This Is What It's Like to Be a Space Rocket Launcher in Alaska | Short Film Showcase

We were up at the maintenance shop and we were waiting for it to go off. When it went off, you know, I was like everybody was real happy for the first couple of seconds. Then after that, it's like, oh no, something's not right, kind of a hopeless person.

I work on rockets, and I also tend to do them for fun. I’ve built several rockets and tried to send some 150,000 feet. They're all microscopic compared to the ones we do here. We are at the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska, and this is where we launch rockets on the narrow Cape of Kodiak Island.

Putting Excel in the middle of nowhere, Alaska's nowhere. Kodiak is even further out here on the island. The primary industry is commercial fishing; there is a huge fishing fleet here, and there's Coast Guard as well to support that fishing fleet. It's pretty interesting to live and work on this type of equipment in this environment.

We're a maritime community, so it poses different challenges that you wouldn't see in a lot of other places. We support customer launches of vehicles where they deploy satellites and stuff like that. We are a relatively young range in the United States. We put a huge priority on safety, and even though the chances of a rocket hitting anything are astronomically small, we don't take any chances.

One of the requirements we have when we launch rockets in the United States is you're not allowed to launch over land. An advantage of Kodiak is we have the Pacific Ocean, the largest ocean in the world, right below us. This gives us one of the widest launch windows in the entire industry.

So the weather closely resembles the Pacific Northwest up here, and we actually get fewer weather-related delays than either Vandenberg or Cape Canaveral because we rarely get lightning, which is actually one of the most common ways to scrub our mission. We don't get hurricanes ever.

Yeah, I was born here, and I guess I've never really experienced anything different. I remember as a kid, we would take field trips on launch days that we knew about. We watched a couple of launches from here and always wanted to work here. My family's been commercial fishermen for a very long time; this boat is actually the same age as me.

I used to fish on a set net site. We'd only fished two or three days a week, so I had a fair amount of spare time. That's how I first found out about here—I read a spacing cyclopedia from cover to cover. This happened to be one of the entries, and I was like, wow, we have rocket launching facilities up here.

I grew up in Alaska, and I was a little disappointed that we didn't have much beyond natural resource extraction. Looking around the landscape, I was excited to find out that they were actually building this someplace that would engender higher technology—engineering something beyond cutting trees, catching fish, drilling for oil.

Alaska suffers from brain drain because there aren't many opportunities in high-end technology fields. Doing resource extraction, there are only so many resources you could extract. Fishing, you know, that's of course always renewable, but it's a boom or bust there as well. Some years, you have great years fishing; some years, you have terrible years fishing. Not everyone wants to work in that area.

I'm the facilities manager. I'm in charge of the maintenance crew. I've been the crane technician; they've said their rockets on the stool without the live ordnance. I work on the range instrumentation, so everything that communicates with the rocket. I support the telemetry where I track satellites, flight safety where we verify our transmissions up to vehicles.

We have both communication facilities and preparation facilities for the rocket. Usually, it's a three-month process before we actually launch the rocket to make the launch happen. We have to spend at least 60-hour weeks—that's all the time away from the family. We're a small team; it takes a great effort from all of us.

What appeals to me most about working on rockets is it's one of our biggest challenges. It's one of the hardest things to build. Rockets are extremely unforgiving of any mistakes. It's all normal stuff; people always think that there's some magical rocket technology, but you know, it's all normal stuff that you might encounter in everyday life, just in a really specific application. If anything goes wrong, everything usually goes wrong.

My personal stuff, I'm always slowly increasing the complexity of what I'm doing. I'm slowly getting to bigger things, going higher, going faster. Still, the explosion in 2014—we really didn't know what was gonna happen. It could have been shut down. It cost too much to rebuild. If I lost my job, my family and I would have to move off the island to find a better job.

We were not working all the time or having to pick up two or three jobs. These are complex projects; they're big. They don't always work. Even the best rockets in the world work 96% of the time, and then when it exploded, all the siding had been ripped off of it, same with the other two buildings. Most of the siding had been ripped off of them.

I always have to keep a wider perspective. All that work that you just invested in this just went away. You learn from it, and you use it to build up the next stuff. For you, it's only a failure if you never learn anything. The insurance company came through, and we were able to rebuild, and now we've got a top-of-the-line facility.

On most launches, the customers just sign their names on the rocket that they're sending up. On one particular one, they allowed the maintenance crew to sign their names on it as well and launched it up into space. I like the story of being able to say I've been up to space.

I watched the last mission from the point, so it's beautiful. There were whales out in the ocean; you hear people talking on the communication—that's because the launch conductor is going through the checklists. You realize you're on the forefront of our technology endeavors. We're the spear that is going out and exploring the rest of the universe.

I think putting up satellites and getting faster technology is gonna be better for all of Alaska, all of the United States, and the world. Kodiak's just one small island on a pretty large ocean, and the earth is just a small planet in a big universe. It's important to push our boundaries of exploration beyond our own island.