Twenty rockets, and this is the first

He did not buy the fuel. He made it, starting with sugarcane he cut, dried, filtered and ground down, combined with ash, which is a chemistry problem long before it is a rocketry problem. The first rocket climbed twenty or thirty metres. That is the one in the photograph, and it matters more than any that followed, because it is the one that proved the fuel worked at all. Roughly twenty launches later he is still refining it. He intends to be an astronaut, and he has already crossed the line that separates people who like space from people who work on it.