Let us guess the answer first: How much do you think your monthly salary is worthy of supporting or having a hobby of chasing rockets?
Chasing rockets refers to a group of aerospace enthusiasts who go to all parts of the country to watch rocket launches with their own photographic equipment with long guns and short guns.
The star chasers ran with the itinerary of the star tour, they ran with the launch information, they went to the Gobi Desert at the Jiuquan launch site, and they also went to the beach next to the Wenchang launch site.
Most of their members are post-00s, who are amateurs who generate electricity for love, but they have made a ignition scene comparable to a blockbuster movie.
was invited by Xinhua News Agency, People's ** and other official media and a number of mainstream **invitations**, and the number of live broadcasts exceeded 100 million, and people across the country may have inadvertently watched their **.
Shooting rockets requires high photographic equipment and technology.
The rocket observation site that ordinary people can reach is often several kilometers away from the launch site, which requires a large telephoto lens, and the light and speed of the rocket when it ignites and lifts off test the tolerance of the camera body.
The equipment carried by many rocket chasers can easily cost ordinary people a month's or even a year's salary just for the lens**.
No matter how you look at it, this seems to be a rather money-burning, rather "post-wave" hobby.
Perhaps many friends will guess that these aerospace enthusiasts have a monthly salary of at least 20,000 yuan, or simply a rich second generation.
However, Yang Hao, a member of the rocket chasing group @spacelens, gave a different answer:
My current income is not very stable, three or four thousand if it is good, and maybe one or two thousand when it is bad. ”
Here is a small base before we shoot rockets, with a monthly rent of 500. ”
Live in a house with cracked walls for 500 yuan
Feed your own "million hobbies".
Frankly speaking, when we first learned Yang Hao's answer, we couldn't imagine how he maintained his hobby.
Equipment, round-trip transportation, accommodation, meals, which is not a cost item.
followed him to chase the rocket once, calculated an account, and found that it was really feasible.
The moment of the ignition of the rocket shot by Yang Hao this time.
Before the launch of the Long March 5 Yao-6 carrier rocket in Longlou Town, Wenchang, Hainan, Yang Hao set off from Nanjing for Haikou.
The outbound ticket is redeemed with past miles, and the date of the rocket launch is often the off-season, so discounted tickets accumulate a lot of miles.
The return air ticket is cheaper due to the large number of people who go to Hainan for vacation in winter and the few people who go to Hainan.
After Yang Hao landed in Haikou, he rented a car with his companions from SpaceLens as a means of transportation, and the hundreds of car rental fees were shared among several people.
The daily consumption of Longlou Town, where the launch base is located, is not high, and the ** yuan of Baoluo noodles, Qingbu Liang, and mixed noodles in Daddy's tea are enough to meet their catering needs.
Many residents in the town make a living from the tourist heat brought by the "rocket launch", and the price of accommodation in the town will increase before and after the launch, and some residents will rent out their backyards as parking lots, and sell tickets on the roof.
When Yang Hao was driving to find a suitable spot to shoot the rocket, he met a resident standing not far in front of his car and beckoned him to drive the car into his parking lot.
He smiled and said that I can't go over to park, and I will turn around and go out to find a parking space, "They want to make money, we want to save money".
A member of the team rented a one-bedroom apartment of about 30 square meters in the town, which was one of the self-built houses in the rural areas of the town, with a monthly rent of 500 yuan.
The room was accessible through a dark, somewhat damp hallway, compactly housed with a bunk bed and a sofa bed.
He said that when the most people were there, there were four people sleeping here, one on the top bunk, two on the bottom bunk, and one on the sofa.
After calculation, the cost of chasing rockets for two or three days is really controlled within 1,000 yuan.
In contrast to the small, rustic buildings, the windows of this small activity room face the rocket launchers several kilometers away, and there is no shelter in between.
It may not be an ideal place to live, but it is undoubtedly a spiritual blessing for this group of young people.
Their cameras and lenses sit on the work table next to the window, and some of the most famous rocket photography works were taken on this ledge more than a meter wide.
It's just that the process of setting up a camera is not so high-
You need to bend down and climb onto the table and fix the camera on the windowsill.
Compared with mature business groups, Yang Hao's rocket-chasing organization SpaceLens is more like an interest club.
Yang Hao, who was born in 1999, is already considered older in the team. Everyone comes from all over the world, with different hometowns, different family backgrounds, and different jobs.
