Termination Shock

The Flying S Ranch Employees’ Model Rocketry Club held its meeting in the picnic area two hours after the conclusion of Bob and Saskia’s tour. It was unusually well attended, and so the event planners had erected aluminum bleachers and pitched more sun canopies. About fifty meters away, on open ground, a folding table had been set up, and beyond that was a row of five contraptions with whippy vertical rods sticking up out of them to various heights, none rising to more than about three meters above the ground. Threaded onto each rod, and resting atop the contraption that served as its base, was a miniature rocket. Three of these were tiny children’s toys. The last two were considerably larger. The biggest was maybe a hand span in diameter and twice the height of a man.

Yellow caution tape had been strung between orange cones to surround all this with a perimeter. A few children, presumably the offspring of Flying S staff, had been credentialed to step over—or, for younger rocket scientists, under—the tape. To judge from the nature of the paint jobs, these kids were the creators of the three smaller rockets. They were doing a creditable job of keeping extreme excitement under control. The two bigger rockets were being fussed over by adults.

Saskia had not expected such a range of ages, such small-town wholesomeness. It stood to reason that the ranch in general, and Pina2bo in particular, would have full-time staff, and that some of those would have families. Willem had shown her satellite imagery of the place. This had revealed clusters of mobile homes outside of the Pina2bo valley but within driving range. Some of the employees must commute for some distance. She’d been in Texas long enough to know that driving an hour or more was nothing to these people. So there was a sort of extended community here of—just guessing—maybe a thousand people all told? Spread thin over the vastness of the Chihuahuan Desert, they were held together by gravel roads and dusty pickup trucks and they came together for events like this one.

Inevitably T.R. came out to say a few words to the crowd on the bleachers over a PA system, which inevitably malfunctioned and obliged him to holler through cupped hands. Refreshments were being served to the crowd on the bleachers.

“Free earplugs for everyone!” was how T.R. began. He wasn’t kidding; ELog people were handing them out from salad bowls. “The Rocketry Club has been holding these events every month for almost two years—rain or shine!” The rain part was apparently a joke. Saskia was slow to get it but the Texans were suitably amused. “It is a very safety-conscious organization! Lou here is the range officer. He is going to cover some important technicalities about federal regulation of airspace. First, though, let’s launch some rockets!”

Lou, a cowboy-hatted engineer in his fifties, sheepishly came to the fore. The PA system had been dialed in and so he was able to speak into a microphone, which was fortunate since he lacked the stentorian YouTube-trained diction of T.R. “First, Jo Anne will launch an Estes Alpha,” he announced. His complete lack of awareness that no one in the crowd knew what that meant, and that some further explanation might be in order, confirmed his status in Saskia’s mind as some kind of inveterate geek—probably one of those people T.R. had poached from the Johnson Space Center. There was some mumbling and fumbling at the table as a girl of perhaps nine executed a procedure with some switches and wires. Lou held the mike in front of Jo Anne as she counted down in a thready but spirited voice from ten. Then the smallest of the rockets gave out a little hiss and leapt from its launch rod on a spurt of smoke. The engine burned for less than a second. The rocket, barely visible, coasted for a few seconds more, then separated into two pieces and deployed an orange parachute. “Congratulations, Jo Anne, on her first launch!” Lou intoned as applause died away and the Estes Alpha began drifting toward the ground. “We’ll retrieve that later. For now, the range remains closed!”