Estes Astron Goblin D-motor powered sport model with streamer recovery, photographed in front of my childhood home in Nürensdorf, Switzerland, approximately in 1978. This particular Goblin was likely ordered from the 1978 Estes catalogue, at a cost of $ 5.25.
At that time, one had to send a letter containing the list of rockets one desired to order to Estes in Penrose/CO, whereupon Estes calculated the overseas surface shipping charges for the order and then returned a letter containing the total cost of the order. One then had to go to the bank and obtain a registered cheque (itself quite a procedure) and then send this in a registered letter back to Estes. Each one of these letters commonly took around seven days to cross the Atlantic. All one could then do was to wait for the "4 to 6 weeks for delivery".
Needless to say, it rather took determination to be a rocket modeller in Switzerland.
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