The Exodus Path, My Struggle.
Although I really did find a way to power the rockets to take hundreds of us throughout the solar system, the only product of my entire career struggle working in so-called "rocket science," was that people wanted to hear the story.
As the "Featured Evening Speaker", again and again, they would keep me long after I was finished talking, asking me questions. What was so captivating? Was it the stories about how we can actually leave the Earth? Or was it just that I was telling them stories and entertaining them? Or was it my struggle against the real world and reality? I can't tell, so I am telling the story
The struggle to make a Vision come alive, a kind of Exodus Path to Leave Earth, became intense, compelling, overpowering, and took on a single purpose at the moment when I first found out there was water in space. I knew immediately I could use it.
At the end of that career, after I "retired" and started another, I had discovered comparatively simple ways to do it:
We would inhabit, occupy, move minor planets and other celestial objects.
After all the effort, all the Visions, I got old instead of making it happen.
This is no science lesson. This autobiographic story describes my struggle, about US government laboratories where I worked, about how I found, and how I tried to tell but was too autistic to tell effectively. I have Asperger's syndrome. And then I got too old, too soon.
I had become excited because everything we would need to inhabit the "neospace", the places between here and the edge of the Solar System, had just become known. Some was already there and telescopes and space probes just revealed it. Some was just developed because of the failed efforts to develop manned Mars missions.
This is not sci-fi. The names are real and the stories happened.
Nature seduced me with the excitement. She let my colleagues and me discover water objects in the space near Earth, in "neospace", the space almost near enough for us to get to and use, between here and Jupiter, Saturn.
Water in space turned out to be everywhere, from the planet Mercury in its the forever dark craters, in the moon, and in mostly everything to way past at least Pluto,
Long ago, when people landed on the moon and when Star Trek inspired us, we thought we could just go there, to space, to the moon, to other planets like Mars or Mercury. But at every turn, we discovered another bad thing to stop us.
We did not find what we needed to live, like water. Our rocket ships were too feeble, too huge, too expensive, and blew up too often. Low gravity in space would float poop, snot and vomit in the air, stinking up the ship and forcing us to breathe it. Low gravity drained our bones of calcium and disabled our lymph system. Space was more radioactive than sitting on pile of old fallout from an atomic bomb. Mars had a little bit of a poison, carbon monoxide, in its carbon dioxide air. Mars would be a poison planet.
So, we gave up. No one even went back to the moon.
Mother Nature only tricked me a little, but she did it again and again. A new problem would suddenly appear just when an old problem was solved.
Mother Nature fooled me. She showed me how it seems there is enough water for us to start leaving Earth. She teased me to think we could be explorers who could inhabit what we explore.
But, she knew I won't get to go there. I am old already. And the world went broke.
More annoying: Mama Nature told us clearly that we were the wrong species for space and she would not let us have the "clear profit" we would need to start The Exodus. She seemed to point to her bulging stomach, pregnant with the new species, her digi-sapiens children, cyborgs, robots, androids.
-------------
It's about the water
More than anything, we needed to have water in space. Every time we looked, we would not see any water.
We simply could not afford to launch the Gulf of Mexico into space. We could not even launch a small fishing lake into space. But that was what we needed. Everything we do to live our lives requires not just water but a lot of it.
We needed Warp Drive. Instead, all we got were feeble toys, little rockets that could barely shove a porta-potty space-can to the moon and back.
We needed strong legs and powerful wings, so to speak. Instead, we were oozing and sliming like snails and clams. Our space ships needed to be more like ocean cruise ships and aircraft carriers, not like NASA's space jails.
Everything in space was mostly too far apart. Whatever rocks, moons or planets were there, were so far apart that a very short trip, like to the Moon, would take many days, not hours like an airplane trip. A quick trip to Mars would take 6 months or longer. A trip to Jupiter or Saturn would take years.
I thought the 14 hour plane trip to Australia was a very long ride, in a cramped seat, rubber cardboard food, kids running up and down the aisle, engine noise, white knuckle fear of flying.
Most places in neospace seemed to be barren rock-deserts, harder than sidewalks and as dry as a fireplace.
The other places seemed to be giant oceans with no surface, just gas, poison gas, that got thicker and thicker and thicker, and with hyper-hurricanes the size of the world, and lightning everywhere. That's Jupiter, Saturn and such.
Nothing seemed to work. We would be stuck here with the terrorists and tax collectors, forever. Instead of space travel, we would be stuck here with the Liberals fighting Creationists, all fighting beheaders and rogue atomic bombers, with high unemployment, inflation, a Carbon Usage Tax, and Global Warming.
And it was all about the water.
I should have quit, but it was too exciting.
I don't know of anyone who put it all together. That is why I am telling my part of the story. I put it all together.
---
Autistic, Like Mongoloids and other Weird People
I was also recently diagnosed to be born with a common and peculiar form of autism: Asperger's syndrome. My genetic breed of human focuses hyper-intensely and takes people literally. We are sometimes called "Aspies".
Most of us Aspies are a bit like Spock, of Start Trek. It makes us a bit difficult to work with or understand. Often we blurt out what's on our mind and interrupt you. We often act inappropriately when we do and say things.
Some Aspies can not look you in the eye. Not me. I stare, deep. I will hit on pretty ladies and stare deep into their eyes every chance I get. I only do that if their person is totally captivating, and not necessarily for neurotypical reasons.
One of my psychologists said he never met an Aspie with less than 130 IQ. This weird combination of inappropriate behavior, smarts and focus makes me and Aspies like me sometimes hard to follow. More than sometimes. In that aspect, we are like those with Downs syndrome, or Tourette's syndrome, or with other types of autism that favor intelligence. Mongoloids (Down's people) can sometimes figure big prime numbers in their heads. I can't to that.
I will sometimes go too fast. I will sometimes say things that are simply not supposed to be said that way. Because I am an Aspie, I can't see what's wrong with doing these things at all. If I went too fast or confused you, tell me and I will try to fix it. Maybe not.
If I use inappropriate language or say things that are too graphic and just not proper in mixed company, or that are insulting or too mean,
too bad.
I'm an Aspie.
You are supposed to treat me nice, like we treat mongoloids and other weird people.
CHAPTER 2
· 1968 physics grad student and Dyson Starship
Someone Inspired Me
Physics Graduate Student, Anxious for Escape
The rocket science part of my career was a like a fanciful journey by someone too naive to know the difference. I started on this journey when I was a graduate student in physics and read the words in a physics trade journal:
".... take a town the size Princeton New Jersey
to the nearest star ..... cattle and livestock ..... "
The article described a starship propelled by nuclear explosions, atomic bombs.
. 
\ M:\azinc\PROZX\To Inhabit The Solar System\- CHAPTERS drafts\to_occupy_the_solar_system GRAPHICS\Cromeo3.jpg
Nuclear explosions would power Dyson's "Orion Starship"
When we discovered and detonated the atomic bomb, it unleashed a powerful Virus Of Change upon the world. It infected us with visions of really leaving the planet, and not just as ghosts. For the first time, we could see how we could someday inhabit space. The energy released was extreme.
How could we use this? Could we make cars that never need gas? All cars need gasoline. Could we make airplanes that just keep flying and never need to refuel? Could we heat our homes without ever needing to chop wood or shovel coal into the stoves?
When I heard of the atomic bombs, I was little, 7 years old, and had to shovel heavy coal into buckets and carry them in. My father had to lift the heavy buckets and dump the coal into the mouth of the pot belly stove in the dining room. Could I use nuclear heat to escape this? Even at 7 yrs old, I thought of it personally, as in "Could I use...".
The world was locked in a Cold War and the United States was fighting a real war in Vietnam. At the same time, the USA was preparing to send people to the moon. These were confusing times and depressing times.
Could we use the atomic bomb energy to make rockets? The Germans used rockets to send bombs to England during World War II, to kill civilians, on purpose. Both the Russians and the Americans were making rockets that would kill all the civilians in the whole city all at once, on purpose.
If we would use the nuclear energy to power the rockets, could we go to Mars or Venus, instead? Flash Gordon went to Mars in the movies.
It had been a dismal time, a dark and stormy time, a confusing time. Blacks were Negroes and had to sit in the back of the bus. People shot the Kennedy's and Martin Luther King. The Democratic Parties of Chicago and Kent State beat us up and killed us because we did not want to go to Viet Nam to kill Vietnamese for them.
And there I was in Cleveland, Ohio, back in the fall of 1968, a graduate student studying solid state physics, nothing at all related to space. I was stuck doing a worthless Ph.D. thesis on "magnetic thin films".
I saw how Physicists with Ph.D.'s were pumping gas and selling shoes instead of getting jobs. Meanwhile the Electrical Engineer PhDs were getting multiple job offers. Not one single professor told me "thin films" were something of extreme value in Silicon Valley.
I was stupid. I had chosen to study Physics in Graduate school, instead of Engineering.
No one had taken close up pictures of anything in space other than the moon. In sharp contrast, the article in the trade journal told us how to propel a rocket ship with people and livestock to the nearest star. The article shocked me.
In those days, most people somewhat expected that kind of shock. The world had just discovered
atomic bombs and nuclear power, and transistors, and color TV, and jet airplanes, and penicillin, and cars, and radio, and plastics, and DNA, and computers, and rockets,
all in one breath,
all within about 40 years,
all within half a lifetime.
It was a shock hurricane of knowledge.
The nuclear devices were extremely powerful compared to anything. The nukes were at least 10 million times more powerful than anything our Life Form had ever seen. It was about 10 million times more powerful than chemicals such as high explosive, food or gasoline. Not a 1000 million, not a zillion, but about 10 million. The nuclear energy made it possible to think about space travel. This was the first realistic proposal on how to do it. It captivated me.
This was the start for me, 40 years ago. Was it Fanciful? Of course. But I was a graduate student. What did you expect? That's what you get when you are a student or a professor. When you are young and a graduate student, anything is possible, even the impossible.
I did not know it was fanciful. "Fanciful" can mean having a curiously intricate quality, or it can also mean unreal, not based on fact. This one, single, fanciful article inspired me to spend an entire career trying to make and power the space ships for us to inhabit outer space.
The starship powered by nuclear explosions was credible because a famous, very respected scientist showed how to do it. The scientist, Dr. Freeman Dyson, showed how to propel a space ship with people on board that could travel far beyond the solar system, and even to the nearest star.
When I first picked up the article I was walking to the physics lab in which I was an instructor. It was October 1968. There was only time for a few fleeting glances at the tempting pages. All I could skim was that Dr. Freeman Dyson, the physicist author, had detailed his proposal to use atomic bombs to propel a very large space ship to the nearest star, and, at a Flash Gordon speed of up to 1% the speed of light. We did have Star Trek then, so Dyson's ship was just Flash Gordon speed, extremely fast for us, but sci-fi slow.
Quickly skim-reading the article in quick glimpses the whole afternoon, I saw how Dyson would propel his space ship by pounding the back of it with atomic bombs. One huge bomb would explode about a mile behind the huge space ship, one bomb every 3 seconds. The atomic blast would pound a bomb-blast-catcher into shock absorbers and springs. The shock absorbers and springs would cushion the blast and accelerate the huge space ship.
Dyson's description was so simple, it seemed to me we could just go make it tomorrow, if we wanted to.
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copied directly from : Physics Today, October 1968
Freeman Dyson would propel the spaceship to the nearest star
by pounding it with repeating atomic bombs. It was atomic bomb blast propulsion.
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Most scientists familiar with the proposal thought it was a bit impractical. Most engineers thought it would not have worked like he said. Dyson was a physicist, not an engineer. A physicist figures the principle of things. An engineer makes things work.
There was a joke:
If it stinks, it’s Chem Lab.
If it’s green and slimy it’s Biology Lab.
If it doesn’t work, it’s Physics Lab.
If you ever tried to do what someone else said was easy and that you should go do it, then you know. You know it was always much easier said than done. Any engineer would tell you how difficult it would be to make Dyson's starship. But, I was a student then and did not know what the "big kids" did.
I do remember this epochal event, that day I got the article, because it really was epochal, for me. It changed everything. Like when someone shot Martin Luther King. I remember where I was, watching the 14 inch round screen color TV in our apartment just before supper. Devastating.
It tattooed my brain cells like when Jack Kennedy was shot. I remember what boards I was walking across to keep my feet dry between the construction site mud-mess on the university campus. Or when the first Shuttle blew up. Or when Princes Dianna died.
This Dyson Starship day is a slowly fading brand in my memory.
In those days, using atomic bombs was ok. The Communists were the terrorists then, with real atomic bombs really pointed at every city in the USA, for real. They built an Iron Curtain and they shot people.
Physicists, like some of my professors, invented good atomic bombs, because God was on our side and gave us the bomb first and let us stop World War II with them. Ours were good. Theirs were evil. The Commies were Atheists. That made the Commies bad in the USA, Cleveland and Texas. But, my professors did not talk about it much because it was all Top Secret.
USA atomic bomb
I knew what atomic bombs looked like. Pictures were everywhere.
The communists were going to bomb us with them unless we made our atomic bombs bigger and better than theirs.
atomic bomb
I was ready for escape. We were all ready for escape. Just like now.
I had wanted to find a way to leave the planet from the moment I read the article on Interstellar Transport.
The Interstellar Transport article seemed to be real.
Later that evening I read more. Dyson was presenting calculations. I read how Dyson really did write how he learned from the secret, atomic bomb tests how to make a starship that could go to the nearest star. What especially caught my eye were the words in his simple figure: "... people and livestock ..."
I read the trip would apparently only take hundreds of years.
"What?" I thought.
The "hundreds of years" was nuts. But I ignored that part.
---------------------------------------------------------------
===================
Credits: Charlou Dolan prompted me as a co-author to write an early version, coaching me carefully on how to write like a neurotypical and not like an Aspie. Neither of us knew "Aspie" at that time. This version is considerably different. Her influence persists.
===================
other interesting chapters/sections recently more refined:
NASA meeting on space and asteroids
First International Meeting On Killer Asteroids
seriously crazy rocket science meeting
Hazard meeting with Carl Sagan
Clear Cutting the Kuiper Belt Comets
space aliens 10 miles under ...
The Iceship And The NASA Space Meeting
===================
CHAPTER 3
First Job at the AEC, and the Dyson Starship
When I finally got my Ph.D., Physics doctor degree, I deliberately got a job working for the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). I did that because I wanted to know how to make a starship just like the one Dr. Freeman Dyson described. Also, they were the only ones hiring.
The Dyson Starship would use megaton atomic bombs to propel it. The AEC made just such atomic bombs.
My boss's boss's boss, who hired me, at the AEC laboratory also knew about the Dyson Starship and also wondered how to make one. His name was Dr. Tom Burford. Burford and I talked about it. As soon as I started work, he got me access to the Top Secret documents associated with the work of Freeman Dyson.
In those days the agency was called the AEC. It is now called "Department of Energy.", the DOE. Some parts of the DOE are another space agency of the United States. There are at least several, not so well known space agencies of the United States. NASA is not the only one. NASA is the adventure one. They do somesaults in space bubble, plant flags and brag. The other ones have to do real work.
You don't like my exaggeration? Too bad. I'm an Aspie.
It seems that most people who don't know me or what I did tell me the only real work NASA does is the deep space science observations. Most people love the Hubble pictures. They really love the robots on Mars. They despise the zero gravity somersault antics and extremely expensive joy rides. The first time I heard such heresy was on a plane to Seattle for a rocket science meeting. The high paid computer geek young guy sitting next to me loved the robots on Mars. He hated the entire manned program. He shocked me. I did not tell him my job was to develop engines for a manned Mars mission.
One always has a "day job" that you do to get money. One also has a fantasy, a hobby daydream you think about all the time. It's the daydreams that make magic happen. And that is what happened. However, it took a while and was mostly disappointing the entire time. I never got rich either. And I got fired a couple of times. Aspies just have a hard time with social situations, like a boss.
Back in the early 1970's, my first job with the AEC was to analyze beam weapons, like "phasor beams", to shoot atomic bomb-tipped missiles out of the sky. My second job was to work on spy satellites to catch other nations testing or shooting atomic bombs. As a side project, I had quickly maneuvered for one of my first projects to use a kind of Dyson starship propulsion.
My incidental job also included finding ways to get and use energy, such as solar power, fuel cells, geothermal things. That is a totally different story. That one was more profitable.
· Beam Weapons ... Laser and the Lesson
Laser Beams and Phasor Banks
The beam weapons were a daydream fantasy that many of us had, because the scientists had just perfected lasers and the engineers had just built large subatomic particle accelerators. Both of them appeared to have what you need to make a phasor beam.
"Phasors" were Star Trek language, of course. All the younger scientists and engineers watched Star Trek, even though it was somewhat trite and childish and the acting was bad. We loved it. I related to Spock immediately.
We referred to our work as "directed energy weapons" when we were giving official presentations.
The laser beam weapon started out to be fun, but quickly disappointed me. My boss's boss's boss arranged for me to get a briefing by a Major Axelman regarding a laser phasor beam that would shoot down a fighter jet. That would be really neat. As it turned out, the laser was mounted inside a building as big as 3 houses on a little hilltop in the desert. The little hill was about 2 miles from the side of a small mountain.
Already it was not sounding good. Phasors were little things Captain Kirk and Spock and I could carry with us in our pockets when we land on some alien planet. Something as big as 3 houses would not even fit on an airplane.
Major Axelman said he would put on a face guard helmet and fly the fighter jet between the little hilltop and the small mountain. They would put a target on his airplane and the laser would try to shoot at him.
"What?" I thought, "This guy is nuts."
After they described the laser a bit more, it was clear this would not be a very good phasor beam. The laser was powered by some chemicals. But the chemicals were deadly poison. The laser was only a small prototype and would only heat up the target, not vaporize it, not melt it immediately, not even knock it down. And the engineering details would show that it would not be so easy at all. It was easier said than done.
The laser beam also had to be aimed and focused on the target. My boss's boss paid for a trip for me to see the aimer telescope. At first it was captivating.
We were in one room, watching through a big window. The workers were in the other room on the other side of the big window, working with the telescope and doing things that looked important. It was a backwards telescope. Instead of looking into the eyepiece, they would shoot the laser beam into the eyepiece. That was clever. The beam came out of the big part of the telescope. Then whatever was at the end of the beam should be vaporized.
The engineers had designed a telescope that would swivel and point fast enough to track a fast fighter jet flying by. The telescope would focus the laser on the fighter jet, and then melt a small, one foot diameter spot on the jet.
"Melt?" I thought, "That's all it will do is melt a small hole?"
This was disappointing. Unfortunately, the laser would never be able to do much more than that, melt the skin of the airplane. And worse yet, during my career, the laser would never be as powerful as the competition.
The competition was just simple, small rockets using real, physical high explosives. Even a terrorist could fire one from his shoulder. That was the competition, some rag head with a Stinger missile.
It was fundamental science that stopped it. My boss's boss's colleague, a laser scientist named Dr. Garth Gobeli pointed out that a simple, 1 pound of high explosive would deliver 2.2 million joules of energy in about 5 thousandths of a second to a 3 inch diameter spot on the airplane, and blow an airplane to bits.
Blow it to bits, Vaporize It. That's what we wanted.
The laser power was too small, by comparison. Even 20 years later, the laser would not even be able to deliver 1 million joules. That would be just the energy of less than half of a pound of high explosive. And the laser would take one second to do so, which would be about 200 times slower than the explosive.
In other words, "no blowing anything to bits."
The laser would be as heavy as the heaviest bomb the airplane could ever deliver. The laser was as heavy as a small airplane, was half as energetic and 200 times weaker than a small rocket fired from a fighter jet, or from one of Osama’s buddies.
It was even worse than that. The laser beam had to be focused and aimed by something, an aiming telescope. But the laser was not supposed to blow up that aiming telescope. The telescope would be made of some magical something.
Spock would say that was illogical, hard to figure. If they could find that magical something that a laser won't blow up, then the bad guys could coat their airplane with that same magical something and not be blown up. This was quite illogical.
And there was more bad news. The laser beam also had to go through the air between the laser and the airplane, and not blow up the air. If the laser was powerful enough to blow up airplane skin, then it would also blow up the air in between. The air would flash and !bam! like lightning, and would sap and drain laser energy.
