BOISE, Idaho USA — High on a hill overlooking the city of his youth, Gary Bennett searched for a weathered concrete pad and reminisced about the heydays of Flash Gordon and the Boise Rocket Research Society.

"I have to credit my grandmother and the Flash Gordon comics I read as a kid for my interest in space," he said. "When my grandmother told me that stars were suns, my universe expanded. And Flash Gordon was able to travel to the stars. We needed better propulsion to do that, and I figured that would be the rocket society's contribution. As if a bunch of teenagers from a town of 35,000 would be the ones to invent it."

Former member L.J. Davis recalls the society as "an all-male organization of adolescent geeks."

Some members, however, went on to distinguish themselves in scientific and technical careers. Bennett earned a doctoral degree in nuclear physics, helped develop power systems for the Voyager, Galileo and Ulysses missions and managed advanced power and propulsion systems for NASA.

His and his cronies' halcyon days of amateur rocketeering in Boise of the 1950s, complete with basement explosions, rockets run amok and scenes straight out of "October Sky," were their launching pad to life.

The concrete pad he was unsuccessfully looking for was on a ridge then known as Ham Hill. Ham radio operators went there for good reception. It also was an ideal place for viewing the night sky, which was why the teenage members of the fledgling rocket society chose it as their "Operation Moonwatch" site. Bennett and other society members poured its 80-foot concrete pad to serve as a base for satellite viewing.

The year was 1957. The space race with the Soviet Union was in its infancy, and Americans were captivated by anything having to do with space. It was an age of primitive rockets, sci-fi movies and epidemic flying-saucer sightings. Operation Moonwatch was a Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory program in which ordinary citizens were trained to watch for satellites and help track their orbits. Though none had actually been launched yet, the very idea of satellites was of intense interest to science junkies such as the 26 young men who comprised the rocket society.

"We were supposed to look through binoculars and call out when a satellite went through the cross hairs formed by a vertical pole we'd put up with a cross piece on it," Bennett said. "Then we'd telegram the Smithsonian with the information. We didn't have cell phones then, but we knew they were coming, from reading DickTracy."

The satellite the program was established to watch for was Vanguard I, the first American satellite. No one saw the competition coming.

"We got a wake-up call when the Russians beat us into space by sending up Sputnik."

Bennett and three other members of the society met that night and listened to Sputnik's droning beep on a console radio. They ended up spending more time tracking Soviet satellites than American ones.

Terrifying rocket launches

But it was rockets, not satellites, that took most of their time and kept their parents awake nights.

Their most successful flight rose about 1,000 feet above the desert between Boise and Mountain Home. Its descent was briefly terrifying.

"It launched so rapidly that we lost track of it immediately," former society member Bill Nutt recalled. "When we came out from behind our launch barricade — I think it was a pickup truck — we heard it coming down. We'd shot it virtually straight up. It was coming right back down at us at a very high rate of speed and no one could see it!"

Some serious scrambling kept the rocket from hitting anyone, which was fortunate because it hurtled to Earth so forcefully and buried itself so deeply that it was never found.

Now a part-time consultant with a doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics, Nutt wryly said that experiment's "obvious success" encouraged the group to build a larger version of the same rocket.

"But this time, instead of an instantaneous burst of power, it sort of sprayed and dribbled fire like some fireworks display," he said. "It did this for about five seconds., then blew up."

To the understandable alarm of a stunned herder, the rocket's nose cone came to rest in a band of sheep. "We left with the picture in mind of the sheepherder minding his sheep in a quiet, isolated part of the desert and looking up to see a flaming, smoking front half of a rocket come over a nearby hill and crash," Nutt said. "It was sort of satisfying from a sci-fi viewpoint."

Nothing was satisfying, however, about a New Year's Eve explosion in Bennett's parents' basement. "We were trying potassium chloride and charcoal powder for rocket fuel," Bennett said.  "We didn't have any charcoal, so my mother suggested grinding up charcoal briquettes in the meat grinder.

"Getting chemicals wasn't a problem in those days. Even kids could walk in and buy whatever they wanted, no questions asked. … It was a classic dust explosion. If you get enough fine, flammable material in the air and get a spark, it will burn. We'd brought in a battery with a wire attached, and when somebody touched the wire the basement just went red."

The walls were charred, and several of the prospective rocket scientists were treated for serious burns. Bennett, who was walking up the stairs, got off relatively easy. "The backs of my ears were singed," he said.

The society had its share of successes as well as high-octane accidents, but faded away in the early 1960s as its members went off to college.

Nutt went on to do computer calculations for nuclear reactors. Davis became a novelist and contributor to Harper's and other magazines. Jim Underhill rescued several downed fliers as a Navy pilot in Vietnam. Bennett, now 67 and semi-retired, is a recipient of numerous scientific awards and fellowships. He lives near Emmett and continues to work part-time as a NASA consultant.

"My hope is that someday we'll get around Mr. Einstein's theories and be able to travel to the stars by going faster than light," he said, sounding a bit like the teenager who dreamed of reaching the stars and helped found Boise's one and only rocket society. "It doesn't make sense that there's so much out there and we're stuck here."

Copyright © 2007, The Idaho Statesman.