Road to the Dark Heart of the Rocket Ruins of The Everglades

The second to last ditch to the abandoned rocket silo - Jake Katel

 

The Devil loves fire and limestone.

In 1966, a company called Aerojet threw Satan a Roman candle, launching the world's largest solid-fuel rocket upside down into a fourteen-story concrete hole in the Everglades.  

 

The Cold War space race. 

 

United States VS. Evil.

 

Communist Russia in an intellectual death-roll with America to see who could put a man on the moon. 

 

First.

 

Urgent national security meant Aerojet got a steal of a deal on a remote patch of rattlesnake and alligator ridden Florida Everglades to make, test, and ship their rockets. 

 

But as trials commenced, local farmers sued, claiming hydrochloric acid from the process destroyed cars, homes, boats, and agriculture.

 

After just a few years, the company depleted its space-budget and ran back to Sacramento, leaving 75,000 acres of primordial Miami a deep-state toxic wasteland of negative space where an army once stood.

Who are you what do you want why you readin this so close

 

Aerojet upside down rocket test blast - photographer unidentified

(Author's note 2025: Miami Jetport aka Alligator Immigration Jail is a different site from Miami Aerojet which is about 40 miles south. They are very similar places but have completely different story and location.)

 

Story Appears in ISLANDIA JOURNAL III/I  
  - copyright Jacob Katel all rights reserved

Under the Everglades, the water is more solid than rock, and the rock is so holey that it can’t hold water.

It’s a liquid paradox that exerted, “An estimated fifteen-million pounds of upward pressure,” according to the Miami Herald (Nixon Smiley, 1968), enough water to stop the world's biggest space missile as it sent a dirty ice cream cone of burnt up solid-fuel from its butt end that gasformed a smokey plume so high it was visible from 15th and Biscayne.

Blood was in the air and Miami was in a thrall of psychological violence. In 1961, the Bay of Pigs set off a hellfire through the underworld. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened total nuclear annihilation. In 1963, JFK got his head blown off in Texas. And by 1965, the Space Race was in full swing as the Vietnam War raged and an LSD revolution swept the nation. 

 

Rock and roll.   

 

Meanwhile in the Everglades, cigar chomping, assault rifle wielding, explosive ordnance wiring, war paint ready, close quarter combat striking, tactical mission running, rum shooting, Budweiser slamming, camouflage geared amateur mercenaries from politically violated families were training in the South Glades to kill Fidel Castro; making their black rifles dance and sing like Celia Cruz at the Tropicana. 



 

The southernmost cities of Miami-Dade County are part of a longstanding military training and aerospace testing region and you can still walk the ruins of an abandoned rocket facility there today. 

 

It's been 60 years since Aerojet built their massive Florida launch site and fuel refinery in 1963. Here’s what the area is like now:

 

I pull up to the station for the 38 Bus - Florida City Max. My plan is to head down south and find someone old enough to have seen the test of the world's largest solid fuel rocket. 

 

The Busway runs parallel to Old Dixie Hwy – the street name a Civil War callback invoking Florida's cracker heritage – and takes about an hour and a half. When Aerojet was built, the South Dade High School football team were called “The Rebels,” and their marching band played Confederate fight music on the football field of war against Mays High School, up the street in Goulds, where future Hall Of Famer Otis Collier was a standout player.

 

Last stop at the Busway, SW 344 St, Gateway to The FLorida Keys and Everglades

 

I hop off the metro bus at SW 344 Street. "Florida City, the Gateway to the Florida Keys and The Everglades.” 

 

I grab my bike from off the steel front rack and ride a couple blocks over to the Yellow Bait Shop. Two guys buying frozen ballyhoo at the front counter greet a curvy lady with a hair cap from a beauty salon, a gold tooth, and a big pretty face. She leans over the counter with heavy shoulders. Watching and listening. I ask if she or the owner know anything about the Aerojet or have a memory of it being tested and blown up.

She cracks a smile and tells me the old owners sold the place and the new owner is only around 50 years old.

The air smells good. 

 

Perfume. 

 

A different kind of bait shop. 

 

Fresh clean woman with a smile.

 

I unlock my bike from the hitching post up front, pedal past the food truck, ride through the Race Trac Gas Station, and round the swerve over to Sam’s Hideaway, the self-proclaimed Oldest Southernmost Tavern On The Mainland USA.


 

The Last Chance Saloon is a couple hundred yards further south, but it hasn't been there as long.