There did not seem to be any way around it. It just was not working out.
This first phasor beam fantasy was down the drain, for me
Weaponization of Nuclear Explosives
------- Tom Burford and the Orion Documents -------
Our mission: make weapons out of nuclear explosives.
Sandia gave everyone I knew who worked here least one safe certified to hold atomic secrets. Like every new hire, I got to choose what kind of safe I wanted when I got my dictionary, ruler and scissors. I picked two secret safes, a big, cabinet-style metal document safe and a little cabinet safe. You had to buy your own slide rule.
The small safe was like a two drawer file cabinet, but with 2 inch steel sides, front, top and bottom, and a big, 4 inch combination lock wheel, with a handle thing to open it. It made me feel important.
The big safe was just a metal file cabinet with metal doors. Two metal bars and a pair of fat, 2 pound, combination locks kept the metal file doors from opening. This safe was taller than me and wider than a big refrigerator, but only one document deep.
I fully expected to have both safes filled to bursting with Atomic Bomb secrets very soon. Then I could make a Starship.
It was the politics protocol I didn't follow, and was too naive to realize it.
The obvious protocol was that one does not just go visit with the boss's boss's boss. One is not supposed to go over each of the in-between guy's heads.
Rather instantly, in the first few days Dr. Tom Burford, the boss's boss's boss, and I started talking. He was the only one in the chain of command who thought about things, strategically, philosophically.
The other guys just didn't know that much, I thought. They didn't act like they were driven by any vision or strategy. So I intellectually ignored them.
Burford and I were standing and looking out his second floor, north facing office windows at the Sandia mountains to the east. Burford was a "Director" working for a Vice President, so he got a 25 foot long run of window, stretching the entire length of his office.
Because he came from Bell Labs, the famous AT&T Bell Labs where transistors were invented and where people won Nobel Prizes often, and because he did some really important work with U.S. Navy underwater acoustics, his long window also faced the best view.
Whenever I visited him, which was many times a week, we both could not resist stopping a second or two to look out those windows.
You think Big Thoughts better when you see Big Things, mountains, The Layers of Time in the rock strata.
We could see the February snow outlining the rock layers on both the southern and northern Sandia mountain peaks, and we could see ridges along the 15 mile long desert mountain range rising a mile above the already mile-high floor of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The mountains marked the east boundary of the city.
The cold outside was so desert-dry and clear we could almost see the branches on old, stubborn ancient pinon trees clinging to sheer, 500 foot rock faces 10 miles away at the top of the mountain.
Burford would most often hold his head down a little and to the side, and slightly manipulate his Pall Mall cigarette, mostly without smoking it. Slightly thin, darker hair, black rimmed glasses, and clean shaven, he always wore a pressed darker suit, never looked disheveled and always seemed to be smiling.
"Did anybody ask you yet if they have to get a passport to visit you?" he joked.
Apparently, some people from back east really were that stupid. Some acted like Albuquerque was in Mexico, which is a whole different country starting a few hundred miles south of here.
Burford, the person who made the decision to hire me, seemed to be the only one who had that intense, intellectual curiosity, like the people at the university. The rest of the people I met here were smart enough, but they just seem to plod and do work. They didn't think about things.
He smiled and raised his eyebrows. "You know, you can see the geological layers quite well, with the snow outlining them." he said. "That top layer on South Peak is Late Pleistocene." he asserted. He knew I liked fossils. He seemed to understand the timelessness and infinity of existence one can see in the fossils.
Actually, I suspected he was planning a neat field trip to that prehistoric-human cave on the other side of the mountain, with a parking area just off the road and 500 feet from the cave entrance. This was a cave that we could actually crawl into, legally. The pollen in the dust on the cave floor and the fire pit way deep inside had enough layers to be dated to something like 14,000 years ago. That was pre-historic man, long before the Indians.
The tip of South peak exposed a 500,000 year record in the Late Pleistocene rock layers.
"Humans were just learning to make good spears and fire pits when that layer was laid down." he said.
Our silent, 1 second stares at the mountain clearly expressed our deep, thoughts. At least I thought they were deep. I was thinking about Starships and 1000 year trips in space.
He was probably thinking he could not get his Mercedes Benz close enough to the South Peak to walk to the peak in a half hour on a Sunday afternoon. There was no road to South Peak like there was to North Peak.
It was a nice break, with the timelessness of the layers of rock in the formation on the mountain, like tree rings capturing 500,000 years of time.
We were supposed to be making weapons of mass destruction. Instead, we were watching snow fall on a mountainside, and talking about fossils. Feeling guilty, we always got back to work pretty fast. Work was mostly exciting.
This laboratory weaponized nuclear explosives. We took the nuclear explosives the Los Alamos scientists invented and made weapons out of them.
"What do you think we can do with a nuclear explosive?" he asked, posing the general concept of trying to figure out how to do something really AT&T-like, Nobel-prize like.
He stared out his window again, holding that cigarette, with the fire end pointed away from him and like he was about to flick the ash off.
"Did you ever hear of the Orion Program? The Atomic bomb powered starship?" I asked.
It was an outlandish question, quite a bit out of the blue, and completely unrelated to ballistic missiles or weapon effects.
I fully expected he would just not care, and that he would know nothing of the program at all. But I had to try.
"Oh yes, quite impressive. You heard about that, eh?" he replied, smiling, grinning almost.
"What?" shouted a loud surprised voice in my head, receiving an instant reward for asking a bold, outlandish question.
"You did?" I answered. This is the first time I met anyone in two years who even heard of it.
"It was really quite impressive. They actually did some experiments to find out how it could work, with high explosives. It was kind of cute how the tiny rocket actually worked." he explained.
"Really," I responded, my neuron circuits jammed, not knowing which of many questions to ask next. He started talking about Dyson's Orion Starship all on his own. I did not have to prod him or coach him about it.
Burford continued, motioning with steady and very mildly graphic, Italian-like gestures how the rapid fire explosives pushed the rocket. I never heard of this before.
Explosives??
His gestures and mannerisms were the opposite of emotional. My gestures and mannerisms were typically the opposite of his.
As Burford was telling me about the "Orion Test" I realized that instead of real atomic bombs at the real Nevada Test Site, with a real fireball hitting a real atomic bomb catcher, he was talking about a toy rocket loaded with sticks of dynamite.
Instant disappointment.
I thought he was going to tell me they fired some real atomic bombs at a real atomic bomb catcher. But he didn't. All he described were just non-nuclear tests, with high explosives.
All I could think of while he was talking was "bunch of boys shooting firecrackers under tin cans." Their excuse to waste the money was that they were demonstrating that you could blow up a bunch of bombs behind a rocket and push it.
! Dumb. Stupid !
He was describing some kind of engineering effort, but I was seeing a cartoon story. Every word he said created another picture. A small, toy rocket, a basket of hand grenades, sticks of dynamite. First dynamite stick blasts it into the sky. Whacks the toy rocket into the air, like it was hit with a hypersonic baseball bat.
Rocket flies off in some direction; like a fly ball; not like a rocket that goes in a well defined direction, but just somewhere. "Rocket" disappears. Just like I would expect something to be if it were on top of a stick of dynamite. Split second just after the first stick: the second stick goes off. Whacks the rocket in some other random, wild direction.
Then they all sit around a dark room playing a movie where we see the toy rocket disappear, and they all clap.
What a disappointment. All I could feel was:
Not impressive at all.
What horribly un-visionary experiments.
But Tom Burford calmly and casually kept on talking, "General Atomics did it. You can get the Secret documents from the Classified library."
"Are they about nuclear things?" I asked, meaning "are they about atomic bombs, or just dynamite firecrackers," and anticipated he would say "No," meaning "just firecrackers."
I already knew I would go away disappointed and would drop the topic forever. He had just destroyed my Vision of Dyson's Orion Starship.
"Oh yes," he replied.
??What??
"You can go over to that double story building, attached to the library, and get the documents from the Classified library," he said, looking out his window and pointing to the small building across the sidewalk and main road between the buildings. "You can look them over in your office."
He made it very clear: he was telling me that I should definitely go right now and get the classified documents and definitely read about it.
Not only did he know about the Orion program, he knew where to get the nuclear, secret part of the story. He understood.
This was completely unexpected.
He knew very well that our Sandia Lab could implement the atomic bomb propulsion if we needed to. He could decide to make something of it if he wanted.
"You think we could find a way to use it? um?" he smiled as he posed his question like a comment.
I was elated. I thought how wonderful it was that he did not pontificate or mandate that we do it, like some arrogant, aggressive boss. Instead, he commented it, softly. He often ended his sentences with a combination "um?" phrase, a light chuckle and a smile.
Wow.
He just told me to go learn about Dyson’s Orion Starship. I knew I had gone to work at the right place.
I walked around his dark wood conference table.
“You know, the Orion really could take us to the nearest star. It’s amazing. We actually did put someone on the moon." I emoted, like a wide eyed graduate student, almost stuttering.
"I didn't really think we would be able to do it." I blurted again, meaning "go to the moon."
He smiled and replied "Yeah, it is pretty amazing. Exciting."
As I walked out of his office I almost talked to myself embarrassingly aloud. "I can and I will just march across the street and get super secret Orion Starship documents."
I thought this almost audibly, moving my lips. I almost forgot to say "bye" to Helen, his secretary. I always acknowledged her.
"Burford will tell them to give them to me," I almost audibly said again, almost aloud talking to myself some more, perseverating and staring at the sidewalk, walking with a side to side wagging of my head in step with my gait, unaware of anyone around me, as I headed straight for the library.
I really was just a young kid. Bright, but quite Aspie.
-------------------------------------
Classified Library
The classified library was just a bunch of memos and documents in a big, two floor room. I expected a "LIBRARY," with mysterious books. I expected high-secret protocol, with a deep underground chamber, protected from atomic bomb blasts and bad guys. I expected something intimidating, with serious credential checking and military uniforms.
I imagined how I would very importantly tell them "Burford told me to get these documents." And then they would obediently and very reverently go get them.
Instead, I walked into a brightly lit room about the size of two gasoline station garages, and just as spacious. The metal second floor was clearly visible from the metal first floor, and all I saw was rows of metal bookshelves.
Some of the metal was painted that light creamy color and not that poo green or military gray, so it looked somewhat like office space and not a garage or a military depot. That was the positive feature. This was a very bright room.
Not many books. Just documents. All kinds of documents. There were about 6 female helpers who knew where all the documents were and how to find out if I had access to them.
This place was not a library at all. It was a storage room for all kinds of studies plain old regular people wrote.
I found it quite simple to get the documents on the classified version of the Orion Starship. The intelligent females helped. They even knew I had the right access without asking me.
The one nice thing about the classified library I really liked was that I didn't have to carry the classified documents myself. They carried them for me. Special couriers delivered whatever secret documents anyone wanted to the important person's office.
The couriers transported the documents in a special, metal, classified courier cart from wherever to wherever, inside the guarded area. The couriers checked to make sure the document-taker had the correct secret access. They would not give up the documents until whoever took them personally signed that they took them out of their hands.
All I had to do was tell the smart ladies what I wanted, and it would be delivered to my desk.
When I got back from the Classified Library I blabbed and blabbed to Marylee, our 40 year old, smart secretary, about what these documents could mean.
"That's pretty impressive." she remarked, looking directly at me with a bright smile through glasses that made her eyes seem bigger than they were. I liked her from the moment she looked at me on my first interview. You might say I hit on her every chance I got. I could really feel her intense intellectual stimulation.
------- The Orion Documents ----------------
It seemed like this whole pile of "Secret Restricted Data" documents about the Orion space ship didn't take up more than a foot or so of my metal cabinet safe. I really expected more.
A foot of documents is not very much space in that metal cabinet safe. My save was mostly empty. A mere foot of documents was not very many for a topic so important.
Once I started talking in the open about Dyson's Orion, another guy appeared and said he heard of it. "In The Open", of course, meant in a secret building and with people having Secret , Restricted Data clearances. What he told me, however, was no secret, according to him.
I forgot his name as he was telling me who he was. He told me there was a secret military program based on the Orion, and they were so serious, he even read about some of the detail on how they would assign a Career Officer, for the people who would be on the space base. ¿ No secret? Ok.
After talking to him, I expected these documents would describe a Permanent Space Station military base, between here and the moon, just like he said.
I was looking for it. I couldn't find it. I looked again. I still couldn't find it or any reference to it or any reference to conversations to it. I looked again the next day. I couldn't find anything interesting at all in these documents.
I skimmed them a few times over, stopping at the pictures and figures. I was confident I didn't miss anything, and puzzled that I just couldn't find the Great Plans for a Great Spaceship Battle Station between the Moon and Earth, like that fellow told me. I couldn't even find a picture or drawing of a big space station or spaceship propelled by bombs. The best I could find was depressingly completely feeble. All I saw were a bunch of detailed, boring things. There were almost no secret things that I would have to forget if I ever left this Secret environment.
I imagined what I would think 30 years from now. Most of this would be too boring to remember. There wasn't anything interesting here to remember.
I was completely disappointed. The most imaginative thing I could find in the documents was a cartoon-like engineer's sketch of a guy sitting in one of two chairs in some kind of roomy cabin. The chair was not even drawn very well. It was just a sketch and nothing like a John Glenn space chair. The driver fellow was shown in a simple sketch drawing to be sitting on the top floor. The two floors below him looked like empty small rooms in the back of a big truck. And the basement was full of barrel shaped containers stacked on top of each other like beer kegs, representing atomic bombs to power the ship.
I was scrutinizing this drawing. It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew. In fact, it seemed to be drawn in a truly childlike way. The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up in between periods of getting drunk. This design looked like the whole set of secret documents were created by a non-believer, non-interested engineer doing a quick project for some marketer who snockered a dumb government bureaucrat out of some money. It looked like the guy in charge needed somebody, anybody, to do the work. It looked like the designer considered the whole concept to be something that some impractical professors suggested.
Why did the designers make it so inefficient? I calculated a horrible small percent efficiency. Didn't they understand?
¿¿Secret?? Every paragraph in a classified document began with some code for its classification. Unclassified. Confidential. Secret. Something.
Not a single thing I cared about or needed or wanted was marked secret or classified or confidential in any way. Huh???
Burford liked the idea that I wanted to look into it. He liked the concept of creating a technology that would enable people go to the nearest star. Bell Labs expected this kind of "imaginative." Bell Labs' ATT were in charge of this place. Burford was clearly a bit Visionary.
But this document was just plain deficient. I wondered if I really did have all the documents. I visited the classified library again, and a very wide-awake and competent lady re-assured me: this is everything on the topic and everything related to it.
This was not the only disappointment.
The Sandia Lab was an atomic weapon factory. I was definitely sure I did not like it here. Dr. Tom Burford was the only guy in my chain of command who came from Bell Labs. It was quickly clear that Burford was the only one up the entire chain of command who knew anything.
Bell Labs was the place where people earned Nobel Prizes, for inventing things like the transistor. Burford treated me like someone from Bell Labs and expected me to invent things worthy of such a prize. He understood.
And the rest of these guys were just war mongers.
---
Tom Burford asked me "would you like to visit a mountain full of atomic bombs?" He was talking about one of the places where the United States stored some of them. Burford knew that if we wanted to make an Orion Starship propelled by megaton atomic bombs, we ought to at least see what a megaton bomb looked like. He arranged for us to visit an air base where the United States stored some of the old time bombs. This was our job, to work with the bombs and talk to those who deploy them. Since that was an important job, we were given unlimited air fare and travel allowance to visit wherever we need. We were Important.
The location of the old time atomic bomb mountain was close to a city whose name I am not supposed to reveal, confirm or deny. The mountain seemed to be so close to the city that if just one of them would blow up, it would completely wipe it out.
When I asked a person who was pumping gas into our car if he thought there were any atomic bombs in that mountain, he said "Sure, big ones, lots of them."
I thought it was a secret, so I didn't confirm or deny what I had not yet seen.
His face expressions and his comments scared me just like he wanted. I think he could tell I was a young, gullible out-of-towner.
All I could think of on my way to the mountain was what it would be like: first a flash, then being dead. I could not stop pondering how it would be to be living normal lives, walking around, talking to someone, and then
--- suddenly without warning
--- Nothing, Vaporized, Dead. Totally Gone.
No commotion, no screaming, no moment of terror, just suddenly becoming white hot vapor. These were megaton bombs we were talking about.
We went to the air base in suits, and we were greeted by layers of full-uniform U.S. Air Force officers checking to be sure who we were.
I expected careful protocol, and they complied. Confident teenagers with machine guns surrounded us, everywhere. I don't know if they were teenagers, but they looked like it and were certainly younger than me, and they were all seriously armed and in their full battle fatigues.
We also had to go through layers of guards and multiple, clearly marked, clearly scary electric fences in a somewhat desert area where if we looked carefully we could see mountain tops 100 miles away all along the horizon. We finally arrived at the entrance of one of the mountains. We passed the final identification test, and the armed teenagers let us inside the tunnel entrance.
Now more teenagers with machine guns and more officers with important looks on their faces escorted us. Inside the mountain we went through several more gates and secret doors. Deep inside we finally got to a rather poorly lit room with a low ceiling and the floor space of perhaps the size of 10 garages. I could not really see how big. It was inside a tunnel, so it could not be that big. The room was full, stuffed, with what look like very long bombs, big bombs on carts with 6 or 8 inch metal wheels. The atomic bombs seemed to be so big they looked like they would not fit underneath a B-52 bomber. There could have been 10 bombs in there, or 3, or 30. I won't say, even if there were 100 in there. And, I could not brag that I knew because I only saw one next to me. I was not able not count them because the whole place was so cramped and people were talking.
None of this part was secret, but I won't tell, either. I might even try to deceive, just to play the game the way it is supposed to be played, the way some of Burford's people taught me. One of them came with us. And one thing I would say to impress people: there were at least a couple of those big bombs in there.
I just could not resist doing something that I knew I would certainly remember. No, I would not pee on a bomb. We were in suits and escorted, and I didn't know what those teenagers with guns would do to a bomb pee-er.
It was just instinct. I put my cheek against one of the more-than-one megaton bombs. I listened carefully for ticking or humming. "I don't hear any ticking," I said to Tom Burford. He chuckled. It was a line from a movie "The Mouse That Roared". Then I tried to measure bomb by wrapping my arms around it. Of course, I couldn't. It seemed wider than a pickup truck. I jokingly asked one of the guides "This thing looks so big it won't fit in the bomb bay of the B-52, will it?"
He laughed and said "No, it doesn't."
I was totally surprised. I was only guessing when I asked him the question.
"They attach it on the outside, and they can't close the bomb bay doors, even to take off." he asserted.
"So, what do you do with it?" I asked, quite seriously.
"We count it." he laughed, quite seriously.
This was the Cold War, and Megatons counted. Here was a room with many, many Mega-tons to count.
These things are too damn big to put 3 million of them into a rocket ship like Freeman Dyson had in that article I read in Physics Graduate School. I don't know if Freeman Dyson ever got to visit this room. He should have. They should bring him here.
Burford did say this visit would be interesting.
The emotion I felt somewhat discouraged me. I could feel it nagging me:
The bombs are too big.
---
------------ An Evil Weapon ---------------
I guess it was really obvious I didn't think my boss's boss, who worked for Burford, knew very much. I was young. I was 26 and I had a brand new Ph.D. in Physics. My behavior was a bit more obvious, a bit less transparent than I thought, and I didn't realize it. I was not as smart as I thought.
Since I talked directly to our boss's boss's boss at random, the guys in between gave me a long leash and let me do whatever Burford and I talked about. My boss, Bill Goodlaffer, listened carefully to what I claimed the Orion rocket could do. Goodlaffer could figure pretty well. He listened well, too. He remembered important, key facts.
He told his boss, Bob Kadiddlehopper, what I said. The both of them wanted to have someone in their group design a super fast missile, so they could look smart. They wanted some weapon delivery system that could reach some far-away enemy target faster than the Commie Pinko Rapist Atheists at the other end could get out of bed to push their retaliation missile buttons.
But I didn't like what I heard.
