The Biggest Bang

Later that evening at the event’s banquet, held in a Rochester hotel, I describe Boyette’s launch to a bunch of rocketeers who didn’t bother to wait around for it. “It was great,” I say, and then, catching myself, “well, not great for Rick or the rocket . . .” A rocketeer puts me at ease: “You don’t have to explain it to us. That’s why we’re all here. We love to watch rockets blow up—and it’s even better when it’s someone else’s.”

Moments later, the man of the moment, a dazed-looking Boyette, appears. “I had a failure of the tube coupler joint on my number-two booster,” he says. “Either I didn’t put enough glue [on it] when I was rebuilding it or . . . But I will rebuild it again.” I ponder the $2,000 and 100 hours that Boyette has sunk into this 72-pound, 10-foot-long, essentially useless object. Earlier in the day, Stephen Boy, to my knowledge the only rocketeer in attendance who is also a clinical psychologist, had given me his version of Zen and the Art of High-Powered Rocketry: “You’ve got to be able to let go. You build something, you put in the time and money and dedication, but you also have to be willing to have things not work out.”

To a spectator, one successful launch looks much like another, and after a few dozen, enthusiasm can wane. But for the rocketeer, each launch is a thrill that might be likened to sex: The arduousness of the preparation and the predictability and brevity of the climax diminish the intensity of the experience not a bit. The phallic implications of this overwhelmingly male sport don’t escape anyone. “My wife, who is a clinical social worker, says it’s just about a bunch of guys comparing the size of their rockets,” says Boy—who, it must be noted, brought one of the largest, the 16.5-foot, 180-pound O’ Boy.

The banquet is a chance for the rocketeers to let their hair down, have a few drinks, talk shop. Underneath the bonhomie, it’s clear that distinct groups are mingling. There are the guys like Boyette who build meticulous replicas of real-life rockets. Then there are the guys who like to build outlandish, bulky, un-aerodynamic rockets. A few examples this year: a flying-saucer-shaped rocket, a rocketized industrial spool, and a series of rockets meant to launch bowling balls into space. (Admittedly, none of the conceptual rockets is creating the stir that Ky Michaelson, of Go Fast fame, did when he sent up Our Stinkin’ Rocket, an honest-to-god port-a-potty, at LDRS 22.)

This variety of rocketeer is having fun with the relatively low FAA-imposed East Coast altitude ceiling while getting in touch with the machine-shop artist within, an impulse familiar to anyone who watches American Chopper or Monster Garage. At the banquet, I chat with Rich Kroboth, a computer programmer from New Jersey who was in a valedictory mood after his bowling ball, ingeniously perched atop a single fin, turned in a solid, if not quite record-breaking, performance. “It took three months to build,” he says. “I owe my wife a lot.”

The third kind of rocketeer is the sort of person who might be seen around the launch grounds wearing a button that reads “Yes, I am a rocket scientist!” These are the guys, usually drawn from the technical professions, who get off on tinkering with propellant chemistry. Some are bona fide aeronautical engineers on busman’s holiday, others just fanatics drawn to high-wire chemistry projects. Representative of this group are Alan Whitmore, an immunologist, and his co-conspirator Jim Livingston, a retired medical-products manufacturing executive. The two North Carolina rocketeers make an intriguing odd couple, Livingston the avid golfer with a country-club loosey-goosiness about him, Whitmore, techno-nerd author of the self-published paper “Performance Evaluation of Experimental Rocket Propellant.” The two joined forces after discovering that Whitmore was building a breathtakingly large motor and that Livingston had a rocket wide enough for it. This is the biggest motor either of them has ever flown, and they are feeling heady and slightly apprehensive. “I’m not just risking my motor but also wrecking Jim’s rocket,” Whitmore says. “And you don’t like to mess up your friend’s rocket.”

Another pair of experimentalists I run into are Dave Weber and Bob Utley, buddies from the Maryland chapter of Tripoli, the national association of high-powered rocketry. These guys aren’t sweating it. Each is flying a motor of a size they’ve flown scores of times before. Weber, a civil engineer, has been into rockets since he was a kid in the ’60s. “I saw a model-rockets advertisement in Boy's Life magazine,” he recalls, “and I fell in love.” The rocketry career of Utley, a computer technician, follows a more typical trajectory. He dabbled as a boy, then “got back into it when my kid was 11 and expressed an interest,” he says. “Like with just about every â€born-again’ rocketeer I know, my kid dropped it and I stayed with it.” Both Weber’s and Utley’s rockets will be powered by a batch of propellant that the two whipped up together. The only wild card: Cooking rocket propellant is not unlike baking cookies—no two batches come out exactly the same.

Until the late ’80s, the size of model rockets was limited by the standard propellant—black powder, better known as gunpowder. Brittle and highly flammable, the stuff is cumbersome and dangerous to fabricate into large motors; manufacturers never considered it worth the trouble. That restraint went out the window when a handful of engineer-tinkerers figured out how to fly model rockets with the same solid composite fuel that NASA uses in its boosters. Solid propellant is a two-part proposition: oxidant and fuel. Ammonium perchlorate, the oxidant, releases oxygen when ignited, which feeds the burn of the synthetic rubber, a hydrocarbon fuel that’s enhanced with finely ground, highly combustible aluminum particles. The brew is three times as powerful, gram for gram, as black powder, and far safer.