“Balls” is the amateur rocket launch held each year about two weeks after the Burning Man festival on the Black Rock desert. Burning man is all about free expression of dance, music, art, and anything else you can think of. Then it cumulates in the burning of a giant effigy of a man in the center of a temporary tent and geodesic dome city. Balls and Burning Man may seem as different as day and night. Balls, is an experience that has only location in common with Burning Man, until the sun goes down….
To a person who may be unfamiliar to rocketry, Balls may seem to be a rocket launch in the desert, attended by a bunch of back yard bombers and spud gun making rednecks blowing up things and drinking beer at noon. An outsider who actually spends a day at Balls would get the impression that it is a sober, hard thinking, geek fest. They see rocket scientists as spending months and zillions of dollars with a mission to perfect a dangerous but elegant machine. This is some what accurate, but not all encompassing description. Once night falls there seems to be another story.
It’s like Jekyll and Hyde on the Playa, by day serious rocket scientists, by night drinking, dancing, wild, rocket scientists. The transition is startling, one moment I’m in a serious discussion about propellant formulations, calculation of C* vs. nozzle size or a mind numbing talk about erosive burning. I turned around and suddenly the same geek is dancing around a mushroom cloud of burning propellant and dodging a shower of sparks. ”Boom”! In the back ground you see a flash of light then feel the thud of an explosion. Then a strange “Wheee wheee whee whee whee wee we we we” sound coming from the whistle of air across the finger holes of a bowling ball as it flies a half mile across the desert floor. This is from Sky Bowler, a bowling ball cannon that someone brought. I pull some beer from the tap of our keg we brought from Colorado and get engaged in another conversation with someone I have never met on the benefits of copper oxide as a burn rate catalyst. Only to be interrupted by the rushing sound of a large black powder rocket taking off, raining down a shower of sparks.
Yeeeeeeehaaaaaaaa! Is all I can hear once my ears un-cringe from the sound. My wife and I left about 9:00 pm feeling a little shell shocked but mostly exhausted. The desert seems to suck the energy from your soul. We had to use a GPS just to find the entrance to the lakebed. While we dodged a few trucks that were intent upon making donuts in the playa, they created enough dust that we could only see a few yards in front of us. Now I know what the phrase “flying on instruments” really means.
Bruno’s Motel is another experience altogether. Bruno’s Country Club, Casino, Motel, Bar, Laundry mat, Gas station, Restaurant, etc. Bruno is the boss hog of Gerlach. Our room did come with a 12″ TV but the remote looks like it was chewed on by a dog and didn’t work. The shower was welcome, and the water was hot, but the heater in the room didn’t work. When you stay at Bruno’s you get two choices of rooms, bad and worse. This time I got bad so I really don’t have much to complain about. The next morning it’s all serious again. Most of the serious rock geeks are eating breakfast at Bruno’s. Green toast is not uncommon, and my sausage didn’t smell right, breakfast is not for the squeamish. During breakfast I can hear that there is nothing but serious discussions going on around us. More talk about transmitter frequencies, thrust curves, and thrust to weight ratios. By 9:00 am everyone is back out on the lake bed, it’s another day of prepping, launching and recovering rockets. By sunset, most people are either picking up debris from the unintended consequences of missing a small detail, or celebrating a successful recovery. The former seemed common this year.
That’s ok, it’s getting dark.
Jekyll time.