Bill Goodlaffer kept saying things about the Vietnamese and the war that disturbed me. His actions and words verified to me that he was one of those Vietnam War Monger murderers, a Nazi. I thought Goodlaffer was a mobster helping that thug Mayor Daley of Chicago and his completely Un-American police riot at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. I believed that Goodlaffer was an accomplice in the same gang as those National Guard murderers at Kent State,.
Goodlaffer clinched it with the task he told me to perform. He wanted me to analyze a way to drag an unshielded nuclear reactor behind an airplane. He said we could "kill the gooks with radiation, " they would fly by, dangling this gamma neutron sparkler behind.
He drew this picture on his chalk board of an airplane with a nuclear reactor dragging on a long cable. He said I should imagine a little biplane towing a banner saying "Eat at Joe's Bar," only the biplane was a B52 bomber and the banner would read "Eat this, you Commie Bastard" as it would spew killer radiation on the ground as it moved along. He laughed.
"Can you imagine," he chuckled. "The gooks would just fall over. Can't you just see it?" he fantasized out loud, with a bit of glee at how clean the battle would be and how we, he and his guys, what he thought were the good guys, would get to fly away victorious. He daydreamed out loud, assuming I would be like the four other guys in his group who I could see also had this Nazi tendency. They heard him talking about this and laughed with him.
Maybe the view out his window affected his mind. His second story window had no view at all. His north-facing window viewed the painted, light blue-white and dirty, open-to-the-sky eating area in the center the building, next to where they sold cold-fat, flat, soft French fries and shoe leather hamburgers at noon.
He was standing between me and the window, holding his coffee cup at chest height like he often did, almost blocking the door, with Marylee behind me. I didn't like it. He said I should analyze towing an unshielded nuclear reactor connected to a glider towed by a long cable behind some suitable airplane.
"Figure a way to make it work. Write a nice report about it." he instructed me, his subordinate.
I could not do it. I just seemed to never getting around to finishing that evil analysis. I was ignoring it. It was too awful. I kept stressing out, about how Goodlaffer was evil.
I guess he wasn't evil. But the Viet Nam war was going on. Traitors did have control of the USA. He was lining up with the wrong guys, guys at the top ordering war crimes just like Hitler and Mussolini.
I found it curious how on the one hand I thought we should stop killing Vietnamese immediately, and on the other hand, at the same time, that we should nuke that Commie city of Hanoi, and make the murderers quit, right now, instantly. I was stressing, and kept thinking, almost aloud as my face puckered, "And we should try President Lyndon Johnson for Treason. And his accomplices, with him. We should try these traitors in charge of our government like we tried the Nazi's at Nuremberg. Same thing. These government right wing extremist traitors are killing 30,000 guys my age, for no reason."
Goodlaffer was a friendly, professional, and sincere fellow. He was actually a good person. And he liked nuclear explosives, like I did. But he happened to be on the side of those anti-Constitution, evil thugs.
But to me an Aspie, this was perfectly logical.
I think it's an Aspberger, "Aspie" trait, to be able to hold contradictory, mutually exclusive concepts together. My thinking would be illogical to Neurotypicals (NT's). I could keep elements containing apparent contradictions separate. NT's could not.
Dr. Spock of Star Trek would understand completely. It was logical.
I am a tree hugger, and I love wood furniture and wood decks and hardwood floors. Stop the war immediately, stop killing people in another country that is not attacking you, and nuke their capital. My boss talks like a Nazi war criminal, and I think he is a good person. Aspie's can do this.
That is probably why I can be a Democrat and a Republican at the same time, a hippie and a conservative at the same time.
But this Atomic Bomb Weaponization Facility was not my place. I felt it. I knew it. I suffered anxiety attacks over it. A recurring emotion came over me every day as I drove to work, every time I entered the gate:
These guys are Nazi's. I want out.
---
CHAPTER 4
----- Beat your Plowshares into Weapons --------
"Could you deliver a big enough bomb to blow up the whole Commie Evil Kingdom all at once?" he asked me, seriously curious. He liked those kinds of phrases. He laughed. I laughed too. It was kind of funny. If we weren't in Viet Nam and the evil traitors were not in charge of the USA, I might like the guy. Goodlaffer had a likeability, even if his office was rather small.
"How fast does it have to go?" I asked.
"Faster than they can push the button." he snapped back. Fast mind.
We all laughed. Goodlaffer was practical, and had a good sense of humor. He was still a Nazi. He was on Mayor Daly's side. Those fellows were Pigs, traitors, and bad. But he was sharp.
We had just finished a loud, hallway conversation where I boasted about atomic bomb propulsion that would make a space ship go "0.1 c," a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. I asserted how we humans could send a space ship to the nearest star, with atomic bombs pushing the ship. Huge payloads. A whole town, with livestock.
"I've got the documents in my safe," I asserted. I had hoped that there was still something buried, something I had not gotten to read about yet in the foot of documents, something that would show me how Dyson figured it.
Marylee Brighteye, our secretary, whose voice seemed to go straight into a particular primitive part of my mind whenever I heard her say anything, and whose body made me have involuntary lust thoughts the from first day I saw her, she laughed at Goodlaffer's quick wit. She seemed impressed. This was Big Time Inventions.
She was 40. I was 26. My wife Terri was way hotter than Marylee, so this was all mind twitter.
I could see how much Marylee was digging it, being there and part of the group of us talking about fast rockets and space ships, and humans leaving earth to populate another solar system. She was smiling and standing up from her desk and looking at us all like that was more fun than any of these guys have had in a while.
This place was usually a pretty boring, sleepy System Analysis Division.
I knew personally how it was a sleepy, boring place. Goodlaffer's guys did a lot of Really Boring detailed analyses here. They did the kinds of analyses that made one nod and bob one's head with a strong need to sleep, in one's office in front of one's desk in one's warm room all by yourself in the middle of the afternoon. I knew first hand.
We would be answering questions of deeply head-nodding significance, like "How often should you replace the vacuum tubes on a spare nuclear bomb part you keep in storage, given that you never use it and only intend to use it to blow up Commie missile silos, but only if they shoot first, and only if you had to use the spare vacuum tube thing?"
Eh??
Another Systems Analysis question: "What is the best way to bomb a Commie navy harbor if you only have 12 atomic bombs and 3 different, somewhat unreliable rockets that can lob up to 8 bombs apiece?"
All I could think of for that stuff was "It's warm in this room. I ate too much for lunch."
Bob Kadiddlehopper, Goodlaffer's boss, was standing by Marylee's desk. He often stood around here and would casually ask key questions. He didn't know any answers. He just asked if we could do this or that, or if some other thing was possible. Most of his questions were Top Secret. He didn't know very much science and the only kinds of questions he asked were just sanity checks. He only remembered what people told him about engineering answers.
On the other hand, he really did know how to ask those damn pointed questions.
Kadiddlehopper always made it a point to talk to smart guys. I guess that is why he got to be boss. So he stood there, looking at me, and then asked the question.
"Could you deliver a nuclear weapon to Russia in 2 minutes?" he asked me.
My brain wheels were turning.
Kadiddlehopper's question translated into a need for something that went through the sky at just about ten times faster than any rocket anyone knew how to make. Everything else took 20 minutes, he wanted 2.
"Yep. That's what Orion does. Faster than anything," I said, blurting it out immediately, thinking "Dyson Starship."
I thought those words in a flash, and I immediately blurted them out, with my mouth engaged before my brain even thought about it.
"Can you really do that?," Kadiddlehopper asked.
Hesitating, my involuntary face expressions revealing that I just blurted it out without thinking first, because I knew I stepped right into it, I answered "I don't know. I 'd have to figure it."
I was at least smart enough to ask for more time.
"What would it take to find out?" Kadiddlehopper asked me.
"Oh, some figuring. I have all the Orion documents in my safe," I replied, pointing to my office and the big metal cabinet safe with a foot of puzzling analyses.
"Ok, why don't you go calculate what kind of payload you could deliver," Goodlaffer broke in.
As my direct boss, he commanded me to do it. This might have been a set-up, but I was too Ph.D. to notice.
Goodlaffer's question of "Faster than they can push the button." should have caused me to slow down and think a bit. But I didn't listen to my mind. I really should have thought about this.
But all I could think of when Kadiddlehopper asked me the question was an excuse to work on Dyson's Orion Starship Propulsion, for real.
Another excuse to do this is that that a super fast rocket to kill murdering, Totalitarian Communists would be a very good thing.
In a flash, I emoted, I felt the images of how those Stalinist Pigs had hundreds of multi-megaton bombs aimed at us, right now, right at my home in Albuquerque. I felt how they were evil. I recalled the images of how the communists killed people all the time, for no reason. I thought of what they did in China, and Russia, wherever they occupied.
The fact was, I would do anything to get to work on the Starship engine.
"See if you can get there faster than they can respond," he clarified. Goodlaffer was somewhat smiling.
He had studied physics at some point. So, you could understand how he really would propose far out, totally impractical things.
"How fast is that?" I asked.
"Two minutes," he replied.
"Damn," I thought. Now I had to do it. Fourty years later I wondered if these guys were playing with me. I am still a bit slow.
But, this was my excuse, and I was going to use it. I proceeded to figure how to make a weapon powered by Dyson's Orion rocket. I would have to learn how big and how small one could make an atomic bomb. I had a perfect reason to go find out all I ever wanted to know about atomic bomb propulsion. I could feel the excitement of what I had a good excuse to do. All I could feel was "Boy is this neat."
This project allowed me to ask any secret question I wanted. I had a Q Clearance, Sigma 3. Heavy Duty. Off I went.
Goodlaffer opened up his metal phone number indexer thing and gave me the names of a handful of people.
He authorized me to talk to them, "anything I wanted to know," he said. This was a blank check.
All I had to do was figure out how to deliver a bomb big enough to wipe out the entire Evil Empire all at once, and do so faster than they could respond.
How big a bomb? As much as we had in silos, probably, all in one bomb.
Within hours of my asking, someone showed me how we could almost certainly make a 5000 Megaton bomb -- a Gigaton bomb. When I asked how big it would be, physically big, I didn't like the answer. It would be so big that no airplane could even budge it, let alone fly it.
"I see, you can make an atomic bomb bigger a whole lot more easily than you can make it smaller" I remarked, summarizing.
After a lot of secret talking and figuring and documents and estimates, I thought I might have insulted the guys when I summarized all that serious work. My statement sounded like just plain common sense to me, I thought.
I learned that small atomic bombs waste precious atomic explosive, like plutonium. Everybody knew that. Even bad guys. But I did not know that it was unclassified that bombs waste a lot.
The minor nuance here was that "small" meant "megaton."
Whoa.
"Megaton" blows up the whole city of Albuquerque, all at once. It was no wonder people like me were scared out of our minds about atomic war.
Focus. This was all about Starships. Focus. The whole exercise was about starships, space ships. I had to keep reminding me of that.
I had to learn about spy satellite procedures first. I had to learn what the Bad Guys would need to go through to decide to push the Kill-The-World Launch-Button, if they saw us launch.
It was fun doing this. I sketched the scenario, trying to figure out how much time I had to deliver the weapon.
The Bad Guys, the Commie Atheists, would be sitting there by their secret TV consoles deep inside one of those Russian police states, watching the U.S.A. from space, with special, heat sensitive TV cameras. The heat-sensing space spy TV would see the bright, white hot plume of our rocket launch, immediately. Even the worst spy satellite, one that a backward nation could launch, would immediately be able to see a rocket launch.
This was easy technology, especially for the Bad Guys.
Our rocket exhaust was really bright. The rocket had to be that powerful to lift the payload to 100 miles above earth. The exhaust from anybody's rocket was typically brighter than 100 million watts. So, the Bad Guys would easily and definitely see it on their spy TV. It's a 100 Million watt light bulb.
The Bad Guys are my target people. As soon as the Target People sitting by their secret consoles would get the message from the spy satellite TV that the Attackers, the Good Guys, are launching, the Target People have to decide: Is the Attacker launching a moon rocket, a spy satellite, a communication satellite, or are they launching an attack on us, the Victims?
Since the Attacker's rocket, ICBM's, won't arrive at their target for another 20 minutes, the Victims have about that long to decide whether or not to push their Retaliation Button.
If they push the Retaliation Button when all we were doing is launching a communication satellite, then they would start a nuclear war that would blow up the world. Big Decision.
On the other hand, if there were some kind of Crisis, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they did NOT press the retaliation button, they would be destroyed by atomic bombs and we would get away with it. That would be a Tough Decision.
After an hour of worrying about that, I gave up all that what-if-ing this or what-about-ing that and just asked Goodlaffer.
"What is the longest time I have to deliver the weapon?" I asked Bill Goodlaffer. I wanted as much time as he would let me have. That would let me make a slower rocket.
"Are you going to blow up all of Western Russia all at once?" he joked.
"Yeah," I answered, because that was the whole idea for this exercise. It also meant I would have to deliver a 5,000 megaton bomb.
Incidentally, the bomb would weigh as much as a big space ship with 100 people in it, headed for Neptune.
"2 minutes." he replied, authoritatively. "2 minutes from us to Russia. Special gift delivered super fast." he joked, nodding his head. He really liked the idea of a super fast, super Top Secret super weapon. They kept saying "2 minutes". Fourty years later I realize I was the fool who agreed to the stupid "2 minutes," and they were playing it back to me, sticking it to me every chance they got.
"If you take any longer than that, it won't be a surprise. They might launch their rockets and blow us up," he explained, just like any good Systems Analyst would figure.
As I look back on this interaction, nearly 40 years later, I recall it really was exactly like this. Strange that I would remember snippets of the words he used, the way he said them.
The emotion of working on things that could wipe out entire nations in a flash, was real. It was intense. No one took it lightly. Perhaps that is why I remembered it so vividly.
In any case, that was fine. The fact was that if we wanted to be sure the Bad Guys could not fight back, then Goodlaffer's "faster than they can push the button" could mean "faster than the time it takes for their spy satellite to radio down the data."
That would be faster than anything, and faster than Freeman Dyson and his Orion can deliver and faster than anything I can think of. That's as fast as the speed of light.
I decided to stick with Goodlaffer's "2 minutes to Russia."
This was all about Starships. I had to keep reminding myself.
The payload bomb that I was supposed to deliver would be a bit big, I figured. I was estimating the payload size. To blow up all of the Commie missile fields all at once meant the bomb had to be 5000 Megatons, at least, maybe bigger. Actually, that 5000 Megatons would not be big enough. The unclassified manual shows how bigger bombs get less and less effective. But I had never read anything about bombs.
When I estimated how big, physically, this bomb might be, I got "about the size of a big house" The 5000 megaton bomb would be at least that big. Maybe as big as an auditorium, like where the high school basketball game is held. Maybe that would be about the right size.
Nobody much figured my bomb, the details. It was just a paper exercise, and everybody knew it. I could somewhat tell. We were just "the Systems Analysts" to the serious engineers who actually did real things like weaponize nuclear ordnance. I did not realize they were just tossinig me random numbers.
But I could feel the excitement, because this payload was the same weight as a starship space ship.
I started talking to myself. Whispers actually came out of my mouth as I sat at my desk. My emotions clearly enunciated. I stared at the desk, looked at my work, and quietly talked:
""But I can't tell anyone the details.
This is secret work.
I'm screwed.""
""I gotta find out if it works.""
I saw myself standing at the head of Burford's heavy desk, with Kadiddlehopper and Goodlaffer sitting there listening reverently to every word I say. And then very, very authoritatively I tell them the true clue.
At my desk, staring at my work, but daydreaming vividly of us in Burford's office, whispers came out of my mouth.
""We're the only guys who will know how this works.
All we can tell the people is
"This is a space ship that can take us to Saturn.""
They all knew that's the way it is when you are doing Top Secret work. They nodded their heads, agreeing.
Snap. Back to figuring. "A megaton atomic bomb weighs about 1000 lbs," according to Freeman Dyson in his "Interstellar Transport" paper. I learned an accurate weight of one bomb in one of the secret documents. But "1000" was easier to figure, especially since Dyson used it. It did not matter.
I talked to myself some more, but this time only the voice in my head was speaking.
""If I tell anyone any real number, I might get me into big trouble.
I don't want trouble.
I want to make an Orion Starship."
Secrets dominated. How could I tell everyone and still not tell secrets?
I just could not keep myself from fantasizing, getting distracted. I recalled a stimulating interaction I just had with a crew cut, bearded mathematician, Dr. Gustavus Simmons. Gus told me "Bad guys will talk to you all day just to get one number from you."
I blankly stared at the dull wall, as if looking right through the metal door with no window. I was promoted an all metal office by myself, lit with bright fluorescent lights, with a North-facing window outshining the lights. My window was way worse than Goodlaffer's. Mine was narrow and dirty, really dirty.
The situation of me telling people only what I would be allowed to tell them, and no more, took over the daydream fantasy.
""A 1000 pounds to make a megaton.
You can go look up that one yourself.""
I was on a podium, answering questions from some Journalists. Some were friendly. Some were not.
"You, commie."
I said, with emotion.
"You're a third world terrorist.," I said, looking right at the bastard.
"You can just go find all kinds of official and unofficial numbers about nuclear weapons yourself.
I'm not telling you." I said.
I was authoritatively sparing with the evil spies.
I sure told them off.
I knew I really could not talk about this outside of the security area. And I had to talk to someone, an intellectual someone. So I took a break and went to talk with Gus Simmons. He always came up with outrageous, surprising comments.
There he was, the mischievous Dr. Gustavus Simmons, with a crew cut and smiling through a grey-streaked beard that reached nearly down to his belt buckle. This time he wore a bolo tie and some drab gray suit pants, and no suit. He was the leader of a small math group under Burford. He was a magician, mathematician and a locksmith who broke into guaranteed-secure Secret safes to taunt the head of Security.
I started in with a strategy question. I asked Gus, directly "When I find out some secrets, what do I say when someone asks me about it?"
I fully expected him to tell me some interesting game theory, like he started to one time before.
"That's easy. Deceive the Bad Guys. Don't lie to them," he replied, clearly happy that I asked him something he could boast about.
"Deceive?" I said. That's lying. I didn't lie very well.
"If you can count on someone to lie, then that guy gives away the secrets because they are bound to lie," he said, expecting me to understand.
"Deceivers are crafty bastards," he emphasized, chuckling a bit.
Gus liked that phrase, "crafty bastards." He used it every time he could make it fit.
"The liars are honor bound to lie. You can often force them to give away a secret just by forcing them to lie." he told me, looking right at me, to appreciate my response and knowing me well enough to see that I would see right away.
He was the crafty bastard himself, full of gleeful mischief. His crew cut hair and very long grey-white beard sent deceiving, opposite messages. Never, ever sloppy, and almost never in a suit, he always played the part of a crafty character. But he wasn't playing it. He was crafty and he was a character.
"Just look at Russian propaganda. When Pravda writes that the reports of a crop failure in the Ukraine are absolutely untrue, everybody there knows they are about to go hungry," Gus narrated, like a story.
"But a deceiver sometimes lies and sometimes doesn't. You can bet that the bad guy has better odds flipping a coin than trying to get the facts from a deceiver."
Gus was a mathematician. But he also kept a current locksmith license complete with expensive lock-picking tools. He also practiced magic tricks. It was all the same topic to him.
He used the grade school phrase "Bad Guys," and I liked it. He is the one who taught me to use it.
Gus did pick locks. He would defeat the lock everybody had on the steel cabinet safes. He deliberately did that about every two or 3 years to get attention. He would always carefully show the guys in charge of Top Secret Security how he did it.
He did this knowing full well it would force the security guys to change all the locks on all the safes in the whole place. Then Gus proudly and very publicly took the credit for finding a security weakness.
The Security guys didn't really mind, too much. They got to blame Gus for all the expense and trouble of improving security. However, they then got to do work they liked, changing locks.
They didn't have anything else to do. There had not been any spies here in 20 years.
Gus was so anxious he manipulated the topic of conversation immediately and proceeded to show me exactly how he broke into the high security locks this time. He reached into his desk and took out one of the older locks that the Security guys had specified for all safes. He set it in front of me.
I recognized the lock. I had one on my safe when I first hired on. Then pretty quickly, they changed it. I wondered why they changed the locks for no reason.
