The Range Head

by Jack Hagerty, LUNAR #002

I had a great time at NARAM that I'll tell you about it an accompanying article. But first these important messages.

Mark Weiss has let me know that the public meeting room at the police station has been booked for the entire second half of September for a community focus group program. We looked into either holding the meeting at another location, or just picking a different date. We used to hold our meetings at the Carnegie building downtown, but that's no longer available to us and Hobby Haven is long gone. Since we'd have to push the meeting into October, we just decided to move it to it's "normal" place the Thursday before the launch. The "September" meeting, therefore, will be on Thursday, October 15th. This doesn't affect the November meeting at all which will go on as scheduled.

Earlier our calendar showed this month's launch as a reprise of our first F/F Scale contest. After announcing that in the July 'Clips, I didn't get a single response from anyone so I never pursued it. I have, however, been pursuing it at the national level. I have an article coming up in either the Nov/Dec or Jan/Feb issue of Sport Rocketry (depending on whether I made the deadline for the earlier one) on the event.

If you've built a model for September, I'm sorry that there won't be a contest for you, but be sure to bring it in and show it to me. I'm deep into a project along those lines (discussed below) and would love to see any models built to the new rules.

Just a reminder that October is our second (and last) night launch for the year. This was a huge hit last year with a big turnout. Remember that our guidelines require that any rocket flown after dusk have a lighting system visible during the entire flight, not just after recovery deployment. Check Lynn's newsletter archive (Vol 4, No 4 – also see the "TLL" in this issue and Orvis' talk on lights and flashers at http://www.starship.org/LUNAR/talks/Orvis9803/) for articles detailing the rules and lighting suggestions. I'm telling you this now because despite the meeting change, there will NOT be another newsletter next month. They won't get back into sync until November.

I got a call from George Gissendaner from the East Bay Radio Control club. This is an R/C airplane group that flies from the BART land at the foot of the Altamont on the north side of 580. They're going to be holding an air show on Sunday, October 4 and they'd like us to participate.

We've been invited to put on a 20-minute demo of hobby rocketry doing anything we want. Normally, our setup time would have to come out of that 20 minutes, but he's willing to make us the first event after the 40 minute lunch break which would give us that much time to set up out on the flight line.

The only down side, for me, is that October 4 happens to be my anniversary and the day has long been spoken for (especially when it falls on a weekend!). This means that I can't participate, but I am willing to help coordinate things beforehand. What I need is a list of people who are willing to fly in front of a crowd, and which of you are willing to be the field boss for the day.

Remember our presentations at the Livermore Air Show? I'm envisioning something similar only smaller: a couple of tables of static displays (with club info handouts) and a live demo that starts with some small black powder models (maybe with an Astrocam), graduates into some multistage flights and ends up with composites. We may get permission to fly an "I" like we did at the last Livermore show.

Let me know if you're interested.

Many of you are aware that I'm writing a book on scale data for modelers in the style of Peter Alway's Rockets of the World and Retro Rockets. The difference in my book is that all of the subjects never existed! They're vehicles from the great theoreticians (Oberth, von Braun, etc.), books, movies, TV and even vehicles that were seriously proposed, but never built (Dynasoar, Titan IIIM, Shuttle C).

The book won't be out until next summer at the earliest, but I've had some really cool cover art done. It turned out so well that I had some posters made up to help finance the book. (You think sticker shock is bad when buying a car? Try getting an estimate to print a 200-page book with color photos!) Right now you can see what it looks like on the NARTS web page in the "poster" section of their "On-Line Catalog" but Lynn offered to set me up with a corner of his starship.org site. The posters are 12" x 18" on heavy art stock. We kept it on the small side to make it easy to frame. They retail for $15 but I'll give LUNAR members 20% off with a valid membership card. I also have a limited number signed by the artist for $25. (I can give you 20% off the base price of those, too, but I still have to pay the artist $10 for her signature!) I'll be bringing them to the meeting and the launch (and probably all the meetings and launches for the next year!).

Our cohorts over at AeroPAC have an interesting feature on their web site (http://www.aeropac.org/). It's a list server which allows any member to reach the entire group by simply sending a message to members@aeropac.org. With this they can not only get critical last minute announcements (like the one above) to the membership, but they can hold discussions on all aspects of the hobby. As an example, they are currently getting ready for their last Blackrock launch of the season, and lots of people are trying to coordinate rides and equipment.

I've held some discussions with our webmeisters Dave Redell (who runs our lunar.org site) and Lynn Kissel (who runs starship.org, his own site that has the electronic version of our newsletter on it). They say such a thing is possible for us, but I want to poll the membership first to see: 1) if you're interested and 2) do you have any problems with your address being included on the list? Let me know. You've got my addresses. (See "Who you gonna call?" at the end of the newsletter.)

I got a note from member Randall Thieme last month which read in part:

What a great idea, Randall! Thanks for thinking of the club. While we don't, unfortunately, have a library, auctioning it off at the next Lost and Found event (which is the November meeting) would be wonderful.

We have several short notices from the membership with items of interest.

Warren Massey forwarded this announcement about a web site called APOLLO 18 (http://www.apolloeighteen.com/):

From Bill Orvis:

And from Anthony Cooper:

Information date: September 18, 1998 lk