The Rocket Fuel Incident

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I had a job as a robotics engineer. I worked in a relatively small building on the side of a mountain south of Roanoke, Virginia. There was another business on the side of that mountain, and it was an aerospace testing firm. In my previous job, before the robotics job, I had been a design engineer for missile guidance systems, and sometimes we would take a guidance system to this aerospace testing company for environmental testing. "Environmental testing" consists of shaking the guidance system, dropping it from a specific height, subjecting it to certain acceleration forces, and subjecting it to extremes of temperature. In short, we did everything possible to mimic the forces that the guidance system would experience during an actual flight. If the system was going to fail, we wanted it to fail on the ground, on a shaker table, not while it was in flight.

But all of that is background. On this particular day, I no longer worked as a guidance system designer; I worked for a different company as a mobile robot designer, meaning I designed the electronics for mobile robots. You're about to see how being familiar with missiles ties into this story.

One day after lunch, our company illustrator, an affable fellow named Ken, and I decided to go for a walk. It was a sunny day and the temperature was nice. The gravel road in front of our building looped—after going past our building, the road continued around a curve and went past another building, which was the aerospace testing company that in an earlier year tested missile guidance systems for my previous employer.

Inside the road's loop was a small forest. My co-worker and I decided to take a shortcut back to our company by walking through this small forest. We soon came upon a scattering of steel drums. They were scattered here and there in the woods. They looked like 30 gallon stainless steel drums. They were smaller than the standard 55 gallon drums we're all familiar with, and they were shiny, unpainted. And stenciled in large, black letters on each drum was the following declaration:

I knew instantly what I was looking at. My co-worker Ken knew, too. Hydrazine has multiple uses but it is best known for being "rocket fuel." It often fuels the small "thrusters" that provide fine guidance to position a rocket or its payload.

Hydrazine is quite poisonous, especially if inhaled, and very explosive if it contacts air. The part of the forest that Ken and I were walking through was peaceful enough on a workday, but there were deer and wild turkey living there and, of course, there were sometimes hunters. A stray bullet could put a hole in one of those drums. There looked to be enough hydrazine scattered among the trees to blow away a good portion of the side of the mountain.

When we got back to our workplace, Ken called the county fire department and told them what we had found. When I drove home a few hours later, I passed a fire truck that was stopped by the side of the road near the drums. I never went back into those woods to see if the hydrazine had been removed. I assumed it had been removed and, if it was still there, I'd rather not know about it.