In Oregon, a Boeing engineer and his son, both avid windsurfers, had rigged their windsurfing sail to a long line, attached it to a pair of water skis, and then used the wind to pull themselves along the Columbia River. Even so, through one of his customers, Moore heard a rumor. There was no World Wide Web to bring these far-flung communities of enthusiasts together. “I was living in my own world-I was in Missouri, in Kansas,” Moore said. If his timing was off, he’d sometimes knock himself unconscious. He found that a well-timed flick of the wrist could bring him in for a soft landing. He strapped himself into a climbing harness, then tied himself to a soccer goal by diving a kite down and up repeatedly, he was able to rise into the air, sometimes as high as sixty feet. He sat in a three-wheeled buggy, launched a large kite, and, by swooping it through the air, set himself racing across football and soccer fields. In landlocked Missouri, he began a series of reckless experiments. Now he was fascinated by a different problem: harnessing their power to take flight himself. In the past, Moore had been interested in making kites more maneuverable. “I was just connecting all kinds of dots.” He stopped his tour, tracked down the performer, horse-traded one of his kites for a glider, and took it back to the United States. He watched as one of the other performers, with a paragliding sail at his back, made a controlled landing on the water, then used the sail to pull himself through the waves to shore. In 1994, Moore went to France as part of a seven-week European kiting tour. Moore himself became one of its top professionals, travelling each weekend to tournaments around the country and earning a national title. Moore had been right about the sport-kite business: he soon opened six stores in Missouri and Kansas, advertising in Stunt Kite Quarterly and other new publications devoted to the sport of kiting. He was one of the first people to fly kites indoors-a boast, since it showed that the kites were so light that they didn’t even need wind. “I could literally walk and move, and my body created enough pressure against this highly controllable feather to orchestrate a whole routine to music,” Moore recalled. He and Bui made sixteen-square-foot sails that were stiff but weighed only three ounces. In the process, he became one of the most skilled kiters in the world. Moore, who has a compact build, a bright smile, and the serious, studious voice of an airline pilot, took his kites on the road, performing at schools and birthday parties, for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and before crowds of thousands at kite expos. The technology they used was modelled on bird bones. They built kites using the shafts of high-performance arrows, which were constructed of lightweight aluminum encased in a carbon-fibre wrapper later, they made their own spars out of tapered graphite tubes that were being used in the production of helicopter frames. Bui turned out to be a gifted scavenger of parts. Moore brought on an aerospace engineer from the University of Kansas named David Bui, and, together, they started reverse-engineering the kites. The problem, he felt, was that the kites he was buying from suppliers weren’t fast or trickable enough-they could only do a loop or two. He watched the sport kites soar, reverse, and double back, and wondered if the kite could become the next bicycle-a vehicle for art, competition, or some combination of the two.Īfter he graduated, Moore opened a kite store in partnership with his mother. Moore was skilled with a yo-yo and had watched riders do tricks on their bikes. But a sport kite-a needle-nosed, fighter-jet-like wing of nylon or polyester-has two lines, which an operator can use to induce acrobatic turns. A traditional kite is tethered to its operator by a single line, and is more or less impossible to maneuver. He had noticed increasing numbers of so-called sport kites arcing through the skies above his home town of Lenexa, Kansas, outside Kansas City, Missouri. Just as he was graduating from high school, in 1990, Chris Moore had a fanciful idea.
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