The Biggest Bang

The experimental days begin with a whimper. Both the Whitmore-Livingston and Weber-Utley teams have expected to launch Monday, but the wind whips up, and the rest of the day is scrapped. Tuesday dawns cloudy, but as the morning progresses, a blue hole opens that you could shoot a fleet of rockets through. “Morning, LDRS 23, this is Dave Weber,” comes the impromptu announcer’s voice over the PA. “This will be the eighth flight of a rocket called Super Tuber. Motor manufactured by Bozo Motorworks out of the Maryland-Delaware Rocketry Association. We expect 3,600 feet. The range is clear, the sky is clear, and launching in five, four, three, two, one . . .”

The rocket gods are not happy. Super Tuber lifts about a foot off the pad and pauses. “As soon as you see that hesitation,” Weber says, “you know something bad is going to happen.” It’s a CATO, all right. The motor’s combustion chamber can’t contain the pressure, and Roman-candle flames pour from the bulkhead and the nozzle, sending Weber and launch organizers sprinting to the scene with buckets of water to douse the charred remains.

Weber’s pal Utley now finds himself between a rocket and a hard place. He’s got a slim new craft on the pad, modeled from a news photograph of a Russian SAM missile captured in the Iraq war. Utley’s rocket is packed with propellant from the same batch that went into the ill-fated Super Tuber. If Super Tuber’s problem was mechanical, something to do with improperly fastened snap rings, say, then Utley’s craft should soar. But if the propellant was at fault—if, for instance, bubbles formed in the curing process, a common misstep that increases surface area and speeds up the burn—then for Utley, launching is tantamount to rocket suicide.

“I could have taken the motor and [test]-fired it,” he tells me. “But I can’t do that to my buddy. He lost his rocket, so I had to push the button on mine.” The explosion—“deflagration” is the preferred term of art—when it comes, is fabulous. Utley, big, relaxed guy that he is, merely says, “I pretty much knew what was going to happen.” It turns out that the top half of his rocket is salvageable, so he’ll rebuild it with the burn marks intact, a badge of honor.

Whitmore and Livingston’s launch has a bittersweet tinge, for a fundamental reason: Whitmore isn’t here. Two days
earlier, his wife, Sallie, was taken to the hospital for emergency abdominal surgery, and he has rushed back to Chapel Hill to be with her. The N motor is mothballed, and Livingston installs his own M motor, held in reserve, in the Viper. With the drama uncomfortably prolonged, he’s feeling antsy. One way or another, let it be done. The countdown goes without a hitch, and the liftoff is textbook—the motor roar, the piercing straight shot. There’s a moment of suspense when a slightly malfunctioning parachute threatens to land the Viper in the middle of a nearby field of classic WWII planes, but through sheer luck, disaster is averted.

LDRS 23 concludes soon afterward, and for most rocketeers it’s time to start plotting next year’s event. But for Livingston and Whitmore, there’s one more chapter. Once Sallie Whitmore has recovered and the Viper has been touched up, the two decide to send their mighty N motor up once and for all. Rockets, Whitmore tells me over the phone, were the last thing on his mind during his wife’s illness. “But by August, I started to get my head around my hobby,” he says. The Whitmore intensity was returning. I remember something he told me when we first met: “Rocketry contains four essential elements of little-boy fun: smoke and fire, loud noise, speed and flight. You wish you could go along every time the rocket goes up.”

And so on a mild, sunny afternoon last October, he and Livingston launched their rocket from their home field off the North Carolina coast. “It was special to put it up together,” Livingston says. “An altitude of 5,825 feet, 478 miles per hour.” The moment, Whitmore says, “was everything we wanted. A terrific noise.”