Pipe Dreams

A veteran of the Apollo program continues a quixotic quest to send a small rocket of his own design 60 miles high and, in the process, save his soul. Maybe ours, too.

A A A Comments By Tommy Craggs Wednesday, Jun 11 2003

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"He turned out to be a banker, too," Colburn says, laughing. "Oh, my heavens!"

Colburn swings the car past a steep dry-grass hill. "Before I was born," he says, "it was just a make-out spot, and that's where I was conceived. There used to be a junkyard over on the other side of this hill, and I used to go try to find parts to make into rockets." Next to the hill is a small cemetery, where his father and uncle are buried.

Paolo Vescia

"Once we get a few space shots under our belt, we'd go orbital," says Bill Colburn, leader of the SORAC project.

Ole and Anna Kagelmacher

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Colburn stops only once to point out anything in detail. Just before a short bridge, he eases the station wagon off the highway. He gestures at what looks like nothing more than a bank of weeds. This is where he launched his first potassium nitrate/sugar rocket, nearly 60 years ago. "The settling pond is down there," he says, motioning to a boxy pool of blue sewage on a flood plain. There's supposed to be a creek somewhere around here, too. Colburn points past the weeds. "That building there -- that sort of unfinished building ..." He's looking at a wooden derelict. "It'd be ironic if I rented that and fixed it up," he says. The structure was meant to be a hay barn, he explains, but was never really used. Now it's an eyesore, a tall, worn-out building teetering on oblivion and crumbling into the weeds, probably unfixable.

"I've always thought," he says, pulling back onto the road, "that it would make a great rocket lab."

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