Amateur rocketeer pushes into space
For men of a certain age, perhaps no toy was more magical than
their first rocket; that futuristic vessel that carried them away
in flights of fancy from the realities of life and into the
beyond.
For men like Hollister native Bill Colburn, Buck Rogers didn’t
stop at the end of the funny pages. Colburn’s first rocket was an
apple crate with nails hammered into it to look like thrusters.
Amateur rocketeer pushes into space
For men of a certain age, perhaps no toy was more magical than their first rocket; that futuristic vessel that carried them away in flights of fancy from the realities of life and into the beyond.
For men like Hollister native Bill Colburn, Buck Rogers didn’t stop at the end of the funny pages. Colburn’s first rocket was an apple crate with nails hammered into it to look like thrusters.
For Colburn, the fascination began with the gift of a chemistry set. “Nothing like the cheap junk that they sell nowadays – where you mix yellow liquid with blue liquid to produce green liquid,” Colburn said. Sixty years ago chemistry sets came with real chemicals and the guides informed junior chemists that if you heat sugar, it separates into water and carbon and if you melt potassium nitrate it burns.
Some of Colburn’s first rockets were sugar and potassium nitrate fuel packed into empty 30-caliber shells.
Today, as a retired engineer and amateur rocket man he builds slightly larger models. The latest is 26-feet long with a diameter of eight inches.
“If I was a 10-year-old boy today, I would probably be in jail because this society is so restrictive, but back then my parents were very supportive in that they did not restrict my activities,” Colburn said.
In an age before the “Space Race,” Colburn started a rocket club in Hollister in 1946. He called the group the “Tracer Club” since there were three members and because the boys were all making rockets that looked like tracers – a type of bullet.
The Tracer Club later became the Rocket Motor Research Society and its membership grew, as did its projects. The last project the group worked on was Project High Jump, an amateur orbital vehicle and one that predated the likes of Sputnik. However, when Sputnik officially debuted it rather took the wind from the club’s sails.
By the time 1965 rolled around, the “Tracer Club” had disbanded, since most of the members now had wives and children. Still, during its tenure the club had launched more than 1,200 rockets.
From its humble beginnings the members of the Tracer Club went on to much larger aspirations. Colburn remembers that one member went on to Livermore Labs and then to work for Physics, Inc. Another went to work for IBM designing memory devices.
At 69 years old Colburn has the demeanor of a mad scientist. With full grizzled white beard and untucked shirt, he looks like he might be more suited mixing chemicals in a laboratory. He fulfilled his life dream at an early age when he graduated to work on the Apollo project for NASA.
For a man whose life has been filled with fantasies of space, specifically the moon, this was a dream come true.
“I wondered when you work on a moon project, where do you go from there?”
He started work on the Apollo Project in 1965 and worked on it through 1971.
“It was a wonderful time, the morale of the people working on the project was extremely high and everyone was very dedicated,” Colburn said. “At the engineering level, we often worked 60, 70, even 80 hours per week. We had techs that actually paid for their own hotel rooms when we had to stay overnight. We designed five mission critical components. If you were there and saw the effort that was put out, there’s no way anyone could think the moon landing was a hoax. There were 12,000 engineers working on the Apollo project, that’s more than the Manhattan Project.”
Colburn, who had also always been interested in magic and illusions, started another career after working on the Apollo Project, one that would take him away from rockets for a time. Though during his time away from the field he was still doing some work with rocket propulsion.
Even back when Colburn was still an engineer many a marketing person would often take him to a business meeting to entertain the clients before the salesman made his pitch.
For a time early in his life Colburn went on the road and traveled as a magician. While there, he made some friends that would later pull him in the direction of magic and illusions as a career. Sometime after his work at NASA some friends told him about an opportunity to produce his own stage shows, focused largely on special effects.
During his career as an illusionist he did work for Disney on the Queen Mary as well as a variety of other live action theatrical productions. He even invented a certain type of confetti cannon.
But Colburn was a rocket man and that interest does not fade easily. In 1992, Colburn started consulting again. He also became the president of the Reaction Research Society at that point. The RRS is one of the oldest continuous rocket societies in the world.
Colburn started his Sub Orbital Rocket, Amateur Class (SORAC) Project in 1995. SORAC was 30 feet long and had a diameter of 12 inches. It reached a maximum altitude of 27,000 feet. However, Colburn says that the rocket never went higher because they didn’t attempt the feat.
That rocket featured a 58-foot hydraulic launcher.
The HAH-203 is Colburn’s latest project. The rocket is 26 feet long and has a diameter of eight inches. It is hoped that the rocket will be able to reach a maximum altitude of 100,000 feet.
His laboratory now sits in a hangar facing the runway at the Hollister Municipal Airport. Here he is at home among his partially deconstructed rockets as well as pieces of other projects he’s concocted along the way. He points out various components that have either failed or gone out in a blaze of glory. One can almost smell the rocket fuel in the air, despite the fact that the chemicals are mixed and stored elsewhere.
He said that a South Korean company was actually interested in having Colburn and his team build rockets for them at one point, but when Colburn deduced that the funding for the project was coming from the South Korean government, he backed out.
Today, Colburn and his team have been invited to bring their HAH-203 project and launcher to the X-Prize Cup Event outside of Los Cruces, N.M.
The X-Prize was founded to stimulate civilian interest in space travel. They first offered a $10 million prize to the fist civilian space vehicle to carry an astronaut and the equivalent weight of three passengers to a legal space of 100 kilometers altitude and then repeat the feat within two weeks.
Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites claimed the prize with the flights of Spaceship 1. Now the X-Prize funds an annual space race in New Mexico. There, civilian programs display their wares, launch vehicles – both manned and unmanned – and participate in many contests including most unique rocket, most powerful and fastest.
Since the first unmanned amateur rocket made it into space, this has been an age of the amateur space program. Another project of Colburn’s, SOARS, is in the running for a NASA contest worth $2 million. The contest is for anyone who can build a space plane capable of recovering delicate objects from orbit. The deadline on the contest is 2011.
“I think that the thing I enjoy about rockets most is that currently, they’re the only way off the planet. It’s a genetic imperative of ours to explore. We are absolutely destined to leave this planet. Considering what we’re doing to it, it’s not a bad idea.”
