This will be a celebration event that you do not want to miss. Over the past 12 years, we have developed lasting friendships and enjoyed hosting this event with the best arena staff in the business. The USA BMX staff and the staff of South Point are more than just partners. The 2023 Silver Dollar National event will be the last in a storied history of BMX family fun and amazing short-track racing. You can read about the old Aerojet Rocket Development Facility and many other abandoned places in my book, Lost Miami: Stories and Secrets Behind Magic City Ruins.One of the largest changes for the 2023 season hits countrywide as all Nationals are now 3 Day National Weekends! Apart from the World Qualifier weekends at the Gator Nationals and Golden State Nationals, every race throughout the 2023 season will give you and your BMX family more opportunities to lock in big scores.Īfter 12 years and 20 consecutive National events, the USA BMX National Series will bid farewell to the South Point Hotel and Casino. Salgado was already incarcerated for unrelated charges at the time he was charged with murder. Between physical evidence and witness testimonies, they found 21-year-old Juan Salgado as the culprit in the killing. On January 23, 2015, detectives were able to recover McKenzie’s firearm and determined that he was shot with his own gun. The following morning, an officer found his body along the Aerojet canal with a gunshot wound in his upper torso. Police conducted an investigation and found his truck in a remote area of southwest Miami-Dade. Later that same year, 21-year-old Christian Joseph McKenzie left his house on November 14, 2013, and never showed up to work. After an extensive search, his body was found in the nearby canal with a gunshot wound to the head and bite marks showing signs that he was attacked by an alligator while in the water. This information led police to Aerojet Road where Trejo’s car was found abandoned. In September 2013, 18-year-old Jesus Trejo went missing after leaving his home to meet some “ white dude” out in the Everglades, according to his aunt. Murdersĭue to the facility’s remote location, it has become the site of multiple murders and unsolved cases. The SL-3 test firing used the same chamber as the SL-2. The AJ-260 SL-2 rocket chamber remains in the test silo to this day. As the chamber was trucked three miles south of the main facility to the test firing site, the propellant was mixed, analyzed, and produced to fill the rocket motor chamber. A large amount of propellant needed for such a rocket was manufactured at the Everglades plant. At the time, the C-111 canal was not yet complete, so the rocket chambers were barged down from Chester, Pennsylvania down to Homestead via the Intracoastal Waterway and then trucked in from Biscayne Bay. In March 1965, two rocket chambers were delivered to the plant. Both motors used a propellant burning rate and nozzle size appropriate for the full-length design and were capable of about 1,600,000 kgf of thrust for 114 seconds. The chambers were designed in short length, meaning half the size of what the final product would be, hence the names given to the test rockets, SL-1 and SL-2. After much research, they decided to subcontract the fabrication of 260-inch-diameter, 24m long chambers to Sun Ship and Dry dock Company located in Chester, Pennsylvania. But once free of Earth’s orbit though, liquid fuel seemed to be the best route to go.Īerojet now needed a cylindrical chamber that would withstand the force and power and space-faring rocket would cause. Solid-fueled rockets were best favored in the initial launch, able to lift over 100,000 pounds of payload through the atmosphere. The canal would be used to barge the rockets from the facility to Cape Canaveral as well as barging the needed equipment in.Ī small debate arose on whether to use liquid-fuel rocket engines, solid-fuel rocket motors, or a combination of both. The C-111, now known as Aerojet Canal, was dug even though it was close to the Everglades National Park, as economic development of the region won in favor of any environmental conflicts the canal would cause. A proposal was made to dig a canal from the facility to Barnes Sound on the Atlantic Ocean. Air Force gave Aerojet General, a major rocket and missile propulsion manufacturer, $3 million to start construction of a manufacturing and testing site in Homestead.Īerojet acquired land for the plant, less than five miles from the Everglades National Park, paying $2.50 an acre per year for an annual lease with an option to buy up to 25,000 acres more at nickels on the dollar. In 1957, Sputnik was launched, being the first human-made object to orbit the Earth an event that sparked a space race of who can get to the moon first, between the United States and the Soviet Union.
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