Into the blue: Rocketeers set off summer in Mansfield

Out here metformin hydrochloride 850 mg on the high plateau, where you can see 10 miles in all directions, nearly everyone cast their eyes to the skies. Made you wonder, “What’s up?”

Rockets were up. Whoosh! Lots and lots of rockets.

About 300 rocket enthusiasts from around the Northwest flocked to Mansfield for the 11th annual Fire in the Sky rocket rendezvous, four days of launching, lunching and laughing at a former racetrack turned blastoff pad.

The weekend, packed with camping families and scores of kids, blended aeronautics, engineering, electronics, physics and model-making into a whiz-bang way to learn and use the laws of the universe, said Carl Hamilton, president of Washington Aerospace, the Puyallup rocket club hosting the event.

“Think velocity, mass, thrust and gravity,” he said, laughing excitedly. “All the good things in life.”

More than 280 flights zoomed skyward on Saturday, when weather was best, with some high-performance models reaching heights of more than 12,000 feet in airspace, requiring a Federal Aviation Administration waiver.

Friday and Sunday, rocketeers launched hundreds of flights between rain showers and bouts of high wind — weather that stalled flights but not the fun.

“Look … these things are fast, they’re loud and they’re super cool,” said Hamilton. “Enthusiasm here is, well, sky high. High winds, hot sun, darkness — it won’t slow us down for long.”

Just ask Deer Park resident Bob Yanecek, president of the Spokane Area Rocket Club (SPARC) and flier of the 57-inch-tall Dual 38, a fifth-generation, stiletto-sleek rocket that climbed on Saturday to 12,299 feet in 36 seconds to capture top spot in the weekend’s Need for Speed competition.

Parachuting down, the rocket got lost in darkness on rolling sageland, and not even the craft’s beeping electronic locators could lead Yanecek to the landing site. He was up and moving at 4:30 a.m. Sunday — first light — to search for the rocket, finding it a few hours later.

“Man, that felt good,” he said.

Nearby, Bryan Whitemarsh of Puyallup paced nervously around the lower stage of his Velociraptor, a 15-foot thrust monster expected to climb — if the wind died down on Sunday — to 8,000 feet, a mere joyride for the powerhouse project.

The Velociraptor’s engines packed 1,200 pounds of thrust — enough to push a car — and could hurl this not-yet-flown virgin rocket … well, not to the moon, said Whitemarsh, but certainly very, very high.  That means 12,000 feet or more, possibly much more.

“It could go far, really far,” he said in hushed understatement. He looked lovingly at the $4,000 rocket, equipped with GPS, radio tracking devices, three on-board computers and three parachutes, one 24-feet in diameter to ensure a soft landing.

After years of design, testing and construction, the flight would provide Whitemarsh with Level 3 certification, allowing him to work with some of amateur rocketry’s most powerful engines, volatile mechanisms not to be toyed with.

“I’m nervous about all this, really stressed,” he said. “It’s been a lot of work that, pretty soon, is going straight up and out of sight. Come launch time, I’ll be ready to puke.”

Whitemarsh reported Monday that the Velociraptor launched at 4 p.m. Sunday to hit 12,800 feet, one of the weekend’s highest flying launches. “It was a wonderful, successful, perfect flight” he said. “And — just for the record — I didn’t puke.”

Across the launch grounds, Mike Wyvel and Scott Berfield dismantled a 22-foot tall, 150-pound flying behemoth they called U4ea (pronounced “euphoria”).

The giant, multifinned rocket flew its fourth and final flight Saturday. “It was kind of a show piece,” said Wyvel, “that we used to demonstrate the fun of rocketry. We would have made it even bigger, but we had to be able to squeeze it through the door of the RV.”

Most of the rocket fans on site, however, were launching much smaller kit models — 24 inches and smaller — that nonetheless provided some powerful thrills.

Maddie Hubbard, 16, of Seattle, gushed with excitement over the successful launches and disastrous returns of both her rockets. “They went up beautifully,” she said, “but after that .. not so good.”

At the highest point, Hubbard’s rockets split into two stages to release their parachutes. A cord connecting the two rocket stages dug deeply into the cardboard fuselage in a common malfunction called “zippering.”

“It didn’t matter that much,” she said. “I just love doing this.”

She looked toward the launch pad where the countdown commenced. “I’m ready to make some more rockets,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”