"You have to make this a highly credible threat," he told me, as he fiddled with some metal things. "If a bad guy can make the tools at home, that's a highly credible threat."
He emphasized the phrase "highly credible threat" with a knowing nod, to make sure I understood.
Sitting around his metal conference table on the first floor office with a south facing window of the type one can not see through, Gus explained the process one must use to get the undivided attention of the Security guys. Gus liked how I appreciated that those guys in Security were surely not as clever as the Mathematicians, like Gus.
He explained this like a master chef describing how to prepare a gourmet meal.
"One must present them with a weakness so glaring even minor scoundrels can succeed at it." He used the word "scoundrel" often, too. He reached for some other metal things from his desk drawer.
"What is it?" I asked as I touched one of his metal things welded to a 4 inch rod thing.
"Like a shim." he mumbled, as he focused everything he had on a combination lock as big as an orange and 3 times as heavy. It didn't open right away. All the safes once had that lock on them because of Gus, from a previous episode, before I hired on.
He was fiddling and fuddling around, poking and twisting metal parts and things into that lock. He was shoving and pushing hard. And it looked like the demonstration was not going to work. Physics experiments do that. They don't work in public.
This was like the joke about one student telling the other how you could tell what lab you were in: "If it stinks, its chem lab. If it's slimy and green, it's biology lab. If it doesn't work, it's Physics."
It was about to look like Physics, so I told Gus "It's ok, I believe you can do it. I used to open combination locks in college. I would show a person who locked their bike with that cable combination lock thing how I could open their lock and steal their bike in less than a minute. So they would go buy a good lock. I know how sometimes it doesn't work."
Gus stopped. But he wasn't listening to me. Or if he was, all I did was challenge him. He pulled and yanked and untwisted and unshimmmed all his tools from the lock, and started over. He was pushing so hard on the metal things I thought he was going to break them. "Don't break them just for me" I blurted out. He was banging on something and forcing a shim thing into the lock. He said he made the shim at home.
"It took a couple of weeks to get it right." he admitted.
And the lock opened up.
I left with a new feeling about security, and that I should be extra proud if I succeed at being a deceiving little crafty bastard.
----------------- Too Many Bombs -----------------
Back at my desk, the Secret Restricted Data about atomic bombs, was open on my desk. These were some pieces we would need to make a Starship. I knew I would have to practice telling the Orion weapon story because we would all want to know the answer. Just the answer. Almost no one would care about the details. Only the Bad Guys would care. The trick was to give the answer in such a way that a Bad Guy could not shim his way into the lock, so to speak, and get the Secret Restricted Data.
Instead of figuring the Orion weapon like I was supposed to, I started figuring the Starship. Deep in a trance of figuring and staring through the metal wall of my office, I concluded that the way to explain the Orion rocket in public would be to use public numbers, and to forget the secret, real numbers.
Anyone could figure this one for themselves. One could read in unclassified publications that a megaton bomb weighs less than about 1000 pounds.
The bomb needed to blow up the whole of Western Russia all at once had to be at least 5000 megatons. Nobody figured that number. It was just "more than we had in the missile fields." It didn't matter. It was the mass of a starship.
So the bomb would weigh less than about 5000 x 1000 lbs, or 2500 tons of payload. That's as much as 25 fully loaded, modern railroad cars, end to end. That's one Big Mother Atomic Bomb. If the thing has the density of cement, about 3 tons per cubic yard, then the Monster Bomb is 10 meters across, or 30 feet across and 30 feet high, which is as big as a rich guy's house.
Now I had to figure out how to push this huge payload of 2500 tons hard enough to deliver it to Western Russia from somewhere in the USA, in 2 minutes. That was not too hard to figure.
But my answer demanded a rocket that was way too big. The rocket would be bigger than a few aircraft carriers. This was not small.
A faceless voice in my thoughts emoted the draining feeling:
too damn big.
Two fundamental physics issues were getting in the way of our making a starship. First, the bomb designers showed how an efficient bomb can not be made small. I could not start out with a small propulsion system.
Second, to go fast still required too many bombs. Putting "not small" and "too many bombs" together meant that I could not make a small Dyson's starship. "Small" meant "as small as an aircraft carrier." The starship had to be made big, maybe as big as a small asteroid.
This was not good. This meant we could not start out with something we could afford, like some space ship to take a dozen of us to Jupiter. We would have to start out with something that would cost as much as the entire USA Gross National Product.
I didn't know how much money that would be. I was not figuring cost right now.
The speed I would achieve, about 50 km per second, would be fast enough to go from Earth to Jupiter in about 150 days, or to Mars in about 17 days.
It took only 5 minutes to figure that this small ship carrying people might really work. All I had to do was just relax the ridiculous mandate that we have to accelerate the space ship in 2 minutes, like Kadiddlehopper and Goodlaffer wanted.
If I made a people ship, everything would get easier.
I could see that if we just accelerated more gently, take 2000 minutes to accelerate instead of 2 minutes, then it could work out.
Remember, a Physicist will dream up impractical things that don't work.
I had to stop this space ship fantasy and figure something about the bomb. They were paying me to do bombs, not starships.
My atomic bomb propulsion system would putt along in space like a lawn mower engine. Every "putt" meant an atomic bomb went off near an atomic bomb catcher. The atomic bomb catcher would be attached to some mighty strong shock absorber springs, which pushed on the payload. Every "putt" would make a flash in the dark black of space. We would see the trail of flashes as it went through the dark night sky, as we looked up.
Some details were starting to crop up. I knew that every radio and every TV set and every stereo in the world would hear the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) static, loud clicks coming out of the loudspeaker, as the brilliant, flashing pulsing, too-many-atomic-bombs-at-a-time propulsion hammered the atomic bomb catcher, accelerating the Big Bomb through the sky.
I imagined and saw it clearly in the sky above me: faster than a speeding shooting star and brighter than flashbulbs directly on your eye.
I wondered if the atomic bomb really blew the living daylights out of everything. I was learning secret things here. Those who create the images of atomic bombs made them omnipotent, irresistible forces, totally vaporizing. But I learned something different about those atomic bombs. Not everything gets vaporized. Almost like a betrayal. The bomb was not an infinite force. This was curious.
When I figured out how hard I was bashing the payload, I discovered I was banging the daylights out of it. The average acceleration was around 42 times more than gravity, enough to turn a person into manburger in one whack.
The peak acceleration on the hardware would be thousands of times higher. This was not good. Everything would almost certainly get smashed to pieces. Not vaporized, but smashed to pieces.
None of this was in any document. I was figuring it with just Dyson's paper.
I escaped back into fantasy. If we were going to Mars in 17 days, we could avoid the crushing accelerations. We could take our time setting off the bombs, and take 2000 minutes instead of 2 minutes to shoot them off. We would not mind at all that we would be accelerating 1000 times less. That would only be 0.042 G, 4 times less than the gravity of the moon. Even the peak g's would be piece of cake for the hardware.
"Hey," I thought, as I figured furiously in my all metal office, a cage with a tiny, mud-dirty window with no view, trying to make it work out, "this is just numbers to me."
It was not working out, and I had invested deep emotion in it, and blabbed how well it would work before I ever figured a thing.
I designed up a rocket that should take the whole payload to another part of the world, fast, two minutes, just like Kadiddlehopper wanted and powered by such and such many atomic bombs going off such and such often. But my design would not work.
I never bothered to ask how much of the sky would light up when more than one atomic bomb every second went off 200 miles above earth.
I had all the figuring in my classified notebook, and I wrote up a one page summary for the file. I did not need to put "unclas" in front of each paragraph. Let them discover it. I found something else to do.
After a week or two went by, Kadiddlehopper was standing in our office area as he usually does, casually talking to us about different things, and he asked me about that fast weapon delivery system. "How many bombs does it take to make it go?" He always seemed to ask the damn pointy, embarrassing question. It was like he read my mind.
"Uh, xxxxx bombs per second." I mumbled. I had to tell him the truth. (Today, not revealing, affirming or denying any classified number, too large or not)
"Oh. How fast does it get there?" Kadiddlehopper was still probing, poker face, with no reaction at all on the ridiculously large number of bombs.
"Two minutes." I said, my hands dangling, as I looked down at the floor. I could not look him in the face.
I didn't want to tell anybody about any of this conversation, or about what I figured. I could see on Kadiddlehopper's face that he saw how stupid and impractical it was. He didn't say it was stupid. He just knew. We both communicated the conclusion "too many bombs" by the way we shuffled our feet and turned our bodies as we stood, not saying much.
For Kadiddlehopper and Goodlaffer, myself and Burford, my figuring was just a quick calculation. I was just trying to figure how well it might work, to see if we wanted to spend real time and money figuring this.
"Maybe I figured something wrong," I thought, as I shelved the whole thing.
Damn Crafty Bastard. That Kadiddlehopper was clever. He didn't give a damn if we could do it.
All he wanted to know was how hard it would be for the other guys, the Commie Pinko Rapist Atheists, to do it.
He wanted to know what to look for. When he found out, then he and Burford would go over to the spy fellows in that other bland looking, nondescript building and tell them what to look for. Then there would not be any surprises, and everybody would go home safe. He didn't care what the answer was, he just wanted to know it.
I just wanted to learn about Dyson's Orion starship.
My calculations showed that the Russians could NOT make a bomb travel faster than our response time. And if they tried, everyone in the world could easily find out they were merely trying to, because the test rocket would be so monstrously visible, exceptionally expensive, and really REALLY BIG.
The rest of my design would definitely not work. But it didn't matter. As soon as we found out it took too many bombs, we didn't' need to go any farther. I never did figure how much shielding one would need, to keep the atomic bomb from getting blown up by the other atomic bombs pushing the rocket.
I know I did not figure the shock absorber part correctly. Now I see why Freeman Dyson didn't cause much of a stir.
Some guy like Kadiddlehopper might have asked him "How stiff a box would you need to hold the your payload, and what kind of shock absorbers are you using, to keep the payload from being smashed to pieces?"
I presume Freeman's answer was "Duhhh."
I learned something embarrassing and something disappointing:
It turned out, "too many bombs" is what everyone everywhere who ever worked on Dyson's crazy rocket figured.
Takes too many bombs.
And I learned something really scary:
-----------------------------------------------------
· atomic bombs weaker
S1 CH 08 A Bombs Weaker 2001.07.02p518.doc
CHAPTER 5
Atomic Bombs Not Almighty Powerful
This was a Top Secret, Systems Analysis Division. We analyzed atomic bombs. And I came here to analyze how to make an atomic bomb-powered Starship work, somehow or another.
New to the real world of real work, I saw the 2 foot diameter clock directly above the entrance on the inside wall above the door of the Systems Analysis Division prove I was not that late. It shot the time message right over Marylee's desk, directly into Bill Goodlaffer's office and directly into his face. Goodlaffer's eyes stared directly at me when I came through the door. He stared hard and looked at his watch. And then at the clock. Back and forth, he was using sign language.
I was only 3 minutes late, for the 3rd or 4th time in a row. He reminded the 3 of us, the new Ph.D.'s, that "we start at 8 and we quit at 5."
His 2 ft wide, 3ft high, metal window and its metal frame let in a small patch of a bright blue sky. He had such a low a status, his window only saw a bit of sky, no view of the mountain, and the eating area in the center of the building. The bright light behind his face magnified his position as The Boss. It gave him a kind of a halo.
Marylee, our secretary, always arrived punctually enough before 8 am to open her several, metal cabinet safes, and always at least one minute before we got there. She was proud that the 6 ft high, 3 ft wide metal cabinet safes were chock full of nuclear weapon, Secret Restricted Data "SRD" documents. The “SRD” is the same as Top Secret in the Department of Defense.
This was the Atomic Energy Commission, the Famous AEC.
She would leave punctually just after 5 pm, after a prescribed, religious ritual of locking the metal cabinet safes. She inserted two, solid aluminum metal bars, taller than her, into the top and bottom slots of every metal cabinet, and then clicked a heavy combination lock into each bar. Then she had someone else, a "monitor," check to make sure she didn't leave a Secret Restricted Data document anywhere, on top of anything, and that she actually locked the locks. Then the monitor signed the monitor sheet.
I would try to inconspicuously watch her put those bars in. As she reached high above her head, on her toes, her short skirt would move up a bit towards her thin waste, revealing curvy legs. I was 26. She was 40. What did you expect?
Al Beckman, the white haired older engineer had the nice office next to Goodlaffer. Al Beckman had the biggest desk and also had a window to nowhere. He had the room all to himself. He kept lots of books in multiple bookshelves.
He kept his room and his desk perfectly clean and carefully neat. His pictures of is wife and family, tastefully arranged all over his wall and on top of his desk, showed off what he thought was the most modern, ultimate dream of suburban life. What looked like his wife's wedding picture showed a pretty lady in a pose like an actress, out of a 1940's movie.
The rest of his pictures were picture-perfect, and stuck in the early 1950's. So out of date, I thought. 20 years out of date. Ancient. But he seemed to be content. I thought he acted like he earned it and was proud of it all. He smiled, and didn't get excited about the little things the rest of us got emotional about.
His diplomacy and extreme courtesy in how he answered and interacted with me raised a shield between his inner person and me. He seemed to block my entry into his emotion world. That mannerism prevented me from empathizing or relating to him. His diplomatic barrier made me see him as old and distant.
He did not have a Ph.D., so he obviously didn't know anything.
Dr. Bill Teague and I, new Ph.D.'s, were talking in the 4 foot wide walk-space between his office and mine about the effects of a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Teague liked the mountains, and I asserted that a bomb on the other side of the mountain would vaporize all the snow, boil it to steam, and fry his playground mountain, immediately. I was trying to tease him.
Al Beckman heard us and courteously waited until the correct moment to interject himself into our conversation. With a slight smile he asked "you think the weapon will melt all the snow on the other side of the mountain?"
An atomic bomb vaporizes anything, no matter what. I know this. I have a Ph.D. So I blurted out with a knowing laugh
"Sure, a one megaton bomb will melt all the snow on the mountain, all at once."
The Little Boy in my head saw the fireball explode 15 miles away from us, on the other side of the mountain ridge The peak was 7 miles to the east of us. The bomb would be on the other side, with the heavy snow and tall trees.
As a Little Boy I had once pretended that if somebody from outer space came by in a flying saucer and tried to hurt us, we would shoot an atomic bomb at them and they could not shield against it.
"Nobody can shield against an atomic bomb," the Little Boy's voice in my mind asserted.
So I said with all the certainty of a brand new Ph.D.
"It'll vaporize everything."
And I authoritatively finished my reply to Al Beckman.
"No, I don't think that's what happens." he said, asserting himself carefully, without bending on his point. Insistent, unyielding, but exceptionally courteous.
"No. Why not?" I blurted back. I had just told him what the answer was, and he didn't have a Ph.D., so he should bow down and accept it.
"Just check the numbers." he said, slowly.
Al Beckman startled me when he contradicted my claim that a vaporizing, purple-hot megaton bomb, hotter than blue hot and much hotter than white hot, would certainly vaporize the snow.
"You need to read this book," he said, with a clear and knowing authority. He reached into his office shelf and handed me a copy of "Glasstone," the bible of the effects of nuclear weapons.
"You can figure it for yourself. You will see. I don't think it would melt all the snow."
I took the book, opened it, skimmed it for 10 seconds and there it was. Real data, detailed, everywhere. A solid book of atomic bomb data.
"Wow, this is real data. It tells you what happens," I said, oblivious that I said it aloud.
I took the book like a dog who grabbed a bone and ran off.
The whole book was so simple a high school kid could have understood it. And it was jammed full of charts and tables and figures and rather simple, power law equations, all telling the effects of an atomic bomb.
I didn't realize this was the unclassified version, and that a much better version even existed. But this unclassified Glasstone had all I needed to know.
This was Starship data.
After just a little figuring, I got Al Beckman's answer. Sure enough, the bomb would not melt all the ice on the other side of the mountain.
Glasstone detailed how the bomb would make a noise loud enough to break my ear drum instantly, like a 44 Magnum pistol going off next to my head. The little round plastic calculator in the sleeve of the book made it really easy to calculate. I could read off just how far away I would need to be from the bomb so that it would only break my eardrums, and no more. Wow.
I read off how far away the intense heat would instantly start the trees on fire and fry skin to charcoal.
"It would cause your face to boil and turn black, and blast the living daylights out of windows and houses, blow everything to bits" I thought after reading on.
However, it would only **blow** the snow all over the place.
Melt the snow? No. Just the top few inches. The bomb had plenty enough energy. But it didn't penetrate the snow deep enough.
I saw a movie of it all in my mind. Bomb going off. Intense white hot fireball. Top layer of snow instantly heated into boiling steam. Under-layers of snow blasted and blown around, a second or 3 later. Twirling around, and then a shock wave would hit.
And Al Beckman was right. And he did not even have a Ph.D.! Amazing!
This was not an Aspie deficiency or failure to read Neurotypical clues. It was the arrogance of a new Ph.D.
And I had no clue. All I felt was the excitement:
"Wow. that's magic. You can live through being hit directly by an atomic bomb!"
This must have been one reason Dyson's atomic bomb starship was not so crazy.
And these atomic bombs were also firecrackers, BIG Firecrackers.
I'm a boy. It's a boy thing.
I really wanted to see an atomic bomb detonate in the atmosphere. It would really be 4th of July, a real spectacle.
I would make up excuses, like, "I want to watch one in the Pacific somewhere.” My excuse: they had done about a decade earlier.
Or maybe "at the Nevada Test Site", where the Nevada-uns didn’t care when the radioactive fallout covered on their sheep, because the government bought all their sheep at the high market price, immediately, for cash.
“Somewhere where it doesn't hurt anything.”
The Power of the Universe, unleashed. I just had to find a way to see where they were exploding atomic bombs, underground. If we were ever going to be interested in using the Power of the Universe to travel the Galaxy, at least I could see just one of them, myself.
I didn't quite know how to get to see one. I decided to ask everyone who had contact with anyone who shot atomic bombs. Those people were the bomb testers, and I started by pestering my boss Goodlaffer.
-------------- Underground Atomic Bomb Tests ------------
It was a sad time for atmospheric atomic bomb shooters. Both the Russians and the U.S.A. agreed to quit exploding atomic bombs in the air. It was a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The Evil Russians and the Free World, which meant us and the Europeans except France, all agreed we would only test the bombs underneath the ground and never in space anymore.
The last few atomic bombs they, and we, shot off in space, scared everyone. The whole nighttime sky lit up and glowed, for hours, and especially over Hawaii. Power lines unexpectedly intercepted an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP), created a power spike over the electric utility grid, blew the fuses and shut off the electricity in some places. I hear the satellites in space got disrupted. The Van Allen belts got energized. It was a scary thing. It was a bit like we were blowing up the sky.
We both agreed to cork up the entire explosion.
Cork an Atomic Bomb?
We would not let it leak, not even a little. And if it leaked, we broke the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Bad dog.
I never saw the treaty. However, someone else said how evil the Russians were because their version read different from our version. The USA version of the treaty said we could not dump radioactivity into the atmosphere. The Russian version of the same Treaty said they could squirt their own people with radioactivity all they wanted. They only violated the Treaty if the radioactivity got past their borders.
I expected that from those commie bastards.
The Chinese Communists kept right on shooting big bombs in the atmosphere, Multi-Megaton bombs. They just did not give a damn about the Earth or anyone else. They were really evil. They didn’t shoot very many, so their big evil was balanced by their almost never doing it. I suspected they were doing it for show.
The French were almost as mean, and kept right on shooting smaller atomic bombs in the atmosphere, too. They didn't give a damn about their allies. Typical arrogant French.
The French were so mean they would delay their atmospheric atomic bomb test until they knew our spy airplanes trying to peek at what they were doing would run out of fuel and crash in the ocean. Then they would shoot their bomb. They were mean, to us, their Saviors.
"So, how do they do an underground test?" I asked Goodlaffer.
"Well, you dig a tunnel straight into the base of a mountain, a mile or two into it, then you dig a side tunnel a thousand feet or 2, and shoot the bomb at the end of the tunnel," he explained, ever so characteristically clearly,
"What???"
