"That's Fat Bastard," says Fortune, motioning to a set of two aluminum fins.
"Fat Bastard, yeah," Colburn agrees.
"This one was, uh ..."
"Something Wicked."
"Something Wicked," Fortune agrees.
These are the names of rockets, built by Colburn and his team as part of an 8-year-old project to launch an unmanned, privately financed rocket 62 miles into the air -- that is, into international space. Something Wicked exploded in the clouds over the Mojave Desert; Fat Bastard clipped a fin and slammed into the ground. Others have blown up at 3,300 feet because of a bad rivet, or burned down like a Marlboro on the launch pad after a sudden wind gust knocked a hose loose. In a few cases the fins were recovered from the wreckage, then drilled to the beam: headstones. "There is something sad about a failed rocket," Colburn says. "Goddard" -- Robert Goddard, one of the fathers of rocketry -- "buried all of his. Isn't that something? I always thought that was a subconscious thing, you know?"
Colburn's SORAC (Sub-Orbital Rocket, Amateur Class) project is maybe two years from its target of 62 miles, an altitude that Army rockets first attained nearly 60 years ago. Its nine launches to date have only been tests, and none of its rockets has flown higher than four miles. (No amateur rockets have climbed above 50 miles.) The price tag thus far has been about $300,000, some of it covered by sponsors. Why is Colburn doing it? "Why did Lindbergh cross the Atlantic?" he says.
But there's more, and less, to it than that. The project was born as HIJUMP in 1956, a year before the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik into Earth's orbit, leaving a paranoid United States to scramble for a response. Colburn, then 20 years old, had wanted to send a satellite the size of a soup can into orbit. When proposed, the project was transcendently ambitious; after Sputnik, the U.S. pursued a highly funded program of scientific and military aerospace research, culminating in the moon landing. America's first satellite wasn't going to be a 20-year-old's metal can. The idea was eventually shelved.
But in the 1990s, with the post-Challenger space program in a cul-de-sac, Colburn resurrected HIJUMP as a private project, giving it a new name and a more modest goal. It's perhaps the final expression of Colburn's well-preserved obsession with rockets. Before he was 10, Colburn invented one of two propellants now widely used in amateur rocketry. In the 1950s, he launched ramjets in Libya while eavesdropping on the Soviets for the Air Force. A decade later, he was one of the thousands of earnest aerospace engineers in black-rimmed glasses and white short-sleeved dress shirts helping NASA put men on the moon. He looked forward to lunar colonies, even Mars exploration.
These days, he's sending 20-foot cylinders a few miles into the desert air -- toward the bottom fringe of space -- and picking the snapped-off fins out of the dirt, a 67-year-old trying to realize what may just be a teenager's pipe dream.
Colburn and the SORAC team work out of a messy rented laboratory in the hangar. Various pieces of busted rockets sprout from every corner of the room -- a nose cone, a blue canister no bigger than a wastebasket, a scorched rocket stage. Along one shelf, there's a cluster of old museum pieces -- rocket motors, nozzles, igniters -- culled mostly from scrap yards and collectors. At Colburn's desk in the corner, a computer sits next to a $50 toy microscope and a stack of science-fiction paperbacks. "That place looks exactly like my mind," Colburn says. "I'm thinking about 25 different projects at one time." (One of those is a six-month job for NASA, developing a gel propellant for satellites that's safer than what's currently in use.)
When Colburn talks, he fiddles with screws, washers, syringes, whatever's lying on the table in front of him. He's quick with an old anecdote, often told to emphasize how much things have changed and often punctuated, appropriately, with, "My heavens!" As a boy, he'll point out, he'd play with drops of mercury as if they were marbles, and he'd mold like clay the wet asbestos his stepfather, a welder's assistant, would bring home from work. Later, during Air Force training, he was apparently exposed to mustard gas, tear gas, nerve gas, and so on. "And I'm 67," he says. "Oh, my heavens!"
