The Human in the Loop
What a rocket explosion in 1986 taught me about AI, weather, and why the human behind the forecast matters
The house started shaking before I understood what I was hearing.
It wasn’t the sound of a launch. I’d heard plenty of those. This was different — a low rumble that built into something physical, something you felt in your chest before your brain caught up. I looked out the window and saw it: a red mushroom cloud rising over Vandenberg, expanding upward and outward against the California sky.
Red meant nitrogen tetroxide. N2O4. One of the most toxic substances used in rocket propellant. And it was moving.
I was off duty. My wife was there. Our newborn son was there. And somewhere on base, the duty forecaster I had trained and certified was watching the same cloud and running the numbers on a Texas Instruments calculator — determining whether the toxic corridor was heading toward Lompoc, California, or out to sea.
It went west. Offshore. Lompoc was safe.
The forecast had called it. The launch was a go precisely because the toxic corridor model predicted the plume would…
