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 MANSFIELD, Washington USA — Ryan Buettner bolted from the worn wooden bleachers and went bounding over the sagebrush like a jackrabbit with a coyote on its tail.
Yeah, there are a few white whiskers in his beard, but when the rocket he spent four months building shot into the heavens without a hitch Saturday, Buettner let loose like a kid, joyously whooping and hollering before heading off to find where his baby landed, somewhere in the endless expanse of uninterrupted earth outside Mansfield. Buettner, 35, of Woodinville, was among a couple hundred folks who made the trek to the outback of North Central Washington this weekend for Fire in the Sky, an annual three-day blowout that brings out hard-core rocket people. We're not talking hobby-shop, rocket-in-a-box numbers that you fire off at the neighborhood park. These folks are dealing in firepower that some Third World rogue nations would be happy to get hold of. Buettner's 9-foot-long, 17-pound, green-and-black projectile he called "The Javelin" was one of the larger rockets fired Saturday afternoon but was dwarfed in size, and especially in power, by the missiles launched from a pad a couple miles from the main site. That's not to say all of the approximately 150 craft that flew over the weekend were monsters — they ranged in length from 4 inches to 12 feet, in weight from 2 ounces to 100 pounds. Some burned simple black powder while others were propelled by chemical concoctions with four-part names that a chemistry major might struggle spitting out. Some seemed like big bottle rockets whose tracks could be followed, while others moved faster than the eye, taking not two seconds before vanishing in the canopy of clouds. Some reached 15,000 feet. Fire in the Sky started in 2000. This is the fourth year the event has happened in Mansfield. Why Mansfield? Because there's a ton of open space and Mayor Tom Snell several years back invited the festival to town after seeing a show about rockets on the Discovery Channel that featured members of the Washington Aerospace Club, the group that hosts this event. Buettner and his 15-year-old son, Devin, made it back to base camp after about a half-hour tracking down and retrieving "The Javelin" from where it landed about a half-mile away. "I'm stoked," Buettner yelled as his wife Jamie hugged him when he returned. The sensors inside Buettner's rocket said it traveled at 506 mph and topped out at 7,397 feet. Buettner wasn't back but a minute when he said, "I'm going to put a bigger motor in it." That's the itch. "There's always something else you want to try," said Mike Wyvel of Everett, a member of the aeronautical club and an organizer of the event. Wyvel got into rockets in fourth grade when his class built them. He said he lost interest as a teen but picked it up again as an adult — a so-called "born-again rocketeer," a term well-known in the rocket world. Dave Woodard, of Bremerton, said he's a "BAR." His dad got him a rocket for his seventh birthday. Forty years on he's still fiddling with tail fins, nose cones and motors. "It's a mix of people," he said when asked what sort of person is a rocket person. Then added, "It's people who still enjoy being kids." Buettner's dad Steve, who got him his first little rocket 20-some years ago, came and congratulated his son on the successful flight of "The Javelin." Then they and Devin headed back to their camp talking rockets. "Every year the rocket he builds gets bigger and bigger," said Jamie Buettner. "I think the next one, he's going to put a chair in it." Copyright © 2008, Wenatchee World.
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