A serious rocketeer needs an even mix of pragmatism (for the science) and whimsy (for the ideas); he should be someone who can build a castle in the sky, then show you the blueprint. It's no wonder, then, that the cradle of American rocketry is also the altar of UFO believers: Roswell, N.M. And it's not at all out of character for Colburn to have had careers as an aerospace engineer, itinerant magician, and special-effects producer. "It's a right-brain, left-brain thing," Colburn says.
Conceived during an aurora borealis and born in Hollister the week Goddard was testing a 13-foot-long rocket in Roswell, Colburn grew up on Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. He'd read science fiction, sometimes going through two books a day. And when an uncle pulled a quarter out of his ear, he took up magic, too. At the same time, he formed the Tracer Club with some friends in Hollister, and a few years later organized the Rocket Missile Research Society in Watsonville. The latter group stayed together, albeit loosely, for 20 years. The RMRS boys met after school and on the weekend, testing their homemade rockets at the beach, or sometimes in their yards. They'd find materials in junkyards or pinball machines; they'd fire dummy bazooka shells taken from Fort Ord, on the coast near Monterey. "Bill was very intelligent, very methodical about the work he was doing," recalls Herb Praskey, a former RMRS member. "He documented everything."
Colburn's mother was an Okie who buried her accent and taught her son to fold his bills lengthwise before tucking them into his wallet, so he'd look twice as rich. His father was American Legion, VFW, an Elk. Colburn tinkered with his Gilbert chemistry set, and around 1945 he discovered a new propellant that mixed potassium nitrate and sugar. It was a safer fuel, one that didn't ignite via percussion or friction. Later, he and his friends headed for an old, dried-out manure pile near the San Benito River bed, stuck a launch rod in it, and lofted a 10-inch potassium nitrate/sugar-fueled rocket, probably the world's first, about 1,000 feet into the air. "In those days, chemistry sets really worked," Colburn says. "Now they give you colored liquids, you mix them, and you get a third colored liquid." Amateur rocketeers still use the propellant today.
Colburn would build his rockets in a shed behind a Presbyterian church in Hollister, with the pastor's blessing, and the two of them would talk God and science fiction. To make flying saucers, Colburn would pinch a jar lid onto a tin ashtray filled with propellant, then light a pile of propellant underneath the ashtray -- and off would skip his saucer, the exhaust leaving scroll-like marks on the ground. Years later, he wrote a history of the RMRS and noted: "The group would often sit and discuss not just rocketry but the Occult, Astronomy, Robotics, and the Bible. We did read the Bible as an Historical Document and in our group decided that it recorded some events which were astounding to the viewers, but technological in cause. In 1952 it was our groups' [sic] conclusion that an advanced technology was present on the earth in ancient biblical times." In high school, Colburn came up with a motto for the Research Society: Et Ita ad Lunam. Roughly, "the way to the moon." Or, as his Latin teacher pointed out, "the path to madness."
Amateur rocketeers like Colburn -- their rockets are built from scratch, unlike those of model and high-power rocket-builders -- played a big role in the early days of the U.S. space program. Goddard, for instance, developed his rockets in relative isolation; despite his occasional work for the U.S. Navy, he is a sort of patron saint for amateur rocketeers. And in Germany, Wernher von Braun's amateur group would invite the public to its launches and pass the hat during the show, says John Wickman, an amateur rocketeer and propulsion expert in Wyoming. Von Braun went on to develop the V-2 rocket for the Nazis, and later the Saturn V launch vehicle for NASA. "Everything in rocket propulsion in the '50s and '60s came out of amateur rockets," Colburn says. "Everything. Everybody had been taught by an amateur rocketeer or had been involved in amateur rocketry."
The creation in 1963 of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a professional society for aerospace engineers and scientists, suggested the value of amateurs in aerospace: It was a merger of the Institute of Aerospace Sciences (professionals) and the American Rocket Society (amateurs). The dreamers were on the inside. (Today, "most of the action is on the amateur side," Wickman claims. The mandate, for amateurs, is cheaper, smaller, and safer -- especially now, after the disintegration of the Columbia and the immolation of its crew.)
