A very handsome 8 1/2 x 11 hard cover book that will look good on your coffee table as well as provide a wealth of data on some of the space flight pioneers and their rockets. 

As soon as I opened the wrapper, I was impressed with the silver colored binding with the red and black text, and a black and white photograph of Dr. Goddard and his gang. Given that bare metal with red and black were the typical colors employed by Dr. Goddard, I really enjoyed seeing them on the cover - a very nice touch. But - there has to be more to a book than it's cover... 

In the introduction Mr. Alway states: "It is the aim of this book to bring the rockets themselves to the modeling public. The stories of the rocketeers of the 1930’s are told to give the rockets a historical context." 

This objective is accomplished via a format familiar to readers of Mr. Alway’s “Rockets of the World”. There are dimensioned drawings of (approximately thirty) rockets accompanied by photographs and, typically, half a page to a page or so of text. The largest single section (thirty some pages out of the ninety four page total) is devoted to Dr. Robert Goddard’s creations. Other sections cover rockets from the American Rocket Society, some early German rockets, Winkler, VFR, von Braun (A-2, A-3, and A-5), and GIRD and other Soviet rockets. In the last section , Mr. Alway includes some notes on model rocket construction and plans for 4 scale models (Goddard A-3, Winkler HW-2, GIRD-09, Razumov-Shtern LRD-D-1) that can be kit bashed from Estes rockets. The book closes with one of Mr. Alway’s constant scale (1/60) diagrams of the various rockets featured in the book. (Will this turn into a poster some day?) 

I had expected to see some “recycled” material from R.o.t.W. but found that for rockets that were covered in both publications, many of the drawings had been updated with additional detail (at least as compared to the first edition of R.o.t.W) and the accompanying text had been extensively rewritten. Even the plans for the GIRD-09 were drawn at a different scale (and use different parts) than the plans that appeared in “The Art of Scale Model Rocketry”. 

While I haven’t read the book from cover to cover (yet) I have enjoyed Mr. Alway’s commentary and insight into the history of these early rockets. Even the occasional touch of humor - claiming that “For the last time, a spaceship had crashed into the desert outside Rosewell, New Mexico.” while describing Dr. Goddard’s efforts of 1941. Also, it is nice to find notes about what the author didn’t know about the various rockets. Mr. Alway provides about a page and a half describing the limitations of his sources of scale data and includes notes on the some of the drawings that highlight significant discrepancies. 

All in all, I find that “Retro Rockets” contains an entertaining overview of some of the early rocket development as well as a source of inspiration (and data) for what could be some truly unique model (or high power) rockets. 

Finally, I must add that I really enjoyed the plans for the Winkler HW-II and Mr. Alway’s clever use that use the nose cones from a “Big Bertha” and a “Mean Machine” to make the teardrop shaped body. The onset of winter and the fact that I expect to move in the near future will slow things down, but hopefully it won't be too long before you read about a “first flight” in one of my launch reports. 
 

Relinquished by Scott Johnson @