 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont and today we are going to explore the Champlain Region Model Rocket Club, a very exciting organization and we have with us the president of the Champlain Region Model Rocket Club, Howard Druckerman. Welcome Howard. Thank you. And tell us a little bit about yourself before we begin. So as a kid I used to fly model rockets all the time and so I used to fly little teeny Estes model rockets and as I got older they got a little bigger and then I had a family and kids and I would fly rockets with them and now that my kids are even older I get to play in a much bigger size. So I still fly model rockets but they're just bigger and they're much more fun at that size. And what about your background? Was your background in science or rockets? So I am an engineer. My background is in math and science. I've always enjoyed doing that kind of thing. I also had one advantage in that my dad was part of the Gemini program for NASA. So he was involved in that. So he was interested in rockets. I was also born on a missile base. Really? Where? White Sands missile base out in New Mexico. I only lived there for a couple of months so I don't remember it but so I've always been around rockets and missiles. That's really in the blood then. I mean the White Sands is where they did all the pioneer work and everything like that. It is. What they did everything, yes. Were you around for the Sputnik launch, October 4th, 1957 was a day of shock for me and a lot of my friends. I was not born yet. Oh, okay. Then we know your age now. Okay. You can bracket it, yep. Okay. That's great. This organization, when did it get started? So around 2000 a bunch of people in Vermont got together and they wanted to fly bigger rockets. So they created a section of the National Association of Rocketry, NAR, and we are section 643 of Vermont. We're the only rocket club in Vermont. And so that gave us the ability to fly much bigger rockets, be insured, have all kinds of guidance from the club, meet the national standards and safety requirements, all of that that goes along with flying rockets. What is the National Association of Rocketry? There are two national organizations recognized that can certify people in rocketry. National Association of Rocketry, NAR, is one of them. It's a triple E rocketry association. We are associated with NAR. And where do you have your launches currently? We currently have our launches up in St. Albans, Vermont, off McQuamshore Road. Farmer there very graciously lets us use his land and we are very appreciative of that and we're very protective of that. And how do you manage to, do you have any liaison with any of the airport or any other people to let them know that you're launching these rockets? So I will say that safety is our number one concern. There are a bunch of requirements to do that. Every launch that we do, we have to file paperwork with the FAA. That has to be done 45 days in advance. Then two days in advance, we have to issue what's called a noticed airman, a notem that says this is the area we're going to be flying in. This is the space, how tall, how big and exactly where. In half an hour in advance, I have to call the Burlington Tower, the Boston Tower, Eastern Air Defense and remind them this is where we're going to be. And then finally, five seconds before pushing the button, I have to look up to make sure there's nothing in the way. That's amazing. And what was the most recent launch? So our most recent, we fly the third weekend of every month. So it would have been the third weekend of August, which I think was the 20th. What types did you launch then? We fly rockets from very small to the rocket that you see in the very front was flown there. That's great. Now what is the purpose of the organization? Is it entertainment? Is it skill? Is it scientific? Tell us about any interface with schools or people who are studying anything that's scientific or educational regarding it. So for most of the club members, it's just the fun of flying rockets. You get to work with unique materials, carbon fiber, fiberglass, Kevlar, or cardboard or whatever you want it to be. And that's what most people do. The club itself is available for any group that wants to have a launch put on for them. We have done launches for probably more than a dozen libraries in Vermont. We've worked with Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, 4H. So any group that is interested in doing a launch, we can help them put it on safely because we know how to do it. We've done lots of these and then we bring along one big rocket to show off. That's great. Yeah, I want to shout out to the Brown L Library in this extension because that's where I found out about your group. You had a nice little display there at the entrance of the library. And I'm sure that got some interest locally. Yep. And then immediately afterwards we did the Williston Library. Really? Yeah. That's great. Now what type of rockets do you fly? The club itself flies rockets anywhere from, and I'm going to pick up a small one from this small to bigger than what you see in front. This is the biggest one I could fit in my car today to get it here. But those are the different sizes and the materials vary. The littler ones are cardboard. The bigger ones start to be high performance plastics or fiberglass. And then if you want to spend a lot of money, you can make