Estes Industries

Estes Industries is a company that makes model rockets. It began in Denver, Colorado, in 1958, founded by Vernon Estes. The business moved in 1961 to a 77-acre site near Penrose, Colorado. In 1969, Vernon sold the company to the Damon Corporation of Needham, Massachusetts, which also bought a smaller rival, Centuri Engineering of Phoenix, Arizona.

Damon combined the two under the name Centuri Engineering, though the Penrose location kept operating as Estes Industries. Centuri products were still developed and sold from Phoenix, but manufacturing shifted to the Estes facility. Centuri sales never matched Estes brand sales, and the Phoenix office closed in 1983, ending the Centuri product line.

After a hostile takeover of Damon in 1989, Estes Industries was spun off into Hobby Products, and the company’s name was shortened to Centuri Corporation. In 1996, Hobby Products bought the assets of Cox Products of Corona, California, a maker of model airplanes and glow-fuel engines, and moved those assets to the Estes facility. The combined company was sold again in 2002 and renamed Estes-Cox Corp.

On August 30, 2002, CEO Barry Tunick, who had led the company since 1991, bought Estes-Cox from the private equity fund TCW Capital for $15 million. On January 15, 2010, Hobbico, Inc. acquired Estes-Cox. Hobbico filed for bankruptcy on January 10, 2018, and Estes-Cox was sold to Estes Industries LLC on April 12, 2018.

Indoor launch of model rockets in Astrodome

Among its accomplishments, Estes sponsored an indoor launch of a model Saturn V at halftime of the Bluebonnet Bowl in the Houston Astrodome on December 31, 1969, along with several smaller rockets.

Estes rockets

Estes produced many rocket model kits, typically using paperboard tubing for the body and balsa wood for fins and nose cones. Early designs were simple, varying in size, number of stages, and recovery method. The first kit was the Astron Scout (K-1), priced at $0.70, followed by the Astron Mark (K-2) and the Astron Space Plane (K-3). The Astron X-Ray had a clear plastic payload compartment.

The Camroc was a small camera that replaced a nose cone and took a single image on a film disk after motor burnout. The Cineroc used a movie camera in larger rockets to capture frames during ascent. In the 1960s, Estes offered scale models of NASA vehicles like the Gemini-Titan and Saturn V.