For the next giant leap in spacecraft design the action is with a handful of rocketeers trying to blast their homebrew missiles into the beyond. *

Photo: J.Bennett Fitts * __Mounted horizontally __on a launch rail, the long, slender rocket exudes such papable menace that you cant' help but feel sorry for the poor bastards on the receiving end. Except that this isn't a wapon of mass destruction. It's a glorified toy built by middle-aged hobbyists moonlighting as rocket scientists. The only people in imminent danger are the guys standing around the makeshift launchpad. We're in the middle of Black Rock Desert, the vast, dry lake bed in Nevada (best known as the site of the annual Burning Man bacchanal), and at the moment there's nothing to hit for miles in any direction. But there's a very real risk the thing will blow up before it leaves the ground.

"All right, listen up," says Wedge Oldham, a sturdy, take-charge ex-Navy submariner, now a software engineer, who launched his own 30-foot-tall, 700-pound monster during a previous visit to the playa. This morning he's responsible for inserting the igniter into the motor of the rocket. The solid-fuel propellant is inert, so there's almost no chance it will catch fire prematurely, but the pyrotechnic compound around the igniter is notoriously flammable. "If something goes wrong, the thermite will go off instantaneously," Oldham says. "There will be no ducking or running out of the way. So make sure you're in the position you want to be in when you're incinerated."

On this scorching summer weekend, 75 amateur rocketeers and a few indulgent friends and family members have gathered in the desert to play Wernher von Braun for a day. Known as the Association of Rocket Mavericks, they're the top guns of model rocketry—and perhaps the shade-tree innovators- to-be of the aerospace industry. If NASA is the establishment, and upstarts like Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites are the contenders, then these guys are the hardcore wannabes—enthusiasts who pour their time, money, and considerable knowledge into these launches and even harbor dreams that their experiments will change the course of rocketry.

The ground crew tilts the rocket until it's vertical. Tom Rouse, a 53-year-old general contractor, looks on nervously as Oldham kneels in the silt and carefully slides the igniter into the engine. A compact man with a trim mustache, Rouse builds high-end spec houses by day and high-flying rockets at night. He's got $3,000 and innumerable hours invested in the missile on the pad, and he's more concerned about its immediate future than his personal safety. "There are so many things that can go wrong," he says. "The motors could be strong but the flight computers fail, or the computers could work fine but an O-ring fails. All it takes is one little problem and it's over in a second."

Photograph: J. Bennett FittsTechnically, Rouse is launching a hobby rocket, but don't confuse it with the cardboard- and-balsa-wood kits fired off by kids since the dawn of the space age. This 13-foot scratch-built beauty features a carbon-fiber fuselage that houses four flight computers, four parachutes that will be deployed by compressed carbon dioxide canisters, and four solid-fuel motors that pack more thrust than a cruise missile. The rocket fires in two stages to maximize speed and altitude: Once the first three motors have burned out, they fall away and the fourth ignites. According to the simulation software Rouse used to plan the flight, the rocket should shoot straight up at least 12 miles before drifting, intact, back to the ground.

Hobby rocketry is divided into two major camps: one devoted to smaller model rockets and the other, epitomized by Rouse, dedicated to high-power numbers. A subset of this more ambitious world focuses on experimental motors, so called because they're built not by commercial vendors but by individuals who can make them as big and as aggressive as the laws of chemistry and physics permit. Three years ago, Rouse formed the Association of Rocket Mavericks to push the envelope.

"For some guys, it's simply a matter of packing as much propellant as will fit in a container, lighting the fuse, and running away as fast as you can," says Tom Atchison, who sits on the Rocket Mavericks board. "There's nothing wrong with that. But we want to raise the technology to a level where we can address some of the challenges faced by the aerospace industry. We're the early adopters. We're in a position to take risks that companies can't when they're fulfilling government contracts. We can work on alternative propulsion systems and innovative recovery techniques. We're saying, 'Let the unwashed masses play with these things and conduct experiments and see what they come up with.'"

