamed of making if I had an income stream. Lawn mowing would only cover maybe one kit every few months and enough engines to have a few launches each Wednesday afternoon after classes with the rocketry club that was sponsored by Herb Desind.
He had the budget and such enthusiasm, it was infectious (says the guy who recently retired from 42 years of working for NASA), that each session would include one or two launches of his Cineroc Super 8mm camera. About every three months he would take advantage of a captive audience ( his science class) of 8th graders to show us a 20 minute reel of the prior quarters launch photograph all splice together with a beach bongo’s sound track (and no I have no idea why he paired it to that music). It reminded me of the opening sound track to Hawaii Five-0.
One of the most memorable bits was during a period where Estes was having a manufacturing glitch of bad casings for there D size motors (circa 71), which is the propulsion engine for the mighty two stage Cineroc, where the first stage motor would explode upon igniting the upper second stage. Usually at about 15 feet AGL. Estes would always honor there products sending him not just replacement motors, but both a new rocket (the mighty Omega vehicle) and a new Cineroc camera (the “payload”).
The memorable sequence that I recall would be the embarrassment of the soccer jocks, where on one fine spring day they came to taunt the rocket nerds while watching our proceedings. The guys in the club were semi use to the occasional failures, however it was very alarming to the jocks, all of whom hit the ground when the rocket did it’s “spontaneous disassembly” with the nerd all standing there laughing, and then two week later them getting to see the film of their manliness immortalized during a Cineroc showing in class with them all cowering to the ground with us laughing before the film got to the over exposed film segment from the failure.
Life rarely serves up sweet justice, but that was a memorable bit of karma for us young aspiring engineer types that regularly have to deal with the ego inflated, hunky, girl attracting athletes, who revel in their mocking the future STEM guys.
Sweet.
Ditto!
How about astronomy? I got an amazingly clear view of the Moon, using a surprisingly modest telescope from my collection. A Meade Polaris 130.
You can even see details of the crater edges, etc! Even at the best, Galileo never had a view like this. And he hadn’t yet figured out things we’ve known now for centuries. In a way, that’s taken out a lot of the mystery. But I still like it.
Adult Space Camp, Huntsville Alabama, December 1993. One of the activities in the week long program was building and launching model rockets. We were doing it over a lunch, and one of the guys was eating a banana. On a lark, a couple of the guys took a whole banana, gouged out a hole for the engine, and attached fins and a node cone to the banana. Some how he got permission to actually launch it (So much for those safety codes, although the launch facility was very well provisioned with a large shield between the people and the launch stands).
On launch, the banana rocket went about ten feet in the air, turned sideways and did a sort of pirouette, then the parachute deployment charge fired, the engine blew out the back of the banana and it all fell to earth. At which point one of the builders spoke a sentence that has probably never been spoken in the previous history of the English language – “That banana would have flow farther if the engine hadn’t ejected.”
The builders, pre-launch (that’s not on the launch stand, this was just a photo-op.)
Wow, I remember building and launching ESTES rockets as a kid back in the 70s and 80s. I loved these things so much! Thank you for bringing back the memories.
Seen the movie?
The movie is terrible. The actual camp was fantastic. Especially the week-long program.
I was at the NYU film school 1969-’73. No one in class had ever heard of the Cineroc (or for that matter, the Edmund Scientific Catalog. The fools! The damned fools! And they called themselves a university??)
I wanted to use it to provide a comic ending to a student film. To this day, there’s a rom com cliche of a film ending with a distinct visual rhythm:
A shot of them. A shot of her. A shot of him. Her. Him. Embrace. Final dialog. Then a long pull-away crane shot as the couple walks away together. Credits roll.
But I wanted the couple to end with a speeded-up argument, topped by a “crane shot” done via rocket soaring away from them in seconds. CUT seamlessly to zooming out on an aerial photo. A shock laugh no one expects from a student film.
Two problems, as I recall 54-55 years later: Some people thought it was insanely dangerous. Done wrongly it would have been, but we weren’t idiots. On the other hand, we were 18-20 years old…never mind.
The other problem was stone cold basic: Cineroc was Super 8. There were laboratories that could enlarge it to 16mm, but even that fairly modest expense wasn’t part of a student film budget.
I had the same thought, and reminisced about D engines and parachutes.
Herb Desind was a wizard, the Platonic ideal of a teacher. His enthusiam was so infectious it put COVID to shame. I’ve known other teachers like that who used rocketry as a way to light the fire in kids. It’s especially important today, when everything is simulated. Kids need to have the opportunity to make something that does something real.
And one thing I’ve always said about sport rocketry: even our failures are worth watching.
Gorgeous! Is that Aitken peeking over the south pole?
Anything that lights up a kid’s enthusiasm is a Good Thing, whether it’s astronomy, or robots, or tropical fish.
Beware the ghost of Harry Belafonte..
Thanks for the post. I haven’t played with model rockets in years, but many of my fondest childhood memories include the distinctive shwISH! sound of a model rocket launch.
Model rockets have many virtues. For one, they look cool just sitting on your shelf. For another, they actually do something, unlike plastic models, which can only fall off the shelf. And when you fly ’em and lose ’em, you get to build another one!
I always dug scale models, which gave me a chance to research real rockets, many of which have delightfully strange histories. Especially sounding rockets, which aren’t meant to orbit their payloads, but get into the region of the atmosphere that is higher than balloons go and lower than satellites go. They are commonly made of stacked up solid fuel rockets from the days when we were afraid of Russian bombers boiling over the horizon and were prepared to greet them with fleets of pointy rockets that could be launched in a hurry: Nike Ajax, Nike Hercules and so on.
Just had this pop up on YT, from 15 years ago.
He landed it upright, just like a Musk rocket!
Well, it’s not in the same category, but here is my personal best. This scale Tomahawk is 6 inch diameter fiberglass, powered by a hybrid motor, which uses liquid nitrous oxide for the oxidizer and cast rubber for fuel. I designed the fill/fire system and sold it through Pratt Hobbies Inc. for several years, including one to NASA at Wallops Island.
Not bad. I also like the way YouTube (when you watch it on YouTube) feels the need to add one of those artificial unintelligence messages explaining what contrails are.
Beautiful!
The human urge to create is a wonderful thing.
Yeah, I saw that. Artificial stupidity.
Well, there were several companies manufacturing hybrid motors at the time, so I figured my niche was launch systems. The only competing system had a fatal flaw: they were using valves from NOS Systems, which makes the nitrous systems used in hot rods. I found a valve manufacturer that would make me valves with coils that wouldn’t burn out if you held them open for minutes at a time. As he said to me about the car valves, in a car, if you’ve got the button down for more than 30 seconds, you’re either airborne or you’ve hit something.
Except the Musk rockets come down under power, not with parachutes. And so they can be maneuvered to land in a specific location.
Picky picky picky
You mean kedavis, kedavis, kedavis.