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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 We did read the Bible as an Historical Document and in our group decided that it recorded some events which were astounding to the viewers, but technological in cause.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.
