Old rocket photos
 

I was reading through a thread and Steve Naquin mentioned that he had a photo of a friend flying a CMR Manta. It occurred to me that a lot of us likely have old photos like this. If anyone would care to share them, this would be a good place to do it. The closest I have is a momentary sweep across the bedroom on a home movie that my Grandpa made circa 1978. It never occurred to me to ask him to take movies of a launch, and none of us had the kind of access that would have allowed us to take a camera to the launch at NKU in 1977. Except for that quick swipe of Super 8, the hobby may as well not have existed for me.
In short, if you have old rocket pics you'd care to share, I'd love to see them. :cool:

1976 or 77

Love the concentration on the Interceptor decals. I was never able to muster my mind to follow through on a project like that one. :cool:

me in August 1967 just prior to my 12th birthday acting silly

Here are a couple of the very few I have from back in the day, both made by my Dad at the only two launches he was at; my very first, and then another in early 1979.

The first one is, as mentioned above (and is my 'YORF' image on my posts here), from my very first launch June 6, 1976. It was an early Sunday afternoon after church and was four weeks to the day before the July 4 Bicentennial that year.

Next, at a different field after we had moved to a different house in summer of '77 is a launch from early 1979 (probably Jan-Feb). An Estes Colonial Viper has just left the pad.

In both photos I note what now seems like a massive wad of hair on my head! I still have the Screaming Eagle from the first photo and I note just how bright white the body tube was then. It has darkened and aged quite a bit in the last 44 years.


Earl

Always love seeing old photos like this.

Having flown my first one in July of 68 photos are nonexixtent. Back then photos were expensive and would have strained my 12 year old bank account past oblivion.

23 years later (89) and armed with a VHS camcorder and 35mm I got a lot of photos and videos of my kids when they were small launching and chasing rockets. Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks were always peak rocket days for us, even though it was usually cold and wet.

Randy
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Yeah, I was lucky in that my Dad was a hobby photographer else there would have been nothing of the two launches he did attend. At that, he had a Canon F1 35mm camera one of the best made back in those days. At 83, he still does some photography stuff.

Earl

The only rocket launch photos I have are from the 2005-2008 time frame.
Not really "old".

Yeah, same here. :(

I have some from a month ago, my folks never took pictures of my rocket launches from the 80s.

Not sure where it came from, but I got an Alpha for my birthday in 1978. I think it was the Deluxe Starter Outfit that was in the 1977 catalog, but I also got my Big Foot pad in the X-Wing set that same birthday. (I still have both the Solar Launch Controller and the Big Foot.) I built the Alpha on Friday night, painted it on Saturday, and dragged Mom, Dave and Jen out to NKU for a few flights after church. I kinda remember Mom taking pictures, but nothing has ever shown up. Not unusual, because Mom had a habit of finishing a roll of film, then letting it sit around for five, ten, fifteen years before she took them to have them developed. As a result, we have a lot of film damaged by light seepage. They have a purple tint to them. Sometimes she just found the film canisters and tossed them out, and I think that happened with the launch pics and a football movie I had her film for us a couple of years later. :rolleyes:

I do not have many pics from my earliest days. This is one of my oldest. North Georgia Regional Meet (NRGM) in 1971, near Atlanta. My first NAR contest. I am standing 3rd from right, just left of the guy with the headwear. The "kid" second from left, looking down, well, he owns Estes. John Langford.


NGRM the next year, 1972. Front row, 3rd from left. John Langford. Me, 2nd from right. Won an Interceptor, my favorite Estes kit that's not a glider or 1/45 Little Joe.



Polaroid of most of my contest models for NGRM in 1973, I think. Among them, Dual Egglofter (Staged D12's), Payloader, Flex-wing Gliders, Slide-pod Rocket Gliders, 1/4A Swing-wing rocket glider, flex-wing glider, parachute or streamer models, and a converted Plastic Model Lunar Module. By that time, I was more into shooting super-8 movies than doing photos.



Jon Robbins' Groundhog series of Swing-Wings had an effect. I built a series of Swing-wings of 6 foot span or more that I called Great Dane. This is the first one, 1972, only one to use a pop-pod. I'm at right, a friend at left.



