Our custom, hand painted birthday cake!
4 very excited kids! My daughter, Jen, is sitting for a friends children and could think of no better outting than our party. Their first exposure to model rocketry, these kids are hooked! These are the CAUTION rockets and a Midnight Express that they built the night before!
Bill Ralston shows off his silver A.C.M.E. Spitfire, right down to the authentic duct taped joints!
Jen and her kids prep and launch the Long OverDue
Here is our booth with a group of folks hanging close by (somehow I got a finger smudge on the lens...) That is my brother in law, Michael sitting on the right. He was a great help on this busy day!
One of over a dozen Deuce's Wild! models flown on this day. This one is dubbed "Kids R Wild!" with photo's of the owners kids on all 4 fins :)
Another Deuce launch. This is one of the things that I love about this rocket. You don't even have to capture the rocket in the picture to know it was a Deuce launch!
Bill Ralstons table with the Richter Recker being prepared for flight.
A closeup of the Richter Recker
Mollie Gardner shows off her custom rocket from a recent Make-It-Take-It session held by Hangar-11 in New York. Mollie is from Merrimack, NH and was our 4th winner in our daily birthday drawing for a free rocket!
Although I missed the launch of Mollie's rocket, I did get this fantastic picture of it returning on a bright pink parachute!
One of the many young rocketeers brought into this hobby with the help of John Cronin (Thank you John!), on his way to the pads with a Rhino model rocket kit.
Jennifer hooks up the clips on the upper stage of the Nomad. It was too windy and the field too small to attempt this as a 3-stage bird!
A perfect launch, but separation caused us to loose the nose cone and break a fin. Where on EARTH is she going to find another nose cone for THIS rocket, I will never know!
A beautiful penut scale redstone ready for the pad
A closeup shows the level of detail in the printed patterns making this a joy to behold.
John Harland with his wide array of FlisKits model rocket kits John is holding up his FarScape and you can even see an original Alien8 model in the foreground of his table.
4 more of John Cronin's kids getting ready for a mass drag race of Rhino kits!
And they're OFF!
This was announced as a "Mean Machine", but I don't think it was, unless it was one that was heavily modified.
A group shot of all of today's participants. Actually, I only counted 70 or so in the picture. At its height, there were a little over 100 people attending today. A solid record for a Tewksbury launch!
Another group shot just before we began cutting and enjoying our cake.
Here is Jim cutting the cake as we begin to enjoy our just desserts :)
Jen also preped and launched the Freedom Forge Missile for a perfect flight!
Deuce's to the left of me, Deuce's to the right! This is Jen's "Matrix Deuce" (if you get up close you can see a bright kelly green binary message on all 4 of the fins.
An attempted drag race of Richter Reckers, Bill Ralston's on the left and John Cronin's on the right. Only John's got off the ground, but about 100 feet up, one of the 3 D motor's suffered a CATO and she came down HARD, breaking a fin and toasting the recovery device.
Jen hooks up the clips on Jim's Sprint '73 for her 422nd flight
LIFTOFF! A picture perfect flight, as expected!
One of the more interesting Saturn C models.
John Harland discusses his rare OverDue model.
John carefully places his OverDue on the pad and hooks up the clips.
A perfect launch and flight. She did snarl up the parachute on recovery and a good thing too. If the parachute had fully deployed it is clear that John would have lost this model.
John Cronin (left) and his new rocketeer on their way to the pad with a Rhino
This was an attempt at taking a picture of a drag race against all 3 of the saucers in the Triple Threat kit. Not even close!
Rhino away!
The Saturn C takes to the air!
Two-stage flying saucers, with a Pheord X150 lift vehicle, hauling an Athena to launch altitude!
Bill Ralston shows off his Stngray and his FarScape models.
Tigh shows off his two favorite FlisKits models, The Long OverDue and the Freedom Forge Missile.