For some odd reason since I was a overactive teenager, I have always wanted to blow up an out house, or better yet put a Jato rocket on one Why I wanted to do this I have no idea.
I heard that the Discovery Channel was in the processes of producing a show called "The Rocket Challenge, and they would be shooting the show at our LDRS National event held in Argonia Kansas. one of the events that they were producing was called how low can you Go. The rules were simple., all you had to do was to launch a rocket to the lowest altitude possible and recover it with a parachute. The second I heard this I new the perfect candidate for this would be a portable out house. There is a company were I live in Minnesota that manufactures portable out houses so I went to there manufacturing facilities a bought a bright orange beauty For $450 bucks I had no idea how heavy it was until we loaded it up in the back of my pick up truck. Right then and there I new this was going to be one heck of a challenge to get this thing off the ground, let along make it fly high enough to recover it with parachutes. The other major concern was, that the out house was shaped more like fright train then a high speed missile so I wasn't sure if I could make it fly with out drastically altering its over all looks, to the point where it would not even look like a out house when I was done with it.
I had only two weeks to get it done as it is I always have a ton of projects going on at one time so I called on my rocket buddies Bruce Lee and Jeff Hove to come over on the week end and give me a hand. Bruce also happened to have Two M1419 rocket motors that we were pretty sure would get the old crapper off the ground, and into the the record books. Bruce tried to do a computer simulation on it. But the information he feed into it only was a guess. So the data we received back was only a guess.
That's why we didn't have allot of confidence that it would fly in the first place. The one thing we new for sure was the flight was going to be spectacular no matter what happened.
After we were done assembling the the rocket at my house for the first time I stud back and looked at the out house and my friends, an Immediately said that's Our Stinking Rocket. from then on we called it Our Stinking Rocket.
My wife Jodi and I rented a Uhaul trailer and brought it down to Argonia Kansas as usual the temperature was above 100 degrees and the humidity was about the same
After we unloaded Our Stinking Rocket it drew a big crowed, all we heard was "are you really going to launch this".
We decided not to use electronic timers to trigger the chutes, instead we used a Magnetic Apogee Detector to fire the chutes as soon as the rocket arced over.
The winds where starting to pick up as we were getting ready to launch, and heat was getting unbearable so I just wanted to get our flying out house off the Pad
The time finely came to push the Button Our Stinken Rocket Just roared off the pad, all 175 lbs of it. In my eyes it was a flaming beauty that I will never forget. unfortunately, something went wrong with the Magnetic Apogee Detector, it send a signal to prematurely deploy chutes right after it left the launch pad. The two Rocketman R-14 deployed, and Our Stinken Rocket turned into an aerobatic airplane flying every which way, it was absolutely spectacular, I don't think we could of engineered a more spectacular flight. So you might ask what is next project The Rocketman team will build ? I will guaranty one thing it will be spectacular.