The only thing they have in common is that they are interested in aviation and are keen to chase rocketsThe second is that they are all using their own income to support this hobby.
A very cruel reality is that everyone will agree with the spiritual value, ideal value, and technical value of chasing rockets, but in the world, not many people currently agree with the commercial value of chasing rockets.
Although SpaceLens has received many offers, many of them are pro bono.
The current income is far from enough to cover the costs, and sometimes when the event party reimburses the travel expenses and provides catering, Yang Hao jokes that "it has been earned".
Anyway, I want to chase rockets, just save a little bit, and take your time for future development. ”
Yang Hao, a native of Guiyang, Guizhou Province, stayed in Nanjing after graduating from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology with a major in English.
He had a stable job, usually doing part-time jobs such as photography and translation, but "after working for half a year, the company is gone", which is also the reason for his recent unstable income.
In order to save money and control the cost of living, Yang Hao chased rockets a few more times, Yang Hao rented a partition room with a monthly rent of only 500 yuan in Nanjing, but he didn't expect that in the middle of the night, the wall cracked.
He questioned the landlord about the quality of the house, emphasizing that the wall had completely collapsed if it was not cracked, and what to do if it fell on himself, but the landlord reacted unimpressedly.
However, this matter is just a talking point for Yang Hao.
In his cognition, the material limitations or frustrations of life are far less uncomfortable than the failure of shooting rockets.
Materially, I can almost endure it, every rocket is unique, and if I don't shoot it, I really don't shoot it.
"Why does it want to go to the moon so much,
Why do I want to get out of the mountains?"
In fact, I am a little ashamed that the above questions about the cost of expenses and how to survive are mainly due to my instinctive curiosity about the idealistic hobby of "shooting rockets" as a worldly instigator who is anxious about income and savings.
After all, I, or I'm sure many people are like me, often in an environment where a sense of "unworthiness" is the cornerstone.
The most commonly heard logic is "you can only enjoy it when you are admitted to graduate school and the public", "save money to buy a house first and then consider spending a lot of money to travel", as well as the endless "monthly salary xxx, can't afford xxx" and "monthly salary xxx, don't deserve to chase the xxx trend" on social platforms.
These rhetoric tacitly acknowledges that there is a threshold for enjoyment and a threshold for idealism.
Therefore, when I see an idealistic hobby that burns money, I instinctively wonder, how much is the monthly salary worthy of chasing it?
And the answer that Yang Hao and his companions practiced is that no matter how much monthly salary you have, you are worthy of chasing it, which is nothing more than chasing it in its own way.
For example, Yang Hao's investment in photographic equipment in recent years has added up to 40,000 or 50,000 yuan, and the photographic equipment of other members has reached hundreds of thousands, down to 10,000 yuan.
Some people rely on their own work to slowly save money;Some people make money by taking portrait photography part-time to get better equipment for themselves;Of course, there are also people who are better off and have their own support.
Yang Hao explained that the equipment ** is actually not a hard threshold for shooting rockets.
Members who can afford to buy expensive large telephoto lenses may be able to take a close-up of the tail flame when the rocket takes off;If the focal length of the lens is poorer, you can shoot a more comprehensive picture of lift-off.
In the end, they will cut together the pictures of these different camera positions and focal lengths to present a complete version of the rocket blockbuster, and everyone will complement each other and make their own contributions.
Some members of the team who were unable to make it to the scene would lend their expensive equipment to their peers for filming out of trust, thinking that the camera was there as if they were there.
When asked why they fell in love with rocket chasing, the members gave different answers.
Some people originally fell in love with images of the sky on a photographic level;Some people are pan-spacecraft enthusiasts, and usually chase planes in addition to rockets.
Yang Hao's answer was once again beyond people's expectations
He feels that in a sense, he is very similar to Rocket, both want to "go out".
As a native of Guiyang, Guizhou, Yang Hao thinks of the mountains surrounding the city when he thinks of his hometown.
To be precise, Guiyang is a city in the mountains, and he has the impression that there are mountains in the park near his home, and the air quality in his hometown is very good, so he can lie on the roof and watch the stars at night.
Due to geographical reasons, many spacecraft will fall off the wreckage during the flight to Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangzhou, Yang Hao has heard since he was a child that "where another aircraft falls, like a meteor", but he has not seen it with his own eyes.
These provinces have a subtle connection with aerospace, and there may be more children like Yang Hao who are interested in aerospace than people think.
Yang Hao's childhood photo.
