The pickup with “Official Rocket Recovery Vehicle” on its side bounced across the rutted dry lake bed kicking up silt. Andy Tryon glanced over his shoulder at his baby cradled in back. In a few minutes, his crew would gently place the Desert Hawk on the launch pad and arm it with an igniter.
Showtime and Tryon was nervous.
The rocket represented three months of labor. He needed to solve the engineering flaw that doomed the Desert Hawk’s three previous launches. The camouflage paint job alone took two weeks. On the rocket’s fins were inspirational quotes from the Bible, Shakespeare, the heavy metal band Molly Hatchet and the theme song from the television show “Star Trek: Enterprise.”
“There’s a heck of a lot of trial and error in this hobby,” said Tryon, a 41-year-old from Victorville, Calif., who drives a forklift for Wal-Mart. “We refer to it as the bug. Either it bites you or it doesn’t. But when it bites, it bites in a big way. Did for me.”
Tryon’s goal is to make a name for himself in the competitive world of model rocketry. If that conjures up images of a junior high science fair, think again.
The Desert Hawk is 10 feet tall and weighs 126 pounds. Launching it required high-altitude clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration. It’s fueled by a mixture of ammonium perchlorate and synthetic rubber; known as APCP, it’s essentially what powers the space shuttle.
What was once a simple boyhood hobby spawned by the Cold War’s space race has transformed into extreme rocketry, a subculture dominated by middle-age men.
“The final result of all the work is that you light a motor and there’s a big old bunch of noise, smoke and flames,” said Richard “Wedge” Oldham, who lives in the San Fernando Valley and builds replicas of vintage Cold War missiles. “That appeals to guys.”
ATF calling
It also got the attention of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In recent years, the bureau has tightened regulations on the purchase and storage of APCP, which it classifies as an explosive. Even small amounts of APCP can require a federal permit and a background check.
Heightened scrutiny since Sept. 11, 2001, threatens to affix training wheels to the hobby, said Ken Good, president of the Tripoli Rocketry Association, which along with another group has been locked in an eight-year court battle with the agency.
“What’s going to happen when an 18-year-old tells his parents, ‘I’ve got a new hobby, but I’ve got to get a low explosive user’s permit and, oh, by the way, the ATF is going to inspect our house to make sure it’s being stored properly,'” Good said. “The kid’s parents are going to say: ‘Gee, can you find another hobby?'”
Or as Oldham put it, “The ATF is worried that someone could use these things as a weapon. We’re lucky if we can hit the sky.”
Oldham, a wiry 50-year-old with steel blue eyes and a habit for Marlboro Reds, is well known among extreme rocketeers. (“Wedge is somebody I’d aspire to,” Tryon said.) He is among fewer than 100 rocket builders who tackle projects big enough to warrant attention at international events such as the annual Large and Dangerous Rocket Ships convention and the revealingly named BALLS launch in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
He also was among scores of rocketeers who gathered in November at the federally managed Lucerne Dry Lake east of Victorville for the biannual ROCstock, an event sponsored by the Rocketry Organization of California.
As Tryon readied the Desert Hawk for launch, Oldham drew a crowd simply by displaying a motor he used recently to propel a 700-pound model of a Nike Ajax missile — without a warhead, of course — to a height of 14,740 feet in 30 seconds.
‘Totally enthralled’
Oldham stumbled onto extreme rocketry like many of his peers did — in middle age when he introduced his childhood hobby to his teen son.
“As a kid in the early ’60s, when the U.S. got into the space race, I was totally enthralled,” he said. “Eventually the Navy and girls got in the way.” Unbeknownst to Oldham, model rocketry had super-sized in the intervening years. It was no longer just a kid’s game. His son grew bored with rockets. Oldham grew more intense.
“I wake up thinking about rockets and I go to bed thinking about rockets,” said Oldham, a software engineer who keeps three framed photos of his most beloved projects on an office shelf where others might have family pictures. “It’s not a hobby. It’s a passion and obsession.”
It’s Tryon’s obsession, too, and on this day he launched his Desert Hawk, pressing a button that sent an electrical charge to the Desert Hawk and ignited its fuel. Thick black smoke spewed from the rocket’s tail. It lurched from the desert floor and roared into the atmosphere
“Go, baby, go!” Tryon said.
– – –
Want a missile?
Get a mortgage
Richard “Wedge” Oldham’s Nike Ajax missile cost him $10,000- $8,000 from a refinancing of his home. His next project, a 45-foot-long replica of a Nike Hercules, will cost twice as much. “It’ll go supersonic. About Mach 1.1,” Oldham said. ‘I don’t know where the money is going to come from. I just know I’m going to build it.”
