Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

“DETA? Well, we were about to close down production for lack of…”

  “I want to order some. What did you call it?”

  “We refer to it as DETA.”5

  “I just need a small amount to start. But if it works out, we may need quite a bit more.”

  “Okay. How much do you want?”

  “I'd like to start with an order of four.”

  “Four. Four pounds?”

  “No, no. Four tons.”

  “Four tons.”

  “How long will it take to deliver it to our test facility in Southern California?”

  “I, uh, I estimate about two weeks.”

  “Any chance you could get it here sooner?”

  “I'll prioritize it. We will ship it as fast as possible.”

  “Thank you. I'm putting a signed purchase order in the mail now.” Mary hung up the phone and ran off to find Tom Meyers.

  Nick Toby set the receiver back on his phone, stood up, raised one-and-a-half arms in the air, and shouted.

  “YES!”

  “Kinda ballsy to order four tons of propellant before we even know if it'll do the job.”

  Bill and Toru were sitting in their desk chairs, facing Mary, who was standing at the chalkboard, writing formulas.

  “I already figured it out in my head,” she responded. “There's no doubt this will work. All we have to do now is calculate the ideal mixture. Ninety percent UDMH, 10 percent DETA? Seventy percent, thirty? Just a matter of number crunching to find the best ratio. Take out too much UDMH and we lesson the performance. Fail to mix in enough DETA and we won't have a high-enough density. My guess is the ideal ratio is going to be around sixty/forty.”

  “You don't mind if we calc it out,” said Toru. “You know—just to make sure.”

  “It's all yours. Get to it.”

  Bill and Toru returned to their desks.

  Two days later, Mary arrived at her desk just after 8:00 a.m. The previous evening, Bill and Toru had stayed late to work. They had left her a message written in large script on the chalkboard: “60/40 is correct. We love the monkey cage.”

  Mary was in the cafeteria, trying to choose between yogurt and cottage cheese when Bill Webber ran in. The first thing she noticed was that he appeared to be sweating.

  “I found you.” He took a moment to breathe. “They approved it.”

  “Approved what?”

  “Your propellant formula. The cocktail. What else would I run over here for?” He took a couple more breaths. “Tom Meyers just stopped by our work station. The mucky-mucks upstairs have approved it for testing.”

  “Really. They're actually going to mix up a batch and load it in a tank.”

  “And test-fire it. Tom has already ordered an engine be sent to the Hill. Your little cocktail is going to be run through a turbopump, shot into a combustion chamber, mixed with LOX, and ignited into one helluva fireball. Great news, huh?”

  Mary nodded, more preoccupied with her lunch choices than Bill's news.

  At that moment, Toru walked through the door and joined them. “Did you tell her?”

  “Yep.”

  “There's just one thing,” Toru added. “They want us to name it. They don't want to call it ‘it’ anymore.”

  Mary thought about that for a moment, then said, “Tell them we are going to call it ‘bagel.’”

  “Bagel?” Bill and Toru began to think of what the chemical connection was to “bagel.”

  Moving down the cafeteria service line, Mary grabbed a container of cottage cheese.

  “I don't quite understand,” said Bill. “Why are we going to call it ‘bagel’?”

  “That way,” Mary explained, “we can say the Redstone rocket is powered by LOX and bagel.”

  Bill and Toru were unsure what to say. Was she serious? Was she kidding?

  Toru cleared his throat, “If that's what you want us to tell them, then that's what we'll tell them.”

  Mary grabbed a container of yogurt, looked at it, then put it back.

  “I usually don't eat in the cafeteria. What's good here?”

  “I don't know,” said Bill. “Try the bagels.”

  Once Tom Meyers and the rest of the management team were confident that the new propellant cocktail would work, Bill and Toru were immediately shifted to other assignments in other parts of the Research Group. From this point on, Mary would carry the ball on her own.