Here's an image of another Great Dane, one with a "K" type tail.


One of my best was Great Dane 15, built by 1976 and flown in F Rocekt Glide. I built a clone of it in 1992, here it is shortly before launch on a D12 test flight (flew best on an F10). It had a pop-=stab DT, like the 1976 model had.


And.....same model in 2007 or so. I added some small radio gear to make it steerable by rudder, no elevator. It flew and handled VERY well. Ended up crashing a couple of years later when the wings did not deploy. I really miss that one.



More, later.

Nice vintage pics, George !

Some Rocket Cars, around 1977. Mine is in the middle. BT-60, over 3 feet long.


Some "X-planes" in 1978, all three scratch-built. I tried to make the big X-wing at left glide. The upper wings deployed up into a "K" type arrangement, but it would not glide. The one in the middle sacrificed accuracy for glide. It had a swing-out scissor type clear plastic canard, and did did glide (Nose ejected off to let the canard deploy). And the X-15 used about a 2.6" tube, and glided pretty nicely for its size and mass. It was a "profile" type model, and I never got around to trying to create decals for it, as that was not very practical in 1978.


I got into making shuttle models. A crude 1/80 orbiter in August 1977. And by 1982, having gotten into R/C, a piggybacked orbiter at 1/72 scale, with wings a bit oversized.


By 1984, a 1/72 full stack shuttle prototype, with scale sized wings. There were a lot of tests, and a lot of setbacks along the way. Heck in 1984 I was not even trying to do a "serious" scale shuttle for contests, I did not have the skills.


So, by 1999, 22 years after the first crude orbiter, with skills and technology I never dreamed of having then....


Backtracking, once I sort of started to get serious about scale in the early 1980's. a Delta 3920 model. BT-70 with Centuri #8 tubes for the solids. This model got me into doing vac-forming, for all those booster noses and nozzles.

Got into R/C Rocket Boosted Gliders in 1980. This was a great one, Avatar-1, using Cannon Super-Micro radio gear. 34" span. Boosted on a D12 or staged D12's. Lasted for 49 flights.


One of the boosts. This was 2-staged, and I was not ready to control boosts by R/C much, so used a big long pod for staged boosts.


A rudder-only model, a 2-channel Avatar, and Gentle Lady sailplane in 1981.


Circa February 1988. Preparing for first test flight of "sunguidance" project. At that time it only had control on the pitch axis, which led to a pretty wild flight due to a bit of a roll. By the second flight it had 2-axis control and went well from there.

In the photo of the Maxi-Brute Honest John on an FSI F100, I am standing 4th from the right. To my left is Bob Koenn in shorts & t-shirt . . . The year was 1975.

Dave F.

Well, I knew I had some polaroid pics from 1978-1979 because I have a scanned pic of me with my FSI Mach-1 Dart in a few places on the forum that I scanned many years ago with a really crappy scanner :rolleyes:
I have an old Epson V500 Photo Scanner sitting here collecting dust that I never could get to work with Linux ... well it worked for a while and then stopped. I now have a Windows laptop that I use to work from home and loaded the drivers on my laptop and whala now my scanner works again so I set out to find the CMR Manta picture. In doing so I found two old photo albums filled with polaroid pictures all dated 1978-1979 same time frame as the FSI Mach-1 Dart picture so I may try to scan a few of the better ones. I haven't looked through these albums since before I moved in 2008 so pretty stoked that I actually located them yesterday. Some of the stills look okay but the slow shutter speed of that old polaroid camera caught mostly blurry shots of anything already off the rod and in flight.

Maybe with the scanner and some sharpening I can get a few decent scans of these pics. I probably need to scan some of these pics anyway because I don't think these polaroid pics will last forever :rolleyes:

BTW great thread Bill. GREAT posts everyone ... keep the pictures coming.
I LOVE looking at old rocketry photos!
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Wow, Steve! Looks like you have lots of vintage photos there! Looking forward to seeing what you are able to scan. I have some Instamatic photos circa 1978 in one of my rocket photo albums that contain tons and tons of LDRS photos, but all the LDRS stuff, even going back to 1991, seem almost like yesterday still, even though my first LDRS — LDRS10 — is almost 30 years ago now! :o But, I may try to post some of the old Instamatic images from the late 70s, if I can find them.

