There are two rules at Frank Grasso’s Stanfordville home: Never run out of Elmer’s glue, and don’t mix volatile chemicals anywhere on the property.
“My wife won’t let me make my own rocket fuel anymore,” said Grasso, 71, a Manhattan College-educated electrical engineer. “I burned off part of my eyebrows the last time I tried.”
The retired Bronx native has spent 28 years using his house as a launching pad for a lifelong passion: amateur rocketry. Grasso’s attic is filled with homemade missiles, and his specially designated “rocket room” is so packed that he has to turn sideways to enter. Projectiles have even taken over Grasso’s bedroom: He painstakingly assembles missile components on his bed while fending off his cat Perseus, who likes to chew the tape used to secure rocket fins while the Elmer’s is drying.
Grasso has amassed a staggering collection of roughly 1,300 rockets in his home — nearly all handmade. “I lost count five years ago,” he said. To date, Grasso has logged 585 launches. His fleet includes a scale-model Minuteman missile, a Klingon battle cruiser, and a Star Wars twin ion engine (TIE) fighter.
Grasso’s love affair with projectiles started with bottle rockets; soon, he was building missiles from kits and making his own fuel. Some of Grasso’s experiments got him into trouble: At Cardinal Spellman High School, a homemade batch of propellant exploded and sent flames shooting to the lab ceiling, earning Grasso a reprimand from the dean of discipline.
In another incident, after a missile swerved toward football practice, school officials promptly disbanded his unofficial rocketry club. Referring to the players scattering in their crimson uniforms, Grasso joked, “It was like parting the Red Sea.”
Grasso had to put his aerospace obsession on the back burner as he struggled to find steady work after college. “I took any job that had to do with wires or electricity,” he said. His determination led to a 17-year career as an electrician for Metro-North Railroad. But he had his childhood passion reignited 33 years ago, when a friend asked him for help building a model missile. That single project sparked his return to rocketry.
His wife, Charlotte, remembers the early days well. “I knew Frank before he took up rocketry,” she said. “After we married, we moved to Stanfordville, and I helped him build them, and even made a few of my own. But I gradually lost interest.” So did their two sons. Dragged to countless launches as children, they have happily left the launching pad behind as adults.
While store-bought kits can go for $300 and often take a single day to assemble, Grasso creates cost-saving rockets from recycled materials that can take up to three years to complete. He fashions parachutes from old umbrellas, transforms dairy containers into internal tail supports, and repurposes Stewart’s coffee cups and Pringles cans as structural connectors — buying only fuel, plastic nose cones, and the cardboard tubes used for rocket hulls.
Some of Grasso’s mid- and high-power rockets have reached 3,000 feet. But whether his creations streak skyward or crash on takeoff, no flight goes unrecorded. Tiny hand-printed lettering crowds his pocket-sized logbook, detailing each rocket’s name, weight, number of times flown, and weather conditions. “Keeping track of things this way helps me learn from my mistakes,” he said.
A member of the Metropolitan Rocketeers Association, Grasso is certified at Level 1, the first step in a three-tier safety credentialing process. Former Pine Plains resident David Mosher is president of the organization, which has over 100 members from four surrounding states and Canada. The group holds regular launches on a Pine Island, N.Y., farm from March through November.
“Frank’s rockets are unique,” Mosher said. “He designs his own stuff. You can always spot them because they’re never painted; and I’m the only one allowed to touch them.”
Grasso’s favorite design is the “Salosaurus,” based on a drawing his son Sal did at the age of 3, inspired by his preschool nickname. Grasso said his rocketry colleagues doubted that Salosaurus would ever fly because of its unconventional shape, but his engineering skills made it soar. He has since made five incrementally bigger versions, and is currently designing a sixth.
Not all launches go smoothly: One in 20 rockets explode on the ground or in midair for a number of reasons, such as defective commercial fuel. Other times, wind catches the parachute, and part or all of the rocket can be snagged in a tree for good. Grasso regularly visits these “tree graveyards” which stretch all the way from Long Island to Cobleskill.
Patrick Grego / The New Pine Plains Herald
Following Grasso’s recent double knee replacement surgery, Charlotte now helps him retrieve his creations. Some of the rockets carry electronic beepers for easy tracking, but the couple has still been forced to hike up to 3 miles through brambles to recover a downed rocket.
“Bringing it back in one piece — that’s when he’s happy,” Charlotte said.
Grasso relaunches rescued missiles up to a dozen times before retiring them. “The joy is knowing I can launch the rocket again,” he said. “It’s like a completion.”