Search this Site

Selected Articles from the
January 2001 Odyssey

Editor: Terry Hancock

Reflections on a Desert Night

By Steve Bartlett

In mid-December, I found myself in the Mojave Desert, cold, tired, dirty, and sore. I'd been involved in testing a low-cost rocket project and things weren't going well: we were struggling with numerous design, manufacturing, and operations problems. Hardware wasn't working right, people were making mistakes, and tempers were getting short.

Our entire team was getting discouraged after working several ten-hour plus days in a row, struggling to keep warm in the morning and evening hours, getting saturated with kerosene, dealing with the daily dose of cuts and bruises, getting sandblasted by 40 mile-per-hour wind storms, and dealing with numerous hardware and software snafu's. We had a launch deadline looming before us and it looked doubtful that we were going to make it.

A lot of us were wondering if we'd bitten off more than we could chew and were paying the price for it. Salvage yards are littered with the remnants of numerous low-cost launch projects that never quite made it: Amroc, Truax, Kistler, and others ran into technical and financing problems. Beal Aerospace had just announced that it was shutting down operations, citing an uncertain investment environment and problems with government regulations and policies. The Kern County tax collector was ready to seize the assets of Rotary Rocket for failing to pay back taxes.

And even well funded programs weren't going that smoothly: the Lockheed-Martin X-33 rocket had numerous technical problems that were delaying their first flight until 2002 at the earliest. Sea Launch was having a mixed launch record at best. Communications providers Iridium and ICO Global, on whom many launch companies were basing their market projections, had both declared bankruptcy and Loral's Globalstar system wasn't doing all that well, either.

A number of us were asking what made us different from the rest of them. We wondered why we should succeed, with our very small crew and uncertain funding, when larger, better supported, and politically popular programs had failed?

Then I remembered those who'd passed before us: Goddard, who'd single-handedly developed the liquid propellant rocket and numerous technologies needed to put it to practical use; Von Braun and the V2 team, who showed that larger rockets could be made to work and could touch the edge of space; the Sputnik and Sputnik teams, who proved that putting something into orbit was even feasible.

Compared to them, our job was easy: cut the cost of space launch. They had the awesome task of proving that the idea of spaceflight was even possible.

I remembered all of the failures that they had faced: numerous explosions, loss of life, fires, destroyed launch pads, and the like. I also remembered all of the technologies that they had to develop from scratch. We were getting off scot-free compared to those obstacles.

So I put my work gloves back on in that cold December night, trudged back out to the pad, and started setting up for another test. Maybe this time we'd succeed and show our forebearers that we'd learned a thing or two from their experiences.

Selected Articles from the January 2001 Odyssey

Other Articles from this issue:

Reflections on a Desert Night

By Steve Bartlett

Selected Articles from the
January 2001 Odyssey