In the decade after he graduated from high school -- he never went to college -- Colburn made the move from the amateur ranks to the pros (with a stop along the way to do card tricks and stab swords in a basket.)
He enlisted in the Air Force in 1954, and a year later he was stationed at Wheelus Air Force Base in Tripoli, Libya. There, he says, he monitored Soviet communications, launched rockets in the desert in front of startled Bedouins, and spotted, over several consecutive nights, the distant lights of a flying object that neither he, nor the radar, nor the Russians could identify. (He still wonders about that.) In 1957, Colburn moved to the National Security Agency, the communications-monitoring agency that until recent decades was so secret the government refused to acknowledge it. At the NSA, he analyzed Soviet space launches, trying to assess the country's technical capabilities and intentions. (He also peeked at the agency's files on UFOs: nothing.) Colburn soon quit, he says, because he feared he might reveal too much in his global correspondence with amateur rocketeers.
For an eight-month stretch in the early '60s, Colburn lived in Knoxville, Tenn., and worked as a traveling magician. The University of Tennessee campus served as his home base -- "I was sort of the court jester" -- while he'd drive around the state for magic shows, picking up a phone book at each stop to look for local magicians who might give him tips. He honed his tricks in a pizza joint and sent half the paycheck from his shows back home to his wife and kids in South Carolina.
Finally, in the mid-'60s, he landed a job as a staff engineer at a NASA subcontractor, General Precision Inc., in Sunnyvale. Colburn helped design five mission-critical systems for Apollo, including a cartridge that blew off the forward heat shield (uncovering the docking ring and parachutes) and a destruct mechanism that would dump the propellant if more than one engine failed. He threw himself into his work during the Apollo missions. He kept odd hours. He wore fake glasses to fit in, according to his daughter Toni Standard. Sometimes, Colburn says, complete blueprints would flash in his head while he slept or showered. Et Ita ad Lunam.
By the early '70s, Apollo -- as well as NASA budgets and prestige -- had begun to peter out. Colburn left for a job in special effects. "I was disillusioned that they didn't proceed with a moon colony or Mars [exploration]," he says. "They did, robotically, but there's nothing romantic about a robot."
A SORAC launch -- in either the Mojave or Black Rock deserts -- generally falls on a Sunday, a good day to lob Hail Marys at the heavens. The flight itself is really just a punch line, though: After months of work, after days of camping out in the desert to set up the launch, the rocket arcs out of sight in 30 seconds, plows into the sand five minutes later, and returns to Hollister in a bunch of garbage bags. And back at the hangar, maybe another fin gets bolted to the beam.
The flights are brief and often unsuccessful, but there's still a thrill to them. Colburn directs the launches from a concrete hut about 75 feet from the rocket; he can only see about 20 feet of the rocket's climb. The 30 or so spectators -- a dozen of them group members and the rest just rubberneckers -- watch from a covered trench behind a concrete wall, 250 feet away. Colburn throws a few switches, presses a couple of buttons, and a bright orange glow appears beneath the rocket, a dot on an exclamation point. "It's like, 'Holy shit!'" Bob Fortune says. "The ground thunders, things shake, everybody ducks. It's amazing. Truly amazing."
On a recent hot weekday in Hollister, under the lazy ceiling fans of the Ding-A-Ling Cafe -- where a sign reads "Flying is the 2nd greatest thrill to man. Landing is the 1st" -- Colburn and Fortune tick off the fates of SORAC's nine launches. They sometimes let out brief, embarrassed chuckles, as if they were explaining a black eye.
SORAC Jr. (some of the rockets were named before the flight; some after; some not at all): The deployment charge fires clear through the bulkhead, and the rocket crashes. "Looked like an accordion," Colburn says.
Fat Bastard: A fin clips a launch-tower guide wire. The rocket traces the shape of a horseshoe and smashes up 1,000 feet away.
