Tag: advanture

Launching a Life: Model Rockets, Wind, and the Spark of Adventure

I’ve always believed that we humans are meant to impose our will on the environment around us. Not recklessly, of course—we’re not charging into hurricanes for fun—but deliberately, purposefully. We don’t let the weather dictate our plans; within reason, we decide what we do, and we do it regardless. That philosophy has guided much of my life, from professional challenges in aerospace to personal commitments. It’s a theme I try to instill in everyone around me, especially the young ones. And on a blustery, rainy Saturday in March, it became the backdrop for one of the most rewarding days I’ve had in years: launching model rockets with my youngest grandson.

He’s nine now, tall for his age, sharp as a tack, and already showing signs of a brilliant future. Science draws him like a magnet. Several years ago, when he was four or five, I bought him a model rocket kit. We planned to build it together, paint it, and send it skyward. But life intervenes—busy schedules, new babies in the family, vacations, the endless pull of obligations. The kit sat on a shelf, waiting for the right moment. I didn’t want to rush him; he was young, and forcing it might have dimmed the spark rather than kindled it.

That changed recently during a trip my wife and I took to the NASA area, touring facilities tied to Blue Origin and SpaceX. Walking those grounds, surrounded by reminders of the expanding space economy, I felt a renewed urgency. Time moves fast—kids grow up quicker than we realize. I started looking for souvenirs for all my grandchildren, little tokens to keep the wonder alive. For him, though, it wasn’t just a trinket. It was a reminder of that dusty rocket kit and his genuine love for anything related to space, engineering, and flight. I made a quiet commitment: we were going to do this before he outgrew it. No more delays.

We targeted a Saturday in March. The forecast called for warmth—comfortable enough to be outside—but also rain and wind. I didn’t care. We were launching, come what may. He’s science-inclined, curious about everything, and I wanted him to experience the real thing: not a sanitized, perfect day, but the messy, unpredictable reality of experimentation. That’s where true learning happens.

The day arrived, and the weather delivered exactly what it promised: gusty winds, low clouds, intermittent rain. We set up in an open field, far from power lines or crowds. First came assembly. We spread out the pieces on a table in the garage—cardboard tubes, fins, nose cones, parachutes, engines. He dove in with focus, following instructions but asking questions at every step. Why this glue here? How does the parachute deploy? What makes it stable in flight? We talked about center of gravity, drag, thrust, recovery systems. Basic rocketry principles, but taught hands-on, not from a textbook.

Model rocketry is more than a hobby; it’s an accessible gateway to STEM.[^1] Estes Rockets, the company behind most beginner kits, has been inspiring kids since the 1950s. These small, solid-fuel rockets reach hundreds or thousands of feet, then deploy parachutes for safe descent. They teach physics, aerodynamics, electronics (with simple igniters), and patience. For a nine-year-old, it’s magic wrapped in science.

We finished two rockets: a smaller one for easy flights, and a larger, more ambitious design. Painted, decorated, engines installed. Then, out to the field.

The first launch was tentative. We set up the pad, connected the electric igniter, counted down. Whoosh! It streaked upward, punching through the low clouds. But the wind caught it immediately. Instead of a graceful arc, it drifted fast and far. We lost sight in the gray. That became the theme of the day: rockets vanishing into clouds, then drifting on currents we couldn’t predict.

We adapted. He learned to estimate trajectories based on wind direction and speed. “Watch the flag,” I told him. “See how it’s blowing? That’s your drift vector.” We calculated rough landing zones, then hiked to search. One rocket came down over half a mile away—caught by a strong gust, parachute fully deployed, floating like Mary Poppins. It landed in a distant backyard. My wife and grandson trekked through yards, knocking on doors, retrieving it triumphantly. No surrender. We recovered it, muddy but intact.

The smaller rocket performed spectacularly—at least in ascent. It hit over 280 miles per hour from a standstill, a blistering acceleration that thrilled us both. But on descent, the cardboard body started unraveling under stress. We didn’t panic. We drove to Tractor Supply, bought glue, repaired it in the field, and used a heater to speed curing. A couple hours later, it flew again—fixed on the fly, better than before.

That’s the real lesson: troubleshooting. Life doesn’t go as planned. Igniters fail. Wind shifts. Rockets drift. You fix it, adapt, persist. We talked about cold fronts, cloud layers, condensation—why the sky looked the way it did, how dense air aloft held moisture, leading to our rain. Meteorology became part of the adventure. He absorbed it all, eyes wide.

