Career at rocket range energizing, fun

POKER FLAT RESEARCH RANGE — After 35 years of driving to work over a small mountain each day, Kathe Rich will soon make her last daily ascent of Cleary Summit.

The longtime director of this university-owned rocket range is retiring at the end of June 2025. She leaves behind a cold, starry sky full of memories above these 5,000 wooded acres.

The Chatanika River valley north of Fairbanks is not always as quiet as it was on a recent June day during which Rich reflected on her career.

Poker Flat — named by its creator Neil Davis for nearby Poker Creek and because he liked the title of a Bret Harte story “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” — is busier during months that feature more darkness than daylight. Then, when the air is frigid and still, 60-foot projectiles boom toward the upper atmosphere, carrying instruments through the aurora borealis.

Since the range emerged from the black spruce forest during a few busy months in 1969, more than 350 of these rockets have blasted above northern Alaska from Poker Flat.

Most of those have been winter events — to allow views of the upper atmosphere that light from the sun would confound. But scientists drive the 30 miles from Fairbanks to Chatanika all year long for other projects, including to study permafrost, to monitor the continuing effects of a severe 2004 wildfire, and to test methods of cleaning up oil spills.

“There’s usually something different every day, and a great energy out here,” Rich said during an interview at Poker Flat.

Rich, 66, has been driving through the gates of this complex in the muskeg since the early 1990s. Back then and for many years following, her voice echoed throughout the range as she counted down the seconds before a sounding rocket blasted off.

“I will always remember hearing Kathe’s voice over the loudspeaker during the rocket countdowns and these will forever be cherished memories for me,” said Robert Mitchell, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He met Rich 20 years ago as a graduate student and returned in 2025 to launch his own mission.

“The rockets would come and go from Poker, but Kathe was always there, keeping things moving along, despite all the many obstacles that would invariably arise during the rocket campaigns,” Mitchell said.

One of the more memorable rocket launches came early in Rich’s career.

A sounding rocket malfunctioned in the cold and blew up on the launch pad 100 feet away. The intense shaking she felt within the blockhouse dropped a ceiling tile fragment on her head, inspiring her to drop to the tile and roll under her console while still announcing over the public address.

That rare rocket mishap also set the vegetated surface of the thick concrete blockhouse on fire above her and others. No one was hurt.

Her trial by fire was an anomaly during Rich’s career of supporting scientists who arc NASA sounding rockets (powered by military-surplus rocket motors) into the home of the aurora, which dances at least 60 miles over our heads.

“With Kathe's guidance in the day-to-day operations I quickly grasped what I was doing — or so I thought,” said assistant range manager Bob Valdez. “Then came the rocket launches. Kathe was the ultimate pro, she took command of the range and the operations.”

With a “weird combination of skills” she acquired while working for an Alaska Native corporation in Fairbanks, Rich took a job at Poker Flat in 1991. She became director of the range in 2013.

Those hiring attributes included “cross-cultural communications skills” that allowed her to better understand the feelings of those in Native communities like Venetie, Alaska. There, during rocket campaigns, scientists from the Geophysical Institute and elsewhere observe rocket launches and monitor conditions in the sky above the village north of the Arctic Circle.

Her gifts also include a frequent, eruptive laugh that has defused tense moments over the years.

“I've appreciated Kathe for her open and frank communication style, and the amount of laughter that punctuates our conversations,” said Richard Collins, head of the Lidar Research Laboratory at Poker Flat.

“Poker won’t be the same without her,” said Don Hampton, chief scientist at the range and a constant presence during rocket launches. “Not that it won’t keep working, we’ll find a way, but just like the departure of (Neil) Davis and (Neal) Brown, the long history of Poker Flat will now take another bend in the road.”

Rich first traveled to Alaska from her girlhood home in Grayslake, Illinois, when she was just 17. Interested in mining reclamation, she enrolled at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and studied natural resources management.

“I had never been on a plane (before she flew to Alaska),” she said. “All my stuff was in a suitcase-size trunk.”

Rich inherited her sense of adventure from her father, a middle school science and math teacher and then principal, and her mother, who taught special education.

When school was out every summer, her parents would drive Rich and her brother on extended camping trips that had a science theme. One summer was spent in Wyoming, helping a woman excavate dinosaur bones. Another summer was to explore fluorite mines in Canada.

“We did fun stuff,” Rich said. “(My parents) were adventurous, creative and afraid of nothing.”

As for her near future, Rich and her husband Frank Popp are building a home on the shore of Lake Michigan north of Green Bay. She is curious as to what life after Poker Flat holds.

“I have not been unemployed for more than a week since I was 18,” she said. “It’s going to be weird.”

She knows she will miss the people who were constant as well as intermittent parts of her professional life, as well as the adrenaline rush of launching a rocket after attending to the many details that make it successful.

“It’s hard to leave when it’s something that doesn’t feel like work most of the time,” she said.