Pyro Geek Hobbyists Experiment With Homebrew Rockets

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."

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