LarryBAR99

The NY Times published a great article last week, " These Rocketry Hobbyists Are Not Just Playing Around ".  I agree! When I was a kid we used to drive from Phoenix to visit my Uncle Larry in Pasadena, California, for summer vacation and our family would go to Disneyland.  Back then, there was a "futuristic" rocket in Tomorrow Land, based on a design by Dr. Verner von Braun.  I'd forgotten about it until we visited my best friend in Kansas City and saw this on the roof of the old TWA headquarters in downtown KC: Old pictures I've seen showed the TWA logo on either side of this Moonliner rocket. When we got back, I started looking for ways to build this rocket!  There was a company offering a model of the Moonliner, but they stopped producing them because of family health issues.  Then I heard about the Washington Aerospace Club's 2025 Moonliner project to build a 30 inch diameter, 22 foot tall Moonliner !  They successfully launched their monster in Sep...

Long time, no post ....  Here's some of what I've been up to in the past few months: Estes surprised everyone (at least me) when they announced at the end of July that they were selling a 4" diameter  Pro Series II™ Mega Der Red Max™ Model Rocket , using a 3-Engine Cluster.  I anguished for a couple of weeks about whether to buy one and they sold out before I decided to buy one.  I should have recognized the "Limit 2" next to the order button meant they hadn't made a lot of them. After a month or so had passed, I saw someone on The Rocketry Forum  discussing 3D printing the Mega DRM so I reached out to "frogglicker" (David Frey) who generously shared the STL files he'd developed .  He designed a custom 2 piece nose cone for me, based on a file I made with OpenRocket.  Estes was selling the 4" body tube used in the Mega DRM so I bought two (just for fun and possible future projects ). OpenRocket simulation of my Mega Der Red Max in flight w...