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I'm at the IETF meeting in San Francisco so there will be little posting over the next week. I suspect I'll be posting something about the Iraq situation simply because we will be actively engaged in Iraq before the end of the week.

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It seems we did a better job than anyone expected. Senator Enzi's staff wants us to hold off until they actually introduce the legislation. See below for more from John Wickman. To ARSA members and other rocketeers,

Please discontinue calling your Senators for now.

The staff in Washington didn't think it was possible and have never seen

anything like it from such a small group. You have been so persistent in

making phone calls that the staffs of many of the Senators are getting

frustrated because they would like to co-sponsor the legislation, but will

not do so until it is introduced. So, Senator Enzi's staff have asked us to

turn off the phone calls for a few days. However, you can still write. It

seems the phones have been tied up a bit. :-)

Some of the wording in the bill is still being worked on with most of this

work focused on closing potential loop holes for the ATF to jump through.

The Senators before making a decision of support would like to see the

wording of the bill, as it will be introduced. As that final wording has

not been decided yet, they cannot make a decision. Your phone calls are

just getting these Senators and their staffs frustrated.

Please be assured that all of us and our respective organizations have been

heard in the halls of Congress with a loud roar. We have their attention

and have picked up support.

We will send out another email when it is time to roar again in Washington.

Congratulations on a job well done!!

Please repost this to other forums and web sites.

John Wickman

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The bulletin boards over at space.com have a thread on lunar colonization with a bit of an out-of-the-box proposal; not all the details are there yet, but the concept of making money via the gaming industry is an interesting one. Given John Carmack and the others I know with common interests there, the idea of a synergy there makes sense!

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Rocketeers! It's time for the next phase in our campaign to win a exemption for rocketry. A web site has been created to coordinate sending educational “Care Packages” to our Senators. One of the issues that has hurt us in recent years is a mis-understanding and lack education about our sport. The “Care Package” effort aims to correct this problem by sending our US Senators items that will give them a better understanding of hobby rocketry.

US Senate Education “Care Package” site The process is easy. Go to the web site and find your state. Look for an item that has not been pledged or sent. Send an email to the webmaster with your pledge. Next follow the link to the item you (or your club, it can be a group effort) pledged to buy and purchase it with a ship to address for your Senator (important!). Make sure to fill out the comment or gift field so the Senator knows why they received the item! We have an example note on the web site.

When you receive your email receipt from the vendor forward it to the web master, Jimmy Yawn at jyawn@sfcc.net . Jimmy will then update your pledge to show �fufilled.�

Items being pledged include:

The October Sky Mobile Video

Handbook of Model Rocketry by G. Harry Stine

Model Rocket Design and Construction by Tim Van Milligan (Apogee Components)

A Quark Star model rocket kit from Doug Pratt (Pratt Hobbies)

Tim Van Milligan has kindly offered to ship 100 copies of Model Rocket Design and Construction books to Doug Pratt and sell them for $18.00 a copy instead of the usual $24 price. By ordering through the Pratt Hobbies web site you can purchase both the Quark Star kit and Tim's book at the same time! Doug, additionally has offered to include your FAX or email in the package to your Senator. If you want to send Doug a FAX for insertion into your package please call 1-866-522-1251 to send your document. It will be forwarded to Doug. We do recommend that you send a FAX or email to Tim or Doug explaining to your Senator why they should support Senator Enzi's bill.

Please keep your total package below $50, otherwise the Senator may be unable to accept the package due to government rules. There are plenty of �Care Packages� to go around! Also, remind your Senator to contact Candice Cotton (224 - 3424) on Senator Enzi's staff to further discuss this issue if they have questions.

We need to educate our representatives about our hobby! Do it now or the ATF will do it for us.

If all of these items are pledged, paid for, and shipped in a very brief time � like immediately, if not sooner, then it is likely that a media-worthy event could occur. With help from rocketeers in the Washington, DC area, we can possibly assemble rocketeers and community groups (clubs, scouts, church, schools) to hand-deliver the goodies and give great sound bites and visual images for the media.

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A Media Resources web page has been created to help journalists to understand the importance of and issues facing hobby rocketry, in order to prepare stories for dissemination.

The new URL is http://rocketreporter.org

The “Published Media Stories” button on the will display all print news and e-zine coverage of the fight to deregulate hobby rocketry, from all over the country. Please check it often.

Additional information is requested to populate this page. Sought immediately is information concerning links to published articles and broadcasted phone videos; descriptions of and links to special (club) projects; links to rocketry sites; the name, location and link to rocketry clubs; and high quality photos of rockets, launches, meetings, competitions, science fairs, and the like.

Additional calls for information will be made as the breadth of the page is expanded. The current page was designed to provide a minimal set of information as quickly as possible. The page is being developed daily, and updated nightly. To submit information, please see the instructions on the media page.

