When males are bored, the fastest and maybe best solution ... is to start a fire. Sometimes that will be the charcoal for a barbecue and ... admittedly less often ... it will be a budget Martian launcher.
I'm not really sure how it developed that Cadillac Man, Lotho, and I came together at the Nashville Space Research Center (i.e. Lotho's backyard). It's a fundamental fact of modern evolution that idle males will revert immediately to Beavis and Butthead ... let's burn somethin'.
Laughing Gecko was not present at the NCRC (i.e. Lotho's backyard) but he was in on the original launches. Let's burn somethin'.
So, we did ... and often.
This is a commercial version of the death traps we launched from the Cincinnati Space Research Center (i.e. the launch pad in the middle of Hosea Avenue in front of my parents' house). This one is a death trap as well ... but maybe not as much of one.
The technique back then was to use a plastic laundry bag with a frame made from drinking straws and tape. In the middle of that was a pin going through the straws to attach a mass of birthday candles, also held together with tape.
Just as in the early days of NASA, our launches were not always precisely successful ... which is to say they often (i.e. almost always) caught fire. The hazard, see, is the candles burn down to the straws ... and then the straws burn ... and then the laundry bag burns. Since the laundry bags are bigger and with less weight, they get up hundreds of feet in the air and you could see them for great distances ... at least until they burned.
We didn't consider the fires in space to be a huge problem because we figured the melting plastic would have cooled before it hit the ground ... so long as it made enough altitude ... which it would not ... for example ... if the launcher ended up in a tree ... by the purple-painted neighbor's house.
(Ed: was the neighbor painted purple or the house?)
Possibly both since we, luckily, did not burn down the house and we did not see who lives in there. They might have been Martians since you could never really be sure on that crazy street.
Our all-time best effort ... required a car chase.
The launcher went up at least 100-150 meters / 300-450 feet and was likely higher than that. You could see it for miles and we watched it as we drove. We were a bunch of stoner freaks and we did have a little bit of responsibility but showing that by driving a chase car to follow a hot-air balloon to discover if it burned and caused property damage, personal injury, or firestorms may not have been the best example of it.
The launcher did burn ... and it looked grand. As it melted, bright spots would fall from it which must have been the burning plastic. The lights would go out long before they got to the ground so everything really did seem nominal.
At least events seemed nominal until the fire reached the laundry bag because then the whole thing burned ... to the great joy and amusement of the ground team but possibly not so much for the astronauts.
We thought, man, for sure we will get UFO reports out of this one ... but ... alas ... I really don't know. Sorry about the shabby reporting but ... wtf ... we were stoned ponies.
(Ed: well, did it start a fire on the ground or what?)
We don't think so (i.e. we have no idea) but the theory was it burned before it got to the ground. That is what appeared to happen and we did not see evidence of fires ... but we still can't be entirely sure Cincinnati had the same number of housing subdivisions afterward.
Note: do not expect cheers from the po-lice when you do this. Back then we would have taken some sort of reckless 'boys will be boys' charge but likely now you would get charged with terrorism and sent to Guantanamo.
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