Tom Atchison carries his rocket to the launchpad with his son, "We're the early adopters."

Photo: J. Bennett Fitts The closest thing the Rocket Mavericks have to a celebrity is Gene Nowaczyk, who last year launched a gigantic rocket to nearly 100,000 feet. (For hobbyists, anything over 10,000 feet grabs people's attention, and flying into the troposphere, which starts at around 25,000 feet, requires some serious engineering. Thus far, only one amateur has made it beyond the threshold of space, defined as 62 miles, or roughly 330,000 feet.) Nowaczyk isn't here yet, but for the past few days his progress has been the subject of word-of-mouth updates ("Gene's on his way." "He's in Winnemucca." "He'll be here tonight."). Until Nowaczyk's follow-up project is ready to fly, though, Rouse is top dog. At mission control—a folding table 1,500 feet from the launchpad—all eyes are on his rocket as he presses the red button.

The thermite igniter generates 4,000 degrees of instantaneous heat, and Rouse's craft shoots skyward with none of the slow-motion gravitas of a space shuttle takeoff. There's enough smoke and fire to satisfy the most jaded pyromaniac. Then an audible pop!—a sonic boom—as the projectile breaches the sound barrier. After a six-second burn, the white plume shuts off, like a skywriting airplane between letters. The booster separates from the second stage, and after three seconds of coasting, the fourth motor lights. Shortly after the flame winks out, the rocket disappears in the blue haze.

Photograph: J. Bennett FittsThe crowd breaks into a ragged cheer. But Rouse is apprehensive. "I don't see a chute," he says. "Does anybody see a chute?"

High-power rocket wisdom, engineering department, has it that going up is the easy part. The real challenge is recovery. Unlike NASA's onetime-use vehicles, model rockets are designed to be launched repeatedly. This requires an intricate in-flight ballet in which the rocket splits into several pieces after reaching maximum altitude and then deploys a series of parachutes to progressively slow the descent of each section. Due to a packing snafu, Rouse's rocket descends too slowly and is buffeted off course by gusty winds. But thanks to the GPS signal beamed from the nose cone, he recovers it unbroken about 10 miles from the launchpad. He drives back to mission control in his pickup with a broad smile on his face.

When he downloads the data logged by the flight computers, he determines that his bird flew to an altitude of 13 miles and reached a speed of Mach 3.47. "How many people have launched a rocket that went to 70,573 feet?" he asks an hour later, still stoked. "I can probably count them on my fingers."

Photograph: J. Bennett FittsBlack Rock Desert is 400 square miles of forbidding wasteland ringed by modest mountains that are largely obscured this morning by the smoky haze from distant wildfires. The khaki-colored playa, parched and cracked by the relentless summer sun, is brittle on top and soft underneath, like a birthday cake gone stale, and each step elicits an audible crunch. In the bleak, seemingly lifeless terrain, the dozen or so RVs and tents look like a moon base.

At the center of the camp is the Rocket Mavericks trailer. A supersize satellite dish positioned to pick up a GPS signal looms overhead. Inside the trailer are a 24-megabit satcom unit able to pump out live webcasts, a pair of Wi-Fi systems that can light 4 square miles of playa, and a Silicon Graphics workstation. Two men sweat in the cramped, un-air-conditioned space as they wrench on a black rocket 7 1/2 feet long that looks like a scaled-down cross between a '60s-vintage X-15 rocket plane and a surface-to-air missile.

The elder one is Tom Atchison, gray-haired, energetic, and upbeat. Atchison, 47, discovered rocketry as a child while tinkering with gunpowder his father had given him to make fireworks. After engineering stints at NASA and HP Labs, he earned his fortune running tech companies in Silicon Valley. When his friend Dirk Gates, founder of computer component maker Xircom, mentioned that he was flying high-power model rockets, Atchison felt his old passion reignite. "I said, 'Wow! That's so cool!'" he recalls. "'Is it legal?'"