"What? The long tunnel would still be there after the atomic bomb went off? Almost as if nothing happened? Wow." I said.
"And then go back and do it again." he continued with a smile and a laugh.
He told Marylee to pull out a document. She knew which one, automatically, because she was a smart one. It had a double-long fold-out picture of the test site, complete with pastel coloring.
I talked to Goodlaffer and myself out loud, like he was part of the voices in my head.
"Amazing" I said, a moment later, as he was paging through it, trying to find something in particular.
My curiosity and delight at dusty dirty tunnels sprinkled with atomic bomb debris seemed to delight him. I knew it would be just like him to direct me to talk with someone who does that for a living. I knew he would want me to learn more. I wanted to trick him into it.
It was just a nice coincidence that his boss, Kadiddlehopper, and another division leader, Dr. Curtis Hines, were in the office area talking about something atomic bomb-ish and got sucked into the bomb test site topic with Goodlaffer and me.
They also got excited that someone else, myself, actually liked this down and dirty, scary, messy part of atomic bombs. Apparently, almost no one else at Sandia would get excited like these guys about bomb tunnels.
Kadiddlehopper and Curtis Hines got a real kick out of my amazement that you could put hardware that close to an atomic bomb and not vaporize it, or at least blow everything to pieces.
Curtis taunted me with a smile, the kind of smile where he knows the answer and wants to tell you about it. That behavior was his inviting peculiarity.
"How would you block off the fireball and all that debris, after the bomb goes off?" he asked.
"I know the answer to that" said Me the Little Boy, waving his hand so the teacher would call on him.
Me the Ph.D. Physics Graduate Student took over as I answered Curtis: "I would use some huge doors and slam them shut with high explosives," I said, responding like a confident, recent Ph.D. with the right answer, and almost using an authority voice.
Then I meekly asked for approval with the question "Would that work?"
"Yep." Three of them all smiled. I was quite surprised that my bold guess would work.
They all knew the answer, and now someone finally came along and really appreciated how really clever and smart they were, in making those slamming-shut doors.
"They slam the door shut with high explosive pistons," Kadiddlehopper said.
"You light off the high explosives just before the bomb goes off, to get the doors moving." he explained.
When the doors smashed shut, they would pinch off and stop any vaporized dirt and bomb parts gushing towards the experiments. And our experiments would not be destroyed. Wonderful. Amazing.
The bomb would make a cavity, a bubble, deep in the ground about a 100 feet across. After the bomb cavity deep underground had cooled off, a few weeks later, somebody would put on a space suit-like set of sealed coveralls and hood, and crawl back in there and retrieve the experiments. It wasn't really safe at all. But nobody really cared.
I had to ask them to tell me again, to make sure I heard them right.
"A Door?" I asked. "A door stopping an atomic bomb?" I repeated, with honest emotion.
"Sure." said Curtis Hines, smirking like crazy. The three of them were so anxious to tell me about it they could just pee. Hines was rocking back and forth just unable to wait to tell the story.
"Well, yeah." said Bill Goodlaffer. "They have this big, 50 ton steel and concrete sliding door," he said, eyeballs white, teeth smiling from earlobe to earlobe, using his hands to show "big."
"And they get it moving with an explosive just before the bomb goes off. They time it just right." he repeated.
Using his hands again, talking like an Italian he repeated one more time, "Just when the bomb goes off, it slams shut."
And his hands slammed shut.
"Holy Cow." I said, using that phrase once again, too often.
"And a split second after it goes off and the door closes, everything caves in around the pipe," Curtis Hines said. "All that exploding dirt squeezes off the pipe and shuts off the hole," he continued.
I didn't know what "pipe" he was talking about, but the whole thing sounded little-boy neat.
I could just feel the excitement:
slam a door on an atomic bomb!
"You need to go see the guys that do this," Goodlaffer commanded, smiling. He completely surprised me. I really did want to see one of those tunnels. He was offering to send me on a field trip to a whole atomic bomb test site, and without even having some project as the reason.
He looked into his phone notebook, found three guys I should go see, and even told me where their offices were. Goodlaffer knew every person who ever did anything in the whole lab and had their name in that little metal, snap-shut phone book.
The Test Director for an Atomic Bomb test and I had an appointment. The cold winter day in Albuquerque didn’t seem to hurt as much as a same kind of day in Cleveland. Maybe the dry cold and constant sunshine made the cold feel warmer. Maybe it wasn’t as cold here as it was in Cleveland, but it was cold enough to freeze water. I saw some thin, very high wispy clouds in the mostly deep blue sky. Those clouds were often there.
I walked up a few wood steps into a group of what seemed like connected-together mobile homes designed with offices instead of kitchens and bedrooms.
This was the first time I had ever seen offices like this. Somewhat shabby. They were definitely warm enough, and the rooms had everything one would need for an office. A set of toilets in some of them, and windows, bookcases, doors one could actually close shut. They were sure not very luxurious. They were drab, in fact.
They looked like graduate student quarters. The white-ish paint was dull. The windows were plain, a little dirty with what seemed like white-ish mud, like some of the dirt in Albuquerque. The desks and tables were metal and covered with that darker, hard plastic.
Two of the three secretaries had those modern typewriters, the ones with the little ball instead of typewriter keys. I saw electrical engineering equations on the blackboards. It seemed like there were lots of buildings here that were left over from the old days, World War II, when they first worked on the atomic bomb.
Dr. James R. A. J. Castro, Deputy Test Director, was one of those in charge of testing our hardware. The object was to make hardware so tough it would survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. The hardware was supposed to survive. We would use that kind of hardware in our bombs.
How close to an atomic bombs were these supposed to survive?
Devices and experiments that Sandia scientists and engineers would place directly at the edge of and actually inside the fireball of an atomic bomb actually did survive. Amazing, I thought.
“You shoot atomic bombs at hardware?” I asked Jim.
“Some of these guys are stupid. They just want to blow something up.” He replied, two moves ahead of me, answering my question like a chess game.
He knew what I was thinking. He answered the question I would certainly ask later, saving me the trouble of having to go through each question one at a time.
This is classic Aspie. Step 1, Step 10, skip the middle. Aspie brains are fast.
The mistake we Aspies make with others is that we assume they are just as fast as we are. The NT's are slow-brained.
J.R.A.J. Castro was fast-brained, probably an Aspie.
"What do they do?” I asked in a clumsy way, wondering why else would you put something in front of an atomic bomb unless you wanted to blow it up.
“They don't calculate whether they are going to learn anything.” he said. “it’s pretty tricky when the thing can turn into vapor in a millisecond.” he said with a laugh.
He showed me what he called a dumb experiment. Some engineer was trying to convince Castro and his group to let the fellow blow something up.
The engineer's whole experiment was only as big as my finger. After a few sentences of atomic bomb physics, requiring a Q Clearance, Secret Restricted Data access to hear about, Castro said "see?"
I saw. That guy just wanted to blow something up and get credit for "nuclear weapons effects testing."
"These guys don't understand. There's only so much space available." he explained.
"Space?" I said.
"You only get a small peek at the bomb." he said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You put a bomb at the far end of the tunnel. You connect a 1000 foot long pipe, shaped like a cone, like a really long megaphone, all the way out of the tunnel. People put their experiments all along the pipe." he explained, using hand motions to speak, like animated Sicilian Italians often do.
"You get to see this yourself?" I asked, hoping he would say yes and let me go along.
"Yeah, it's exceptionally interesting." he replied, putting on the professional stare, to minimize any hint that he dug the hell out of it.
"There's some really interesting physics that goes on here."
He likes to use precise English, such as "exceptionally interesting."
"Can I go see?" I asked.
Castro, a Sicilian physicist about a year or two older than me and who went to the same graduate school I did, he also loved the bomb. Only he was smarter than me because he jumped over to electrical engineering. He liked the complex plasma physics that only happens when huge energy densities apply, like at the interior of the Sun or an atomic bomb. He was the Deputy Test Director for some of the tests.
"I'll take you out there and show you," he said. He was just as excited about these things as I was, except that he acted far more mature, and probably was,.
So off we went. We flew out to Las Vegas, checked into our rooms downtown, and had a nice evening meal.
All the restaurants and casinos had girls dancing with no bra, no matter where we went. He drove. That's what I liked about Las Vegas. All restaurants had interesting dancers.
I saw him put a single quarter in a slot machine once, because I kept stopping and pulling the handle as we walked around. He would not put money in. I would not put any money in either. Slot machines were everywhere, absolutely everywhere.
"Here." he said. "Have some fun." as he put in a quarter for me.
I pulled the handle and watched with glee as the wheels turned. "Wow." I said, barely audible. He shook his head at me and laughed.
Part of the fascination with a slot machine is that it only costs a quarter to be allowed to pull the handle and watch the wheels turn. Sometimes the machine gives you some free pulls, when it gives you a little money you can use to pull the handle again.
And that was it, no more gambling. According to Castro, that was stupid.
"It does not compute," he said, with a smirk and shaking his head. He figured things a lot. He loved complex plasma physics calculations.
After walking around a bit amidst the pretty colored neon lights, and bells and a light flashing indicating somebody winning, in what seemed to be endless, connected gambling casinos, we went to watch a show for 15 minutes where the girls danced with no underwear. We only had to buy two beers to be allowed to sit there. Then we went back to our rooms and got a good rest for the next day's work.
Contrary to what everyone thought, when we go through Las Vegas on the way to the Atomic Bomb test site, it's no party.
Next morning we drove out 70 miles to "Mercury," the name of the compound for the test site. After passing through a moderately simple security system, we drove up to an old tunnel, "G Tunnel" it was called. It seemed to be recently abandoned.
A few big heavy chains and locks and gates gave only a very mild message to stay out. A portable trailer with a few people 300 feet away were the guardians. We had to check with them to enter the tunnel. And since Castro was the Deputy Test Director, everyone said "Hi Jim," and we went in, no paperwork.
But first, we put on some free coveralls, over our suits and ties. Just in case we rub some radioactive dust, it would stay on the coveralls. We also put on hard hats, because sometimes a piece of the roof falls on you. Now that would be dangerous. You could get hurt without a hard hat.
We were walking in a tunnel with no lights. Just flashlights. And I was talking and talking and talking. About philosophy of life, about physics, about atomic bombs, re-entry vehicles, phasor banks.
As we were walking, Castro pointed to my left "We shot something-or-other bomb here" as he pointed to a sealed-off side tunnel. I forgot the name of the something-or-other bomb as soon as he said it. Every atomic bomb test had some kind of cute name.
A side tunnel was just that. A tunnel would appear off to the side. Just like Goodlaffer said.
This was really amazing. Tunnels in a mountain, to corked-up bombs, atomic bombs.
"Atomic bombs really went off in this tunnel, didn't they. This is amazing. You would think the ceiling would fall in." I said to Jim, aloud. I acted like a little 4th grader on this tour.
Castro pointed up to the ceiling with the flashlight. "See the rock bolts."
This was even more amazing. They bolted the ceiling so it would not fall in when the atomic bomb went off just a couple thousand feet away, down a side tunnel. They screwed a 3 foot rod into the ceiling and then bolted on a steel plate the size of a big book to hold the ceiling rocks in place. They also attached a wire mesh to the ceiling. Just in case a piece fell off when you were walking by, it wouldn't hurt you too much.
And we were walking and walking. And I was talking and talking.
We were standing by the 3rd or 4th side tunnel entrance, about a mile deep into the mine shaft. I looked at the 15 foot metal hatch, like the hatch on a submarine, and I kept on talking, trying to explain something, and going on and on, and Castro was laughing.
And I kept talking, and talking. He was trying to say something, but I wouldn't let him. I was not done with my point yet. He laughed and kept trying to interrupt, to say something.
Finally I asked him "Why are you laughing at me? What are you laughing at?" I thought I was saying something profound, and maybe he thought it was silly. Or maybe my fly was open.
"What?" I asked.
He pointed the flashlight to the right of my pocket and with a smirk said "Look at that sign. I been trying to tell you."
The sign, at about zipper height, said in so many official words, "Don't stand here. This spot is radioactive."
"This was Camphor. The hatch leaked," he explained, using his typical shortest possible sentence.
"What?" I asked. I was acting stupid.
"The radiation blew all over the wall. You got some," he asserted.
He could often think like me and knew what I was going to ask next. He would answer what I would ask, two questions in the future. Maybe he was related to my ancestors back there in Sicily. Who could tell?
But, with radioactivity, you can't feel it or see it or hear it or smell it. So it must be ok. That's what I thought about that radioactivity. Must not be that bad.
The atom bomb shot named "Camphor" didn't quite work right. The high pressure, vaporized rock gas had pressurized the big hatch-door. That big hatch-door we were standing next to didn't quite seal. It leaked a little. Nothing much leaked. Only some radioactivity leaked into the bomb tunnel. The clean up crew removed enough of it so people could walk by somewhat safely.
The wall I was standing next to was where it squirted, apparently enough to warrant a warning sign.
I didn't know how much radiation actually leaked. I suppose I could have looked it up, or asked someone. At least two people I know would definitely tell me the truth if I would have asked.
Dr. Wendell Weart told me how the shot named "Baynberry" leaked, really leaked, into the atmosphere. He said the fire coming out the leak into the desert really looked like a bomb went off. "We actually might have violated the Treaty with that one," he said, surprising me with his frankness. He was one of the geologists on the team in charge of corking the explosions.
"It leaked off sideways, along a fault. We didn't expect it to do that," he explained.
At the end of the day, my radiation badge blared and shouted to everyone that I got some radiation. Nobody noticed or seemed to care. It was not enough to raise the alarm.
It was my initiation.
I suppose it was no worse than one of those foot x-rays I remember getting in the shoe shop back during the late 1940's. Now we know those foot x-rays were dangerous.
I just had to see more. But this time this was all we had time to see.
The Sedan Crater
We got back to Albuquerque and I pestered Goodlaffer for more access.
"Did you ever see anything interesting out there?" I asked, hoping he would volunteer something new. Then I would ask him to describe it in detail. That would get him all excited. And then I would pull the punch line: "How would I get to see it?"
"The thing that really demonstrates the awesome power of a nuclear device is the Sedan Crater," he replied, very officially, nodding his head for emphasis and affirmation.
"Really? What does it look like? Did you see it?" I asked, prodding him.
With an excited smile, holding his coffee cup in his hand, he told me "God, I couldn't believe it when I saw it. This is a huge crater."
"Huge." he said again, with hand motions, and almost spilling coffee out of the cup. "It digs a h-u-uge hole." He really got excited. "You gotta see it. It is like the Grand Canyon."
Wow. I didn't have to prod him. He volunteered that I should go back to the test site again.
He asserted how awesome it was, over an over, and assured me that I would see something that sounded like it would be half a mile across.
Then Al Beckman, overhearing stories about the bomb, came out of his office, which was next to Goodlaffer's, and told his version.
"I was really impressed when I saw that hole," he said. "It's really impressive. Big." he asserted.
"It makes you really think about how powerful these things are that we work with," he said, switching the flavor of the conversation. "It makes you kinda wonder if we are mature enough to have all that power over nature," he said, trying to be philosophical.
I expected to see something like a Grand Canyon. And Goodlaffer volunteered to pay for another trip.
This was exciting.
-------------
Ben Saw the First One
Ben Benjamin saw the first atomic bomb go off, at the Trinity site in New Mexico. Taller than me and heavier, and so mild mannered and gentle, a real gentleman. Light hair, fuller face, fair-skinned like a Swede I believe he was. I could prod him so easily to tell stories about people. He would volunteer them at the slightest excuse. The gentle smile of his soothing voice became tattooed in my mind.
His office was in a big bull pen building, as long as two football fields. The dozen north south hallways made a simple grid against the 4 east west highway hallways. The building was jammed with offices and rooms full of electronic devices and fabrication shops. He was in the north east end. He and Dr. George Hansche, his boss, were in charge of taking the pictures of the bombs.
We were in Ben's office and I prodded him to tell me what it was like. He said he was there at Los Alamos when the possibility of the Bomb was a super secret. He said famous physicists had done some measurements that indicated it might work. Ben was there before they tested the first atomic bomb, and they didn't know for sure if it really would work.
"I was just a teenager then." Ben paused and then started to boast, in a nice way.
"I was a very smart technician, so they abducted me into the New Mexico desert instead of letting me carry a gun and fight World War II."
"I was glad I didn't have to get shot at."
"I was just a kid. When I signed up, volunteered, I was ready to go fight the Nazi's."
"They abducted me and would not tell me where I was going. They just said 'you will find out when you get there.' "
"I wasn't allowed to write my family where I was. They changed the postmark on my letters." he said. "I was living in Los Alamos, but the letters were postmarked Santa Fe."
" They didn't' tell me what the secret was for 6 months." he said.
"Do you remember anything about the first bomb going off?" I asked.
"Oh yeah. We were all huddled there, curled over, in the dark, waiting." he said.
"Then I heard somebody ask Hans Bethe "Are you scared?" just before it was supposed to detonate."
Hans was a famous physicist, one of the inventors of the bomb, one of the two or three Maximum Bosses of the entire atomic bomb project.
"And then I heard Hans say "yes, I'm scared." with that deep accent of his. "
"We didn't know whether it was going to blow up or be a dud. And then it went off."
Ben knew about atomic bombs. He was there for almost every shot the United States did, including the atmospheric shots.
"We built houses and planted trees in the desert, Frenchman's Flat, and then we blew em away," he said, chuckling slightly.
"I got to run the camera's." That was Ben's specialty then. The optics. Cameras. Fast cameras.
I had begged him to take me along on one of his NTS trips and show me what he was talking about.
So, Ben Benjamin took me on a field trip to the Nevada Test Site and Bill Goodlaffer paid for it.
Ben and I flew into Las Vegas, had a typical steak supper where we could have a drink while we watched some ladies dance with no underwear. The usual thing.
He saw how curious I was, as I stared at the naked lady, and how she looked at me, smiling at me, almost dancing just for me, I thought. Apparently the lady knew him.
But Ben got us out of there rather abruptly.
"Why did we have to leave so fast?" I asked, not wanting him to know how much I wanted to gawk some more.
"Next thing you know, she'll come out here and get very friendly," he said, without much emotion.
Now that part I understood. I could not spare the cash. Terri and I were scrimping to pay back the loan we took to get a down payment for our new home.
And, Terri would know. She would just know, by the guilty look on my face. She would be very pissed.
I never did anything like that. But I was saving up. "Maybe someday when I am older" I thought.
We expected the next day would be a long day, so we really couldn't stay. We needed sleep to get up early.
The next morning, driving on the way out of town to the Nevada Test Site, we stopped at about 8 am for a hearty double hamburger breakfast at a well lit, rather big hamburger joint. The girls were already dancing topless. The hamburger was big, seemed about a pound, and tasted very good.
I was anxious to see the main attraction: the site where we detonate atomic bombs, test nuclear weapons, blow up nuclear explosives. My main reason for going here this trip is to examine the monstrous big hole an atomic bomb made, the Sedan Crater.
On the way to the crater, we drove by one after another, circular, collapsed dimples on the Nevada Test Site desert. Each dimple was about at big across as a football field. This was the tell-tale sign of the other way to do underground testing.
For this "other" way, they dig a 12 or 20 foot across hole, and then dig it a mile or two deep. Different holes, different sizes.
The hole they dig gets smaller as you go down. They line the hole with steel and concrete. They put the bomb at the bottom.
Along some of the pipe on the way up they put the electronics and things to illuminate with the bomb. Finally, they fill the rest of the hole all the way to the top with concrete and rocks.
Then they detonate the weapon. I don't know what happens if it doesn't detonate. Rumor has it that one or two didn't.
At the bottom of the hole, the bomb creates a 100 foot-across bubble, called a cavity, where it detonates. A 100 foot across hole doesn't just stay there. It's roof collapses. As the roof falls to the floor, it is like the bubble floats up. This keeps happening until the "bubble" gets to the surface.
The subsidence craters are the collapsed dimple left over when a deep underground cavity created by an underground nuclear weapon test collapses. The craters were shaped like a shallow cereal bowl, or the saucer under a coffee cup. But they are about 1 or 2 football fields across. The caked dirt cracked inside the bowl. We drove by one after another.
