My childhood Rocket Days

Karl and I were destined to enter the space race all by ourselves. It was I who wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to soar

into space and conquer new worlds. There was no doubt in my mind what I wanted to achieve.

We went down into my basement to build a rocket ship that would carry the first mouse into space.

We had a great plan. We would assemble and test some small rockets first. Then after a few succesfull launches and maybe

failures, a larger more powerful rocket would be built. This last ship would carry a small mouse with a parachute into the upper

atmosphere and return our mousetronaut back to earth. If it reaches orbit, we will have to deal with that success later.

We started by making small rockets the size of a finger. We broke match heads apart. We added gunpowder in our secret

mix. We packed them into tubes of glued paper.

We found the gunpowder in one of our neighbor's garages. This garage was only a few houses down from my house. We

would then add magnesium powder to the fuel we were making to give it an extra boost. What were we thinking?