Space-going vehicles rely primarily on liquid fuel. But liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen are don't-try-this-at-home propositions—too expensive, too complicated, and too dangerous for most amateurs. Gunpowder propelled early generations of hobby rockets in the '60s, and it's still used for puny models. But by the '80s, amateur rocketeers were dabbling with bigger, much more powerful motors packed with solid fuels similar to the propellants found in Cold War ICBMs and the space shuttle's strap-on boosters.

Gene Nowaczyk (left) and Gary Stroick assemble the 17-foot, 375-pound Piperr-8. It's designed to fly 18 miles into the sky and return to Earth intact, ready for another launch.

Photo: J. Bennett Fitts Rocket engines are rated on a letter scale from A to Z, and each letter is twice as powerful as the preceding one. Thus, a C motor is twice as powerful as a B and four times as potent as an A. Generally, model rocketry runs from A to G. Everything else is considered high-power rocketry. The largest off-the-shelf engine is rated O. Here at Black Rock, a couple of rockets are flying on experimental P motors, and the star attraction is Nowaczyk's king-size Q.

When Atchison rediscovered rocketry in 2001, the scene felt like the early days of computing, when the big companies—and big money—were in mainframes but the innovations came from geeks working out of their garages. He gravitated toward the Rocket Mavericks, who were more serious- minded than some of the other tinkerers, and quickly imbued the organization with a vision that transcended hobbyism. "The challenge is cheap, repeatable access to space," he says. "I could definitely see us doing orbital flights by 2015. We're focusing on the suborbital piece first because we have to develop the skills of the early adopters."

Photograph: J. Bennett FittsAtchison's pitch resonates especially well with techies. It's no coincidence that the Rocket Mavericks' roster is heavy on Silicon Valley stalwarts. Exhibit A is the owner of the black rocket that Atchison is helping to prep. Looking boyish in his floppy hat and baggy shorts, Steven Jurvetson is a 41-year-old managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. As one of the most tech-savvy venture capitalists in the world, he's a celebrity around Sand Hill Road. He and his young son had been launching model rockets when Atchison introduced him to high-power models, and Jurvetson's first taste of the hard stuff—a launch on the playa in 2006—hooked him. "Blowing things up is inherently fun, and there's something about a rocket roaring into the air that excites you on a visceral level," Jurvetson says. "But along with the pyrotechnic appeal, rocketry makes the science tangible and allows you to engage it on a personal level."

Jurvetson is putting his money where his mouth is. His $10,000 Draper Fisher Jurvetson J-Prize will be awarded by Rocket Mavericks to the first rocketeer who makes two or more successful flights to 30,000 feet while carrying a 4.4-pound payload—a useful capability for academic research. Also, he has built his own rocket to go after what's known as Level 3 certification, the highest "degree" in hobby rocketry, which will allow him to play with engines rated class M and greater. Jurvetson has come to Black Rock in a rented RV carrying all his rocket gear, his son, and his high school buddy Erik Charlton, a marketing executive at Logitech who's here to make an L3 cert flight of his own.

Photograph: J. Bennett FittsJurvetson is ready to assemble his motor. The solid-fuel propellant is molded into grains, also called slugs or chunks, that look like spools of thread and feel like pencil erasers. He loads them into a cylindrical case, much as he might slide batteries into a tubular flashlight. Then he screws everything together and walks his rocket out to the launchpad. There he discovers a problem: He can't switch on one of the two onboard flight computers—essentially a microcontroller that serves as an altimeter and orchestrates engine stages and parachute deployment. After a quick-and-dirty fix with superglue and a soldering iron, the rocket is ready for liftoff. Jurvetson lets his son press the red button. The launch is perfect. Five seconds into the flight, as the rocket carves into the clouds, his son asks plaintively, "Can I let go now?"

The rocket tops out around 6,000 feet. But this flight isn't about altitude; it's about a safe launch and intact recovery. Jurvetson meets both goals, satisfying the certification requirements. Following his flight, he's as amped as Rouse was after flying 10 times higher. Armed with his L3, he's ready for, well, just about anything. "In many industries," he says, "great ideas get lost in large bureaucracies, and it's people at the low end of the market who push the envelope. Who's going to explore crazy ideas like airbag landings on the moon? Rovers, pod racers, glider reentry?" The answer, unspoken, is clear.