• iz

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I had an uncle who told us for a long time that he ran an international trading company from an island called Diego Garcia. It was only with the first Gulf War that I found out that Diego Garcia was a military base and that there was no way Uncle Mike was running a trading company from there. He and his wife would be gone for months with only an extremely anonymous sounding US military P.O. Box to keep in touch. With the new war gearing up I decided to find out what Diego Garcia actually looked like. That picture to the left is from that website. The entire site reads as though it were written by a drill sergeant. Nice to find out about a place that's going to be so important to our liberation of Iraq.

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John says its time to make follow-up phone calls to your Senators and find out where they stand. When you call ask the following questions:

• Have they decided whether to support Senator Enzi’s exemption for rocketry in the Safe Explosives Act?
• If so, have they decided whether they want to cosponsor the bill?
• If undecided, do they need more information or is there something about the exemption that is bothering them? If they need more information, tell them to contact Candice Cotton at 224-3424.
• If against, what don’t they like about it? See if you can answer the objection. If you don’t have the answer, refer them to Candice Cotton who may be able to answer their objections.

See http://www.space-rockets.com/congress.html for details.

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In an open letter to Jim Banke at Space.com, John Wickman (ARSA) sets the record straight on the when and why of the arbitrary 62.5 gram limit for rocket motors. Click on the Read More link below to see the rest of the story. To: Jim Banke at Space.com

As someone intimately involved in getting a rocketry exemption in the Safe

Explosives Act, let me set the recorded straight on the ATF statement.

First, you need a little history on all of this to put it in perspective.

In 1970, the Organized Crime Act created for the first time an “Explosives

List” which was to be regulated by the ATF, a division of the Internal

Revenue Service. At that time ammonium perchlorate composite propellant

(APCP) was placed, for reasons unknown, on the Explosives List. From

creation of the law up to 1997, the ATF's position was that consumer rocket

motors were propellant activated devices and exempt from any ATF

requirements for permits or licenses. In 1997, the ATF suddenly decided

that only motors under 62.5 grams of propellant weight were exempt and

motors with propellant over 62.5 grams needed a permit. This 62.5 exemption

was never put into formal/published regulation by the ATF. It was a “shoot

from the hip” regulation where the ATF threatened to arrest and prosecute

anyone with a motor over 62.5 grams that did not have a permit. In August

of 2002, the ATF published in their monthly newsletter that they were going

to determine whether they would continue with the 62.5 gram exemption. The

implied threat was that it could go away. Even by 2002, the ATF never put

the 62.5 gram exemption into published, formal regulation. It was just

selective prosecution. At the end of January 2003, the ATF for the first

time proposed a formal 62.5 gram regulation. A regulation attached to a

series of new regulations having nothing to do with rocketry. As I write

this, there is still no official exemption for any size rocket motor in the

code of federal regulations, only a proposed regulation.

As you can see from the history, the ATF at one time exempted all consumers

rocket motors for over 26 years, then overnight, on a whim, the ATF decided

on exempting only those motors under 62.5 grams. The change in 1997 dealt a

blow to most consumer rocket motor manufacturers. Estes Industries being a

notable exception. All of their motors where under the 62.5 gram limit.

What is to prevent the ATF from changing the 62.5 gram limit downward later

this year after the media spotlight is gone and Congress adjourns. Nothing.

The rocketry community has no protection in United States Code. That is

what we are asking for. We are asking for what the ATF gave consumer

rocketry for over 26 years before they whimsically changed their minds. We

are asking for a complete exemption from the explosives act in United States

Code for the protection of the ENTIRE rocketry hobby from the ATF.

It is very short sighted for Estes to look the other, in exchange for an

exemption. An exemption which the ATF in their own newsletter, six months

ago, indicated they were ready to eliminate. Without the efforts of ARSA,

TRA, NAR and Senator Enzi, one can only wonder if the proposed 62.5 gram

exemption by the ATF would be made. Estes Industries may want to think

about that.

John Wickman

Amateur Rocketry Society of America

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In a joint effort between Ozark Propulsion Labs and Loki Research, a 6" x 8ft long full P motor was successfully fired this past weekend at MDRA's Coverdale Crossings field. The motor, filled with 82lbs of propellant, burned for ~8 seconds and provided a peak thrust over 3000lbs.

This motor is a collaboration with Florida Institute of Technology for their JAMSTAR project. The website is : http://www.fit.edu/projects/jamstar. The flight is scheduled for April 19th, and SIMS show ~100,000ft.

A preliminary video of the burn is here: http://www.dgmicro.com/opl/movie/77kpmotor.wmv

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Stephen Baxter has to be the best hard SF writer. Not only do you always get a good story, but you end up learning a lot about the various fields he decides to cover in the story. His most recent book, Evolution, tracks human evolution from just before the dinosaur extinction event all the way through to the planetary nebula. The most impactful thing about the book is that we die out around 2050 due to a large volcanic explosion in southeastern Asia. My immediate response to that was a mind numbing, “We should have done better than that.” But this morning I read the news and I modified that to a depressing, “I sure wish we could do better than that.”.

Anyway, as with all Baxters books, well worth the read….

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