Kids’ rockets falling victim to security fears
For more than 40 years, kids have taken to the fields and woods with their model rockets for that burst of sparks, spirals of smoke and the “FFSSSSSSTTT” that is the unmistakable sound of approval for countless hours of labor and hope. But model rocket makers say the days for their hobby are numbered, thanks to little-noted provisions in the Homeland Security Act that classifies the solid fuel used in model rocket motors as an explosive material and imposes new controls on interstate shipment of the fuel known as ammonium perchlorate composite propellant, or APCP.
The new rules don’t take effect until May, but United Parcel Service already has stopped shipping rocket engines, and hobby store supplies are drying up.
Mark Bundick, president of the National Association of Rocketry, said the future of the hobby is in jeopardy.
It already cast a pall over the Team America model rocket contest, featuring 9,000 high school students competing for a $25,000 prize scheduled for May in Northern Virginia.
Bundick, who became interested in model rocketry as a hobby when he was 12 years old, said the government’s efforts to control sales of model rocket engines is unnecessary. The propellant in model rocket engines can’t be used to make bombs, and the balsawood, plastic or cardboard used for rockets aren’t weapons.
“These rockets are not a threat to anyone,” Bundick said. “This is having a chilling effect on an activity that is really very safe.”
Former NASA astronaut Jay Apt, an engineering professor at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, said he is concerned that government efforts to regulate engines will discourage a next generation of engineers and scientists. His teenaged interest in model rockets led to his four space missions, he said.
John Kallend, a professor of engineering and physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said he is part of a program that uses model rocket programs to teach children from Chicago’s inner-city the practical applications of trigonometry and physics. Building and shooting rockets shows the teenagers how they can apply abstract mathematics to determine the speed and the height of the rockets they’ve made, he said.
Kallend said he believes lawmakers didn’t realize that trying to control sales of rocket engines might have such an impact. He also warned that without the supply of cheap commercially produced engines, teenagers will respond by trying to make the rocket engines themselves in basements or garages, a practice that would be dangerous.
Kallend said the commercially produced engines aren’t explosives. He recalled that in the 1986 Challenger disaster, the propellant-fueled rockets didn’t explode, but continued to burn smoothly off into space after the space shuttle and its hydrogen rockets exploded.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms says it has been blitzed with protests from some of the estimated 2 million model rocketeers in the country, and intends only to apply the prohibition to larger rocket engines that contain more than about 2 ounces of the propellant. In a statement, the bureau said it needs to control larger engine sales “to better monitor explosive commerce in an effort to enhance homeland security.”
Tim Van Milligan, president of Apogee Rockets in Colorado Springs, Colo., an engine manufacturer, said the exemption would allow sales of only small engines. It also would disrupt the activities of those who want to build more sophisticated machines. “It’s going to shut down most of model rocketry as we know it now,” he said.
Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., said he has looked into the issue and agrees with the model rocket enthusiasts. He has introduced legislation that would put remove the propellant from the list of banned explosives.
that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regulates. “A rocket propellant is not designed or intended to explode,” he said.
Trip Barber, a retired Navy captain and Pentagon weapons specialist, said he has examined the propellant and concluded it is of no interest to terrorists.
“It’s not physically possible to use a model rocket to shoot down an airplane,” he said.
Barber said there is an ample supply of gunpowder available at gun stores for black powder gun enthusiast terrorists could use. He said the banned propellant only gives off smoke.
“Kids like things that go whoosh,” he said.
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(Contact Lance Gay at gayl(at)shns.com or visit SHNS on the Web at http://www.shns.com.)
AP-NY-03-13-03 1653EST