His mother is a professional photographer; his dad experiments with content creation, traveling the world for a YouTube-style channel. He’s grown up watching high-end video production. YouTube is this generation’s Hollywood—kids dream of channels, subscribers, viral moments instead of rock stardom. He’s paid close attention: editing, cuts, narrative flow, dialogue.

Throughout the day, he filmed. Multiple angles—me prepping the pad, countdowns, launches, recoveries. He captured mishaps: the long drifts, the repair session, the triumphant finds. I noticed but didn’t interfere. I figured he was just playing around.

That evening, he went home and edited. A 15-minute video emerged—polished, narrated in his own voice, with cuts, transitions, music. It chronicled everything: building, launching, laughing at failures, celebrating recoveries. Sophisticated doesn’t begin to describe it. For a nine-year-old, it was remarkable. His parents’ influence showed, but this was his creation—his enthusiasm, his story.

I was floored. Not just proud (though grandparents are allowed that), but genuinely impressed. He turned a grandfather-grandson outing into a production. It had heart, humor, science. I’ll share it on it here to give it a wider audience—he deserves it. He’s not shy; he expresses himself openly. This glimpse into our family’s Saturday might inspire others.

The day wasn’t perfect. Rockets got lost (temporarily), weather fought us, plans shifted. But perfection isn’t the point. The mishaps were the gold: recovering a drifter, gluing a torn tube, predicting drift. Those build resilience. Intelligence, unfed, can wander into unproductive places. Hobbies like this channel it productively. Model rocketry feeds curiosity, teaches engineering basics, fosters grit.

In aerospace, where I’ve spent much of my career as an executive, we deal with unpredictability daily. Rockets don’t always fly straight. Missions face delays, anomalies. You troubleshoot, iterate, succeed. Sharing that with him—hands dirty, minds engaged—felt like passing a torch. He’s headed toward engineering, space, something impactful. My job is to show doors worth walking through.

We’ve only started. More launches ahead. He’s proud of his “trophies”—the rockets on his shelf, reminders of the adventure. When things go wrong, he doesn’t panic. He fights through. That’s a lifetime gift.

If you’re busy, schedules packed, kids growing fast—make the time. Block it out. The weather might not cooperate, but impose your will. The rewards—light in young eyes, skills cascading forward—are worth every gusty, rainy minute.

[^1]: Estes Rockets official site and National Association of Rocketry resources highlight educational benefits; see generally model rocketry as a STEM tool.

[^2]: Personal observation; no specific external citation needed for family anecdotes.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an independent writer, philosopher, political advisor, and strategist based in the Cincinnati/Middletown, Ohio area. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, he has worked professionally since age 12 in various roles, from manual labor to high-level executive positions in aerospace and related industries. Known as “The Tax-killer” for his activism against tax increases, Hoffman has authored books including The Symposium of Justice, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and Tail of the Dragon, often exploring themes of freedom, individual will, and societal structures through a lens influenced by philosophy (e.g., Nietzschean overman concepts) and current events.

He publishes the blog The Overmanwarrior (overmanwarrior.wordpress.com), where he shares insights on politics, culture, history, and personal stories. Active on X as @overmanwarrior, Instagram, and YouTube, Hoffman frequently discusses space exploration, family values, and human potential. An avid fast-draw artist and family man, he emphasizes passing practical skills and intellectual curiosity to younger generations.

How Will Electric Vehicles Pull RV Trailers: Climate religious fanatics want to get rid of gas-powered cars, but electric cars aren’t powerful enough for American lifestyles

Videos like the one shown of Castle Rock at St. Ignace, Michigan, would not be possible without the RV lifestyle that is such a big deal in my family. I like my family, my kids, the grandkids, the sons-in-law, my wife, and our dogs, I love it, and we make several trips a year, generally to some remote part of the country to see what is unique there and to return with some spectacular experience and good memories. Recently we took our various RVs to St. Ignace, which I considered an easy drive from Cincinnati. We’ve been on trips where we would do 600 miles per day, breaking camp in the morning and stopping many miles later only to pitch camp wherever that might be. And we would do that for days on end, especially traveling out West. We’ve been on trips out West where not only my whole family but members of the extended family were traveling together in a convoy of RVs, and it’s quite a cool way to see the world yet still have all the familiarity of home. Campgrounds for RVs are unique places with like-minded people who are there for all the same reasons, so the experience is usually always very good. It’s really a great thing to be able to take your home with you while traveling. But the St. Ignace trip to that region of America was what I considered close. We left in the morning and pitched our camp for dinner while family members trickled in at their convenience. And it was in that way that we were able to go see many interesting things in that local region, like Castle Rock, together. 

