The responses were something like: Why do you want a rocketry club in Boulder? You could always drive three hours to one of the nearby clubs!

With that a failure, I tried attracting the attention of people who make use of the local hobby store, Boulder Hobbies. I put up a poster on a corkboard near the entrance, but I got maybe one or two replies by e-mail, and nothing else.

I mostly gave up on that, too. I decided that I might as well get used to the idea that I would be doing my rocketry exploits solo from now on.

Some time later, my mom had a random conversation with a woman who coordinates activities for eccentric people like me. This lady worked at my high school, Fairview, and the next thing I knew, there were posters around the school, proclaiming that a rocketry club was about to form!

The first preliminary meeting was on December 12, 2001. The sponsor of the club, Fairview physics teacher Mr. Guthrie, talked about the safety code for model rocketry, and we also watched select scenes from the motion picture October Sky.
The next meeting took place the following Wednesday, the 19th. I opted out of this meeting to go see the first Lord of the Rings movie on opening day. Subsequent meetings took place during the next semester. We started out each building a rocket from a kit. I built a simple Alpha III, which was pretty boring to build.

After launching those rockets, we each went on to design our own rocket. This was a new experience for everyone but me. (I think I had an unfair advantage over the other club members, because I had already flown fourteen rockets of my own design.)

I dubbed my design Sprint II, as it was meant to replace the original Sprint, which I lost in 2000 at NARAM-42 in southern Colorado. The new Sprint had similar proportions to the original, although it was longer and had smaller fins.

This new design was bland at best. It incorporated nothing new or innovative which I hadn't tried at least once before. I didn't have the greatest amount of enthusiasm for it; I actually put more effort into helping other people with their designs than working on my own.

That brings me to the people in the rocketry club. There were about ten of us, but I'll only mention those people that were particularly striking, or just unsound of mind. My observations reflect the people as I knew them at the time.

The so-called "Janusz Strzepek" was the only club member I knew beforehand. (That's said yah'noosh strez'peck. His American parents defied the convention of Anglo-Saxon names by given all four of their children Polish names.) That name is pretty cumbersome, so he goes by Jani, not said ja'nee, but instead yah'nee. He shouldn't be confused with the long-haired, eccentric keyboard-player with a name of the same pronounciation. Doubtless, he is pretty eccentric himself; he delights in asking people why they "shaved the hummingbird." But he's also rather cool; when he caught word of the WAEC, he created a 3-D version of the logo with a rendering program he has.

Another of the unique individuals found in rocketry club was a certain "Kash," who was also given a name unfamiliar to Anglo-Americans. "Kash" is pronounced kosh, to the delight of Babylon 5 fans everywhere. I suppose the name is a derivative of Kaśyapa, a god in Hindu literature. In German class two years later, each student was assigned to report on a literary epic of choice. I studied the role of dragons in European stories; Kash chose the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana. In the days of rocketry club, however, I don't think Kash was literate in anything besides the Star Wars trilogy. As far as I could tell, he had it memorized.

Certainly the most insane rocketry club member was a certain Max. I always called him "Maxwell," because he called me "Wilhelm." I made the mistake of informing him of the existence of my website, and he proceeded to spend countless hours memorizing trivia about me rockets. He would meet me in the halls and spout out random statistics about the first flight of SAM-66, or the balsa nose cone on Arcturus Mk. 1. Oh my.

We finally launched our rockets on May 8th, two years and a day after I lost Space Racer on the first WAEC demonstration launch. There was a competition going on during our launch to see whose rocket could fly the highest. Mine didn't win. The first flight was pretty unremarkable, although it did suffer a little damage because of failure of the recovery system to deploy.

I repaired the damage, and rocketry club flew again on May 29, 2002. I extended the body tube, and I fired it off two more times. The first of these flights culminated in a landing on Greenbriar, a road that runs up to Fairview (shades of Sprint's first flight?). The second of those flights was unremarkable.

At this point, I noticed that I was nearing the limits of single model rocket engines. With the given power limits up to E engines (which were what I could buy in town), there are a few practical limitations. Sure, I could cram an E9-8 into a minimum-diameter, three-finned rocket and send it high into the blue, but I would probably never see it again. What would be the point?

I kicked around ideas of using tracking aids, like radio transmitters that served as homing beacons once the rocket landed. But by now I was tired of high-performance rockets. My focus was shifting to scale modeling. After Sprint II, I never rolled out any more ambitious high-altitude designs.

Length: 37 cm
Core diameter: 1.8 cm (BT-20)
Engine mount: 18 mm
Nose: Ogive
Recovery: Streamer
Number of Flights: 3

Official WAEC plans