Couple of Exciting News Items

I haven't written much here in over a week. I'm directing a show for the Bloomington Playwrights Project, and it's been a lot of work. I've barely been able to touch my rocket projects in the last week!

But I've had a couple of really great things happen, so I wanted to share them here.

The first is that I'll be teaching a rocketry camp this summer!

The Bloomington campus of Ivy Tech Community College has a College for Kids series of classes every summer, and model rocketry is apparently the most popular.

From the 2010 College for Kids model rocketry camp

I'll be leading a group of kids aged 11-14 through a week-long rocket building project this June, and we're going to launch at the end of the week! If any of you College for Kids students or parents are reading this, we're going to have a blast doing this, and I'll post more here soon about the class.

This means that within seven months of becoming a rocketeer, I've landed a rocketry job! It shows that if you're serious about rocketry, you can learn a lot and then go and share that knowledge with other people - which makes it more fun.

I have a lot of choices to make in the next month about what we'll do and what we'll build, but I've been actively pursuing the rocketry camp for a few months now, and I now have official confirmation.

The second exciting piece of news is that I'll be moving to Boston later in the summer! My girlfriend got a great job at Boston University, so we'll be going out there. We're even looking for a place with a little extra space for me to build and store my rockets. She's awesome.

Now, I know that Boston is currently buried under a ton of snow right now, but that's no discouragement for me. I like snow.

Yes, it's deep. But isn't it beautiful?

And there's a lot of exciting rocketry stuff going on in the Boston area and New England in general. I hope to go join CMASS - one of the country's great rocket clubs - and to check out the great clubs in the neighboring states as well.

I'm busting through my skin with excitement about this. Apart from two years' living in France and one year in Oviedo, Florida, I've not lived outside Indiana, and I've always wanted to see what it's like living in another part of the country. I love Boston, and it's a great city, I can't wait to get out there.

Does this mean that this will be the only and final rocketry class I'll teach at Ivy Tech? Not necessarily. I'm hoping to drum up some interest among not only the kids in the class, but among parents as well.

People who aren't involved in rocketry don't realize it, but the hobby has really grown up in the last twenty years. I don't know the actual statistics or demographics, but from my many hours spent online talking to other rocketeers, I get the feeling that, these days, there are a lot more adults building and launching rockets. With the advent of mid- and high power rocketry, there's lots of room to grow with the hobby.

So, I'm hoping to get some of the kids' parents involved in rocketry here in Bloomington, and who knows - perhaps a local club will sprout up. I may come back for several weeks to teach a rocketry course for adults. I keep learning more and more about this exciting hobby, and all I'm really looking for is someone with which to share what I've learned - and then go out and launch some rockets.

Oh, I have slowly pecked away at my Estes Partizon rocket - which is nearly as tall as my mother. Here's a teaser - my first attempt at internal fillets (fellow rocket n00bs, I'll explain this later):

More soon...

Like my Facebook page for blog updates.