them out of carbon fiber. Who made these? These are all rockets that I have put together. Most of them are kits, not all of them. Some of them are custom. They take anywhere from 10 minutes to put together to several weeks. And are they special designs that you made or are they based upon rockets that are in use today, either for military or for exploration? So all of the ones you see that look like this one with the red fins, white body and our US Army Patriot scale models. This happens to be a one quarter scale. So the real Patriot would be 16 feet tall, 16 inches in diameter. This is 4 feet tall, 4 inches in diameter. This rocket itself is capable probably of going to 6 to 8,000 feet. And then it comes down under a bunch of parachutes. The one in front is a one third scale of a Nike Smoke. That was a 50s sounding rocket used by NASA to understand the upper atmosphere. That probably is capable of 15,000 feet if I wanted to pump it that high. Could you? Would we be able to do that? So in Vermont we can only go to 10,000 feet. So we're limited to 10,000. What about, are there any instruments or payloads on these or anything besides the propulsion end? Is there any guidance system? So there's no active guidance. There are active things that we do to release the parachute. When the rocket gets up to the very top up at Apogee, the rocket will split in the middle right here and a very small parachute will come out. All of the pieces are tied together and it comes down under a very, very small parachute for a rocket that size. So when it's up at, say, 6,000 feet, you don't want a large parachute. You want it to come down quickly. And then when it gets to about 1,000 or 500 feet, the nose cone will pop off and a very big parachute will come out. So it's only under that big parachute for the last 500 feet so it doesn't drift as far. We have a better chance of getting it recovered. We will fly with GPS or radio beacons so that we can locate them. Once we push the button, they go wherever they go. We don't have any control over that. So knowing where it landed is helpful. What kind of propellant is involved in these? So for the littler rockets, they use black powder. Same thing as gunpowder. For the bigger rockets, we use something called ammonium perchlorate composite propellant, APCP. It's the same thing that was in the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters. It's the same thing that the military uses in all of their missiles. We have one advantage. Most of NASA and the military want just high performance. We get to play around. The companies that sell these make them with blue flame, orange flame, pink flame, purple, yellow, white smoke, black smoke. And the one that I like the best is black smoke, yellow flame and sparks everywhere. And loud. That's great. And when you do this, do you make any recordations or monitoring of what took place? Do you have a log or a report that you put together? So for every launch that we do, I do a flight report. And you can see that on the club website. We record basic information of every flight. And then one of the members is videotaping most of the flights. I can't say he gets every single one of them. And he puts together a short synopsis of every flight. So for the entire launch, you can go see what flew, who flew what. Have you ever had any things go wrong? Yes. Several things have gone wrong. We have had people not put their motors together correctly when you get to bigger rockets. It's not just a slide in. You have to assemble the motor. And if you assemble it wrong, it can catch fire and not go up. Instead, the rocket just burns on the pad. We have never had a rocket explode. We don't use that term. We have had them over pressurize, but never explode. We have rockets get caught in trees. And one of the things that we tell everybody who comes to our launches is, you're responsible for your own safety. You have to be looking up and rockets will land wherever they land. So we've had them land close to people. We tell people, we do call things called a heads up. If a rocket is going to be near somebody, we fire off a horn. And then we ask everybody to look up specifically and point to that rocket so everybody in the crowd can find it if it's going to land close to people. When you have your launches, how are the sites set up? It's a big, huge open field. It's a 5,000 foot circle with just pretty much open field. There's a couple of trees, but it's just no houses, no roads, no nothing. And what do the people observe? We have one central area where everybody goes and rocketeers and guests, anybody is welcome to show up and watch. We have one area that's, I'm going to say, a specific distance away from where the rockets are launched. What that distance is, again, is a safety regulation for little small rockets. We do 50 feet. As you get to bigger rockets, it could be 100, 200, 300, 500, or 1,000, depending on the size motor you're flying. That's great. And what kind of events do you have planned for the rest of this year? So we fly the third weekend of every month, typically Saturday, weather and field conditions dependent. So you can just go to our website and see, just look for the third weekend. We make a decision on Thursday nights as to whether we're going to fly Saturday or Sunday or scrub the launch. Again, it's all weather dependent. And if the field is pure mud and we can't drive on it, we're not going