"Places that are hospitable for rockets are inhospitable for the people who fly them," explains Jim Cornwall, an engineering technician at Universal Propellants in Phoenix. Cornwall is a member of the weekend's organizing group, the Experimental Rocketry Association of Arizona (XRAA).
Each evening, Cornwall and the majority of rocketeers will retreat to Bruno's Motel in Gerlach to wash off the alkalai dust that permeates the most hermetically sealed of containers. Cornwall's wife declined to come for the weekend. It seems that in order to fully appreciate rocketry, one should be in possession of a y chromosome.
"Rocketry has everything men enjoy in sport: smoke, fire and the occasional accident," says Brian Liggett, who does computer sales and service in Central California. He and his group, the Q Project, end up scrubbing the launch of their 500- pound, 30-foot rocket after the motor manufacturer's own rocket explodes. (Rockets are classified by the size of their motors: G's, the smallest flown this weekend, are petite; the P's and Q's are monstrosities.)
With the Q Project down for the count, Liggett helps his 8-year-old daughter, Chelsea Jackson, launch her first rocket. Jackson named it "Tribute to Mt. View Golden Bears" for her school and painted it green and white. This rocket makes it off the launch pad, but the parachute fails to open.
Many of the launches fail, but the participants aren't always disappointed. Bruce Lee, a computer systems manager from Omaha, Nebraska, expected his rocket to go up seven miles. Instead, it explodes right after launch, raining debris down from the sky. The men huddle around the carcass, speculating the cause of the failure. Lee, who has been flying rockets for 35 years, takes it in stride.
"I suspected the motor would have a problem," he says. "It's all part of the sport. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't." Lee plans to return next year and launch the world's tallest model rocket.
While many of the rocket tests are just for fun, some crews aim for bigger game. Initial Civilian/Amateur Near Orbit (ICANO) is launching the last of their test rockets before making a bid for the Cheap Access To Space competition.
CATS is offering a $50,000 prize for the first group which can send a rocket up 250,000 feet, and $250,000 for the first group who can hit 700,000 feet (out of earth's atmosphere). Tom Rouse and his team members have spent the past two years and over $80,000 in an attempt to claim the prize money.
ICANO has received FAA clearance to shoot their N class rocket 30,000 feet into the air so they can test the telemetry (altitude tracking) system. As the end of their launch window closes, Rouse and his assistant work furiously to get the rocket ready. It's like watching somebody defuse a bomb in reverse. Finally, the rocket (which I have christened Ultravixen) is armed.
We drive a safe distance away to observe the launch. The rocket roars to life and screams toward the sky. Suddenly, it curlicues. The rocket separates, and the two stages plummet to the ground. When the data is later analyzed, ICANO learns that when the rocket broke through the sound barrier, the fins were too narrow to carry the vehicle smoothly through the shock wave.
"I'm disappointed," says Rouse, a builder by trade. "All the electronics worked perfectly." The team begins discussing modifications for the final design. There will be no more test launches before the big performance in Manitoba in November, and the group will pack it in if they do not make it. "My wife wants it to be over," Rouse says. "The sport is fun, but this competition is monetarily serious."
JP Aerospace is also testing two rockets for the CATS prize. In May, they got one of their rockets up to 72,000 feet by launching it off of a weather balloon over the Black Rock Desert. John Powell, a computer program from Davis, Calif. who formed JP Aerospace over 20 years ago, bills their project as "America's other space program." While Powell loves building and launching rockets, his goal is to bring space to the people.
"The space industry shouldn't cost billions of dollars with only a few people going up," he says. "The Wright Brothers were just a couple of guys working out of their garage when they built the first airplane. At the same time, there was a group with hundreds of professors and millions of dollars who had a failed attempt a couple days before the Wright Brothers flight. What if that group had won? People would have thought you had to be something special to fly an airplane, and today they would cost millions of dollars each!" Their M-class rocket, also being tested for telemetry, not only makes it off the launch pad, it makes it safely back to the ground.
On the right side of the field, a mondo-launch tower has being set up. Hybrid Dynamics from Jefferson, Ga. is preparing to test an experimental R/S size engine. Although the company has developed military and commercial rockets in the past, this is their first independent attempt.
"We needed a machine shop to make rocket parts," Hybrid's president Alouise McNichols explains. "So we opened a machine shop and used the profits to fund our research and development."
During the first launch window, the rocket lights but the valve freezes. Part of the crew rushes into town to plead with the FAA for another time slot. When they acquiesce, a second test is rapidly prepared.
McNichols paces in the hot sun at a distance from her crew. Her partner, a genuine rocket scientist named Drew Prentice, prepares the rocket for its second flight attempt.
"The most important thing is the safety of the crew, and getting the rocket to leave the rail," McNichols says. This time, the rocket fires up, but the top half blows off and the motor is left sitting on the launch pad. The Hybrid crew is bumming, hard.
"You can't let this stuff get to you in this business," McNichols says. After the weekend in the Black Rock Desert is over, they will be returning to Georgia to work on new designs.
After XRAA cleans up the debris and the burn scars, there will be no trace of their presence left in the Black Rock Desert. But next year they will return to this, or another remote location, to enjoy more smoke, fire, and, of course, the occasional accident.
advertisement