  By the time the four-ton shipment of diethylenetriamine arrived at Santa Susana, management had decided to pass on the “bagel” suggestion and named the new cocktail “hydyne.” Its theoretical density was 0.8615 grams per cubic centimeter, about a 10 percent improvement over alcohol. And its expected specific impulse was 310—also a 10 percent improvement.

  On paper, everything was looking up.

  “In the 1950s nobody in America knew how to build a rocket. If the Germans had told us to turn around three times and bow to the test stand, we would have done it.”

  —BILL VIETINGHOFF, SANTA SUSANNA TEST ENGINEER, RET.1

  Twenty-five million years ago during the Oligocene epoch, a section of land emerged from the sea, pushed upward by immense tectonic forces. The newly exposed earth hardened into a mixture of shale, siltstone, and conglomerate, with a chico sandstone overlay. For many millennia, the rocky exposition was methodically sculpted—systematically carved by wind, rain, and the occasional volcanic cataclysm. Nature's hand carved the rock strata obliquely, creating mushroom-shaped sandstone formations, a labyrinth of narrow valleys, and a crosshatch pattern of rounded ridges. It was the sculpted sandstone mounds that would give these mountains their peculiar geologic style—a series of hills buttressed by abrupt masses of andesitic and basaltic material and covered with castellated blocks of numerous shapes and sizes. Amongst these rounded crests grew scrub, brush, and sage grass, all competing for limited space and soil. For millions of years it stayed that way, disturbed only by the elements and a wide range of animal life.

  Humans arrived eventually, of course, beginning with the native Chumash population that survived off the land for several thousand years. Still, the valley with the low-lying sandstone knobs changed very little.

  While all these surface events were occurring over the millennia, something very significant was happening below. Millions of years of accumulated zooplankton and algae had compressed under intense heat and pressure, eventually morphing into an entirely new substance: crude oil.2 It was the most coveted type of crude—light, untainted, and easy to reach, and its discovery caused the modern world to intrude. It was in 1865 that a Mexican deer hunter named Ramon Peria stumbled across a surface seep of a thin, green oil and staked his claim. Ten years would pass before commercial drilling could begin, but when it did, the investors would claim ownership of the first successful oil well in California,3 providing fuel for untold thousands of vehicles, from Model A's to Cobra Mustangs.

  They called the place Simi Valley.

  Despite the importance of the discovery, it was not crude oil that would make Simi Valley famous. Rather, its modern notoriety could be traced to events that began in 1947. That year proved to be a key moment in the history of the sandstone hills. No sooner had World War II ended than the war for technology began. Forty miles southeast of Simi Valley, in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, a man by the name of Dutch Kindelberger had built a company and called it North American Aviation. A major supplier of fighters and bombers during the war, Kindelberger and his company needed to find peacetime products in order to survive.

  The invention of the atomic bomb had created a discussion over unmanned delivery of this new megaweapon. The Germans had been pondering a solution back when the atomic bomb was mere theory. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both the United States and the Soviet Union were working the same problem—in the Atomic Age, how does one deliver such a massive bomb to the enemy without risking pilots and planes? And so the idea for an intercontinental ballistic missile was born.

  North American Aviation was soon garner
ing government contracts for large booster rockets, and business got very busy very quickly. Kindelberger had found his peacetime product, and he had found it in the fiery heat of the Cold War.