 

 

Sam's Hideaway, Homestead, FL, Miami-Dade County

 

Out front of Sam's, a group of tough guys who've been knocking down coke-and-whiskeys all day for the past twenty years are talking loud, busting chops, and joking around. From the looks of it, one or three of them could  have been little kids when Aerojet was blasting down here, but, "I don't know nothing about that," is all I get other than a laugh.

 

"They shot the world's biggest solid fuel rocket into the ground upside down, down the street from here! The blast was seen from downtown Miami," I say.

 

 

Blank stares.

I walk in. 

 

The bartender is a motorcycle lady. 

 

She's in my face.

What can I get you?

 

I’ll have a beer.

 

A what?

 

A beer.

 

What kind?

 

Whatta you got?

 

We have Stella.

 

I’ll have a Stella.

 

Stella?

 

Stella.

 

I drink the beer. It’s ice cold. 

 

I stand back.

 

Two heavy dudes are downing shots, then swigging from plastic cups of mixed liquor on ice. An old bladeless fan that looks like a Cadillac wheel spins round and round. 

 

It's 2:30 p.m. Tuesday. 

 

It's a nice bar.

 


I ask if anyone has heard about the Aerojet Test in 1966.



 

Bartender: What?
 


 

I tell her about the world's biggest solid fuel rocket. The 170-foot hole where they fired it upside down. The big empty concrete place. The canals they built to ship the rockets.

 


"I heard of it."

 

 

She walks off to make more drinks, and I keep talking, but she's gone. 

 

The government killed all funding in order to bet on the Apollo Space Program. That's how the place got left behind.

 

South Dade Real Estate

I drink another beer then walk out. I bike south on the stretch to Key Largo, and cut west into an empty lot where there's a 12 acre site of blank real estate, then I leave and head north all the way up Krome Ave from Last Chance to Kendall Drive. 

---

A week later, I ride to the ruins of the Florida Aerojet rocket site on a 70 mile midnight loop.

 

South on SW 157 Ave

West on SW 184 St

west on Ketanji

South on Krome

Looking west across Krome Ave

 

My trusty horse is a $250 Walmart bike from 2018 with no back brakes, one gear, and a rejiggered derailleur that I have put thousands of miles of Miami-Dade County on. Nobody knows how or why. Not even me.

 

I been doing this a while. Over ten thousand miles on this phase. And about 50,000 lifetime Dade County bike miles since 1988.

 

Why I'm doing this today is I'm a writer and Islandia paid to run a story of mine and this seems like a funny way to do it. 

I make it over all the cracked concrete, grass, and gravel, through broken glass, car parts, and construction, on sidewalks, streets, and farms all the way to the Krome Ave bike path, one of the best evolutions to the roadway in the past 20 years, which used to be a one lane unpaved deathtrap, and now boasts eight lanes and this concrete path where I dodge the crazy cars, trucks, heavy metal, ATV's, eighteen-wheelers, and swerving traffic. I fly through wildfires, fog, rain, heat, laser light intensity, cold, sweat, insects, and that's just the fun part. It's a long journey to the Everglades.

 

 

At 344 I cut left to US1 and get food at Florida City Burger King. Four double cheeseburgers only cheese and ketchup. To go. 

 

Two miles west.

 

The sun is gone and it's dark out when I land at the “Robert Is Here” produce market at SW 192 Ave and 344 street, so I strap a headlamp to my forehead. From here it's fourteen deadly street miles to the dead end of Aerojet Road.

 

Through the dead valley flatlands of old Highway 9336, to a dirt and gravel lot against a strip of abandoned crete rock road.

 

 

South Glades. 

 

The creeping rust of rocket fuel washes over space through time. 

 

I stop to eat a double cheeseburger, set down my pocket knife, accidentally leave it on the ground, and then realize that it's missing when I'm four miles down the road, as a flooding plane of rolling fog discombobulates my surroundings.

Wait. My knife. What if I need it?



 

I can't see for the constellation of mirrors re-beaming my headlamp back at me through the hundred billion reflective water drops clouding the ground, but I decide to keep going. Fog is invisible in the dark, but I can't risk riding lights-out because I'm liable to crash head-first into an alligator or anything else that might be in the road. With my light on, reality is subsumed in zero visibility atmospheric cover. The Everglades they don't tell you about. I can't see beyond what's right in front of me. If I look down, I can only see what is directly under wheel.

