Big Bertha =or= Yes, I am a rocket scientist

The neighborhood was built on some rotting dinosaurs, and it smelled that way. The machines, the big yellow machines they used to unearth the earth, strip the trees and unleash the gases of million year old putrefying dinosaur made the suburban outpost hum. There were empty fields, evocative of a desert. It was the northeast. The houses were one story, like the same desert, sometimes called "ranch houses" by whomever would try to sell them or sell them to themselves. The water company was artesia. All imagination, all indicators were that this was a little desert enclave in the swampy forested midatlantic. It was literally a cultural desert.

Mose and Otard were friends. Old friends. They lived in houses on opposite ends of an expansive empty and dry field which had given up the ghosts of those dead dinosaurs so long ago. In the afternoons the would get up to whatever skateboarding, soccer, or prank that was inspired that day. Somehow Otard had a whole cache of Estes brand model rocket engines, which he had previously overlooked as interesting. In the backyard there was a shed and a bicycle sally port that had a metal roof. Using magnesium fuse that had been acquired through Mose and his connections, Otard would light the small engines propped up on a rock or whatever and watch them careen off in to the hilly field, wildly changing course and propelling through the air like some kind of scrivened cursive. Man, he loved that.

There were also rockets. There were smaller rockets with model numbers that he had put together from kits, with fins to guide the projectile on a course set by a long steel rod and a loop on the side of the rocket which gave the projectile a good start. They went up, sometimes to the point where they could barely be made out with his eyesight, and then were supposed to discharge the cone with a small final expulsion. There were rumors that they had cameras that one could also set up to be fired with the parachute that was the payload in the cone of these rockets, taking a single photo from the peak of the trajectory. He did not have one of these cameras. Later he thought to fly a kite or a helium balloon made of mylar or something strong above his Harlem 6th floor apartment, with a wireless camera perpetually casting its view down to a receiver and potentially fed through a web page, but the romance of a view looking down from the sky had not struck him yet.

So the rockets went up and they came down, and then engines when fired alone would spell out some mystical divine message above the dry and very flammable tall grass. The fear that the rocket would settle on the ground with fuel enough to set the grasses alight made the excitement all the more profound. There were considerations to take the fuel out of the engines and somehow concatenate them into a larger engine, but the fuel was solid and they were aware that this project probably held unanticipated features that they did not have the resources to address. The bastards were fast though. Probably at least 100 miles per hour on a small rocket.

Big Bertha was a large pink rocket that sat in the corner of Otard's bedroom, a monument to the future. She stood 3' tall and pink, and had the diameter of a can of soda. Her guiding fins were thicker and stronger than the smaller rockets, and she had not the fitting for the Estes size engines. She was the future of rocketry. She was pink and unafraid. Her statuesque defiance of levity was an affectionate challenge. She had no parachute. She was a one-way rocket, and the only launch she deserved was the good one.

Mose had an uncle that worked for a company called Rocket Research. They probably made weather rockets or something, and in retrospect, this was probably the source of the magnesium fuse that burns so beautifully under water. This was tested in the blue plastic backyard kiddie pool. Fire under water was a James Bond scuba welding affair. Some serious business. Then it became a tool. Those electric ignitions with the equivolent of a match head on a thin wire were flaky, and one of the things that unnerves a rocket scientist is a flaky ignition system. The magnesium fuse, which burned evenly and very very very hot, was a sure-fire thing so long as the engine and the fuse were in reliably solid contact. They were also outside of the established Estes safe ignition protocol, and inherently advanced in that they were not accepted by the establishment.

One afternoon, Mose said that he had an engine for Bertha. For whatever reason, Otard dismissed this as bullshit, since there were no known retail engines and he did not have faith that Mose had stayed up all night working on a prototype engine of Bertha's caliber. The excitement that Mose probably expected, and did not receive, killed his own excitement. The engine did exist, but was ignored because of Otard's very unscientific presumptions.

Rocketry was put aside, since the small engines were expensive and neither of them had any regular source of income. Still, Big Bertha stood in the corner. She had black & white checkered collar below the nose cone, and the lovely washed out desert pink. Big Bertha was a one-way rocket.

The seasons changed and it was winter. Winter inhibited rocketry, as recovery was impeded by wet and cold. Foliage was thinner, and it should have been taken advantage of, but neither of the young rocketeers were into the idea. It was a video game season. Sure, snow was fun, but for the most part it was not a time for adventuring into the fields in search of a 1-2' long tube of cardboard.

Finally the early spring came, with all of its impish opportunity and Mose came over to Otard's house with the fabled Rocket Research engine. Otard was amazed. It was made of some sort of plastic, maybe pvc, and as big as he imagined a stick of dynamite to be. It had a different material for a nozzle, or the nozzle was fitted with a second, harder nozzle. It had model numbers that did not fit the Estes schema, and it was heavy. She didn't even fit into Bertha's motor mount. They had to devise a way to mount this engine, and it would require fitting a collar into the existing motor mount and adding the length of the engine to the base of the rocket. They looked at anything that was cylindrical and made of a material they could work with. Wrapping paper tubes (too small), PVC pipes (too difficult), tall beer cans (too messy, not strong enough), etc. Finally they found a poster tube that fit nearly perfectly, and with some taped wedging, the engine fit snugly into it and the fit they made by screwing the existing motor mount crossways suspended into the new engine mount kept the engine enough near to center. They worked on modeling this mount for the better part of a week.

Finally they were satisfied, or disenchanted with working on this part of the project and wanted to get to the launch. They considered that they better give this particular launch a wider berth. A Big Berth. They used a 4' length of magnesium fuse, improvised a launch rod with some dowling rod and she stood so beautifully on her launch that they took their time, savoring the potential and contending with the fear that this power may be more than they were equipped to handle. There was fear.

At 16:06:08 they lit the end of the fuse with a butane torch lighter, having established that it takes about 28secs per foot for the fuse to burn. The rocket began to ignite at 8 minutes after and took off with a roar they had not heard before. It made them cover their ears and the neighborhood echoed the blast. Clumps of dirt flew up and out to 7 or 8 feet and there was a great trail of acrid smoke. They watched for several seconds the rocket ascend, then turn slightly south and carry with the same velocity and exhaust that it had left the launch. Soon the rocket appeared to get so small, to become such a speck so far away that they wondered if it began its descent. The backdrop in the sky was a white and fluffy cumulus cloud and they could not see any indication that it had pierced this cloud, or any indication that it hadn't.

They never saw that rocket again. Suddenly, the attention from the neighbors, now curious what that blast was about made them overly aware of the significance this launch could have. They ran up to the launch spot, saw that there was a 2.5' wide crater 1.5' deep and tried to kick the missing dirt back into it. They knocked over the wooden rod, and then walked quickly back to Otard's house. Did that rocket just go into orbit? They would never know, but probably. Would the g-men come knocking? Maybe. The rocket days were over. They had no more engines, and Big Bertha was sent home.