  Soon, thousands of engineers and technicians were ensconced in buildings the size of blimp hangars, toiling away behind 400-pound steel desks. These men—and they were all men—were designing the new motor of the modern age: the liquid-fuel rocket engine. From satellites to cell phones, it was an invention that would change everything for everyone. The new generation of engineers had learned from the Germans, having borrowed technology from their defeated European colleagues; men—and they were all men—so conveniently and secretly imported into the States by the US government. From meticulously kept German records and testimony, the engineers knew their rocket engines would have a high degree of unreliability. “Barely controlled bombs,” was an early description.4 But the cavernous hangars of Downey were too close to civilization to test the products they were making. A safer and more secluded place would be needed, and so a small army of supervisors fanned out like military scouts to find it. The test site had to be remote—far from homes and all the many pleasant accoutrements of civilization that must be protected. This requirement, however, was as much for secrecy as safety. To work on post-war high technology projects, engineers and technicians would all be required to pass a rigorous background check and be eligible for top secret security clearances. Even so, safety was a necessary concern. Large rocket engines were so loud they could, in less than a second, vaporize a man's eardrums or disintegrate a pane of living-room glass. At an average of 180 decibels, large rocket engines were the loudest devices yet created by human hands. Since permanent hearing loss could occur at a mere 140 decibels, even with good ear protection, the engineers knew they needed seclusion—preferably seclusion that was encircled by earthen or rocky berms to muffle and subdue the powerful roars that would be an almost-daily occurrence.

  In a raised, boulder-strewn bench 300 feet above the Simi Valley floor, in a fortress-like cirque of those sandstone knobs, engineers and architects found that seclusion. Scattered at random throughout the cirque, a dozen rocket engine test stands were built. Each one was a behemoth the size of a Beverly Hills mansion. They were constructed of thousands of steel beams, wires, and platforms—boxy architectural wonders of anti-aesthetic practicality. Concrete blockhouse control rooms were scattered throughout the area—about one blockhouse for every three test stands, constructed half a mile away for safety. The facility took less than a year to become operational, upon which some overpaid supervisor used a small mountain range to the south as inspiration for its name: the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL).5

  Most of the engineers who worked there, however, simply called it “the Hill.”

  The men who designed and built the SSFL were confident they had achieved the goals of safety, security, and seclusion. No doubt many a company supervisor patted himself on the back, saying, “Forty miles from civilization will make this place completely safe.” Yet no sooner had the first bolthole been drilled into the first steel I-beam than real-estate developers began eyeing the orange groves just to the east, a vast swath of flatland named after Mission San Fernando Ray de España: the San Fernando Valley. In short order, the stampede began, commencing in the area now known as Pacoima and steadily working its way west. The onslaught of thousands of three-bedroom, two-bath people-boxes pushed, like a tsunami in slow motion, inexorably westward.

  The mad dash of development took only a few years to accomplish; its swath of destruction complete and absolute. Before long, the armies of homebuilders had reached the valley's western terminus, leaving behind not so much as a single citrus tree. It was at that terminus where the backbone streets of Victory, Sherman Way, and Roscoe Boulevard ended—stopped cold at the point where the cheap, buildable land ended and the bouldery terrain began. It was here the ancient Oligocene sandstone pushed itself through the rich soil and began its ascent, rocky and barely passable, into the southland's bronze ozone sky.

  On the morning of January 5, 1955, the quiet solitude of the sandstone knolls was interrupted by the purr of an in-line six, sky-blue ’53 Chevy heading north on Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Ascending gently in elevation, it left the shoulder-to-shoulder world of flatland suburbia in its rearview mirror, then turned left onto a winding, two-lane blacktop called Santa Susana Pass Road.

  Mary was sitting up front. She was thirty-four years old now and showed little resemblance to the rag doll from Ray. She was still a short, petite brunette, of course, but now she could afford to take care of herself: makeup, better shoes, a top quality pair of glasses to correct her near-sightedness. Still, growing up on an impoverished farm had instilled in her a lifelong penchant for frugality—all her clothes were still home-sewn.

