The Biggest Bang

On Saturday afternoon, the buzz is all about an upcoming launch by Florida engineer Rick Boyette. He has assembled an exquisitely detailed 1:17-scale model of the Chinese Long March 2E that shot satellites into space in the early 1990s. Authentic Chinese lettering, lovingly reproduced, runs down the fiberglass body. “It says â€China into Space,’” Boyette explains. “That’s what somebody told me.” The propulsion comes from four strap-on booster motors surrounding a larger central one. Called a cluster configuration, this can be notoriously difficult to pull off. Unless the boosters fire simultaneously and with identical force, the rocket won’t go straight; an unbalanced liftoff can rip an airframe apart. Boyette is known in rocketry circles for beautiful, ambitious projects that sometimes suffer from lack of attention to technical detail.

I catch up with Boyette as he and his team scurry around attending to last-minute prelaunch routines. “You guys wouldn’t happen to have some duct tape, would you?” somebody asks. The two onboard parachutes have to be properly folded and stowed inside, and connected to the rocket frame with Kevlar cord. If the Long March launches as planned, two parachutes, set off by a time-delay charge or an altimeter, will deploy when the rocket reaches its apogee. To prevent the heavy nose cone from damaging the rest of the body during landing, a small drogue parachute will inflate to lower it; a larger chute will deliver the rest of the craft gently to the ground. Ideally, the rocket will return undinged, ready to be outfitted with a new motor and launched all over again. Of course, Boyette has already flown, crashed, and rebuilt the Long March three times.

Forty-five minutes pass before Boyette announces, “It’s armed.” We all retreat 1,000 feet, as per regulations, to the vicinity of a few bales of hay. “Five, four, three, two, one . . .”—and nothing. “No smoke, no joy,” as the phrase goes. An inspection reveals that the problem is not Boyette’s: The ignition box provided by the event organizers has malfunctioned. A few quick repairs, and Boyette is ready for a second try.

This time the launch sequence goes without a hitch, and the Long March, all its motors burning brightly and noisily in sync, lifts into the sky—for a few seconds. It rises 1,000 feet or so, then blows apart, a rocket piata, casing, tubing and parachutes raining down like party favors. Boyette looks strangely calm; it’s as if he expected that something would go wrong. “I have no idea what happened,” he says. “I was watching it go up and thinking, â€I’m home free, I’m home free,’ and then . . . Maybe it was just too much force.”

This is what’s known in the trade as a garbage-bag recovery, wherein the rocket returns to Earth in pieces, to be pored over for forensic clues, then deposited in the nearest dumpster. It is but one of the many varieties of failed launch that will take place over the course of the festival.

Sometimes a rocket fails to ignite; it sits on the pad refusing to budge, like a disobedient dog. Or, on successful ignition, hot gases burst through the motor’s combustion chamber, escaping into the relatively delicate airframe, and the rocket blows on the pad, leaving what is sometimes described as “rocket confetti.” (This is a CATO, or “catastrophic at takeoff,” event.) Or the rocket hurtles happily skyward but the forces generated are too much for the frame to withstand and, like Boyette’s Long March, it breaks apart in midair.

But most rockets that come to grief do so on the return trip. You’ll hear the announcer say something like, “It’s coming down hot” when the main chute or, worse, both chutes fail to deploy. Rockets that hit the ground at 100 to 300 miles an hour are known as “lawn darts” or “worm guillotines.” From the human spectator’s point of view, though, the most worrisome kind of rocket is an unstable one—one that’s flying under full power in any direction other than straight up.

If a set of faulty calculations slips by
the launch-safety officer, a homemade
rocket may pinwheel out of control after takeoff. As it burns fuel, its center of
gravity may shift, causing it to stabilize in a
horizontal position and do a fair, if short-lived, approximation of a cruise missile. “People can
see it coming,” says Duane Wilkey, a
middle-school science teacher who is one of this year’s launch organizers. “So there’s enough time for them to get out of the way.” Many here recall the triangular rocket that flew, briefly, at LDRS 19 and that is affectionately remembered as “the Flaming Pyramid of Death.”