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!”
Two more such rockets, each a little bigger than the last, were launched in short order by other children. “And the range is open!” Lou then announced. This was apparently the signal for the kids to run out there and find their rockets among the cacti and the rattlesnakes. While they did so, Lou delivered the promised peroration
on federal airspace regulatory policy. “Those rockets y’all just saw can’t go higher than fifteen hundred feet,” he said. “The engines is just too small, they ain’t got the impulse. Impulse is a little old scalar variable defined as the product of—” He noticed T.R. making a throat-cutting gesture and broke off before he could supply the mathematical formula. “Point is, the FAA don’t care ’cause we ain’t messing with their airspace! But these two big boys still on the pads here,” he said, waving at the remaining rockets, “that is a different story! These have . . .” He trailed off, performing a mental calculation. “Sixteen thousand, three hundred and eight-four times the impulse of Jo Anne’s little old Estes Alpha! They can go high!” He pronounced it “hah.” “So hah they could maybe hit a plane, or vice versa. So every month when we hold a meeting of the Flying S Ranch Employees Model Rocketry Club, you know what we gotta do?” It was probably meant as a rhetorical question but still elicited a smattering of “No! What?” from the bleachers. This knocked Lou off his stride but he soldiered on. “We gotta get us a permit from Uncle Sam! It ain’t that hard. They’re real nice about it. We fill out a little old form says we are fixing to launch a couple of high-power model rockets from the Flying S Ranch on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time and you better spread the word to all the pilots not to fly over the area! And that’s exactly what they do! Just like that, the FAA sends out a Notice to Airmen and warns all the pilots to steer clear of the area and keep that box of airspace—you can think of it as a box—empty. Now, some of these cowboys round here have pilot licenses. I guess there’s Meskin drug runners too, but we don’t care if we hit them. Anyhow, they don’t bother reading the Notice and come flying around anyway, so we go belt-and-suspenders on it. We got watchers posted all round, watching the sky to warn us of any of them interlopers. If they tell us the sky’s clear, which it usually is, we’re good to go!” This seemed an obvious applause line, so the crowd made scattered “Woo!” noises while Lou conferred with a younger club member who was wearing a headset and tending to a radio—or, at any rate, a mess of cabled-together laptops and mystery boxes that seemed to answer to the same purpose as a radio. This culminated in a lot of serious nodding. “Skies are clear! Visibility is excellent! Sheng’s gonna launch a high-power rocket, take some pictures of us from ten thousand feet. Say cheese! Take it away, Sheng!”