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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."
