Motivated by the written word...

The monotony of all the flying done during my spring work travel season has been broken by reading Wes Oleszewski's "Growing Up with Spaceflight" series. Wes - aka the infamous Dr. Zooch of scale rocket fame - spins pretty good yarns about growing up with the space program, starting with a wee lad watching Mercury shots and progressing on through Gemini, Apollo, and the Shuttle. I have just finished reading "Project Apollo Part 1", and I had to laugh when at the end of the book Wes describes getting into model rocketry. Consider this short excerpt:

"A few months earlier I had gotten an MPC "Pioneer One" model rocket for my 13th birthday. Of course just flying it and watching it come down on its parachute was something for regular kids and not for the insane spaceflight lunatic who lived at 3324 Lexington Drive. No indeed - I had to heavily modify it and add stuff that would certainly get me thrown out of the National Association of Rocketry - had I been a member. Today I had assembled a kludge the likes of which was so dangerous that it was a miracle that Vern Estes himself did not come to my house and slap me up-side my head; it was perfect."

Wouldn't be fair to Wes to go further; if you want to know what the kludge involving the Pioneer One was, buy the book - it's only a few bucks on Amazon, and there is a lot of great stuff on the early Apollo missions presented in a fun, leisurely manner. However, I think you can guess that things did not go well. Most of the "spaceflight lunatics" who grew up in the 60's did stupid stuff with rockets - my ill-considered schemes were so crazy bad that I dare not speak of them with current rocketeers, lest I be called accursed and cast from their company. So I admire Wes for putting some of his exploits in print. As for me, I'm gonna keep quiet.

MPC Pioneer 1 (Click to enlarge).

MPC ad showing the Moon-Go at right (Click to enlarge).

As a kid, I also owned a few MPC kits, and liked them very much - they looked cool and had plastic fin units and detail parts. These passed into oblivion decades ago, but I have managed to gather a few for the kit stash, including a Moon-Go, which was one of my favorites. Anyway, the book's description of the Pioneer One incident reminded me of my past model, and I realized that I have enough original MPC parts in the bins to build one. And, so this weekend, I started work on a Pioneer One - it goes together quickly and I should have it finished and painted by Southern Thunder, where it shall make an appearance, involving "just flying and coming down on its parachute."

Old rocketeers have no desire to tempt the fates - we cannot dodge quickly anymore.

Note: There is a short history of MPC rockets and some catalog images posted here, should you have the interest. Wes' first rocket was a Flare Patriot, btw.