Orville Carlisle and the Invention of Model Rocket

For decades, 420 W. Norfolk St. was the home of Carlisle’s Correct Shoes, the store where Nebraskans from miles around would come to buy comfortable footwear … and visit Orville Carlisle’s fireworks museum! When Orville (1917–1988) and his wife, Mary (1919–2017), opened the store in Norfolk in 1947, they had no intention of creating a hybrid retail-exhibit space. However, both were members of the Pyrotechnics Guild International and Orville was a founding member of the National Association of Rocketry. It was only a matter of time before his collection of fireworks, rockets and Fourth of July memorabilia outgrew their basement. [1]

The fireworks museum was not Carlisle’s main claim to fame—he was actually the person who invented the single-use engine that became the standard design for model rockets. The propellent was solid, slow-burning and safer to use than the self-mixed, incendiary liquid concoctions that rocket hobbyists had been using. Carlisle fell in love with pyrotechnics by playing with the fireworks that his dad bought for his three boys every Fourth of July, but learned the science behind the explosions from the chemistry sets that he and his brothers would receive for Christmas. “Those sets had a lot more in them in those days,” Carlisle recalled in a 1985 Esquire profile by journalist George Plimpton, “potassium nitrate, barium nitrate, strontium nitrate, with which you could make colored flares … in high school we had the components to make nitroglycerin, but we got scared half-way through, cold feet, and we flushed the stuff down the drain.” When he got older, Carlisle started working with a local family that was in the fireworks business. Every summer the American Legionnaires held a battle reenactment, and he would help plant firecrackers and flares throughout the battlefield to simulate enemy fire. [2]

By 1954, the Carlisles were running their shoe store—and the fireworks collection was an evening and weekend pursuit. But Orville’s brother, Robert, a model airplane enthusiast, asked him to help build a model rocket. In addition to developing the single-use propellent engine, the rocket kit Orville developed incorporated a parachute; rather than shattering upon impact, the rockets could be recovered by the owners. After inserting a new engine, they could fire them right back into the sky. Carlisle called it the Mark I Rock-a-Chute. (Eventually, there was also a Mark II.) He wanted to produce and sell it, but for the next three years the kit lay dormant. [3]

It was only after Carlisle read an article by G. Harry Stine, an engineer at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range, in the February 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine that he decided to turn the Mark I Rock-a-Chute into a business. Stine’s article was all about the safety rules that missile engineers and model rocket enthusiasts alike should follow. “When we get letters from amateur rocket men,” Stine wrote, “we usually give three loud cheers and shake in our boots at the same time … because we know rocket flight testing is dangerous.” [4] Carlisle decided to send Stine a Mark I Rock-a-Chute kit to show him how his engine innovation could more safely introduce people to rocketry. Stine, impressed by the model rocket, agreed to partner with Carlisle to produce the kits; their company, Model Missiles Inc., operated for almost a decade and could barely keep up with the demand for the Mark I and, later, Mark II kits. Although Carlisle tried to win the patent for his single-use engine, he lost on a technicality and competing companies began selling their own kits based on his design. [5]