Precautions and Safety
Model rocketry is a safe and widespread hobby. Individuals such as G. Harry Stine and Vernon Estes helped to ensure this by developing and publishing the NAR Model Rocket Safety Codes and by commercially producing safe, professionally designed and manufactured model rocket motors. The safety code is a list of guidelines and is not at all mandatory for those practicing model rocketry unless one is a member of the National Association of Rocketry.
One of the main motivations for the development of the hobby in the 1950s and 1960s was to provide young people the opportunity to construct flying rocket models without having to engage in dangerous construction of motor units and direct handling of explosive propellants.
The NAR and the TRA successfully sued the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives(BATFE) over the classification of Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant(APCP), the most commonly used propellant in high-power rocket motors, as an explosive. The March 13, 2009 decision by DC District court judge Reggie Walton removed APCP from the list of regulated explosives, essentially eliminating BATFE regulation of hobby rocketry.
Read more about this topic: Model Rocket
Famous quotes containing the words precautions and/or safety:
“We must take precautions against being prematurely honed sharp—since at the same time we are being prematurely honed thin.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)