Heads up. That's a rocket and nobody's totally sure where it's going to land. Coming in hot. How fast is it even coming down? The guy next to me doesn't seem that worried. Just be ready to dodge if you see anything going towards your face. He's busy setting up a rocket of his own. Its chance of success maybe less than 10%. I think 10% might be high. He's also one of the first people who ever invested in SpaceX. [music] So, he's standing in a desert under falling rockets about to launch one he's pretty sure won't make it. I wanted to know why.
All right, just drove 6 hours from Oakland to Gerlach, Nevada. Tomorrow is a big day. First time with this rocket launch. Sleeping in the good old Toyota Avalon, which is my grandma's car borrowed from my aunt. It's about 1:00 a.m. We're going to get up at around 6:00.
This is the Black Rock Desert. Flat, empty, and a long way from anything you could hit. [music] Which makes it a good place to do things you can't do anywhere else. In 1997, a jet-powered car broke the sound barrier out here. It's still the land speed record. All right, this is cool. It's like being on a boat where you can just go any direction. Once a year, it's Burning Man. And once a year, it's this. It's called Balls. [music] It's been running since the early '90s and it's where amateur rocket builders bring what's too big or too experimental to fly almost anywhere else.
Flew with a full keg of beer. That's so cool. It runs 3 days and a lot of people camp right here on the lake bed. There's nothing out here you didn't bring yourself. [music] With one exception. Every morning, Becky makes breakfast. Around here, [music] Becky's a legend. Becky's breakfast here. Look at that. It's amazing. And on the last night, they set fire to whatever fuel is left. We'll get to that. Hundreds of rockets fly over the weekend. But I was here for one of them.
So, what altitude are you thinking of getting to? Uh, hopefully. So, who is this guy? Steve Jurvetson is a venture capitalist. He was the first VC to back Hotmail, then he bet early on Tesla, and on a rocket startup called SpaceX, [music] back when both looked like long shots.
The amazing thing is that almost none of them quit. They want to do what they're doing. They think that to stop doing that is death.
So, he helped found the rockets that [music] land themselves. And in his free time, he's out here with a fiberglass tube, duct tape, [music] and zip ties. He's been doing it for 20 years. He could watch any launch [music] on Earth from the front row. Why this?
Well, I'm hoping they miraculously somehow hit 30,000 ft, but it's probably going to be closer to 25. Yeah. Hey, my name is Steve, Steve Jurvetson. We are watching a rocket I built that has a 4-in minimum diameter airframe, is a solid ammonium perchlorate motor that comes all the way up to here in the rocket. So, it's a lot of go. The engine weighs more than twice as much as the rest of the rocket combined. So, it's very lightweight, composite, fiberglass. Inside of here are two flight computers, and each flight computer drives explosive charges that will go up, separate the rocket in two pieces, it'll tumble down amazingly, tumble down in a flat spin with a very long cord between them, and then it'll pop off the front. We'll see.
[laughter] And my mind's going through a lot of things right now. It might work the way it works, the way I think it will. That's called drag separation. It's when the rocket came apart at motor burnout, and then you have a complete yard sale in the sky. Everything just goes open loop, and it's just burning motor chunks.
Just fun hanging out, people building rockets, cool conversations about physics and the beginning of the universe and time, and you get this many smart people together, it's pretty interesting what you end up talking about. It's like quasi-particles that come into existence and disappear, and all of these little different... You can visualize with all the different like Feynman diagrams that come out of the electron. Like... Yeah. And it's like rock...
Out here, half the fun is walking the camp to see what everyone else built. This is a rocket that mixes a margarita as it goes with its gears. It goes to 11. That spins the thing. It's a turbine, a rocket margarita maker.
Yep, so 1/4 in aluminum should be good for a little over Mach 4. Um, this is all a test. This is a 24-in diameter, six times up-scale Madcow squat called Project Sasquatch. Flew yesterday to 3,920 ft with a 55-lb 5-gal beer keg on board. With beer in it? Yeah. So, as you can see, when we got the rocket back just after flight, we threw the chiller and keg down into the lower section, [music] and we tapped off beer for free. Everybody last night could enjoy a nice cold beer flown on board. That's so cool. Suborbital. It was a suborbital flight.
Rob scared me to think that maybe the magnetic... There's a magnet-triggered switch. On-off switch? This is a... No, well, well, well... No, here's all we know for sure. A magnet [clears throat] will turn it on and off. Proximity magnet. Okay, that's fine. So, will whatever that sensor is...
That's Steve's son. He's the rest of the launch crew.
This is the main reason to put a video camera on both parts of the airframe is sometimes one part survives and the other doesn't. So, well... Because the top section is going to come down and crash into this as it slides by, right? See, purists say this is going to affect my ultimate altitude. You think it will? Yes, it will.
Before anything flies, it has to get past the range safety officer, [music] and he has thoughts about the zip ties. You know, these cameras will be gone. I... You would think so. So, the range safety officer has a personal curiosity on the strength and structural integrity of duct tape and zip ties cuz we have two experiments going on. Will [music] this melt? And separately, how will these zip ties hold up cuz zip ties usually last longer. What do you think? We don't know the melting point. I expect they're coming off. [laughter] And what's the estimated maximum Mach number? Oh, uh, 2.7. 2.7? Yeah. That's nearly 2,000 mph. Okay, good luck with the flight. Thank you.
So, we're walking to pad C, which is one of the furthest. Uh, midsection. So, the closest are A and B. Next tier is C, D, and then E. E is bigger. It's out there. This is no joke out here. [laughter] These are big boy rockets.