The scrub plants seemed to grow better in the bowl than on the desert. Ben said the plants probably grow better because the ground water moves through the soil better, after the bomb cracks the soil. The Sci-Fi movie people claimed the radiation did it, and would also make monster ants. I did not see any giant bugs. They were hiding and only came out at night, when everyone was in a bar watching naked ladies.
All of Nevada seemed to be parched, burnt, barren, but it wasn't. When we got out of the car I saw grasses, twig plants, stiff micro-bushes growing, slowly, but obviously growing. It was hot outside, and it was cold in the morning. The sky here was always blue. But the sky in the distance was always pale blue because one could see so far. Fifty miles was nothing.
Ntscrater3.jpg
http://www.enviroweb.org/issues/nuketesting/hew/Usa/Tests/Ntscrater3.jpg
We were standing in the hot sun.
I started to dart, but Ben Benjamin would not let me just run over to the crater edge and walk.
"Too dangerous." he said.
"Radioactive?" I asked.
He raised the level of his voice with alarm: "No. It can still collapse."
"Really?" I ask, like a dumbbell.
"You can drop 40 feet straight down and get hurt." he snapped back, trying to keep me from being impulsive like he has seen me do before.
"These things will collapse for no reason, years after the shot," he added as he stared somewhat off into the distance, as if remembering his old days here. His mind was clearly off somewhere.
"Like falling off the roof of a 4 story building and landing on the sidewalk. You go splat," he said, bluntly.
We got back in the car and he took a detour from the plan and drove me to the site of the "ground zero" for some of the first airburst shots he helped photograph.
He drove the car right up to the flat, target area in the desert. He knew just where to drive to get around the metal cable barriers hanging across the dirt roads to the ground zero areas, to keep other people out.
Around the ground zero they had set up buildings and houses and vehicles at various distances away. And then they detonated an atomic bomb in the atmosphere and watched what happened.
"It blew it all away," he said, as we wandered around, somewhat aimlessly.
He didn't complain or stop me when I touched the bent rebar of a broken concrete building. There wasn't much to see or touch. I had seen a whole lot more debris in some New Mexico ghost towns I had visited. I guess that is what the bomb did. Cleared things out.
"Is this radioactive here?" I asked.
"Probably a little. Not much," he said slowly, as an afterthought. From the way he walked and wandered, I could feel how this had once been a site of excitement, exhilaration, commotion, activity, voices, people doing things, Grand Things, earth-shaking things of cosmic proportion.
And now, it was just dust on a desert.
He drove us off towards another canyon with more tunnels where they had shot off more bombs. On the way I saw a green splotch in the hills to the North. It looked like a mile away, but it was about 8 miles. We took another detour.
"That's a natural spring. Artesian. It always runs." he said.
"You mean in this desert?" I asked.
"There's water here. Every once in a while. The natives knew exactly where it was." he said.
Sure enough, as we got up closer we saw the green up close, a spot with a dozen green bushes as tall as Ben, and a trickle of water oozing along a 50 foot stretch of an otherwise dry gully. Green water-plants hugged the ground along the water.
About a 100 feet from the water was a 1920's vehicle engine attached to the front part of a vehicle.
"I was gonna come back and get that engine some day," Ben mumbled. He liked antiques.
We left the water hole and headed back to the canyon that had some used-up bomb tunnels.
In the car, Ben explained to me how one can even be 3 meters, 10 feet, from an atomic bomb and not even get much radiation.
"It only takes 10 feet of dirt between you and the bomb to shield the radiation." he asserted.
Then he casually commented "of course the shock wave is pretty strong."
He always got a kick out of using the same phrases the physicists used: He said "It turns into plasma."
Me The Graduate Student explained it to me, silently, as we drove to the next destination. Silently I said to myself, "Of course it does. The 10 feet of dirt between you and an atomic bomb does not mean you live through it. As soon as the bomb goes off, concrete and dirt moves outward at about Mach 10 and compresses, squeezes, almost instantly. The super friction heats it up so much it turns into white - purple hot more-than-boiling white hot vapor. Vapor more dense than rock. Sure, for the first few microseconds there is no radiation."
His words were still a surprise: a few yards of dirt stops atomic bomb radiation.
The bomb tunnel in the canyon was locked up tight. We were not suited to go in anyway. We never even got out of the car to see it.
Our driving out of that canyon reminded Ben of an atomic bomb that deliberately blew out of a tunnel.
"They used an atomic bomb to make an atomic bomb cannon." he said, one hand on the steering wheel, pointing to the side of the canyon we were in with the other.
"What did they do?" I asked, expecting a short story.
"Well, they shot off a small atomic bomb inside the tunnel on one side of this canyon." he started to explain, slowing his words as he looked around, to find just where it had been.
"I don't see exactly where they did it here." he continued, looking around at what was clearly not familiar anymore.
"It's been a while," explained, excusing the fact of his not being able to point right to the tunnel.
"It shot the projectile out the tunnel and hit the other side of the canyon." he said.
"Of course. what you expect?" I asserted. I believed him and could not imagine what else an atomic bomb would do.
"What scared the hell out of them was that the didn't curve like an arc, it went straight, straight across the canyon." he explained.
"Did they ever make a cannon out of it?" I asked.
"Well, if you like dragging a Mountain along." he replied.
"The problem is that you have to use a mountain to contain it." he explained. His clear and simple explanatory sentence lacked that sarcasm his Ph.D. colleagues liked to use.
He left me to figure for myself that a one-shot gun that weighs as much as a mountain would not be worth much.
Ben was finally taking me to the SEDAN crater, like I wanted.
SEDAN was an atomic bomb test to learn how to dig the biggest possible hole with an atomic bomb. Both the Russians and the USA bragged how our newly discovered atomic explosives could dig huge canals cheaply. Bigger than the Panama Canal. Fast. Easy.
The old ones actually thought they had discovered something better than dynamite with which to dig earth. They did not consider the radioactivity. Small detail.
For this SEDAN test, they buried an atomic bomb as deep as the calculations said they should. It was buried just deep enough to dig the biggest hole possible using a typical nuclear explosive. This was the big event.
I almost couldn't wait.
There wasn't anybody else here on this desert that we could see. It seemed we could see 20 miles of road easy. This was the Nevada desert, and this day's visibility was something like 100 miles. We were the only ones driving around this part.
Ben casually drove up to what looked like a hitching post for horses at an unpaved, sandy parking lot. Apparently this site was so unimportant that they just left it unpaved, just sand. I could not see any real signs, professional signs, anywhere to guide anyone. I saw only one professionally painted sign that told how deep the bomb was, how powerful it was, how big across the hole was and how much dirt was blown out. Raw engineering data.
"Well, here we are," he said, blandly.
Ben's bland comment matched my first impression of this site.
Some sand dunes surrounded the crater, so I could not see into it even after we drove up. All I saw were sand dunes. We walked past a metal cable rope designed to keep a car from driving too close.
We peered over the dunes and into the crater. It was a puny hole no bigger than a couple hundred yards across. It was only a few football fields across and only 1 or 2 football fields deep. It seemed like someone had driven a caterpillar tractor down into it and left it there. Ben said that was an accident.
Terri and I and some fellow graduate students had walked into a bigger hole in Toledo, Ohio, looking for fossils, where they were excavating Silurian and Devonian mud to make cement.
sedan3.jpg
http://www.nv.doe.gov/news&pubs/publications/historyreports/news&views/sedan.htm
This was no big hole at all.
I guessed the reason Freeman Dyson proposed to use atomic bombs to propel space ships was that he saw everything I just saw, all these tests. I wondered if he was impressed or not at SEDAN. I wasn't. This was no big deal at all.
I found out from my radiation badge reading after we got back to Albuquerque that I got a radiation dose from the dirt, but apparently not much.
As we left and for weeks after I got back, I felt it and didn't say it:
"The bomb is not that Almighty Powerful."
CHAPTER 6
Make No Long Term Plans
\ s1_ch_09_epochal_events 20090220_1017.doc
M:\azinc\PROZX\To Inhabit The Solar System\- CHAPTERS
It was early 1970's in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The nuclear weaponization facility hired some highly perceptive, truly smart people who thought completely outrageous things and said them. I was taking a break and had walked down the hall to visit one of them, Gus Simmons. My office was now in the building where Physicists worked, and where the important Vice President had his office. My status had gone up.
One fourth Native American, three fourths Outrageous, Iben Browning, another one of them, was there with Gus. Iben startled me by opening a conversation with a characteristic punch line:
"If we bomb the center of Russian cities, we destroy their whole economy. If they bomb the center of our cities, they do us a favor and clean it out."
"What?" I retorted, taken by surprise.
"In the US, all the productive people flee the city and move to the suburbs. The center of the city is left to the ghetto poor who can't afford to move. Then the city passes absolutely fair and equitable laws to share the wealth with all the non-producers, the poor and stupid. Any productive person who stays, pays for it"
"I didn't know that's what happened. I thought it was the ghetto that made the city a bad place." I said.
When I was a pre-teen, union workers and businesses moved out of Cleveland and went to the suburbs, like Parma and Berea and Chardon. The Ford and Chevy plants moved out there, too. Everything productive fled the center city.
"Well, isn't the center of the city where you find all the hospitals for the destitute and penniless. Isn't that where the bums go for free food?" he remarked.
"In Russia, the Communists have to control everything, so they put everyone in the center of the city." Iben went on.
I meekly commented I thought it was because of the Siberian cold. I thought the Russians lived as close as possible to each other because they wanted the shortest distance between warm spots.
This was the first time I ever heard such heresy about the fair and humane social programs, and nuclear war, or about how or why Russians were concentrated in shabby apartments in the center of cities.
"They will never have a nuclear war with us," Iben assured me.
"The ultimate decay of a culture is civilization," he had said in his office in the suburbs when I had visited him there on some kind of official business.
"All the great invasions of history were caused by hungry people from the North going south, for food," he had said. "Climate drove history."
I never checked it out, but I guess it was true.
On another different day he had said "You have to let the diseased part die." He was asserting the ultimate in anti-bureaucracy.
He was referring to social programs for animals and people who are in a bind for some reason of their own doing. Skills becoming obsolete, like taking care of horses, making typewriters, taking dictation for the boss. Or like persisting to live in places where hurricanes flood you, rivers overflow into your house, or ghost towns from the coal mining era where there is no work and won't be.
"A bureaucracy is designed to keep all the diseased parts alive," he explained, in more detail, "no matter what the cost, even if it kills the organism."
"The Ultimate Act Against Nature is keeping a species from going extinct."
"Interesting," I thought, as I mumbled the words loud enough he could hear, and as I stared aside for a moment, realizing what he had just said.
"I like the Condors," I said. "I'm glad we didn't kill off all the buffalo." I didn't agree with him every time. But he sure made me think.
Iben Browning was there, working with Gus on something. They both took a break to talk with me.
He must have saved up sound bytes to startle me. Every time I met him he had a new one.
---------- Epochal Events ----------
The most intriguing concept Iben and Gus ever came up with was the story about Epochal Events.
Gus had just been promoted to a Department Manager of the Math Department. Bob Kadiddlehopper, my boss and also Department Manager, had an office next to Gus.
Having wandered into Gus's office because Iben was there, I had remarked to Iben and Gus how the exponential explosion of discoveries and technology during our lifetimes had changed everything, forever.
"No. Discoveries aren't going exponential at all. They're constant, but very frequent," Iben said.
Gus smirked, tracking my facial expressions as Iben baited me.
"Don't make any long term plans," Iben warned, as if he knew something, and poking me in a direction of ominous fear.
They were up to something. I could tell by their faces. I had come in and interrupted just when they had become excited about something.
"Epochal discoveries are happening so fast that everyone alive is destined to be as mixed up and confused as teenagers for their whole lives, and I can prove it." Iben asserted.
"And it will be that way unless almost everyone dies," he continued.
"What does everyone dying have to do with discoveries?" I asked.
"Discoveries change all the rules," he replied, with a smirk.
"I know that. What's it got to do with everybody dying?" I pressed him.
Now both he and Gus Simmons were both smiling, watching me get hooked. They had discovered something and they just had to tell me so bad they were about to pee their pants.
"It's not exponential. It's a constant number of man-years between discoveries," said Gus Simmons, the newly-promoted-to-manager, right wing crew-cut, left wing beard-to-the-belt-buckle mathematician magician lock-picker.
Now that was different. They were talking about the rate of discoveries. Whenever it would come up, everyone, without exception, would say "Its accelerating, exponential."
But, the pace of discoveries is actually a constant, they say. I had thought that we were in a truly unique period of human history, an absolutely new era of sudden, exponentially growing, explosive world changing discoveries. But not quite, they said. They captured my attention.
"If you plot the number of man-years between discoveries, it's a constant, something of order 50 to 100 Billion man years," said Gus, very mathematically, precisely.
"Man-years?" I asked.
A man working for a year is a unit of management-speak. That is like "hours" to a mechanic, like "4.5 hours to fix the brakes."
For people in the technical business it typically takes a team of people to do things, and it typically takes lots of people and many months or a year or two to do a multi-million dollar project.
Gus just learned about the unit to measure the human effort needed to do something. Being newly exalted and anointed as "Manager" of the Math Department at Sandia Laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission, he learned "man-years."
Iben Browning was a Zoologist by training, so he had a propensity to classify things. "I was walking up the stairs of the Smithsonian in Washington DC, and along the railing on the wall up the stairs they had a chart showing the 'Ascent of Man' from the beginning of human history till now." he explained.
"At the bottom of the stairs they had the invention of fire. Then they had the wheel, the discovery of agriculture, writing, and on up the stairs. Under each invention they had the number of humans alive at the time. So I just wrote down the events and the number of people on a piece of paper. When I got to the top of the stairs there were a lot of events, like the printing press, steam engine, telephone, telegraph, computers."
Gus then said "I wondered how many man-years it took to discover something that changed everything. I expected it would take fewer man years the more we knew. So I plotted the number of man-years it took to discover an epochal event."
Then he paused, looking right at me, waiting for me to calculate the answer.
We are technical types. We will all calculate, as a reflex action. We all expect that the more we know, the less work it will take to discover things, and get rich.
"It's exponential," I blurted out without thinking. Then I realized they had just told me it wasn't. I looked somewhat stupid.
Gus kept looking right at me, didn't flinch, and stated the observation:
"The number is something like
50 to 100 Billion man-years."
"Amazing," I exclaimed. A constant, I thought, not exponential. The discoveries aren't exponential, like we thought. They are a constant.
"So when is the next one?" I asked. And they both laughed out loud.
"Everybody ask that question." said Iben.
"Well, it's pretty hard to predict the future. You never know." said Gus, with a tone of voice that revealed he was not a sure as he was before.
"Can't you tell from what we see burbling up now?" I asked, a bit clumsily. "Like computers?"
Slightly frustrated, I asked a different question:
“How do you precisely know what an epochal event is and when it happens?”
One of them said "You can't tell until you look back and see that it really changed the culture. When all the rules are changed, then you can look back."
"Ok, what was the last one?" I asked.
Either I found a weak point, or they were being scoundrels. Neither of them could come up with anything definitive. Atomic bombs? Nuclear power? DNA molecules? Computers? Jet airplanes? They were arguing between each other about what was and what wasn't.
The Transistor stood out. A Man on the Moon stood out. Those were recent. I don't know how the Man on the Moon changed things, but I agreed it sure was magical.
TV only came up as a progression from the telegraph, the telephone, radio and movies.
I said "Drugs, I bet that's the next one."
The druggies all seemed to be having a really culture-changing good time. Timothy Leary started a revolution where people were having 4 dimensional experiences, synesthesia experiences, experiences that we only read about when Catholics described what the Saints experience, and 12 hour orgasms.
They didn't even respond. Neither Iben or Gus gave a damn about drugs.
Then I said "The Pill," because it totally changed the rules of family, dating, behavior. Pregnancy was the thing that forced people to be monogamous for at least as long as it took to raise the children.
"The Pill and Penicillin," I quickly followed up. Penicillin kept the venereal diseases from causing a problem with sex.
None of us could pinpoint the very most recent epochal event.
Then Gus explained his mathematical point again:
"There are about 4 Billion people on the Earth. At 50 Billion man-years between epochal events, that means every 12 years something happens to totally change the rules. At 100 Billion man-years, it's every 25 years."
I could see this in a flash. All 4 billion people on Earth working a living for 25 years is 100 billion man-years.
I could see why cultural and religious "truths" would seemed to be true for so long.
When there were only 10 million people on the entire earth, like there were during Roman times, during Jesus or Buddha or Confucius times, and 25 billion man-years per Epochal Event, one could wait 2500 years before something would make Jesus and the Bible wrong, or Confucius wrong.
One could wait 10 lifetimes with no challenges to our way of life, and no changes to Truth.
That seems to be exactly what happened.
"So just when you get things figured out, everything changes." Gus said, referring to right now, today, his life now, and dismissing any historical significance.
If you care about right now and not history, then the Epochal Event theory explains why we are destined to become mixed up every time between 12 and 25 years go by.
If you care about history, then you see why Epochal Events like DNA, radioactive dating, 500,000 years of ice layers, microscopes and telescopes flatly contradict the Bible. You would see how nothing contradicted the Bible or the Pope or religions at all for the first 1,500 years after Jesus. But epochal events eventually changed the rules.
Iben and Gus, focused only on "right now" and not on the principles and philosophy of Life like I was, had just explained mathematically why we would be destined to be just like a teenager who "can't seem to figure out the rules."
"Wow." I said, bright eyed. "Every 12 to 25 years you have to start over figuring things out."
"So if you don't keep looking out for the change, you will be hopelessly out of touch. It's never-ending," Iben explained.
He sat there looking right at me and explained like he was explaining the workings of a car.
Gus said "Those who don't change become complete anachronisms.".
That seemed to explain preachers and Italian grandparents pretty well. They all seemed to hold fast to the principles they learned when they were young, to their Rosaries and Bibles, Saints, devils and angels, or whatever their stern and overbearing parents taught them long ago.
I could see for myself how even only moderately old smart people were even getting things dead wrong a lot lately.
My grandparents sure didn't know very much. They sure thought they did. And those old and arrogant, authoritarian Catholic priests and the Bishop of Cleveland didn't know much either. When we moved to New Mexico, we listened on the radio to those Bible Thumpers out of Texas. What they said sounded just simply uneducated. And they talked like they had a speech impediment.
My father thought he knew a lot, and he was only 2 generations out of step. He never changed from his youth. When I was a rebellious young teenager he and I got into an argument and he told me "When you get older you will see that I was right."
I was waiting, waiting for him to be right, and it never happened.
"So that means, you will be mixed up every 20 years, or 5 times per lifetime." I said.
It was startling. Everyone around me did seem to be mixed up. This explained it all. I saw it in a flash.
when it became
less than one lifetime ...
Great turmoil happened all over the world when the time between rule-changes got down to one human lifetime. Sometime during the last century or two, something fundamental happened. The time between epochal events decreased to less than about one or two lifetimes.
It was not that way at all, just 300 years ago. All those old cultures, like China's, Japan's, India's, Russia's culture. All focused on long term plans. Plans that could take 100 years. It was not that way 1000 years ago.
And they were Dead Right, as long as the time between epochal events was 100 years or longer, the longest human lifetime. But the time between epochal changes isn't greater than 100 years. It's 12 or 25 years. Their time constant is now wrong. Dead wrong.
During the mid 1800's any half-awake person could experience for himself that the basis for some fundamental rule of his culture was no longer true at all, completely wrong, period.
Revolutions appeared, everywhere. American Revolution. The French Revolution. Bolshevik. Communist. It even started earlier, with the Protestant revolution.
This Epochal Event thing wasn't just a science thing. It related directly to Right and Wrong.
---
How did this relate to their job of weaponization of nuclear explosives?
They were deciders in one of the most prestigious laboratory systems in the world. They were in the Think Tank. Their job was to figure what to do next. That's what Tom Burford's whole Systems Analysis Directorate was all about. They got paid when we figured correctly on what to do next.
Strategy above everything. That was one of Gus Simmons's principles. We were getting paid for Strategy.
