We’ve been launching rockets at my house since before half of us were old enough to ride a bicycle.  The Brother and Pops are almost always the ringleaders.

This trip to Iowa was no exception.

The Brother made what he called an “experimental rocket” from a poster mailing tube that he purchased from the US Postal Service, a soda bottle, and a whole bunch of D engines.  Before he clipped his rocket to the launch pad, he walked over to all of and explained, in true Brother fashion, a little bit about his experimental rocket.

He also warned us all that, due to the potentially unstable nature of the rocket, he had absolutely no idea what it was going to do.

Here is Brother’s rocket, the US Postal Service.  As you can see from this picture, my parents have an ideal backyard for rocket launching, especially when Randy plants beans instead of corn.  (Randy’s soybean field is the darker green bit halfway back.  The lighter green field is our pastures.)

And so, Brother hooked everything up on the US Postal Service and began the countdown.

“Ten…Nine…” he started.

“Can we skip a bunch of these numbers and just cut to the chase?” Paul asked.

“Eight…Seven…Six…”  Brother ignored Paul and continued counting, in true NASA fashion.

And then…

BLASTOFF!

The rocket went up!

With Space Shuttle like finesse, the US Postal Service lifted majestically off the launch pad with a WOOSSSSSSSHHH and lots of smoke.  And that’s about when things started to go wrong.

Brother wasn’t kidding when he said his rocket may be slightly unstable.

The thing got about as high as the trees, then it started doing loops and twirls in the air.  All twenty of us were laughing so hard by this point that not a single person managed to catch the rocket’s erratic flight pattern on camera, but The Kid did manage to catch its crash landing in the pasture…right by the poor cows, who all bolted off for a safer bit of grass.

Smoke was billowing everywhere and Dad and Brother went shooting off through the electric fence (which Pops had wisely turned off for the occasion) to go retrieve the US Postal Service.

It was intact.

Brother immediately began gluing fins onto the base of it, claiming that “this will stabilize it”.  (He was right, by the way.)

Marshall had also made an experimental rocket, and his appeared to be a 2 liter bottle of soda around a rocket body.  I wasn’t sure quite what it was, but I did know that it looked dangerous.

Dad, Paul and Brother prepared the soda bottle rocket for launch.

(This is our launch pad.  The grass is starting to burn out from all the launching…by the end, it was black.)

Final tweaks were made to the soda bottle rocket, and Brother placed it on the launch pad.  Marshall did the honors and only counted down from five, which I believe that Paul appreciated.

When Marshall depressed the BLASTOFF button, his rocket went up and then turned sharply and began aiming itself at all of us innocent bystanders.  (This is why they were called experimental rockets.)  There was much screaming and scrambling before the rocket veered off and crashed into Dad’s White Pine trees.

I’m hoping Kid cuts his videos down of these rockets soon so I can post them.

I have not laughed so hard in…seven weeks.

We were doubled over, leaning on each other and gasping for breath as we all laughed and recounted the effects of  “DID YOU SEE THAT THING COMING STRAIGHT FOR US!”.

I tell you what, nearly getting killed by an experimental rocket provides quite a decent adrenaline rush.

Mom and the other ladies moved to the screened in porch for safety.