A few hours before dawn in January 2015, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket departed from a launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on a mission to the International Space Station. It was the company’s fifth cargo resupply mission and the first time it attempted to land a booster on an autonomous drone ship. Rocket launches always inspire awe, but for Ryan Chylinski, this one was life changing.

A part-time photographer, Chylinski had signed up for NASA Social, a program that grants media credentials to unaffiliated writers and photographers. It was his first time photographing a launch up close. “It was addictive,” Chylinski says. “I just kept thinking about it.” He returned to his IT job and spent the next two years dreaming about rockets.

Ryan Chylinski

In late 2017 Chylinski gave in to his obsession. He sold his belongings, left his job, and hit the road in a Capri truck camper with his dog, Tuck, to photograph rockets full-time. Most people in their mid-thirties would balk at that kind of career move, and Chylinski, now 35, admits he had reservations too. But he told himself it would just be for six months. If it didn’t work out, he’d return to corporate IT.

He’s been on the road chasing rockets ever since.

Chylinski is part of a small group of (semi-)professional rocket chasers who are obsessively documenting the new space race and paying particular attention to the happenings at SpaceX. They’ll camp out for days in a remote part of Texas just to get a glimpse of the company’s experimental rocket engine. They lurk in Florida harbors as drone ship paparazzi. They attend every single launch, no matter how unglamorous the payload or inhospitable the hour. By showing up, these rocket chasers are uncovering news about the secretive happenings at SpaceX.

This past March, Chylinski was hunkered down in a cramped bungalow in Cocoa Beach, Florida, a small tourist town just down the road from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He had converted the condo, which he was renting for the week, into a personal command center in advance of the first commercial launch of the massive SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras and equipment were strewn about the floor, some owned by Chylinski and some on loan.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to commercial space flight

He had picked up a gig to film the launch, which allowed him to splurge on the condo. Normally Chylinski operates out of his camper, which he named the Voyager 3. He parks it around Orlando, where he might spend weeks on end, depending on the launch schedule at Kennedy Space Center. Chylinski says he supports himself on a modest income, mostly from online photography gigs, so he often sets up shop in cafés. But most of Chylinski’s launch photography is done for free. He uses the photos in personal projects or gives them to magazines in exchange for the media affiliation needed to access NASA’s facilities.

For most launches, Chylinski sets up three or four mirrorless cameras around the pad and uses sound triggers to take pictures when the rocket engines ignite. But for the Falcon Heavy launch, Chylinski significantly beefed up his rig. He also set up three high-speed cameras near the pad, which would capture the engine’s explosive power at nearly 2,000 frames per second. One of the camera models hadn’t even been released to the public yet, but Chylinski had established a relationship with its producer, Kron Technologies, which sent him one to demo.

These sorts of cameras weren’t designed to accommodate the unique challenges of a rocket launch, so Chylinski had to get creative with his setup. The biggest problem, he explains, is providing sufficient power to the cameras. A consumer DSLR camera can last for days in sleep mode, but the high-speed cameras will burn through their batteries in a matter of hours. Typically cameras are set up around the rocket at least 12 hours prior to launch—but the gear may need to stay out for much longer than that. Launches are frequently delayed for days, and there’s no guarantee that camera operators will be allowed to return to the launchpad to swap out their batteries.