Looks like you got some good coverage there of your ‘golden’ years!

Earl

This would have been 1986 or 1987. Flying a NASA Pegasus near my parent’s house.

Ah, back in the day when young kids could build a good looking scale model using common household materials:)

Frank

Those are great photos George.

This is before super glue and I call it, "will that stupid glue ever dry" CA 1976 Working on a Klingon Battlecruiser I won at my first Boeing Employees Rocketry club meeting in Kent Washington.

Wow! Coverage, even! :cool:

I tried a rocket sled in the winter of 1977 or 78. Didn't work at all, but the disassembly was impressive.

Great thread idea.

I have to scan some old pics to post.

Here's a few I have scanned.

1 - Mini Max Scorpion, SSRS E30, iirc, circa 1977-78

2,3 - the Air and Space Museum model rocket display, April 1982

My early years of the hobby were filmed with a Kodak X-15 Instamatic camera using 126 film.
I used slide film as it didn't require an additional printing cost.

My slides are currently all packed away but I did scan three of the slides in the past.

Here then are those slides from 1972-1973:

1) Launch of my Estes Citation Patriot on a B4-2 motor

2) Launch of my Estes Firing Line RTF X-15 on an A3-2T motor

3) A group photo of all my rockets at the time, circa 1972

My rocket car, the red one in the middle, I converted into a rocket sled after a rare snow in 1978. Put skids on it in place of the whells. At first, used old FSI D4 engines. Kaboom. Kboom. Kaboom. Four in a row catoed! They had been fine the previous summer. OH, cold temperatures, the first real-world data I had, personally, for engines blowing up more in cold weather. I switched to Estes C6. Those worked. But the car's rear skids did just that.....skidded. The car's back end skidded out to the side, it would not run straight. So if I did it again I'd do something more like skis parallel to the snow (the skids were 1/32" plywood at angles of about 30 degrees to the snow)

But it was literally a spur-of-the-moment idea due to the rare snow, did what I could in about an hour and then tried it.

A few more photos.

BT-50 sized Concorde model, using a similar internal pod method as the SkyDart. Plans were in the July 1980 issue of the Model Rocketeer. The Wasatch Rocketry "SST" HPR glider was an uncredited ripoff of this design.


After Sunguidance in 1988, a project in 1989 using the same system to control a gimbaled motor. The system technically worked but due to sunguidance never pointing the engine straight for liftoff, that caused complications (and at least a couple of flights got into a roll so fast that the modle ended up flying ballistically. And one finless attempt went totally out of control as the sunguidance deflected the mount too much for launch to be able to maintain control) . Most of the flights were F10 powered, but the very first was 2-staged D12 with the booster fized straight, the upper stage being gimbaled.

At NARAM-34 in 1992, a dry lakebed site near Las Vegas. F powered helicopter model. Blades was 3" by 36". Model flew well, IIRC over 4 minutes. winning Team div.


Two Little Joe-II photos, decades apart. At left, by Ric Gaff, at Johnson Space Center in 1979 at NARAM-21. Mark Bundick pointing at the "do not climb on display " sign, as the rest of us have climbed onto the display. I'm at the far right end. In 1979, I never had any ideas of building serious scale models someday. I liked the Little Joe-II, but never thought of scratchbuilding one. The other photo, 2014 at the International Space Hall of Fame Museum in Alamogordo, NM. With the only other surviving (mostly) Little Joe-II.


OK, so by 1990 I had gotten good at scale and built competitive Little Joe-II models. NARAM-34 in 1992 had Super Scale, so I built a pad to go along with it. Jay Marsh at left, Wayne Hendricks at right.

Cool pics, George.
Nice to see a pic of someone WITH a cigarette in these days of "everything BADDD tor you" can't show, PC crapola.

Hope to figure out on Friday which of our numerous old photo albums have some of my old rocketry photos from the late 60s. Hopefully will post some tomorrow.

Jay FINALLY kicked the habit, does not smoke anymore (that was a 1992 pic).

