When I was in 7th and 8th grades, I belonged to the Model Rocket Club. Once a week, a handful of students would stay after school, and, under the supervision of our science teacher, Mr. Teague, we'd gather in the parking lot behind Williams Junior High School and fire solid-fuel-powered rockets made of cardboard, plastic and balsa wood into the air. The fun part was pressing the launch button on the little hand-held, battery-powered igniter and watching the rockets take off. The less fun part was hunting in the woods and fields around the school for the rockets after they'd parachuted back to earth.
I was pretty into it, as you might imagine, even though my limited modeling skills - and even more limited budget - basically meant that I only built the cheapest and most simple of the rocket kits offered by the Estes company and its prime competitor, Centauri. That didn't stop me from drooling over the plethora of sleek rocket designs offered in their catalogs, though -
especially those designs based on the sci-fi movies and TV shows I loved. In fact, those annual, digest-sized catalogs were just as compelling to me as a burgeoning teenager as the Sears Christmas Wishbooks were just a year or two before. I spent hours and hours poring over those colorful pamphlets, fantasizing about owning all those beautiful rocketships....
Anyway, Estes offered flying model rocket kits based on the spaceships of
Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica... and even offered a
Black Hole "space probe" rocket, while Centauri sold a
Space: 1999 Eagle. These things were genuine marvels of engineering; the X-Wing and Viper were fairly easy to to adapt, since they were reasonably aerodynamic designs already. But the
U.S.S. Enterprise and Klingon Cruiser really required some creative thinking on the part of Estes' designers. In the case of the TIE Fighter and the
Space: 1999 Eagle, they ended up with basically lightweight, hollow, vacuformed plastic models that sat atop standard cardboard tube rocket fuselages.
I desperately coveted the X-Wing and Viper - I knew the others were beyond my skills - but the only one of the sci-fi tie-ins I owned was the Centauri Eagle... and I never even got it painted up. Eager to see it fly, I took the assembled but unpainted model to one of our meetings and took my turn at the launch pad. When I pushed the button, the Eagle shot into the sky -- and came right back down when the parachute failed to deploy. It crashed into the parking lot and the plastic shell shattered. I wasn't happy.
I know the hobby still exists, but I doubt that it's as popular as it was back in the late Sixties and Seventies.
Very informative post. I was not aware that this type of merchandise even existed! That Black Hole Space Probe has got to be the RAREST Black Hole merchandise item I've ever seen. Of course, now that I know about it I must have it in my collection.
ReplyDeleteI myself did not partake of rocket launching as a kid, though I wish I had since it sounds like a lot of fun.
I tried to build a bunch of these myself. Made it to Cape Kennedy around the time of the launch of Skylab and I was hooked on the Apollo program from there on out. I bought a lot of the rockets that were supposed to look like the Saturn V and a bunch of the smaller ones. Funny how they never really looked like anything NASA flew no matter how hard you tried.
ReplyDeleteI could never make the dang engines work. Never. Finally, one day, in the middle of the city, I set up a launch pad in the alley behind my dad's house. I don't know what I did different that day than any other otherwise botched attempt, but that day I got one of the damn things to go up into the air.
I never had any flying model rockets as a kid, but as a budding artist I absolutely LOVED those gorgeous illustrations on the packaging, especially artwork for the Estes Star Wars "Proton Torpedo." Great stuff.
ReplyDeleteChris-
ReplyDeleteYou need to go to a regular hobby shop. If one is not available, try and find a Hobby Lobby. They still have the model rockets if you want them.
Thanks, Shanksow, but I'm not interested in getting back into the hobby. I don't have the time or money to indulge.
ReplyDeleteI prefer to remember how much fun it was back when I was 13.
My wife goes to Hobby Lobby and Shanksow is correct, they stock them, although it is not at all like when I was a kid and there were multiple hobby stores in my home town who all had a whole section of kits, supplies, engines, etc. Hobby Lobby here has maybe 3-4 kits and none of the models or graphics really are inspiring.
ReplyDeleteAre there any books out there about the history of this hobby? I bought one a year or two ago about the history of Aurora Models. I was concerned about shelling out $20 for a book about plastic models but it was a really good & interesting read, much moreso than I thought it would be.
I spent many a summer using my cadet training to build homemade model rockets. You only needed to be 14 at the time to purchase the rocket engines so we would go a week just designing and launching until we got tired of it.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Estes make a kit that had a stock rocket as the center, attached to what looked like the engines from the starship Enterprise?
ReplyDeleteYes. It was called U.S.S. Atlantis, and one source I checked says it was produced 1976-1981. I was always amazed that it was clearly a Starfleet variant ship, but I don't think they ever identified it as having any affiliation with "Star Trek" (and probably didn't pay any licensing fee, I'm guessing). Just Google "Estes USS atlantis" to find gobs of photos. It was an awesome ship, and the decals put it on an equivalent scale with the AMT plastic Enterprise/Klingon ships, so it could be displayed with them or used in play battles alongside them (which I did!). Very beautiful model --- even had something sort of like shuttlecraft landing decks on the top and sides.
ReplyDeleteYes. It was called U.S.S. Atlantis, and one source I checked says it was produced 1976-1981. I was always amazed that it was clearly a Starfleet variant ship, but I don't think they ever identified it as having any affiliation with "Star Trek" (and probably didn't pay any licensing fee, I'm guessing). Just Google "Estes USS atlantis" to find gobs of photos. It was an awesome ship, and the decals put it on an equivalent scale with the AMT plastic Enterprise/Klingon ships, so it could be displayed with them or used in play battles alongside them (which I did!). Very beautiful model --- even had something sort of like shuttlecraft landing decks on the top and sides.
ReplyDelete