This story resembles Honeycomb Comet in that both have the plot device of a successful rich man being attacked by relatives and leech lawyers when trying to pursue his expensive dream.
Thoughts on the story itself:
The social setting is very much the 1930's. Entertainment is local. Law enforcement is local. There are cars, but not many. There is no sign of computers or large-scale communications networking. There are phones in this era, but they play no part in this story.
There is a comment that the frail old man has been cautioned against cigar smoking by his doctor. This indicates worry about the smoking-health link predates the iconic flare-up of the 1950's. This indicates that smoking is something people have been forming strong opinions on for generations.
Rocket flying is treated like inter-war airplane barnstorming. It's something that goes on in open fields near small cities around the country, as part of the county fair attractions, and on a shoe-string budget. There are sheriffs with warrants checking if the rocket has been paid for or are there liens outstanding -- typical county fair checking of the 1930's, and even today. Heinlein talks about public complaints of the NIMBY sort -- the kind that tend to flow around any semi-nomad entertainment community that moves from one fixed settlement to another.
Safety is a crew issue, not a government issue.
The fact that we haven't had a barnstorming rocket-era in our real history reflects two things: a) that rocket flying is somewhat bigger in scale than plane flying, and Heinlein envisioned, and more importantly, that The Curse of Being Important had not struck aviation and rocketry when Heinlein was writing this. There was no NASA dominating space-oriented rocketry, and the FAA was not yet dominating aviation safety, flying procedures/rituals, and air traffic control. Aviation could be small scale, and Heinlein was writing as if rocketry could be small scale too.
Interestingly, the Curse of Being Important was already on health -- the passengers for this barnstorming were required to have a doctor check them out before flying.