Usually, on these kinds of trips, I set up a little mobile office outside the camper because I typically get up way before everyone else. And at that little location, I have a little refrigerator and power for my computers, and I can also catch the news. So during that trip, there was a lot of talk on the news about electric cars and California imposing new rules that by 2035 they would make it so that only electric cars would be allowed on their roads. As I looked around from my little portable office at some of the big rigs, the Class As and Cs, and many large trailers like luxury yachts on wheels, I wondered how that would work. Obviously, the people saying such things about electric cars didn’t understand the “trailer” markets in transportation and how important they were to American life, or they just didn’t care. If you stand along a highway and count cars, you will find that about every 15th vehicle is pulling some kind of trailer, whether it’s an RV, a boat, or landscapers dragging around their lawn mowing business. Trailers are a big part of American life. And electric cars can hardly keep up with the needs of just one vehicle traveling more than a few hundred miles. The technology for electric cars isn’t even close to being good enough to hold a charge for a sustainable distance, let alone pulling  a trailer while traveling. When we travel with our RV, we get around 12 miles per gallon, which many would consider great. Some of the big trucks get under 10 miles per gallon, which climate activists find reprehensible. But Americans who prefer to travel with an RV are quite happy to pay for the bad gas mileage because it gets them off the grid enough to relax. There is nothing like stopping for gas and using your own restroom, getting drinks out of your own refrigerator, or doing like my wife and I did at a Cabela’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when we didn’t want to waste time on the road to eat at a sit-down restaurant, we just ate in our camper kitchen in the parking lot. I had to stop by and get some shotgun primers, and we were eager to get back on the road. The RV lets us live that way, and it’s one of the best ways to travel that you can imagine. 

I think it’s fair to say that my wife and I have traveled all over the world using all possible means. We’ve had a little bicycle cart pull us along in Paris, we’ve flown in big luxury aircraft, traveled in first-class seats overseas, by train, boat, and everything you can imagine. But there is nothing better than RV travel, and Americans, a lot of Americans, love their RVs. Electric cars cannot pull an RV trailer. If California ever does make it illegal to travel with anything but an electric vehicle, they will hamper their economy to ridiculous levels. They obviously haven’t thought things through, or they think they can eradicate the RV market because they hate it and think they’ll get away with it. But that is a terrible miscalculation. The kind of people who travel by RV are willing to get terrible gas mileage to take their homes with them on a trip because they want to be away from liberals and their liberal grid while on vacation. Campsite owners get it; RV campers like to be left alone. They don’t want a housekeeper. They don’t want to interact with people in the hotel lobby; every time they want to leave. They don’t want to be bothered, and any attempt to take that freedom away from them will result in very destructive political discourse.

The way we like to travel, even with gas behind much more than with just a regular car, is far cheaper. Otherwise, we would have to pay to be entirely on the grid of the Liberal World Order, the hotels, the restaurants, the toll roads, and everything we would do while on a trip we’d have to pay for. Then multiply that times the number of people we usually travel with, which is ten or more people, and you’d have a travel bill of ten to twenty thousand dollars. With the RV, a trip to St Ignace is just a few thousand dollars, which is much more practical, especially if you plan to do it several times a year. Liberals, the climate lunatics who make up all these proposed stupid rules, don’t like families either, so if something they do destroys the American family, they consider it a bonus. But before that happens, the people who use RV travel to vacation away from the Liberal World Order, the TSA agents at airports, the womb to tomb hotel accommodations where your personal space is constantly under siege by noisy people, always waiting in line for restaurants to serve you three meals a day for a week or two, and suddenly travel isn’t worth it. And places like St. Ignace would suffer significantly because it’s only because of RV travel that my family would have considered going there for vacation.   Because of RV travel, we can take the family to many such locations that otherwise wouldn’t get any attention. So this proposal for electric cars attacks more than just the gas-powered transportation industry; it attacks the basic needs that Americans have to engage in travel and adventure. To go to places like the cheesy tourist trap Castle Rock. Which would be terrible because out of all the cool places that we went, when the grandkids and my kids think back on the good memories of our vacation together, it will be the spontaneous stops like we had at Castle Rock that they remember most. And that is what is at threat through the stupidity of liberalism most and why their proposals must be defeated in every way possible at the ballot box.  

Rich Hoffman

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