Perhaps these guys were inspired by
Jack Parsons, maybe.
Bertrand Brinley, Homer Hickam, and/or Jimmy Yawn would be my first guesses.
Bertrand R. Brinley (19 June 1917 in Hudson, New York – 20 October 1994 in Luray, Virginia) was an American writer of short stories and children's tales. He was best known for his Mad Scientists' Club stories.
The stories in The Mad Scientists' Club originally appeared over several years in Boys' Life magazine, starting in 1961, and were later collected into book form. The Mad Scientists' Club, The New Adventures of The Mad Scientists' Club and The Big Kerplop! were first published by the now-d...
Homer Hadley Hickam Jr. (born February 19, 1943) is an American author, Vietnam War veteran, and a former NASA engineer who trained the first Japanese astronauts. His 1998 memoir Rocket Boys (also published as October Sky) was a New York Times Best Seller and was the basis for the 1999 film October Sky. Hickam's body of written work also includes several additional best-selling memoirs and novels, including the "Josh Thurlow" historical fiction novels, his 2015 best-selling Carrying Albert Home...
Or maybe Jimmy Yawn or Richard Nakka , who have web sites but no Wikipedia entries.
Or maybe any of the dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of YouTube videos that you can find by searching for “rocket candy” or “sugar rockets.”
Homebrew rockets powered by stovetop mixtures of sugar(s) and stump remover (potassium nitrate) are a fairly big thing among rocketry-oriented Happy Mutants. Cooking the propellant mixture on a stovetop requires some simple precautions, but if you observe those, the process is generally quite safe.
Rocket Candy, or R-Candy, is a type of rocket propellant for model rockets made with a form of sugar as a fuel, and containing an oxidizer. The propellant can be divided into three groups of components: the fuel, the oxidizer, and the additive(s). In the past, sucrose was most commonly used as fuel. Modern formulations most commonly use sorbitol for its ease of production. The most common oxidizer is potassium nitrate (KNO3). Potassium nitrate is most commonly found in tree stump remover. Additiv...
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