I attended the meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Fire Prevention
Regulations yesterday to give a presentation on rocketry, including HPR.  
During the presentation, I mentioned that because of the recent change 
to 527 CMR 16 that essentially threw out all the old rules and adopted
NFPA 1122, it was no longer clear whether non-model rockets fell under 
fireworks, explosives, or neither; and that neither of those two codes
were really applicable or adequate to regulate HPR.

The response of the Board floored me.  The explosives expert, who runs
the rocketry subcommittee, and the chemical engineering expert, who is
an old model rocketeer, both determined that HPR was not regulated by
the Board.  Furthermore, it could not be regulated by the Board, because
the enabling legislation specifically authorizes only MODEL rocketry
regulation.  None of the other Board members contradicted them.

What does this mean?  It means that we're gearing up to include true
HPR in our sanctioned Regional Sport Launch, planned for May 28-29-30
in Massachusetts.  We already had a waiver in the works for model
rockets > 16 ounces, so that isn't a problem.  Right now it looks as
if our field may be able to handle up to J's and still be compliant 
with the Safety Code.

We intend to invite members of the Fire Board to attend the launch
as a demonstration, so that they can get familiar with the hobby.  
Because of this, we will be doing very conservative safety checking
and we would appreciate our flyers not attempting to launch unproven
vehicles.

So that they wouldn't get hot to "close the loophole" on us, we
offered to work with them to inform them of the progress on NFPA
1127 as it goes through the NFPA process, so that they can adopt it
if HPR ever becomes a regulatable entity.  One thing working for
us here is that they have finally decided to interpret the law as 
Harry Stine demanded they interpret it back in 1986 -- as requiring 
them to adopt recognized national regulatory standards instead of 
just making up their own.

(Why was HPR illegal before this?  Because the old regulation had
a clause that essentially said, "any rocket that is not a model rocket
is a firework."  Whether the Board ever had the statutory authority 
to make that stick will probably never be clear; but if they ever
thought that they had, they are less sure of it now and so would
probably never try to re-introduce such a clause at this time.)
-- 

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