All of us, Gus Simmons, Iben Browning, my boss Bob Kadiddlehopper, his boss Burford, we were all part of planning long term research projects. Like Fusion. Or Space. Or engineering projects, like spy satellites, or hyperfast missiles, or android robot-delivered atomic bombs.
The Lesson was:
"Make no long term plans."
Never plan a project that takes longer than an Epochal Event.
If you do a project that takes 40 years to finish,
no one will give a damn
when you actually succeed
beyond your wildest dreams.
There goes lifelong visions.
The Epochal Discovery is that the Short Term gains win over Long Term strategies, nowadays.
Short term only. New. Terrible. Troubling. Upsetting. Heresy.
"Make no long term plans."
If I would succeed at some long term plan, nobody might even care, because some epochal event would happen between now and when I got there.
"Holy Cow," I thought. "That's Epochal."
---------
Many times after that little Epochal Event get together I would try to reproduce their data. I would get a fact here, a data there, but I never got enough to check their math. I wondered: how right were they?
It did not matter how right they were about the exponential part. All that mattered was that multiple epochal changes are occurring during my lifetime.
The epochal changes
make every lesson of History
and every Truth of Religion
suspect.
That is epochal.
· NERVA at Jackass Flats
Encounter With A Nuclear Rocket
a personal epochal event
As a side benefit for being so interested in space travel, my boss's boss's boss, Dr. Tom Burford, encouraged the atomic bomb testers tell me anything and everything related to making and using atomic explosives for propulsion, including the Top Secret things. Burford know I might use them in a starship. The word somewhat got around.
An atomic bomb test director named Dr. Mell Merrit introduced me and another bright eyed, bushytailed Ph.D. named Dr. Bill Bishop to a rocket that would take people to Mars. He gave the two of us a personal tour of Jackass Flats, Nevada, where the key, nuclear rocket work was done. It was just down the street a bit, so to speak, from where they had detonated gigantic atomic bombs in the atmosphere and deep in underground tunnels and holes at the Nevada Test Site.
The nuclear rocket project had just been abandoned and stopped. The nuclear rocket building had just been closed down. Mell Merrit got us into the abandoned building and let us see the rocket.
Mel's exact words to Bill and me were
"that's the rocket that could take us to Mars."
When I saw the rocket on the test stand, I ignored the "radioactivity" warning sign and ran up to the rocket itself. I tried to wrap my arms around this nuclear rocket. It appeared to be so small I actually imagined I might be able to get my arms at least half way around it.
I should not have run past the radioactivity sign like that. I got a small dose of radiation. But it was worth it. I was a bit eccentric anyway, before that. After all, that rocket could have taken us to Mars.
The rocket was called "NERVA". People talk about this rocket program to this day. This rocket used hydrogen propellant. A nuclear reactor heats the propellant to a temperature where things would glow brighter than the filament of an old fashioned, incandescent light bulb. The propellant boils furiously and almost explodes into a hot vapor. The propellant vapor is guided directly into a rocket nozzle directly attached to the nuclear boiler.
This was simple.
A small nuclear reactor powered this NERVA rocket. NERVA used liquid hydrogen propellant.
Instead of atomic bombs, this rocket used a more tame form of atomic energy, a nuclear reactor. The engineers made this rocket and made it work. This was practical. This would not take us to the nearest star, but it would take us through the solar system. The NERVA really could be practical because they actually tested it at full power.
Never mind that there was zero liquid hydrogen in space, rendering it not practical enough for us to inhabit the solar system. with it. No gas stations for it. Ignore that.
Seeing and touching this NERVA rocket was an Epochal Event for me. Typical for Epochal Events, it would not be obvious for a long time.
CHAPTER 6
e-beam phasor
Getting Fired Into A Real Day Job
Another Phasor Beam
They kept wanting me to work on phasor beams. The second phasor beam was a particle beam. The engineers who made the particle beam accelerators thought they had a better idea than the scientists who made the lasers. I got to analyze that one as well. But it did not work out either. For all kinds of reasons, the beam was too weak, the beam would not go straight, and the beam would not do as much damage as they wanted. I had to laugh when I heard that a beam generator would take so much power to operate that the lights would dim in the part of the state they would test it.
When we wanted to put the thing into space, the power supply would be heavier than at least 10 space shuttles. It would be 100 space shuttles heavy if you believed the engineers instead of the scientists. And the beam would not go straight, either.
However, I did learn a valuable lesson. The lesson would be so valuable that it would be the key to making a simple rocket to let us inhabit the solar system. I would use the extremely valuable lesson for knocking killer asteroids and comets from colliding with Earth.
I did not know that it was a valuable lesson then. No one likes to learn a lesson. We want things to work out, not to give us a lesson.
The lesson was that if you are delivering a blast of energy to something, to make it blow up and knock the target to bits, then there is an optimum way you should do it. This part was obvious.
More precisely, you don't want to do heat up the target too slowly, or it will just slowly boil and not blow the target up. Like the face doctor using a laser to burn off a mole or pimple: the mole comes off but your face does not blow up. This was obvious as well.
Not so obvious and most important, you don't want to heat up the target to fast. The answer is not like the rocket equation at all. It was supposed to be, but wasn't. That lesson was contrary to intuition and unexpected.
If you heat up the target too fast, the surface blows off at very high speed. However, too little of the surface blows off. The blast is too small, and the bad guy gets away. And the bad guy shoots back with a real rocket that blows you to bits.
Eye doctors do this when they do Lasik eye surgery. Their eye surgery laser deliberately heats up the target with too much energy too fast. The laser blows off just a layer of molecules off your eye lens surface. The molecules become very energetic and move very fast when they leave your eye, but they don't blow out your eye. They don't even bump your eye. You don't even feel it. For you, that's good. For a rocket, that's bad.
The lesson is that if you use your precious energy packet to blow up just the right amount of target, then you cause the biggest motion and commotion in the unfortunate target. Contrary to rocket scientist intuition, you get the biggest bonk with only a medium atom ejection speed, and not the maximum speed.
Another thing I learned was a good trick if you need to shove an asteroid out of a collision path with Earth. The clever trick was to use the target itself as the blasting mass. All you need to deliver is a blast of energy. The fast version of Dyson's starship did that. All the phasor beam weapons deliver just a precious blast of energy, but not mass. The energy can travel at very high speed, such as the speed of light. But if you could afford a slower speed to deliver the energy, you could use energetic mass to deliver the energy.
If you were a space cadet, you could use this to save the world. You would use the mass from near earth asteroids and near earth comets, already in highly energetic orbits in the sky, as your energy source. You will move them a little, and then save the Earth from total disaster. It will be much easier said than done, of course, because I am a physicist who is telling you what you should do.
The phasor beam projects were going so badly that I wanted to quit. I was so vocal about it and such a complainer, and did my job so poorly, that my boss's boss fired me off the job. His boss, Dr. Tom Burford, had gone back to Bell Labs and could not rescue me.
Even though I had been nominated to and voted in as the President of the New Mexico Academy of Science, I was still fired. I did a bad job at that as well. I was simply too much of an Aspie.
I went away completely depressed and believed I had no skills and was worthless.
· spy satellites
· \ S1 CH 12-spysatellites-Nf-.doc
I finally got a regular day job, as a spy from space.
His nose was big and wrinkled. His coarse laugh and blunt smile fit well with his thoroughly bland, plain, ordinary clothes, no tie, with absolutely no fashion anywhere in his appearance. No pretensions at all. Thinner, taller, just like an old fashioned engineer doing a job.
Dave Henry's Spartan metal desk in a small office with no windows, with documents and papers piled neatly everywhere, all suggested no signs of any highly intellectual activities. No interesting trinkets of space hardware on his shelves. No fancy wood conference tables. I sat in the uncomfortable, metal visitor-chair next to his desk. His office was so small office only a single chair fit next to his desk.
This geek engineer was completely unlike those highly intellectual physicists I was in the process of abandoning.
He was interviewing me for a job.
We were deep inside a single story metal building the size of a football field. The light-beige-painted, metal wall hallways went north and south, east and west. A perfect grid. I had been working at the southwest end somewhere. This was at the north east middle end, somewhere.
He posted a job for something related to spy satellites, little robot space ships that monitor treaties and watch atomic bomb tests.
The job description he posted wanted someone who could figure algorithms, computer procedures, for a space system. I knew about these guys. I had met their boss, and I knew rumors about their satellites that spied from space on communist atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere.
"Are you the same guy that did those algorithms?" he asked, with his loud, deep voice. He reached into the bottom right metal drawer of his desk and pulled out a document I had written about 8 years earlier.
"Yes, that's my document." I replied. I knew we had distributed it to everyone we could think of who could possibly use the algorithms.
In the document he pulled out I showed how to compute sine's, cosines, tangents, logarithms and exponentials without having to use long chains of multiplications and divisions. That is quite a trick. All you had to do was use a handful of simple additions and subtractions, and you would get a 10 decimal accurate trigonometry function. This was something one could do very easily with simple integrated circuits.
In my document I had explained how to use simple electronics to implement the these methods into portable devices. It was very similar to what I thought the Hewlett Packard "hp-35" calculator did. I didn't know what the calculator did. My algorithms where sure easy to implement.
But it seemed that nobody ever used the algorithms, or cared. People thought it was elegant. That's all. I always thought it was a shame nobody used them.
"We used some of those algorithms on a piece of hardware." he said.
"What?"
He stunned me.
"Wow weeeee." screeched several voices in my head. Elated was the only thing I could feel. Nobody ever gave me credit for using anything I had ever done or written in my entire life, except here.
And they didn't even tell me or ask me about them. They just used them.
I knew immediately it meant I did such a good job and wrote it so clearly that they could just go and do it, like they did.
I wanted him to give me the job.
I didn't understand that all he wanted to do was get a real job done, with a pressing deadline.
I never encountered his type before, one who did not want to talk about it or ponder its significance. I never met a physicist who had a deadline to do something real.
But I started in on him anyway, the only way I knew how, to make him feel proud about his work.
"You know, Curtis Hines said that the satellites are the reason we don't have an atomic war." I remarked.
"Yeah? Why ' zat?" he responded, in his dullest known mode.
Dave Henry was just not very interested in philosophy or feeling good. He was a man with 2 first names.
It just didn't register that he didn't care.
"No Surprises." I started with the conclusion. "You don't have to worry about any surprises." I began to explain.
He was supposed to be thinking strategically. I assumed he was trying to think of ways to keep the super powers from starting a battle. I wanted to have a conversation about how this is really a wonderful, good, positive endeavor he is engaged in. But he just didn't give a damn.
"We got a launch date to meet. Do you mind overtime?" he responded.
His team had a satellite that had a real launch date, and Dave Henry needed some people to finish programming for its data stream.
I still didn't get it.
"The other guys don't have to defend against the maximum threat if they can see your real threat and how it isn't that bad." I explained, speaking directly into an intellectual vacuum.
"We have to launch this
thing on a pretty tight schedule." he replied, as if I didn't say
anything.
"You can get comp time. We can't pay you over time, you're salaried." he explained.
I finally got it. "Comp" time is "compensatory time," where you take off on vacation for the same number of hours you worked extra. We all know, that never happens. My kind and his kind think work is play, a hobby. We forget which is when.
"I work all the time anyway." I mumbled.
"It'll be fun to do something real." I commented without thinking first, and unintentionally revealing that all the other things I had done were not real.
He didn't get that part, or, he didn't care. I could see that he felt like he was scoring a high-powered physicist.
He quickly led our conversation back to discus something that required Secret Restricted Data, Q Clearance, where we talked about the details of what an atomic bombs exploding in the atmosphere looked like to a satellite.
I commented about "catching commie pinko rapist atheists trying to pollute our atmosphere," with atomic bombs, hoping he would laugh.
His only reaction was to ask
"How soon could you start work?"
Then he said "You want this job?"
"Of course, yes, immediately, right now, can I start tomorrow?" screamed the ecstatic voices in my head. But all I could do was mumble: "Yes. It looks interesting."
Of course I wanted the job. It was the only thing the whole of Sandia labs did that really stopped atomic wars.
I could not believe it. I got the job, just like that. And, they actually already used something I had done.
All the way back to my office I was fantasizing. "This is real, a real job."
An emotion rattled repeatedly in my mind that was the feeling of finally doing something instead of nothing, thinking, figuring, showing how things don't work.
I could hear my voice saying to me "This is real, with a real deadline and real hardware that really has to work."
It was also a huge compliment to me. They implemented some algorithms I wrote about.
I was elated that something I did was actually worth something. All that time with the Star Wars guys and with the phasor banks and laser photochemistry guys was all bull. All the space travel stuff was fantasy.
This was real.
I finally found what I had been looking for.
I learned something, too.
Question: How do you pick a topic that people beg to hire you for?
Answer: Pick something they really want done now.
---
I felt so good about this job. A couple of years earlier I had helped trying to find ways to monitor atomic testing treaties. I really did know something about what we were trying to do. I wasn't just a physics nerd, I thought.
One time Dr. Sam Stearns connected his PDP-8I computer up to an "analog to digital converter." His computer was really compact. It was only as big as a refrigerator.
"It converts the computer signals back into sound." he told me. I had never seen a device like this before. That is what I like about working at a National Laboratory. They get modern devices like this to play with.
I had helped him get some digital tape recordings of seismic signals of earthquakes and some digital seismic signals of nuclear weapon tests.
"If we can tell the difference between an underground nuclear test and an earthquake, we can put that into the treaty." he said. "Perhaps we could limit underground tests."
"What do you think they would sound like?" he asked.
"I don't know." I replied, not realizing I was acting on queue.
"Listen to this." he said, as he played an hour of the Valparaiso Chile earthquake seismic record, digitally speeded up so the whole thing played in 8 seconds.
"Wow!" I blurted..
He played it over and over several times.
It sounded like some plop sound mixed with the sound you get when you bend a long wood saw, sort of a long boing. And then, near the end of the digital record, we heard it start to repeat. The signal had gone around the world once and was repeating itself. During the time while this signal was happening, people were dying in the earthquake.
Every time I heard it I imagined people being buried and smashed, crushed by a roof beam on their chest, not able to breath, slowly suffocating, dying in extreme pain, maybe with blood dripping out of a pressurized leg sticking out of a crushed building too heavy for emergency crews to lift.
Never before had anyone heard the sound of an earthquake, speeded up.
Then he played the sound of an underground nuclear weapon test.
"Bang!" it went. Exactly like a shotgun blast.
He played a few other nuclear weapon underground test signals.
"Bang!" they sounded, every time.
"Sure is easy to tell the difference." I commented the obvious to Sam.
"How would you make a program to recognize the difference?" he asked me. That was the challenge.
"I don't know." I replied.
Neither did he.
The 1960 Valparaiso Chile earthquake was a magnitude 9.5, the biggest ever recorded.
"That was an order of magnitude more energy than any nuclear weapon we've ever tested." Sam said. It was also the largest earthquake ever recorded. It was trivial to tell the difference.
"Do you think you can tell the difference between a very small earthquake and a small nuclear test in Nevada?" he asked me.
"I don't know." I replied. That was a hard problem.
I went and did other things. He gave me a copy of the sounds on a reel to reel tape. The tape got lost in a move.
This spy satellite job was definitely different because we knew exactly how to make it work.
But I did go away from Sam Stearn's digital earthquake sound with a mild emotion permanently embedded in my feelings:
an earthquake bigger than any atomic bomb,
really happened to Valparaiso, Chile.
-----
My office was an isolated desk in the middle of a long, old, trailer that was just one, long room. Airtight against the weather, obviously very used, but clean. Nancy Ruiz had a desk at the north end, with a filing cabinet and one of those smaller, metal leg, dark plastic top tables behind her. This trailer was connected to another trailer like just like it, with Dean and his secretary as the only occupants. Dean did something related to the Nevada Test Site.
Both of our trailers were out there in the mud patch just outside the main building. Wood boards over the mud made a path. Mud happened nearly every other day during the late afternoon summer rain.
Emery Whitlow was at the other end of our trailer. He had another whole table for tool boxes. On another big table he was working on real space hardware.
Each space hardware box was about as big as a microwave oven. Each box of things, mostly electronics, seemed to have wires and slotted cards and tiny electrical parts jammed full. There seemed to be no extra space in any box for anything more. I guessed that was space stuff for you. Every nook and cranny counts.
On the big table between he and I was a single element heater plate, designed for the chemistry lab. It was perfectly flat and about 6 inches on edge and half an inch thick. It had a dial on it, for very accurate temperature control. That's where Emery cooked his lunch.
Nancy and I were waiting for our new offices in the main building, 30 feet to the east. But Emery was exiled here, literally.
"I'm exiled out here, you know," he said, with a forced smile, but confiding in me. I had befriended him immediately. I liked the way he worked, so meticulously.
"Why are you exiled?" I asked.
"I mouthed off to one of Brick's high level colonels," he said, now somewhat boasting.
He actually told a U.S. Air Force officer, customer, some honest, highly critical but inappropriately timed truths about how the hardware was put together, the management, the Air Force "weenies" as he called them, and general disgruntling.
"Wow, you didn't get fired," I said, astounded, and revealing a fear typical for Sicilians.
No full blooded Sicilian (myself) would dare confront the bullheaded, stupid, loud mouthed violent despot elders, authorities, who would break your arm or shoot you for that kind of insolence.
"Besides, it was true," he asserted, this time gritting his teeth, wincing, still angry.
It wasn't the first time. He mouthed off for the N-th time, one too many times. Brick Dumore, the boss-boss, told him he had to stay out of sight, period.
"So, why didn't they fire you?" I asked, wondering how he got away with it.
"They need me to put the hardware together and make it work," he replied, calmly.
They couldn't fire Emery because
1. he was too skilled,
2. there weren't others to replace him, and
3. he climbed a pole to defuse a live atomic bomb for them.
A live atomic bomb? Defused it?
¿ ¿ ¿What???
Nancy was supposed to be putting the whole software picture together for this satellite we are working on. I was supposed to figure out how to calculate the location and size of the atomic bombs our new spaceship hardware would see from space.
And Emory Whitlow defused an atomic bomb.
Emery's nickname was "Shorty." I knew he was short. But I didn't like those derogatory nicknames. I never did. That is something out of the cruel past.
I always called him Emery, and he liked it. Respect. He really liked that.
Emery Whitlow saw 152, atomic bombs go off. He was there. Doing all kinds of things for the tests. At the Nevada Test Site and in the South Pacific. Underground tests, atmospheric tests, tests in space. He saw big ones, monster Megaton bombs, and small ones.
He told me how one time an atomic bomb at the top of the thin, radio antenna-like metal tower wasn't quite working right. It would not detonate.
??? Atomic Bomb did not Detonate ???
When they pushed the button, nothing happened. The Atomic Bomb did not go off.
When you push the button, at least the high explosive in the Atomic Bomb should explode. But it did not. That means the wires are not connected right or shorted.
Somebody had to go up to the top of the tower to find out why, and fix it.
So, Emery got into the small metal cage and the electric pulley hoisted him up. At the top, the automatic turn-off switch that stops the electric pulley motor didn't work. The switch was broken or stuck.
The motor tried to keep pulling the cage. The tower started to bend.
"I was yelling at the top of my lungs down to the crew, to shut it off." he said.
Eventually they did. Then he got out of the cage, high up in the air, one foot in, one foot out, stretching to do something.
The 4 prong connector to connect the "fire" cable was rotated 90 degrees. The wires were wrong.
Somebody had jammed the connector in even though the holes were the wrong size. He un-jammed it, put it in correctly and got back down.
Then they detonated the atomic bomb.
"Weren't you scared?" I asked, suspecting Emery was pulling my leg and telling me a tall tale.
"Nah. You wouldn't feel a thing." he casually replied.
From the way he said this, I was sure he practiced this a hundred times on a 1000 wide eyed people just like me.
I figured it was true, if the atomic bomb goes off, you don't even know it.
I figured that you are vaporized within microseconds. It takes about 1000 times longer for the nerves to send any signals through your brain. Your head would turn into vapor before your nerves could begin to send a nerve signal that something hot just turned on.
So, you would be there, and then suddenly, not.
