LUCERNE VALLEY, CALIF. — The pickup with "Official Rocket Recovery Vehicle" on its side bounced across the rutted dry lake bed kicking up silt. Andy Tryon glanced over his shoulder at his baby cradled in back.
In a few minutes, his crew would gently place the Desert Hawk on the launch pad and arm it with an igniter.
Showtime, and Tryon was nervous.
The rocket represented three months' labor. He needed to solve the engineering flaw that doomed the Desert Hawk's three previous launches. The camouflage paint job alone took two weeks. On the rocket's fins were inspirational quotes from the Bible, Shakespeare, the heavy metal band Molly Hatchet and the theme song from the television show "Star Trek: Enterprise."
"There's a heck of a lot of trial and error in this hobby," said Tryon, a 41-year-old from Victorville who drives a forklift for Wal-Mart and has the quirky earnestness of a Trekkie. "We refer to it as the bug; either it bites you or it doesn't. But when it bites, it bites in a big way. Did for me."
Tryon's goal is to make a name for himself in the ambitious world of model rocketry. If that conjures up images of a junior high science fair, think again.
The Desert Hawk is 10 feet tall and weighs 126 pounds. Launching it required high-altitude clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration. It's fueled by a mixture of ammonium perchlorate and synthetic rubber -- known as APCP, it's essentially what powers the space shuttle.
What was once a simple boyhood hobby spawned by the Cold War's space race has transformed into extreme rocketry, a subculture dominated by middle-aged men who harness technology, testosterone and their credit cards in the pursuit of ever-greater thrust and altitude.
"The final result of all the work is that you light a motor and there's a big old bunch of noise, smoke and flames," said Richard "Wedge" Oldham, who lives in the San Fernando Valley and builds replicas of Cold War-era missiles that break the sound barrier.
"That appeals to guys."
It also got the attention of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which in recent years has tightened regulations on the purchase and storage of APCP, even in small amounts, because the agency classifies it as an explosive. Heightened scrutiny since Sept. 11, 2001, threatens to affix training wheels to the hobby, said Ken Good, president of the Tripoli Rocketry Assn., which along with another group has been locked in an eight-year court battle with the agency.
