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.