Riding Rockets

Above Albuquerque the stars and planets blazed with a clarity I had never seen before. They seemed soaccessible. With the help of a small Sears telescope and my imagination I traveled this sky on a nightly basis. I would stare at the crescent of Venus and the red circle of Mars and count the brightest moons of Jupiter. The thrill of those observations was no less than what Galileo must certainly have experienced. When a wire-thin sketch of moon was part of the fresco, I would train my telescope on it and imagine I was walking its deeply shadowed craters and mountains. When meteor showers were predicted I would drag a sleeping bag into the desert and lie awake to watch their flashes of fire and pray that one would miraculously land nearby.

But another night sight was soon to thrill me even more.

Chapter 4

Sputnik

On the morning of October 4, 1957, I entered my dad’s bedroom to say good-bye before departing for school. As usual he was drinking coffee, smoking his pipe, and reading the paper. This morning, however, he was purple with rage. “The goddamn Reds have put some type of moon around the earth. Balls! What the hell is Eisenhower doing? What if there’s an H-bomb on the damn thing?”

I picked up the paper and read about the orbiting Sputnik and how the Russians were saying it was just the beginning of their space program. They were working to put men into space. There were interviews with American scientists who predicted our nation would do the same. A smaller sidebar explained that Sputnik would be visible as a moving dot of light over Albuquerque just after sunset.

That evening I stood with the rest of the city population in the cold October twilight to watch the new Russian moon twinkle overhead. My dad watched from his wheelchair, cursing Eisenhower for being asleep at the switch. I was struck dumb by the spectacle. The paper had said the object would be moving at 17,000 miles per hour, 150 miles in the sky. I was mesmerized by the thought of traveling at such speeds and altitudes. The newspaper had said men would someday do it. The science fiction movies of my youth had long depicted manned spaceships flying to distant planets. Now Sputnik proved that was really going to happen. There would be spaceships! I couldn’t imagine a more exciting adventure and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to fly in space.

Within weeks I was launching my own rockets in the New Mexico desert. These were not the cardboard and balsa-wood rockets seen in today’s hobby stores. Those didn’t exist in my youth. My rockets were multistage steel-tubed devices, five feet in length with welded steel fins, and filled with wicked home-brewed propellants. Basically, my rockets were pipe bombs. How I survived this period of my life, I have no idea. I was a preteen boy mixing rocket fuel in glass jars and tamping it into steel tubes. You couldn’t get closer to mayhem and death than that.

I searched for any source of steel tubing. An early find was the extension piece of my mom’s vacuum cleaner. Its stainless-steel gleam and lightweight construction hadrocket written all over it. “It’s perfect, Mom!” I cried. Without hesitation she handed it over. She and my dad were oblivious to the dangers of my experiments. In response to the new celestial Red menace, school-sponsored rocket clubs were organized to get kids interested in science and engineering and the formula for rocket fuel was passed out like raffle tickets. If the school was involved, then it must be safe, was my parents’ erroneous thinking.

Not only did my mom give up her vacuum extension (and henceforth had to vacuum like a scoliosis victim), she also let me use her iron to heat plastic to form parachutes for my capsule payloads of ants and lizards. That work destroyed her iron. She let me use her oven to bake recipes of foul-smelling, fertilizer-based rocket fuel. My dad’s extensive tools were at my disposal, as was his time. He would drive me to machine shops to have nozzles turned on lathes, and to chemical supply companies to purchase rocket fuel ingredients. He would drive me and my bombs into the desert. There he would rise onto his braces and crutches and hold a Super-8 movie camera on the action. I would set up the rocket and lay wire to the car battery. Dad would offer an irreverent prayer that the rocket would land on Khrushchev’s head, then he would recite a short countdown. At zero I would touch the wires to the battery and hope for the best. Sometimes that best was a perfect streak of smoke leading a thousand feet into the azure blue. A white puff would mark the firing of the parachute extraction rocket and we would be treated to the glorious sight of my Maxwell House coffee can capsule descending on a parachute of dry-cleaning plastic and kite string.