Personal Info
I live in Northern California with my wonderful wife and two middle-school age daughters.
I'm a member of the AERO-PAC Tripoli prefecture, who are justly famous for hosting the beautiful Black Rock Desert launches.
I resumed this hobby in 1997 after a 25 year hiatus. The triggering event for my "born again" status was an assignment from my brother to buy a "big" rocket kit for his son as a Christmas gift. The research I did for shopping ended up getting me sucked back in, and it was all downhill from there.
I grew up in Trona, California; an isolated hamlet in the Mojave desert built around a humongous chemical plant. The village and chemical plant were adjacent to a large, dry salt lakebed.....an ideal launch operations range!
As a kid, my first rocket was a compressed Freon® powered kit from Vashon Industries that I picked out of the Neiman Marcus catalog. I worked my way through the usual Estes and Centuri kits and the last project of my youth was a scratch built Evel Knievel/Bob Truax Sky Cycle, built concurrently with Evel's ill-fated snake river attempt. I even went so far as to build a 45 degree c-rail launcher. I thought it would be cool to launch this thing down the length of my street.....a fabulously dumb idea, but it worked and nobody's house burned down.
These days, my other hobbies include playing golf, real barbecue, and attending to my semi-exotic vacuum tube powered stereo. Professionally, I'm a Chemical Engineer and I've worked in the data storage industry forever.