Something Wicked: The flight computer fritzes and ejects the parachute with the rocket going Mach 1.4. "Disintegrated," Colburn says.
4 Inch: The flight computer balks. The rocket "lawn darted," Fortune says.
Bobcat 2000: The rocket motor explodes at 2,000 feet. "We call that 'energetic disassembly,'" Colburn says, though the euphemism "doesn't make it feel any better."
Towering Inferno: "Absolutely the worst," says Colburn, who still hasn't watched the video of the launch. A strong gust shakes loose the oxidizer vent hose. The hose catches fire, the fins catch fire, and 20 minutes later SORAC No. 6 is $15,000 of kindling.
Fin Test: The computer balks again.
Napoleon Blownapart: Gas slips past a leaky rivet into the oxidizer tank. "Blew both ends out," Colburn says, at 3,300 feet. A small section continues the rocket's arc.
March 2002: Gas slips past the welding into the oxidizer tank. "Looked like an exploding cigar," Fortune says with a laugh.
In 1992, Colburn began work on a short history of the group he and his friends founded, the Rocket Missile Research Society. The book's title, Ardent Youth, is a phrase he attributes to Howard Seifert, a president of the American Rocket Society (the most successful of amateur experimental groups) and the father of Colburn's third wife. Seifert, in fact, gets the first word, in a quote on the title page: "The French have a proverb, 'If the young only knew, if the old only could!' which might well be applied to a challenge now facing the American Rocket Society. The challenge lies in the proper inspiration and guidance of the many teenagers interested in space and rockets."
Part memoir, part manual, part science fiction, part lament, the book is all exclamation points, digressions, safety notes, drawings, graphs, diagrams, letters, and handwritten equations. On the first page, Colburn describes a rocket launch, then writes: "The dull-eyed and leaden-souled I suppose are watching television programs, washing Motor Homes, or drinking beer at an afternoon's barbecue. Not bad things to be doing, but part of a stultified, unknowing, and ignorant state of being. What does this have to do with a History of an Amateur Rocket Group? Only this ... our Nation is suffering terribly from a technological blight." Ardent Youth sold 200 copies, mostly to other amateur rocketeers.
Still, the book served a personal purpose. It was part of Colburn's re-immersion in rocketry, as well as a response to the death of a boyhood friend and fellow rocketeer, Dirk Thysse. After a long hiatus from aerospace, which began at the Apollo mission's conclusion, Colburn wanted to "catch up," he says. Until the early 1990s, he had worked in live-action special effects. His last project was a job for Disney, on the "haunted" Queen Mary -- ghosts, swaying chandeliers, shifting deck chairs. ("You put magic and aerospace technology together," he says, "you get special effects.") But he found himself drifting back toward rocketry, something he can't entirely explain.
Within a few years, Colburn was resurrecting HIJUMP, partly as a contender for the CATS (Cheap Access to Space) Prize, which offered $250,000 to the first private team to launch a rocket some 124 miles into the air. One early SORAC sponsor was John Carmack, co-founder of id Software (of the Doom and Quake computer games). The team never got an entry off the ground. No one claimed the prize, and these days even 62 miles is a long shot. "Nobody's close," Colburn says, "including us." Says Fortune, who runs a painting company in San Jose and who took over a rocket-parts business from Colburn: "It's like the Holy Grail. Oh, man. We can't even duplicate the Nazi technology of the late '30s and '40s."
SORAC No. 10 -- made, like the others, of aluminum and composite materials -- will probably launch in the fall. The rocket, which sits in a heap in Colburn's lab, will be 27 feet long, and the parachute will burst out of the side, rather than the nose. The flight will also test a new computer and altimeter. SORAC hasn't climbed above four miles, but Colburn still thinks the project is two years from space. (When it happens, he says, he'd like to take the crew to Roswell.) And after that? "Once we get a few space shots under our belt, we'd go orbital," he says. "I'm not even thinking about that right now."