  Mary had never met the driver, or either of the two men in the back seat. They were all rocket test specialists who spent most of their time on the Hill—the kind of techies whom the engineers rarely associated with. She had great respect for these men, since they were the ones who took most of the big risks in the rocket-engine business. These were the men who handled and loaded the propellants—exotic chemicals so hazardous they could freeze an entire human body in seconds, fill their lungs with deadly toxins, strike them with two dozen different cancers, or melt the flesh right off their bones. These were the adrenaline junkies, the risk takers, the aerospace equivalent of mountain climbers. And they were a far different group. The engineers she worked with were very professional, of course, but they were frat boys—the kind of men who were quick with a joke, easy with a compliment, loud and raucous at parties, and generally fun to be around. Most of them, anyway. But the propellant technicians were unlike anyone she had worked with before. None of them said very much during the drive. They were quiet, thoughtful, sober. Most of them, anyway. They talked very little, and when they did talk, it was in whispers. Since leaving the office, Mary had tried several times to start a conversation, but her attempts had led nowhere. These were men with a big job, who had no time for small talk. This lack of conversation only added to her anxiety. Today was going to be one of the most important days of her life. If they were successful, it would also be one of the most important days in modern American history, though almost no one would know about it. Government and company regulations regarding secrecy were as hard as chrome molybdenum steel, and just as unbending.

  Mary looked skyward, searching the sandstone knolls on both sides of the road. She had heard that North America's largest bird sometimes made its home in these hills.

  “What are you looking for?”

  She was surprised—one of the men in the back seat had spoken an entire sentence.

  “Condors,” she replied. “California condors.”

  “Oh yeah. They're up here.”

  That got her attention, and she turned around to face him. His name was Frank, and he had the face of a sailor: sunburnt skin, chapped lips, a neck with too many wrinkles for a man his age.

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  He shook his head. “But they're around. The Feds come up here once in a while looking for them. Biologists. People like that.”

  “I saw one once.” The driver had come alive, too. “We were doing a test on the NAVAHO engine a couple years ago. A condor circled over the blockhouse compound for about twenty minutes, then flew away.”

  “If any of you see one, please point it out to me. Okay?”

  The three men nodded, then resumed their passive, nonverbal composures.

  A minute went by, and they arrived at the turnoff to the SSFL. They would now be off the public highway and on federally restricted land. The driver turned left and arrived at a guard gate. Each individual in the car showed their badge and pass to the uniformed guard, who then made some notes on a clipboard. Then they drove on.

  It would not be long now.

  Mary grew more nervous, and her breathing became rapid as the front gate appeared around a curve. She swall
owed hard and tried to calm her nerves. She removed a pack of Winstons from her purse and tapped out a cigarette. When the driver saw this, he wagged an index finger in front of her face and pointed to a large roadside sign not far ahead.

  The sign read, “NO SMOKING BEYOND THIS POINT.”

  Mary nodded and put away her cigarettes. For now, nicotine was out.

  As the car moved past the sign and through the gate, she pondered some of the horror stories her supervisors had related during training. In the early days of liquid-fuel rocket testing, there were many unknowns: accidents and unforeseen incidents happened with regularity. One day, a technician was pressurizing a small sphere. The regulator he was using malfunctioned and indicated a much lower than actual pressure. The pressure in the sphere built up to a point beyond its capacity, and it exploded, blowing the technician's right arm clean off.6 Another incident involved a technician who had loaded liquid oxygen into a propellant tank just prior to a test. The loading procedure took much longer than expected, and all the while the oxygen vapors that naturally vented and swirled during the operation saturated into his cotton clothing. Hours later, long after the test had been completed, the man lit a cigarette and was immediately immolated in flames. He died on the way to the hospital.7

  Mary felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around to face the man seated next to Frank. His ID badge said his name was Roger. His prior experience with rocket propellants was clearly in evidence; he was missing two fingers on his right hand, and his left forearm was heavily scarred.

  “Excuse me,” he said, leaning forward. “This propellant we're testing. I have a question.”

  Mary was happy to finally have an intelligent conversation.

  “According to my paperwork, it's a mixture of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and diethylenetriamine.”

  “That's correct.”

  “Are you sure they're miscible?”

  “Yes, they're completely miscible.”

  “You're certain.”