Photograph: J. Bennett FittsGene Nowaczyk, with his salt-and-pepper Van Dyke, muscle T, and cargo shorts, looks more like a tourist on a Las Vegas bender than a rocket scientist on a launch site. He smokes a Marlboro Light as he works on his rocket; a gallon bottle of Jose Cuervo is close at hand. For the record, though, he's not actually drinking the tequila, just swirling it around in his mouth and spitting it out. "I've got a toothache," he says.

Nowaczyk, 40, is a mechanical engineer who came to rocketry by chance. "My daughter wanted to do this," he says. "Then she turned into a girl, and Daddy turned into a boy." He formed a company—Payload Specialties—to develop so-called sounding rockets, which are designed to take instruments aloft on research-gathering suborbital flights, and next year he plans to fly his rocket into space. Eventually, he hopes to turn Payload Specialties into a moneymaking proposition.

But today's task is to replicate the 100,000- foot flight he made here last year. Nowaczyk, his partner, Tim Covey, and their friend Gary Stroick arrived last night after towing their trailer 30 hours from Missouri. They worked on the rocket until 2 am, and they were back at it by dawn. Watching them check the wiring, pack the parachutes, and screw the pieces together spotlights a fundamental but often overlooked truth: Rocketry is hard. Inspired entrepreneurs with deep pockets, like Elon Musk and John Carmack, have suffered countless failures despite spending millions of dollars on their rocket programs. Even NASA gets things catastrophically wrong every now and then.

Nowaczyk's rocket is a monster by hobby standards—17 feet long and 375 pounds. It looks like a big white cigarette with a silver needle nose on one end, three badass fins on the other, and a black section near the top that houses the flight computers. The homebrew Q-class motor is rated at 9,000 pounds of thrust. (The Redstone that propelled Alan Shepard into space in 1961 pumped out 78,000 pounds.) Nowaczyk has made room for a payload compartment to hold various pieces of memorabilia, including a baseball signed by members of the Chicago Cubs, and an experiment he's ferrying on behalf of a Missouri high school that will correlate altitude with temperature.

Photograph: J. Bennett FittsThe rocket is so big that Nowaczyk transported it to Black Rock in dozens of pieces, planning to assemble it on the launchpad. Now he trucks it to a 22-foot-high hydraulic launch rail he fabricated himself. For six hours under the broiling sun, Nowaczyk, Covey, and Stroick piece everything together. Twenty minutes before liftoff, they power up the onboard video cameras. Nowaczyk turns his attention to the flight computer. Suddenly he murmurs, "We've got issues. It isn't arming."

Unflustered, Nowaczyk methodically prods the computer. Covey is concerned that the power will run out before reentry. "You've got 15 minutes," he tells Nowaczyk. "Twelve and a half ... Gene, you've got 10 minutes." After consulting the computer manual, Nowaczyk is finally able to boot the machine, and he calmly buttons up the rocket with four minutes left on the clock. The team hustles into a pickup truck and reaches launch control at T-minus two minutes. Wedge Oldham counts it down: 10, 9, 8, 7 ... Nowaczyk punches the launch button and the rocket streaks skyward on a white plume that sends dust clouds roiling away from the pad. A second later, a white light flares and the fuselage explodes in a fireball that showers debris over the playa.

There's a moment of silent shock and awe. Then come the groans. High-power rocketry wisdom, black-humor department, holds that the only thing cooler than a successful launch is an unsuccessful launch. But nobody's laughing now. Nowaczyk has sunk too much sweat equity and too many dreams into this project. Still, he manages a grin. "Negative launch angle detected," he jokes. Then he drives off to collect the wreckage.

*Preston Lerner *(plerner@pacbell.net)profiled auto-racing prodigy Colin Braun in issue 15.10.

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