These days, Burton, a retired professor in the University of Illinois Department of Aerospace Engineering, is 82 and still working with CU Aerospace, a Champaign-based company he helped to found with five other UI faculty.
Rod Burton was 10 years old when he began dabbling with rockets.
Growing up in Geneva (that’s Illinois, not Switzerland), he had a Gilbert chemistry set and made gunpowder in his basement and put it in rockets that he fired in the field.
“I found a formula in a book,” he said. “I used to buy some of the ingredients down at the Walgreen drug store.”
He said a mishap with the gunpowder “created a huge flame” that blackened the basement ceiling and filled the house with smoke. Burton recently visited the house and said the blackened ceiling is still there.
Burton works out of his home in Northbrook. He recently conferred with officials at NASA concerning the company’s potential involvement with a manned trip to Mars.
We “would be involved with the thrusters or the rocket engine,” Burton said. “My PhD is from Princeton, and Princeton happens to be the leader in this type of engine. It would take years to do enough research to build one of these units.”
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