The Great Pumpkin Rises...

Not to become a rocket blog, but that's what we did today.

The video Em took of the Great Pumpkin rising here about sums it up. It was a perfect day: 63º with winds of 2 to 5 mph, sunny and clear.



We went to the park we launched at last time because there were kids there. Except there weren't. We had the place to ourselves.



What's the matter with these people? You're not going to have that many Saturdays this perfect. Pretty soon you'll be stuck inside, video games, cable TV or not.

We also launched Dudley and He Who Shall Not Be Named on their maiden voyages. Scribble 3 and Gonzo 2 got a shot.

Em tried to catch Dudley.



It was a bad day for parachutes. I mean, weather-wise, it was perfect. No breeze to carry a rocket of into the trees or whatever. But today, the parachutes didn't want to open. Instead of an open canopy, they opened into tight plastic wads, a shape with notably less drag.



I'd taken a tip from the Handbook of Model Rocketry and wrapped the chutes in a sheet of recovery wadding. This is to prevent scorching, which it did. But it must have also played part in our zero percent opening rate. I don't think I could have intentionally kept the parachutes open in most of these cases.



Some kids did show up after they noticed the crazy rocket guy was back. And I asked Mo at one point (when she'd taken a break from trying to eat the beach volleyball court) if rockets were fun. "Pencil rocket!!!"



The kids, both mine and the others, wanted to see more launches. But I was out of recovery wadding. For some reason, it sometimes comes with motors, sometimes not. You need it every time, but go figure. I had a pack of it I bought back in July that I finally ran out of, on a day when I could have flown thirty flights without losing a single rocket to the breeze or the trees. We did get six launches off without losing one, and that's a record for us to be sure.

Makes you want to fly, right?