Rocketry Records and Attempts
In addition to the flat surface, distance from populated areas and uncontrolled airspace over the area also attract experimentation with rockets. The following are highlights of amateur rocketry records set at Black Rock:
- On November 23, 1996, the Reaction Research Society launched a rocket to 50 miles (80 km) in altitude, a significant leap in amateur rocket altitude records at the time.
- On May 17, 2004 the Civilian Space eXploration Team (CSXT) launched a rocket to 72 miles (116 km) in altitude, which was the first amateur rocket to exceed the 62.14-mile (100.00 km) Karman Line required to claim a space flight.
Other rocket launches attempting various altitude records or space flights have occurred at Black Rock. In May 1999, JP Aerospace used a rockoon (balloon-launched rocket) in an unsuccessful suborbital space flight attempt covered by CNN. The rocket reached 75,000 feet (23,000 m), which was far less than the intended Karman Line to reach space. CSXT made unsuccessful space launch attempts in 2000 and 2002 before the successful 2004 space flight. JP Aerospace returned to the desert in 2009, launching an armchair to the edge of space for Space Chair, an advertisement for Toshiba electronic products.
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Famous quotes containing the words records and/or attempts:
“Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
And even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping-place
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-ordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized?... A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)