The problem isn't the wind velocity but the direction it is blowing. Some years back, a high-power rocket got hung up on the wires at the west end of the field over the marsh area toward Lion's Mouth Road. National Grid had to bring in a tracked bucket vehicle from the Charlton area to remove the rocket from the wires. These wires come off of the Seabrook Nuclear Power station and carry 345 kV. A little while after the recovery, the Amesbury Fire Department hosted a meeting between CMASS and National Grid. We were told the recovery operation cost $5000 but we wouldn't be charged for it. NG also said if the shock cord had been just a little longer, it may have shorted to another wire and tripped the circuit breakers at the Seabrook plant; this would be a $1,000,000 job to get it back on line. To continue to use the field, we agreed that if the wind was blowing toward the wires, we would cease HPR flights and limit the low- and mid-power flights to 1000 feet. We also had to move our HPR pads a couple of hundred feet further away from the wires.
We've been adhering to this agreement since 2016. Some days we've had to halt HPR operations when the wind shifted toward the wires. For the 20 September 2025 launch, the forecast on Windy shows the direction will be toward the wires all day. Due to some odd flight paths after launches with the wind blowing in the right direction, some rockets have headed toward the wires. We've been fortunate to not have a repeat of the triggering incident, and I will always be conservative when it comes keeping rockets off the wires; the next time NG has to come out, we lose the field.