Waiting for the Rockets at Poker Flat

Waiting is the name of the game if you're in the business of launching rockets. No one knows that better than the staff at Poker Flat Research Range, located 30 miles north of Fairbanks. After scientists and technicians recently waited for days for the natural and manmade conditions that would allow a launch, three rockets roared northward from the range to begin the third decade of rocket launches from Poker Flat.

Kathe Rich is the operations controller at Poker Flat. Among her other duties, she's the voice behind launch countdowns. After a year in which there were no launches from Poker Flat, she was glad to share her space in the blockhouse, a concrete bunker covered with earth next to where the rockets wait to be launched.

"This is great," she said as people milled about the room at 4 a.m.. "This is what we're here for."

The researchers, rocket builders, and those who would launch the first rocket of the season were awaiting the 4:50 a.m. passage of a satellite because it figured in the decision to launch the 73-foot rocket. The rocket would need to pass below the satellite at the same time the sky was clear overhead at Poker Flat and at Kaktovik, where the rocket's planned explosions would be captured on tape from a ground observatory.

The rocket was part of a joint experiment of Johns Hopkins University and the Russian Academy of Science to see the effect of the explosions on particles in the ionosphere. The altitude of the ionosphere, in which the aurora performs about 60 to 600 miles above the ground, is what makes the sounding rocket a useful tool. Balloons can't get up that high to carry their instruments, and satellites can't orbit low enough, but scientists can arc a rocket through the ionosphere that can take measurements or release tracers they can see from the ground.

Scientists in charge of the rocket had waited five days for the right conditions. Two mornings before, Rich stopped the countdown 69 seconds before the launch, when Kaktovik suddenly clouded over. One morning before, high winds at 20,000 feet would have pushed the rocket where the launchers didn't want it to go.

Waiting five nights to launch a rocket seems like a drag, but Ray Martinez, launch officer at Poker Flat for the last eight years, said he and others have waited as long as three months for a suitable night. "We get a little cranky after awhile," he said.

No one was cranky on that Friday morning. With the temperature at 31 below, the sky was clear at Poker Flat. Kaktovik was cloudless. At 4:20 a.m., two range workers drove out to the Steese Highway to block traffic near the range. With three minutes left to launch, the aurora began to ripple in three bands, making people hopeful that a second group of rockets--used for another experiment that required an especially active aurora--would also launch before daylight.

At 4:57 a.m., Rich began a final countdown that was heard on speakers all over the range. When she reached "zero," the valley brightened and the rocket raced upward, trailing a shower of sparks. The detonation, a sound like thunder, took a few seconds to reach observers at the Neil Davis Science Center, a few miles from the blockhouse. The rocket trailed fire in the sky as it climbed. From Poker Flat and the rest of interior Alaska, the rocket's first explosion made it look as though a new star had briefly appeared in the "W" of Cassiopeia. After about eight minutes, the rocket had done its job. The final stage landed on the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean.The wait was over.

"Now I can finally relax," said Will Holmer, a NASA contractor who helped assemble the rocket and for whom the launch was the culmination of eight months' work. "I'm going to sleep real good tonight."