LUNAR Demo at the 1995 Wings for Charity Air Show

For the third year running, LUNAR was invited to give a rocketry demonstration at the annual Livemore Air Show. This year, the rocket gods did not smile on us, although we did eventually get to launch a few rockets for the crowd. The show was on Saturday and Sunday, and we were scheduled to fly on the mornings of both days, but due to "circumstances beyond our control", we just ended up launching a few rockets on Sunday afternoon.

Saturday morning, we were out on the runway, with our mobile launch pad bristling with great rockets, all set up and ready to start our first countdown. Suddenly, we were informed that late-arriving aircraft required that we leave the runway. We were then told that, due to the delay, the show would have to go on without us -- we were cancelled!

Sunday morning was even worse. After setting up on the runway, we were informed that the whole airport was shut down due to an accident. It turned out that a sight-seeing helicopter had crashed, killing one passenger, and injuring another passenger and the pilot.

What a bummer.

When the airport reopened, they rescheduled our demo for 2:00pm rather than just cancelling it again. We had four rockets to fly. Larry Baskett's camera rocket failed to ignite after three tries. Eric Kleinschmidt flew his Patriot (which suffered minor damage due to parachute deployment failure) and then wowed the crowd with his Phantom 4000 on an I. As a nice change-of-pace, Bob Parks flew his AeroTech Phoenix RC rocket glider.

We also had a booth set up at the show, and spent several pleasant hours on both days talking with interested folks about rocketry. Quite a few said that they had been especially interested in our demo and that they intended to come to our September launch.

Ron Baskett wrote a more complete article for the LUNAR'Clips newsletter.

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