Colburn doesn't like to talk about any hopes beyond SORAC -- the project's motto is "baby steps into space," which lacks the swagger of Et Ita ad Lunam -- but they're clearly on his mind. "I don't want to do an orbital," he says another day, amending his goal. "I would actually like to create a vehicle that could do a lunar orbit." It sounds almost absurd -- a 67-year-old whose rocket hasn't flown above four miles wants the moon. But the space program was built on the backs of people with dreams too big for their means; Goddard was ridiculed for suggesting in 1920 that a rocket could reach the moon. And that's how it happens: The dreamers aim for the moon, can't get past the clouds, but along the way develop, say, a safer propellant, or a different kind of motor, or a better fin, which someday makes its way into a NASA design. Et Ita ad Astra. Baby steps to the stars.
Hollister (population 35,000) is, in some respects, the ideal place for a 67-year-old to live out adolescent dreams from the 1950s. The first thing to greet a driver arcing into town on Highway 25 is a blown-up cutout of James Dean. Johnny's Bar & Grill, along Hollister's main strip, features by its door a large sketch of Marlon Brando. (A notorious 1947 bike rally in Hollister provided the inspiration for The Wild One; even today, a sign in town advertises a "Harleys & Hot Rods Show & Shine" on the last Wednesday of the month.) Vintage cars prowl the streets here, and a Mustang fighter plane pokes its nose out of an airport hangar.
A 20-minute drive through Hollister in a maroon station wagon with Colburn and his girlfriend, Suzanne Kellogg, includes a few shaggy dog stories, several That used to bes, two My heavens!, one run stop sign, a boyhood home outside of which a pair of Hispanic men appear to be shutting off the water, and a general complaint that civilization is sliding backward.
Colburn points out a eucalyptus stand in the hills at the edge of town. "That was an old Gypsy camp," he says. "This guy was the king of the Gypsies in our area, and his wife was a real harridan. I don't know what he had done, but one day he walks out the back door of his place and puts a chair in the middle of the yard and sits down and smokes a cigarette. His wife comes to the back door, throws it open, and says" -- Colburn screws up his face to get the accent right -- ""You feelthy sonofabeech, your eyes a-gonna rot outta yer head.'" He lets out a wheezy laugh. "I think they're still there," he says of the Gypsies. "But they're in the used-car business now."
"I used to hang out with a boy my age called Harry Blohm," Colburn goes on later, nearing a park, another Wild One landmark. "He was a banker's son. And several years later, I happened to be passing through town, and I looked him up in the phone book. I hadn't seen him in maybe 20 years. I say, 'Harry, this is Bill Colburn.' He says, 'Yes.' I say, 'Bill Colburn, you know, from the fourth grade, fifth grade.' He says, 'Yes.' I say, 'Well, how have you been?' He says, 'Fine.'
"He turned out to be a banker, too," Colburn says, laughing. "Oh, my heavens!"
Colburn swings the car past a steep dry-grass hill. "Before I was born," he says, "it was just a make-out spot, and that's where I was conceived. There used to be a junkyard over on the other side of this hill, and I used to go try to find parts to make into rockets." Next to the hill is a small cemetery, where his father and uncle are buried.
Colburn stops only once to point out anything in detail. Just before a short bridge, he eases the station wagon off the highway. He gestures at what looks like nothing more than a bank of weeds. This is where he launched his first potassium nitrate/sugar rocket, nearly 60 years ago. "The settling pond is down there," he says, motioning to a boxy pool of blue sewage on a flood plain. There's supposed to be a creek somewhere around here, too. Colburn points past the weeds. "That building there -- that sort of unfinished building ..." He's looking at a wooden derelict. "It'd be ironic if I rented that and fixed it up," he says. The structure was meant to be a hay barn, he explains, but was never really used. Now it's an eyesore, a tall, worn-out building teetering on oblivion and crumbling into the weeds, probably unfixable.
"I've always thought," he says, pulling back onto the road, "that it would make a great rocket lab."