My mother DIED of lung cancer, after decades of smoking. It was a terrible way to go. An inevitable downhill struggle over a period of about 7 months after she was diagnosed, an insane never-explained delay of nearly 2 months to begin radiation therapy (which failed).

And a final 3 months or so of home hospice care where I was the primary care giver, with a hospice nurse dropping by for an hour or so 2-3 times a week. Even with supplemental oxygen, she got to the point where her lungs could not function well enough so her oxygen level dropped to the point where she was incoherent, did not know who she was and did not know who I was. Not Alzheimer's, literally low oxygen affecting her brain.

Kill yourself however you want to kill yourself, if that's your thing. But it's a terrible way to go. And if you have friends/family, it's gonna be hard on them. Her last few months, especially last few weeks, was the darkest time of my life.

I already know it's a terrible way to go.
My mother passed due to the same disease in 1998.
Everything you said is true. It took the doctors two precious months to get her diagnosed properly. They kept saying pneumonia was causing the coughing of blood.
Symptoms appeared in October of 1997 and she passed 5/1/98.
She had to take so much pain medication it eventually reached the point the body could no longer handle.

It was more of a comment on how everything in the world has gotten way too "PC" in almost everything.

George,

Thank you for sharing that . . .

I know, from personal experience, that your emotional pain must have been immense, at the time, and that the pain never truly goes away !

I lost my mother to Dementia . . . She died from her physical problems.

She had a severe heart condition ( 5 heart major heart attacks - The first one happened when I was 14, in 1975, right after NARAM-17, in Orlando, FL), Brittle Diabetes, and a few other conditions, by the end. Her physical health finally took her from me, bodily, at age 73, in January, 2006. However, her Dementia took her from me, mentally, in 2003, when she looked at me, one day, and said "Who are you ?" and never remembered me, ever again !

You and I have had our differences, over the decades, George, but I want you to know that I understand, empathize, & sympathize, and will keep you in my prayers . . . That is a promise !

Dave F.

Dave -

Lost mine to dementia four years ago after a seven year battle with it. It tears your heart out...and you never forget what they went through. Wouldn’t wish that disease on anyone. Moved heaven and earth to care for her and would do it all again if it would change things. But dementia is cruel and does not let you win, regardless of what you do. It robs, steals, and cheats. I know she is in a much better place now, but I still ache knowing what she had to go through here in her final years.

Earl

When my mother went through her cancer battle it was the darkest time in my life as well.
We lost her shortly after she turned 50 years old, which is what I just turned 2 weeks ago.
My brother, father and I were there when she passed. I can remember the exact time like it was yesterday.

Yep. Mom left me 3 years ago. It took a long time and I spent my retirement savings on her. Worth it to have her, but so hard when they don't know you, etc. Oh but that is a pain I hope others don't have to experience.

Mike Myrick is the short kid whose elbow is sticking out on the right. The guy in the middle whose arm is sticking up in front of his face might be known to anyone from Atlanta by his radio moniker, "Willard at 96Rock".

...and sitting in the car in the background is Howard Hughes. To his right in the front passenger seat is Elvis. :chuckle: ;)

Sorry, I couldn't resist....

A photo of the budding famous, no doubt. Funny how we never really know where people will end up.

BTW, where in the Atlanta areas was this, do you (or George) remember? I am at Atlanta native, but moved from there when I was 8, so my 'working' knowledge of the Atlanta area and suburbs is dated for sure by now. Wonder if that specific spot is even still a ball park (which is what it appears to be in the photo, but I may have that wrong).

Earl

We called it Levitz Proving Grounds, an industrial park just getting started behind the Levitz Furniture store on a frontage road (now called Button Gwinnett Dr) near the Pleasantdale Rd Exit off I-85 just outside Spaghetti Junction. Here are two aerials, one from 1968, the other recent. The green star on the recent photo is about where that photo was taken. The long warehouse to the right of it was built in 1972 which forced us to another industrial park on the other side of Atlanta along Fulton Industrial Blvd, south of Six Flags, which is where George's second photo was taken. I don't quite have the exact location of that one.

1987, year of the mullet.

Can I send that to him?