Page 4 of 5
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.