to get cars stuck. So we don't go on, you know, if the field is bad or there's four feet of snow or whatever. But we do fly year round or we try to. That's very exciting. Now tell us what kind of interaction or relationship you have with youth groups or school groups or people like that. So I have done talks for groups to explain what this is all about. There's a lot of science involved in flying a rocket. It's not just a straight tube. It's got fins on the end and there's science involved in what those fins do. I also, as part of, you said I was at the Essex Library the week, the month afterwards I was at the Williston Library. And as part of that, with the Williston Library, we did a launch for the, for anybody who wanted to, for Williston and Essex Library members where they showed up. They built a flying saucer and it's literally a plate that gets a motor. And then so we built, they built it. They color it. It's meant for little kids. They get to color it. We give them lots of markers. And then we go out. We went in the field behind the Williston Library and every kid who wanted to launch their rocket launched it. That's great. And every kid had a blast. Every single one. That's fantastic. And what, you know, in terms of interest in the field or related scientific endeavors and disciplines, have you seen any of that take place? Kids who, or other people who might attend your events, have any of them become really interested in rockets? I'm going to take your question in a slightly different way. We have had several, NASA has several challenges. There's a Team America Rocket Challenge put on by NAR. There are another, there's another group that does a challenge. We have worked with schools for Team America Rocket Challenge. We have worked with several universities in terms of working with NASA challenges. The NASA challenges are quite complex. One of them, for example, was to send a rocket up to a minimum of 5,000 feet. Boy, a payload that came down, which was a buggy, and then the buggy had an autonomously drive to a location. So those are the kinds of things. So that's a pretty involved challenge. So those are the kinds of people that we've worked with, several universities. The kids are learning at all levels, whether it's Team America or it's at the college level. They're used to this, working with this level of power that they start to have with rockets those sizes that they massifize and fly. What's the, maybe the penultimate launch you had, the highest it went or the longer the flight? Tell us if you have any of your special achievements that you remember. So we, there are three levels of high power rocketry. I'm just going to call them one, two, and three because that's what they're called. Maybe as high as you can go in the United States. At our August launch, we had somebody fly a level three rocket. It was 12 feet tall, six inches in diameter, almost 60 pounds at takeoff, and he had it up to 5,800 feet. And so a lot of power involved to get a 60 pound rocket up that high. And you got it back. And he got it back. That's amazing. Over a mile in the air then. Oh yeah. Our flight ceiling, we've had guys go to 10,000 feet, but that's our maximum. We have one guy in the club right now who wants to go to 25,000 feet. So he's going to have to go to a different launch, but he will do that. And you're planning to do this every single month, whether permitting? Yes, every single month. Tell us about this big one here. Who made, who made that and what were the powers of the one in the front of the table? Right. It's got a tail of a, a Nike smoke. It's been extended a little bit to be a little taller so I can get a bigger parachute in it because it's, it's fairly heavy. When it's fully loaded, it weighs right around 25 to 30 pounds, depending how much propellant I put into it. If at about 23 pounds, that much propellant, you know, that with that much propellant, it'll go around 2,000 feet. But as I said, it can go 25,000 if I want to put another 10 or 15 pounds of propellant in it. It is what I called that dual deploy where it gets to the very top, separates in the middle, comes down on a very small parachute. And then when it gets to a thousand or 500 feet, whatever I set it to, then the main parachute pops out and it comes down much more slowly. It will fly. It's basically a level two or level three rocket. In terms of the power and the level of the rocketeers that can fly it. It will go, oh, I've had it go 600 miles an hour. So that's not a big deal for these rockets. People do break mock. There is no sonic boom on something this small. Usually what happens is the sonic shock, if it's not built properly, destroys the rocket. So there's certain requirements if you want to go faster than mock. And that's your biggest one right now? That is not my biggest one. It's the biggest one I could fit in my car to get here. Wow. Several miles in the air now with these things. My biggest rocket is capable of 25,000 feet, five miles up. I can't fly it in Vermont because my limit is 10,000. And my pocket book is not big enough to buy that much propellant. But tell us about the organization. Obviously, we just mentioned a little bit of expenses involved. And tell us how your organization operates. So we have a bunch of requirements for people at a minimum. Anybody can come fly with us. That low power, totally unregulated, not involved, nothing there. When you start