The first time he explicitly fell in love with aerospace was in 2008, a year that countless Chinese have never forgotten to this day.
China completed its first spacewalk.
Yang Hao clearly remembered that it was the school teacher who reminded everyone that day. He watched the astronauts get out of the capsule on TV, and because he was too young to know what would happen next and what the astronauts would do, he was very excited.
The next day, I went to the street to buy the newspaper and read the news pictures on it over and over again.
Chang'e-1 completed China's first lunar exploration project and mapped the entire lunar orthophoto map. The successful launch of the first relay satellite, Tianlian-1, has made future deep space exploration possible.
That year, Yang Hao's father saw that he was interested and bought him a copy of the "Chinese National Astronomy" magazine, and he guessed that his father's original intention was to encourage him to study hard.
The reason why he was obsessed with aerospace, Yang Hao didn't understand until he grew up and needed to face the college entrance examination and then study and develop in another country
Why do you say it's going to fly to the moon so hard?What did I try so hard to get out of the mountains?”
"After watching the rocket launches, I kind of understood that they resonate, and they are all about rushing out to explore a whole new world. ”
In the introduction of the vlog of the first rocket chase, Yang Hao wrote:
"How far away the dream is, I will tell you that it is twelve years. ”
Everyone needs to feel "alive".
After Yang Hao began to chase rockets, he was invited to a space activity site for children in Daliangshan, where he met Yang Liwei and felt the "dimensional wall cracking" for the first time.
This time, when shooting the rocket, a child who was brought by his parents to watch the rocket pestered him.
Before the rocket was launched, the boy's mother asked Yang Hao if he could let the boy see what the rocket looked like from the telephoto lens of his camera.
The camera was set up very high, and Yang Hao tilted the body slightly so that the boy could see it on tiptoe.
Later, Yang Hao briefly introduced the process of rocket launch and the possible scenes to the mother.
The boy didn't seem to be able to understand the proper nouns discussed by the adults, but he still curiously followed Yang Hao's gesture and looked at the launch tower in the distance.
Yang Hao said that every time he waited for the launch and waited to press the shutter, he felt "alive".
Yang Hao's experience reminds me of a preface written by Liu Cixin in the work "The Age of Angels".
In it, he recounted that in April 1970, in a village in Luoshan County, Henan Province, a child and a group of adults and children looked up at the dark night sky and watched a small star slowly fly by, which was China's first artificial satellite, Dongfanghong 1.
Seeing the flying satellite, the child's heart was filled with indescribable feelings, he felt that it was flying between the stars, and even worried that it would collide with other stars.
It wasn't until a few years later that he learned from popular science books that the satellite was far, far away from the other stars, and that there would be no "space crash" event.
And that child was the later Liu Cixin.
We will never know how many children and how many people have been blown away by the spectacle of a space launch.
In the field of remote experience of the ** rocket launch, in fact, you can't see the hull clearly, you can only see a huge sun-like fireball rising, through the clouds, recreating day in the night, illuminating the earth.
The loud wave of sound overwhelmed all sounds, and people began to tremble physiologically unconsciously.
The breathing and heartbeat that you don't care about in your daily life are amplified by the tremors at this moment, and in addition to the whistling of the rocket in the air, only the amplified nervous heartbeat and the sound of blood rushing in the body are left in your ears.
Indeed, it is the voice of "living."
You watch it leap into the sky, break through the clouds, and fly into the universe, the afterimage of the point of light on the retina arcing between the ground and deep space.
Watch as it escapes gravity and the wreckage falls behind it.
Indeed, you can't help but feel nostalgic for the symbolism of the act of "going out".
Perhaps there is a moment in everyone's heart, detached from everything in reality, forgetting the pressure of going to school and firewood, rice, oil and salt, and shaking for the ultimate pure ideal, like a dream into the world.
It may not be to watch a rocket launch, but it may also be a fireworks I saw in my childhood, a song I heard when I was a student, a ball game or a concert I watched.
It has left a seed called hobby and ideal in our hearts, and it may sprout like Liu Cixin in the future, but it may not germinate.
Because even if it doesn't germinate, the seed is still a seed.
The germ contains a moment of brilliance and feeling, and whether or not the soil in the heart dries up in the future, it symbolizes that the soil has given birth to great hope.
Author: Leaf Orange. **Vista sees the world (ID: vistaweek), not demanding correctness, but only good talking. This article is authorized** from Vista to see the world, click the button below to follow immediately.