About the show
Do you love to fly low and mid power rockets or are you a beginner looking into model rocketry? If you answered “yes!” then this show is for you. The Model Rocketry Show is a bi-weekly podcast discussing model rocketry. With your host, The Rocket Noob, you’ll learn all about rocketry basics.
We’re talking rockets you can fly in small fields or build and launch with your scout troop. Listen now and go from kit to sky in no time!
About Daniel, “The Rocket N00b”
I got into rocketry in a very unusual way – through theater.
One Christmas, as a kid, I got a lot of space-themed presents, including a giant plastic model Space Shuttle with hundreds of parts, and the Estes Silver Arrow launch kit, which included an easy-to-assemble rocket. The rocket required only a bit of plastic cement to assemble.
But all my attempts at model building as a kid were just a mess of glue, and since I didn’t have anyone to help me or guide me, I never built the rocket. I thought about that rocket kit from time to time for years afterward.
A few years ago, at a Target, I saw that same Estes Silver Arrow launch kit. My first thought was, “Huh… People still do that?” I immediately sent a text to my friend Chad, who was the artistic director of the Bloomington Playwrights Project, a theater where I was a frequent actor. Chad is also a magician and a NASA geek. I wrote, “Hey, dude, if I got a model rocket, would you want to go launch it with me?”
Five seconds later, Chad replied “#%$* YES!” But I had other stuff to do, and never got the rocket.
A year later, Chad informed me that he had some model rockets, and we should have a launch. We went out to a park, launched five of his rockets, lost three of them, and I thought maybe I should have one of my own, just in case we did it again.
After shopping around, I found Der Red Max, a cool-looking rocket which didn’t cost too much. I was really nervous putting it together, as I never thought I had the skill to “make stuff.” But four days later, I had a really awesome rocket I’d built myself, and when we launched it, and I got it back in one piece, I was hooked.
I read The Handbook of Model Rocketry. I started buying more model rockets and building them, and decided I needed a place to put pictures of what I was doing.
I created a blog called The Rocket N00b, just to show somebody what I was doing. Soon, I started doing instructional posts, my hope being that maybe some of my friends, most of them also in the arts, might see that this is really fun, and it’s not that hard, and might join me.
Eventually, other people started finding The Rocket N00b. It’s a blog where I like to share what I’ve learned with other beginners, making things as clear as I can, so other rocket n00bs can benefit from my experience and mistakes. Getting into rocketry has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.
