Newsman Walter Cronkite remembers the year of Apollo 8: "The whole 1960s really culminating in 1968 were the most terrible decade, undoubtedly, of the twentieth century and very possibly our entire history, even including the decade of the Civil War. America was divided as it never had been since the Civil War and by the Vietnam War, by the civil rights fight.

"Everything seemed to come to a head in '68. There were the assassinations of two of the leaders of the more liberal causes. Bobby Kennedy, shortly after winning that election in California that probably would have put him over the top as the presidential candidate that year, and Martin Luther King, of course, in Memphis, was a terrible blow to the entire cause of civil rights. By the summer of '68 the Democratic convention turned out to be a terrible shambles of violence and counter-violence by the Chicago police... By December the country was pretty far down."

Model rocketry, as a hobby, enjoys a limited amount of regulation, at least in the US. In large part, that is because the community has been very good about self-policing. Most folks who are serious about the hobby closely follow the safety guidelines published by the two national organizations (Tripoli and NAR), and steer newcomers to as well. Serious accidents are few and far between, intentional damage even more so. Compare this to, say, drones, which seem to be more widely embraced by the public, but are much more closely regulated and have been implicated in a number of serious incidents like https://abcnews.com/US/drone-operator-charged-hitting-super-... . Model and amateur rockets are cool. Folks mis-using them are going to run into a lot of pushback from pretty much every direction, because it'd only take an incident or two to ruin the hobby for everyone.