here's the rest of that Tom Milkie sequence.
Again this was following an Open meet sponsored by Athens Area Rocketry Association, with Metro Atlanta Society for Educational Rocketry (MASER) as our guests. 1974. Barnett Shoals Elementary School, Athens, GA

Ignition!


"controllers are looking into the situation"


"yes John. That was supposed to happen"


"Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"

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Roy
nar12605

"Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"

NARF! Great photos!

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Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

4 out of 3 people struggle with math.

Chemically, alcohol IS a solution.

NAR# 94042
SAM# 0078

Great pictures Roy. Looks like you guys had a decent flying field too.

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Steve Naquin
TRA# 677 L2
NAR# 85518 L2
SAM# 0052

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"Had" is the operative word. Pine trees and houses grow FAST in the south. The school (which was fairly new then) was recently torn down and replaced by something almost twice the size. And the parking lot is three times bigger.

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Roy
nar12605

I hear that...happened at my former junior high school where I had my first flight. Old school was torn down three years ago and the new school is quite a bit bigger. It stretches out over a good chunk of what used to be a softball field and down towards what used to be a practice football field and ‘track’ around that field. Nowhere to fly there now at all and the center wing of the building comes about 20-30 feet from covering the spot from where I flew my very first rocket.

Earl

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Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970

I have no pics of me at all, but I do have a few rocket photos from the late 70's. The photos aren't date stamped, but there's an X-Wing and an early Astrocam (my cousin's) so the indoor shots were likely fall of 78 and launch shots probably 79.

The launch pad was functional. I had no scale data so I just eyeballed a photo from a magazine to get the pad and tower size. The "floors" were plywood from an old piece of furniture that my brother ripped into squares for me on his table saw, as well as the 1/2" hardwood.

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I love sanding.

After seeing my cousin's fancy launcher with all kinds of electronics and lights, I decided to add lights to my launch pad. Eddie was an electrical engineering major at UT so his pad had sensors and a servo operated hold down mechanism to launch clusters with solar ignitors and a 6v supply (just to make it a hard project). The unpainted wood was also servo actuated to do various things like hold rockets still, turn on switches, etc. I don't remember specifically what he was doing with it that weekend.

My launch pad.


Eddie's fancy launch pad.

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I love sanding.

Temporary lighting for a mood shot, and then a pre-launch shot in my pasture. I did the quick and dirty lighting because we were going to do a night launch of one of his rockets.

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I love sanding.

My finally painted Pershing 1A (took forever to find the proper military color paint). Getting closer to Eddie's night launch.



Eddie's night flying bird on his launch pad.

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I love sanding.

Eddie's Phoenix lifting off a month or two later. His launch system was one of his senior projects in engineering school. Each time he came home, he had modified it or added new capabilities to test. I wish I remember all the stuff it was capable of. It had an automated countdown launch controller similar to the one he designed for me for another of his class projects.

I had some tiny model railroad 12v incandescent lights on my tower by then, but they didn't put out much light. I fabricated reflectors out of card stock and lined them with aluminum foil. Ugly, but better than the toilet paper tube light I'd thrown together a few months earlier.



Another shot of Eddie's new Astrocam.

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I love sanding.