getting into the high power rockets, that's where things start getting involved. To fly high power, you must be a member of a national organization, whether it's NAR or Tripoli, TRA. And to join those, that gets you your insurance and your ability to certify. Mostly insurance is the reason that they do that. And then from there, if you're flying low power, you can just show up and fly. We're going to help you. Our goal, there is no competition in what we do. Our goal is to have everybody be successful, whether you're a club member or not. We want to see you have a safe flight, go up, and you get the rocket back. So there is no competition. We fly one rocket at a time. We all watch it go up. And we all watch it come down. And we help the person get their rocket back. That's great. Now, how are these rockets on the pad and where are the controls? How are these ignited or set off? So we have a wire that runs from wherever we're sitting to the rocket. There's an electrical igniter in each motor to light it. The distance, as I said, that you are from the rocket depends on the size of the motor and the complexity of the flight. And basically it's just a wire and a push button switch to a 12-volt car battery. Going in three, two, one. And when you say motor, what does that consist of? Motor is the propellant in a container with a nozzle at the back. And so we light the propellant and the exhaust comes out the bottom end. And there's a way to adjust that for the time and length of the flight? No. You pick a motor and once you've picked that motor, you get the characteristics of that motor. Your average little SD's rocket motor burns for about seven tenths of a second, maybe a little longer, maybe a little shorter. For the big, high-power rockets, if I pick a class of motors, and I'm just pick a number, H, each motor can run anywhere from seven tenths of a second. To six or seven seconds. The average thrust for one that burns in seven tenths of a second is very high, but it's for very short. But an H motor defines how much propellant or the amount of propellant there. When you have your launches, you invite other people to come in and shoot their rockets as well. Anybody who wants to fly, the only requirement we have is if you're flying high-power, you have to be certified to that level. And have an active membership in whatever club. That's great. What other kinds of activities do you have? How do you sustain all of this? Obviously, you must need funds or membership fees or something like that. How do you sustain this offer? We have two fees to join the club. We're not very expensive. We're $15 a year to join the club. That's it. We charge a $5 a month launch fee. That's basically for things that we burn up. The clips that get into the exhaust don't last very long. We go through a lot of those. We have a lot of launch equipment that we maintain. We maintain a lot of safety equipment. We have a fire extinguisher, which we have used several times. We have to keep getting that recharged. We have a first aid kit. We have a PA system. We have a warning horn. All of that stuff to keep everybody safe. That sounds very exciting. It's really a lot of enthusiasm, I suppose, when people get together for this. We are all dedicated to what we do. We all have fun at it. That's great. That's fantastic. In terms of outreach, do you have any lectures coming up in the future or any type of other educational visits or anything like that? Not particularly. Nobody is asked for anything right now? You're up for that. Any time anybody asks for something, schedule a work, we do that. Like a school or something of that nature? Yep, we've done schools. Like I said, schools, clubs, whatever. I know that a lot of the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts do rocketry, and some of them do them on their own, but we have advantages if they call us in in that there are things that we can do to make their launches safer. So you're available to consult with other people? Always. So the experts in the county then, or at least in the region? Yep. Nationally, there are around 5,000 level 3 rocketeers, which is as high as you can go, and I am one of those. There's only four in the state of Vermont. That's really great. It sounds very exciting, and you're always looking for people to join or people to consult with you. Anybody with any interest is welcome to come just watch the first time if they have little rockets of their own, or they work to build little rockets with their kids. We have a pretty massive field that they're not going to lose the rocket in if it's a little kid flying his rocket. That is really wonderful, and you have a really very excellent website, which also launches are shown and all the information we've discussed today, and we're going to put that up, but also we're going to be able to show some of your recent launches. Thank you for providing that for us. It's very exciting. Well, that is really wonderful, Howard, and I want to thank you very much for appearing on Positively Vermont, and we'll maybe see you in the future if you get any more operations going. It's really good, and take a look at these rockets. These are really awesome items, I'll tell you. That's fantastic. Well, thank you very much. My guest today on Positively Vermont has been Howard Druckerman, the president of the Champlain Region Model Rocket Club. Thank you for watching Positively Vermont.