On the Rampart of Science and Awe

Northern Lights and Rocket Flights: My Years at Poker Flat Research Range is three books in one.  

First, it’s an insider’s chronicle of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War.  That vast national effort, which included sussing out the military implications of barium trails, induced kinetics, and noctilucent clouds.  And so acronyms of esoteric provenance and serious purpose dot the book: SECEDE I, (and SECEDE II and III), AFGL, DASA, LASL, MPS-19, PF-NT-139, and VERLORT.  This was the serious stuff of designing, engineering, and testing the wares that won the war.  And these days, as we recognize yet that America’s technological strengths are being challenged by new forces and foes, it’s useful to recall what a successful effort looks like. 

Second, it’s the story of a middle-class family in the midst of this long twilight struggle, including the tradeoffs of work and home life.  And so divorcing, remarrying and the blending of families; five children, total.  All of it, to be sure, in a far-off setting: The middle of Alaska, where the temperature dips to minus 50 degrees below zero, and where the average annual temperature is a chilly 28 degrees, Fahrenheit. 

Third, it’s a story of wonder: The awe of personal observation, the pride of scientific discovery, and the joy of sharing new findings with others, especially the young.  All under the canopy of one of nature’s most spectacular displays: Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. 

We read, for instance, of those “devilish little darlings and dancings.” That was the familiar scenery of the nocturnal sky.  And yet “on a great night, the aurora looks like rampant rainbows. The lights slash and stab in blades and needles of green and violet; they shear off into isolated, red-feathered explosions, and then dance back into formation where they hang like a sedate but quivering final curtain.”

Yet the focus of the book is not on lyrical flight, but rather, Poker Flat.  That is, the research range owned by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and utilized by NASA, the Department of Defense (now War), as well as various other science-minded outfits.  The protagonist is Neal B. Brown, director of the facility from 1971 to 1989, and a prolific diarist and documentarian (and the many photos in the book offer a further window into the lives and deeds of Brown and his colleagues).  After Brown’s death in 2021, Sue Mitchell, an official at the university, took on the challenge of refining Brown’s material, pulling it into a single manageable, entertaining, and enlightening volume. 

Brown was born on a farm in Idaho in 1938.  Near the town of Moscow, in fact—an ironic prefiguring of his career during the anti-Soviet Cold War.  Indeed, decades later, for science purposes, from thousands of miles away, he found himself tuning into to . . . Radio Moscow, live from Russia.   

Growing up as a reader—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter on Mars series was a favorite—with techie tropes toward auto repair, ham radio, photography, and backyard rocketry, Brown graduated from Washington State University in 1961.  In those days, smart physics grads weren’t drafted into the military, but instead were inducted into the realm of defense contractors; in Brown’s case, that took him to NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California (smack dab in what’s now Silicon Valley), where he did much work with the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. 

As a newbie, he recalls, “My job was to measure the electron density of the nitrogen gas flowing out of the electrical arc and across the area where they wanted to put a model.”  He continues: “My second job was to create a higher-temperature, more focused electrical arc.”  Only an engineer can get truly excited about such work (he brightly refers to “one of the most beautiful sets of scientific experiments I had ever seen”) and yet the rest of us can step back and observe: It’s this sort of endless iteration—not easy, not cheap—that powers the complex weaponry that wins wars, hot or cold. 

From that first job in California, Brown took a more senior position at  Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, where, although a civilian, he was accorded the status of a colonel.  Not bad for someone in his mid-20s.

In 1971, Brown became the first supervisor of the Poker Flat facility (the place name was cheekily borrowed from a 19th century short story by Bret Harte about prostitutes and other lowlifes).

The rocket-testing and scientific-observation range was a long way from the local city best suited for a family, and yet Brown had no complaints. “I used to jokingly tell people,” he writes, “that over my 18 years of driving the nearly 60-mile round trip each day to Poker Flat, I likely had come close to driving the distance to the moon and back. I had always loved that daily commute. Where else in the world could you work at a space-age facility and enjoy such beautiful scenery and occasional bear, moose, or fox as you drove back and forth to work each day?”

And the work itself often mixed natural marvels with military imperatives.  One mission was figuring out how to hide the digital signatures for American aircraft inside those devilish little darlings—the auroras, full as they were of radar-messing solar particles.  

Yet for all the hard work, humor bursts out.  Brown, obviously a packrat in his life, collected various cartoons, recipes for high-tech popcorn-making, recollections of outhouses races, and jokey song-lyrics, such as a ditty to be sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.”  Sample lyric: “Oh—we come to the Poker Range/ The people are very strange.”  All preserved now, for posterity, including the memory of the Darth Vader that stalked around the lab and the R2-D2 programmed to beep “Jingle Bells.” 

After having launched nearly 1500 rockets from Poker Flat, Brown retired in 1989.  He was well remembered by his colleagues; the main road renamed in his honor. “I felt humbled that the people who had worked with me for so long, and whom I cared about so much, felt this way about me.”

Then, in middle age, “I discovered an interest in middle-school science education and teaching teachers how to do a better job with their students, who were now using computers for the first time.”  And so in the mid-90s he created the Alaska Space Academy.

What Brown writes of his time as a teacher applies to the book as a whole: “I have come to realize how important stories are that inspire the imagination.  I have used stories to get my teaching points across . . . I have routinely told about experiences from my own life that I think will connect with experiences in my students’ lives to teach my lesson or to get my point across.” 

Getting his point across for the sake of country, family, and the future: As Northern Lights and Rocket Flights: My Years at Poker Flat Research Range demonstrates, Neal Brown lived an interesting and event-filled life, one well worth recalling and admiring.