Product Overview
Summary:
- 777 pages
- 6” x 9” with both hardcover and soft cover versions available
- 42 pages of B&W photographs and illustrations, plus color covers
- Extensive endnotes and other annotations.
- $42.99 (hardcover)
- $29.95 (soft cover)
Description:
Forty years ago, a hobby rocket flight to 100,000 feet was unthinkable, Yet, beginning in the mid to late 1970s, hobby rocketry evolved from just another branch of the toy industry into a serious avocation using exotic airframes, sophisticated control electronics and professional fuels that are today pushing homemade rockets to speeds above Mach 3 and altitudes over 20 miles.
Large and Dangerous Rocket Ships tells the story of high-power rocketry, from its beginnings in the late 1970s as a reaction to the National Association of Rocketry (NAR)’s overly cautious restriction of going beyond “D” impulse motors, through the summer of 2018, where individual flyers were flying to the edge of space. In parallel, it chronicles the evolution of the Tripoli Rocketry Association from a high-school general science club to become the national legislative voice for the High-Power hobby. In a tail-wags-dog scenario, it shows how Tripoli’s experience was used to help develop the NAR’s own HP regulations when the time came. Today, both organizations are partnered in protecting the rights of rocket fliers in the US.
It is also the story of the largest annual amateur rocketry event in the world, LDRS – the subject of several national television shows featured on the Discovery Channel and Science Channel. It also provides the origin of this rather provocative description of the hobby, but you’ll have to read that for yourself.
In this massive work, author Mark Canepa also traces his personal journey through the hobby. While this is his first history book, he has previously authored Modern High-Power Rocketry 2 and written extensively on the subject for Sport Rocketry Magazine (the NAR’s official journal), Rockets Magazine, Extreme Rocketry and Rocketry Planet.
