So we launched a few rockets today—me and the offspring.

It’d been a while coming. The firstborn’s science group had launched a few a month or so ago, and she’d brought home a model she’d built there—sans wadding or engine or launching paraphernalia. Meanwhile, the little guy had been becoming seriously obsessed by rockets in general and by the Apollo program in particular—for a while, at bedtime, he was insisting on watching videos of launches and lunar surface activities on my laptops, and his favourite books are still on rockets and Apollo (got this great thing aimed for around his age—intricate illustrations taking you right through Apollo 11 in some detail, liftoff through the lunar excursion and back to splashdown—really tries to convey a sense of it—what it might have been like spending a week in that tiny capsule and lander, what it might have been like to be so far out there… good stuff…).

So they’d asked and I’d promised we’d get ‘round to launching a few of our own, and today, after an awful lot of cloud and rain and other inconveniences kept holding us up, we finally got a nice, clear day, if one a bit cold, a bit windy, for fiddling with bare fingers with engines, igniters and alligator clips. And so I picked up a kit with most of the remaining required stuff, got some wadding, another rocket, a buncha engines…

And it went generally well. Between the two rockets, we did four launches, of which three went perfectly—tho’ one of those did fly… well… some distance downwind…

Yeah, well, quite some distance. The thing is, the wind was a bit high, if up and down. I almost passed on launching anything whatsoever, but with two excited kids along, well…

So I took to waiting out the wind, waiting for relatively still moments for launches. Which worked fine for a few tries… Nice, seamless flights—up to the top, a bit upwind, chutes opening, thing coming back down all in one piece, all good… Almost impressive. Like we knew what we were doing or somethin’…

But then I fired one up on a C engine—second such flight. Musta got, I dunno… looked like at least a few hundred feet up…

And I guess the wind up there was a lot stronger than on the ground. ‘Cos coming back on the chute, it sailed several hundred metres. Through one anxious moment over a very, very, very tall hardwood… and over a hill and out of sight, and never mind by rules of thumb we should have had loads of room for that altitude. And if it had snagged on that monster tree, recovery would have been out of the question. Hell, I don’t think the fire department has arms go that high…

But we found it, brought it back, all intact. Lucky, in retrospect—it had landed maybe 50 feet from a muddy, swampy bit next to the river… That, too, could have been messy.

The failed flight… yeah… not sure what that was about. Tried an A engine in the one my daughter brought back, thinking we weren’t quite sure what was supposed to be in there, and though it fit fine, it looks like maybe I should have put something a little punchier in there, after all. ‘Cos it got up, turned over, came back down, engine still firing, burned out just before driving its nose cone into the ground.

Not so good. But hey, on balance, not a bad day. We’d have launched more except for the whole frozen fingers problem… It is getting a bit late in the season for this stuff, I guess.

Kids loved it, anyway. Little guy was having a great time, tho’ a little too nervous about the things actually to press the launch button. Firstborn happily sent one off on her own. Expect we’ll be firing a few more in not much longer.