 

I make it past the abandoned juvenile prison and the six miles to the dead end of the street. A patch of trees block and dissipate the clouds. Two more double cheeseburgers. Bag of cookies. Drink water. Drink Bustelo instant coffee cut with blue Gatorade powder. A glob of oil on a cough drop. Record video. Make 360 degree photos. Make proof. 

 

Look at my next obstacle. Three water drainage culverts that block the path east before the remnants of the southernmost structures of the Aerojet complex. The actual rocket pit itself.

 

Walk the plank

 

I walk across the laid out wood planks that people have made a bridge from as I hold my bike to the side and walk it through the water.



 

I ride forward a few hundred feet and arrive at the next ditch, then walk across it, stopping halfway.

 

I hear the death-ghost whistle from the ominous concrete. Diamond back snake head death rattle click clack knocking on hell's gate, baby.

 

No human in their right mind is out here without a gun. Why am I the crazy one? Six point six miles from some point six miles from the middle of nowhere. 

 

Dark. 

 

Moonless.

 

Night. 

No GPS. No bars. No knife. A real life vision quest. Me versus the satanic past of the reptilian heart of an evil drenched in history. The purple beating ventricles of iron in the mud.

What ever world war fever dream overheated here, never left, and all the human sacrificial offerings that came later made it grow.

Somewhere in the zombie flux. 

 

Living. Dying. Already dead. 

Watching. Waiting. Ready to pounce. 

 

The place is angry. Full of spirits.

 

Shadow people dart between the dark and darkness. 

 

I'm not alone.

This old demonic hell-spent rocket fuel is haunted. 

I pick up my bike, turn and take off at high speed, running across the first board on my way out of there like it’s an obstacle course and I want the fastest time.



 

Vision quest. 

 

I see where the path leads. It's a trap. That old concrete shack Pandora isn't worth the price. 

 

The journey is the thing. 

 

I'm halfway through a 70 mile marathon that would've killed Pheidippides.

 

Ride the insane wind.

Fog explodes in a suffocating crosscurrent of refuse from the cold war.

 

The temperature shifts rapidly. Hot jets and cool streams blast across the flatlands like giant stock cars racing on an oversized Hot Wheels track.

 

 

Confusion reigns. Mosquitoes cloud. Voices with guns talk fast and run into the bush. Savage lizard eyes catch particles of my flashlight beam and glint with orange menace. Fuel trucks bear down with horns drawn and brights on blast.



 

I can't smoke. The air is too wet to flick my Bic. My GoPro camera is steamed out. Burnt rubber on the concrete path looks like snake and alligator rorschachs. 

 

Standing on the pedals of my bike over total Jungian desolation. 

 

The barren wasteland drowned by non-corporeal flood. 

 

Spectral deluge. 

 

Floating, suspended, blinding, invisible joke.  

A raging river that rocks the psyche through visual distortion. 

 

Tiny drops of terrifying power that sink battleships yet are made of ghost water. 

I take a breath and laugh. 

The moon over the Everglades on January 22, 2023 was a waxing crescent. A sliver of light, shaped like the edge of a scythe. The grim reaper's invitation to 1% illumination.



 

It was a dark and foggy night.



____________



The former Aerojet rocket complex and fuel refinery are ruined structures on the edge of oblivion where people gather as a rite of passage, for personal accomplishment, to create art, or for adventure.



 

It's a modern day Machu Picchu. A historic relic of old Miami.



 

The physical structures remain, but their liminal meanings mutate over time. From rocket testing site to wildlife environmental area. 

 

The area should be protected and maybe even flooded as a mangrove buffer zone. 

 

Everybody knows that ghosts can't breathe underwater, and it's the one place the evil eye can't see.

The Aerojet company is still active and celebrated 100 years of business in 2015, then recently announced its acquisition in an all cash transaction valued at $4.7 billion.

 


If they still own any of the original Aerojet South Glades real estate, that's 50,000 acres (with an option for 25,000 more) of location, location, location, that could finally take off like a rocket ship, right side up.




 

Story Appears in ISLAND JOURNI III/I  
 

 

copyright jacob katel. All rights reserved

Epilogue:
In 1983, the State of Florida, led by Bob Graham with help from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, paid around $17 million bucks to purchase the land and turn it into a park, home to many important species and crucially recognized even then as imperative to restoring natural flows of water along historic routes from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.