That was unexpected, but interesting:
"They aren't going to fire someone
who re-connected a dud Atomic Bomb for them,
and, on top of a skinny metal tower."
One day before lunch he told me about how they were in some tents in the South Pacific, getting ready for a multi-megaton atomic bomb test.
"Was it fun out there?" I asked, hoping he would say "naked women, free sex."
"We sure ate good," he said.
"We were in these tents, big enough for at least 4 cots and 3 hanging lanterns, getting ready for a test." he said.
"How far away from the bomb?" I asked.
"Far enough," he said, and continued on because he had a story and wasn't going to let me distract him this time. I had distracted him many times before.
"During the middle of the night we heard a loud screeching," he began, starting to smile, and clearly recalling something he liked.
"Repeated, loud screeching all over the place," he said, with a bit of glee.
"I turned on the flashlight and all me and my tent-mate see are these big, monster rats, crawling up whatever they could as high as they could, inside our tent," he said, the punch line, as he watched my eyes get big and my expression reward him for persisting.
"What did you do?" I asked, wondering if he got bit, or his tent mate got injured.
"Aw, we grabbed a broom handle or something and whacked em." he said, somewhat ignoring the question.
"Outside, the rats were trying to escape huge attack crabs, crawling all over the beach, with legs covering 3 feet across," he exclaimed, showing me with his arms how big the crabs were. His arms indicated 3 or 4 feet across.
"These damn crabs were grabbing live rats in their claws, crushing them, and the rats were screaming." he said, asserting another good punch line.
I could not believe it. The crabs were eating rats.
"We ate some of those crabs," Emery said, using a satisfied hunter look as he told me.
"The guys on the ship wanted some, and we gave 'em some," he said.
"They tasted pretty good," he said, concluding his South Pacific, terror-in-the-night sci fi story about atomic bombs and killer crabs.
His Nevada Test Site story scared me.
"Did you ever see an atomic bomb up close?" I asked. I asked every one I could about their atomic bomb experience.
"Closer than you would ever want to be," he replied.
I expected he would say he was one of the guys they put in trenches, too close to the bomb, during the early test days.
"We were in a pickup truck at the Nevada Test site just after they set off one of the smaller A-bombs," he started to explain.
"I was in the passenger seat. I noticed the Geiger Counter was 'pegged.' " he explained.
"Pegged" meant that the needle of the meter was all the way to the right, like a speedometer at maximum. The Geiger Counter was a device about the size of a quart of milk and clicked when a radioactive decay particle happened to go through the Geiger Tube. The meter told them how many "rads" per hour, or per minute, or per second, depending on the sensitivity "gain" setting of a dial on the little box.
"Hey, this thing is pegged, I told the driver." he said.
"What did the driver say?" I asked, on cue. He set me up.
"Turn down the "gain". It's too sensitive." he replied.
That's no way to run things, I thought. This is radioactivity, not noise or fumes.
"So we kept driving. Then I looked down and the thing was still pegged. I said 'it's still pegged.' He said 'turn down the gain.' ok, I said."
"Then what?" I responded, on cue again. Even I can understand this. The meter is reading more radiation than the Geiger counter is able to measure. That's way too much. They are in real danger.
"It's still pegged. So I asked him, 'What do we do?' And he said 'step on it.' "
Emery said that with a laugh, as he delivered the punch line. He must have rehearsed one a hundred times, too, on gullibles like me.
"Step on it" means "step on the accelerator and go faster" to get out of there.
Marvelous delivery, marvelous punch line. But I didn't laugh. He expected me to laugh.
"So, did you get any radioactivity?" I asked. I was as serious as hell. This was not funny.
He saw I was more interested in him than in the adventure. Apparently, this was not the response most people gave him. I cared about him, not his misfortune.
His face turned serious. He paused. He leaned to the side a little. His gritted his teeth, something like a forced wide smile, and I think he didn't know he was showing his teeth like that.
The joke left his face and something distant took its place. With a sadness and frankness and a low tone he said "Yeah, we got some." That was unrehearsed.
He then told me what happened.
"Well, the wind shifted. We were in the fallout."
"They lost the records," he continued, then smiled a half joke, half dead serious, "probably on purpose."
He looked down, he looked up and he said "They figured I got 75 rads."
There was some silence between us. I recalled that 150 rads is the beginning of lethal doses.
"Did it do anything to you?" I asked.
"I don't know. I was always mean." he laughed.
Then his face got that distant look again. He looked down and then back at me. He involuntarily showed his teeth again.
"My daughter ... " he explained, calmly, frankly, because he said something that made me stop, cry inside, and want to yell to everyone what he told me.
We didn't talk about it much more.
Emery lost his only son, a volunteer, front line medic, in Vietnam. He died as he was trying to carry a wounded soldier away. Tears kept coming to his eyes. My eyes, too.
On a different day in the Exile Trailer Emery told me another Nevada Test Site story, about the crows.
"They were about to shoot an atomic bomb and we started the camera's rolling. At the same time some crows were flying toward the camera box. Then the bomb went off. This one crow looks back, and you could see he was wondering 'what the hell is that.' You could see his tail feathers go up."
"What happened?" I asked, like a dummy that I am. I don't follow jokes that well. I'm and Aspie. I take things literally.
Emery smirked a little, stopped, and then loudly clapped his hands,
"And then splat!"
he laughed.
After the hand-clap, well rehearsed part, he answered my question, wondering why I asked:
"Well, he smashed into the camera. They were gonna sit on it."
Everybody who hears this knows that bird gets smashed into the camera.
"You know we launched atomic bombs from Kauai," he said, smiling the way he often did when he was about to tell a 3 sentence short story with a sarcastic punch line.
I had been to Kauai, and even passed by Barking Sands. I had heard Sandia had some people there doing something-or-other.
"Did you see that one go off, too?" I asked, because Emery Whitlow had seen 150-something atomic bombs go off.
"Naw. It blew up on the launch pad," he said, laughing.
He was so irreverent. But, rockets would blow up on the launch pad all the time. Most of the rockets we watched on TV when I was in college blew up on the launch pad. It was always exciting to watch. Fire and excitement all over the screen. Reporters getting all excited at the excitement. Rockets always tended to blow up on the launch pad.
"One of our chicken-shit, scardy-cat engineers was so frightened when they pushed the button to destroy the rocket on the pad that he started crying."
He paused for a second, carefully looking at me to relish every surprised expression I might emote, and then added, laughing like a seasoned atomic bomb worker,
"The atomic bomb fell on the ground and started burning up."
Emery paused a moment to let me picture how an atomic bomb the size of a color TV set would drop on to the launch pad and catch fire. He expected me to get scared. But I knew better. If an atomic bomb is asymmetric, it will fizzle 100 percent of the time. It has to remain painfully and precisely the way the designer designed it, or it won't work at all. But Emery didn't know that I knew that.
He expected me to be all afraid. He expected how I would imagine how it could turned the entire launch area into a hole the size of 3 football fields and could have vaporized the control room and all the scardy-cats in it.
"He was crying and sobbing like a baby." Emery continued, mocking the guy.
"He was so afraid he was going to be blown up and killed."
I thought it was a bit funny and laughed.
When Emery saw me laugh instead of getting scared, he remembered I knew about bombs, and immediately added, laughing even more, "He wouldn't have felt a thing."
Emery must have recalled when he told me about the time he was on that tower all by himself and fixed the connector that was supposed to trigger the atomic bomb that didn't fire.
----
Six months later, as I walked from my office to my VW in the brisk evening cool of the New Mexico desert, a blank voice in my mind said
"They didn't fire him because he sat with atomic bombs."
-------------
I had grown to like the seclusion of the old trailer. But was moved to another .
Dave Henry was in the hiring mode. Everyone he hired had to wait in the unclassified area, outside a tall fence, until their clearance came in. Their desks were packed together in an old trailer on the other side of the building.
He hired a new Ph.D. fellow with a strange name, "Round Tree." I thought the fellow would be a Native American when Dave asked me to interview the guy. Some American Indians were supposed to have names like that. And I could not imagine a Native American wanting to work on computers, let alone get a Ph.D. in it. But he was a regular Texan with no accent.
Dave also hired some technicians. One of them, Stan Dutler, was assigned to work with me. Other people in the Lab had hired some female computer people. All new hire female's desks were packed in the same, old trailer while they waited for their clearances. They were young, thin and pretty. And they were smart. I tried to talk with them every chance I could. Too soon they all moved to somewhere in the Lab.
And then we all moved, including Stan, to nice offices on the inside. Everyone except Emery Whitlow.
Our whole team moved into nice, pleasantly crude office spaces inside the building. The room was big enough for 10 or 15 of us to share. Some of us, those with higher status, had a sturdy, new, chin-high wall to separate our desk areas. The room was warm in the winter, cool in the summer. My desk was a nice metal desk, with a clean plastic surface.
I liked the secluded hiding place around the corner I had chosen, deep in the rear of the room and around the bend. No one could see me if they wandered into any of the 3 doors to the area. I could focus entirely on the spy task: the flash location transformations. Those transformations were as tricky to solve as it sounded.
Dave Henry's office was out in the main area. Dave had lots of room in his office, compared to his other offices. Now he moved up to an office with no windows, big enough for a small metal table and three chairs. Neither his table nor desk nor walls were cluttered with anything.
Lena Valerio, his secretary, had her desk just outside his door. She took care of all of us.
A door connected our space hardware guys and their lab to our room. I always enjoyed walking past oscilloscopes and wires and tiny parts being put together on tiny boards, like a miniature city.
Dr. Don Rountree was furiously making software around the corner from me. Rountree was a very competent software Ph.D. His part of the satellite would unpack the bundles of data into neat little time-stamped bins, so the rest of us could work with them.
Stan Dutler was working furiously, implementing a fast computer code I designed to keep track of bright spots, such as the huge number of sun glints and reflections shining into our spy satellite view.
Don Summers, the mathematician, was helping me with the location transformations. He and I had to do the math to assign a location to any bright spots in the field of view.
Don Summers printed in the old fashioned style, on that wide computer paper with the holes on each side. He wrote those equations starting all the way from the left margin and continued all the way to the right margin, 15 inches away, and then continued on the next line, and kept on writing equations till he filled two or three sheets. Never made a mistake. Stunning work.
Sometimes, some said "always," he would not use deodorant or take a bath. I didn't ask. I didn't know. His soiled shirt overflowing his belt, his soiled pants with a nail-sized hole above the knee, his dirty mustache and his awkward, sometimes crude, blunt humor annoyed my wife and most females. But I didn't mind. He did stunning work.
Don Summers was worth 3 or 5 times what I was worth, and he only as a Masters Degree. He owned airplanes and hangars and threw people out his airplane half a dozen times on most clear Sundays.
I was happy. We were working with a real deadline, a real launch of a real robot space ship. The space ship hardware would look for real atmospheric explosions in the very atmosphere we really lived in. Our software would locate the fireball, calculate how big the bomb was, and tell on them. Someone in the Pentagon would eventually get our data.
If it wasn't too classified, our classification people would release the data and someone would tell the Media, Jane Fonda and the rest of the anti-war people that some bad people were shooting dirty nuclear weapons in the air we breathe.
This was important stuff.
Most of all, it was real. When we would issue an event report, Dave Henry told me it could go directly into the Pentagon and wake up a General in the middle of the night. If it were a real nuclear weapon detonating somewhere it shouldn't be detonating, like in anger, we would sound the alarm. Testing big atomic bombs at a nuclear test site is one thing, but using them in anger, blowing up cities, is completely different.
This was quite different from the research things and wild idea things I had been part of. I had abandoned working on the reaction initiators for external burning hypersonic vehicles. Those vehicles would look and act like flying saucers in the distant sky, if they would only ever work.
I had abandoned phasor banks, which I showed would not work.
I had abandoned doing anything for the New Mexico Academy of Science, of which I had been President.
Nobody seemed to bother us with such nonsense. We were working furiously on the software.
Computer terminals appeared. One terminal was near me. I got to use it any time and any way I wanted, my own personal computer terminal. I felt important. I could program the main computer instantly. This was real luxury.
We were really doing it, getting ready for a launch.
---
Dave Henry at ground zero
"Did you ever see an atomic bomb go off?" I asked Dave Henry. I was turning over every rock, asking every older guy I met at this lab the same question. I wanted them to tell me stories about atomic bombs. We will never see these things again, I hoped. So everyone who ever saw one was walking history.
"I was at ground zero." he boasted, and smiled.
"How can you do that?" I asked, knowing that there must be some trick. I never heard of any bunkers directly under the atmospheric tests. The ground motion would smash him against the ceiling or wall. I imagined him sitting at his desk, and then the concrete ceiling would be going 200 miles per hour, straight down at him. And then splat.
"I was on a ship. Directly under ground zero." he asserted, teasing me.
"Ok, how?" I asked, stumped. I knew it was a trick. It had to be.
"It was 70 km overhead. In space." he said. It was a nuclear bomb test shot in space.
"Wow. Did you hear anything? What did you see?" I asked. Instinctively I started in, looking for any description one can get from these him. All the oddball things. Anything.
"Yeah. As soon as it went off. I heard a pop." he said, as he flicked his finger off his thumb, like a "pop."
"I got to watch it. Nobody else did." he boasted.
"How was that?" I asked.
"The sailors were instructed to go inside, under cover. But I was not in the military. I told them I had an experiment on that test and I was going to go out there and watch. I was a civilian. So I went out."
"Then what?" I asked.
"The sky lit up."
"It filled the whole sky." he said. At 70 km altitude, there was no fireball. The whole sky above him did light up, especially because he was directly below.
The atomic bomb was in space. There was no fireball and there was not shock wave. Just light.
That's why his nose was crooked. He was directly underneath an atomic bomb.
He didn't get any radiation, either. The air between the ground and space was about the same mass as 15 yards of water.
I remembered what Ben Benjamin told me: "Only 3 yards of stuff and you get no radiation."
Dave Henry was completely safe, and he knew it.
"Did you see any others?" I asked.
"Yep." he said, with a smile.
"I watched the atomic cannon go off." he continued. The other guys were ordered to stay inside the trailers. They were military. I wasn't. So I stood outside."
"What did you see?" I asked.
"I was three miles away from the detonation." he responded.
"You don't want to watch when it first goes off. So I kept my back to it. Then I turned around and watched." he said.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Nothing much. I saw the fireball."
Three miles away seemed a bit close. I bet he was farther than that, but the AEC was definitely known to put people too close to those bombs. Or, that atomic cannon must have shot a very small atomic bomb.
The Greenpeace and anti-nuke friends had something wrong. It was like they could not figure or compute. They got the radiation part wrong.
I needed to know the truth about radiation. I needed to know to get off this planet.
They cheated us with radiation scares. Where were the monsters? Where were the sick people dying all over the place?
This was after Chernobyl. And it was after Three Mile Island. The anti-war people I felt aligned with failed me.
This guy was at ground zero twice, and he had the crooked nose before either.
I felt cheated and resentful:
Greenpeace lied to me.
I know many people who prospered after getting scary close to nuclear things.
-------
He was so proud. Dave Henry pulled out a beautiful, full-color, pretty-color map of details of somewhere in the swamps along a South American equator. He unfolded it across a conference table near my desk His crooked finger landed "right there" on a lake, such a pretty blue lake, on that expensive map
"You don't want to wake up the Pentagon with a sun glint." Dave said, beaming.
"That lake was reflecting right into the sensor," he said, crunching his vowels and consonants as if the sun's reflection were alive and the lake was helping it.
"If we didn't do our job so well, this would look like a 200 megaton bomb."
That was not some random big number he quoted. It was the real number that our sensor would have shouted.
He was really proud.
"You just make your algorithm exclude anything that comes from where the sun is making glints," he said, holding out his left hand's crooked long fingers like he was holding an imaginary earth and pointing at an imaginary point with the other hand's crooked index finger, jabbing at the glint region.
I tried to imagine the earth like a smooth, blue, shiny small basketball held in my hands at arms length, with our satellite about where my eye was. That was about the right distance.
I started to panic. This was not an easy geometry problem.
"It's kind of tricky," he declared, smirking a bit, with the satisfaction of knowing that he beat the glints.
Well, I knew damn well it was tricky. I knew he was smart, and that he did figure it out all by himself, for a different satellite. It was one of those geometry problems that could keep me up way too late.
All sorts of mathematical transformations relating the angle of the sun, the space craft rotating in the black of space, and the somewhat pear shaped Earth somewhere underneath, with the curved oceans, all had to be figured so we could tell where glints would be.
To Dave and I, this was a puzzle. How do you make sure you don't report a sun glint?
To us, every bright flash could be some evil terrorists trying to hide their test of a nuclear weapon. So, we better not miss one.
On the other hand, we had to make sure we didn't wake up the Pentagon with a false alarm.
Those glints created buckets full of false alarm candidates every day, all the time.
I realized I didn't much care about the false alarms.
I thought to myself, hoping Dave would not see my lack of real interest, "If a 200 megaton bomb hit, we would not need a satellite to tell us."
"After all, the sun is a Trillion-Zillion ton atomic fusion bomb." Dave Henry would say, repeating the description that cast our beloved, Greenpeace Sun, the Mother of Life, as a dirty, war-mongering nuclear fission bomb spewing killer subatomic radiation all over Earth.
"Of course, the bhang meter will tell you for sure if it was a nuke," he said.
"So, why don't we just let the bang meter do the work?" I asked.
"Go see Gary Masters. He'll tell you what to put into the software," Dave instructed.
I didn't quite understand.
Gary Masters was the expert on a particular sensor that triggered the satellite to wake up when someone shot an atomic bomb, and would determine if it was a nuclear weapon or not.
So, I went out to the engineer trailers to go find Gary Masters.
The satellite hardware guys worked in the trailers. The steps were muddy and dirty. The trailers were attached together to make bigger offices. They had been painted white once, probably 15 years ago. But these were trailers for engineers, so half broken steps and dirt and unpainted boards for a sidewalk over dried mud puddles were ok.
On the other hand, on every shelf, on every desk, in every cabinet, I saw at least one and typically several, clearly expensive, interesting-looking pieces of hardware, carefully resting or waiting for more work. All the hardware was absolutely professional and perfectly engineered.
The engineers handiwork was truly fine art. This was Sandia National Laboratory.
Most of the hardware things were box shaped, and most had metal box shaped parts attached to more box shaped parts. Wires and expensive looking connector cables and sockets were attached. Some had shiny plates and obvious 1 inch square windows attached with shiny brass or stainless steel screws and carefully milled stainless steel or aluminum puzzle pieces.
Sometimes the sensors were round like a quarter or dime. Sometimes they were flat sheets on what looked like dark glass.
Some cone-shaped things were painted the blackest black I ever saw and were just there as sun shades. They looked like totally black megaphones covering a hole in the dark bottom of the box.
I ran into John Mitchell first. His office was just as primitive as the other engineer offices. The floor was worn down to the wood in the often-walked-on places. The plastic and rubber floor mats were worn and dirty. The windows were almost as dirty, splashed with dried mud from the dust carried by wind and wetted by summer rains.
John collected refined trinkets in his office. He had more space hardware relics and paper posters of space programs than most others. He got around more than others. He got to talk with the Air Force brass.
Some of the poster pictures had our hardware drawn in.
"Why is it called a "bang meter?" I asked John.
Immediately I realized this was a dumb question. It measured the "bang." So they call it the "bang meter."
John Mitchell smirked.
"It's not "bang, it's bhang." he said.
"Long ago, during the days when the AEC shot atomic bombs in the atmosphere, some weird scientist weenies just like you invented a "Bhangmeter," " he joked, poking fun at physicists.
"When they first made this device their bosses said it was so crazy they must have been smoking bhang." he explained.
Bhang was the India-person slang word for marijuana.
He described something secret about it.
And the UNCLAS part was that a Bhangmeter measured squiggles and blips on the light signal. If one looked at the signal carefully enough, all the real atomic bombs had a certain set of almost unique squiggles and blips. High explosives, sun glints, and meteors did not have those blips.
There were meteors and sun glints, and both could look like atomic bombs to a satellite camera.
"We stare at the whole earth, waiting for a bomb to go off," he said.
"As soon as a bomb goes off, the light triggers the Bhangmeter."
"So it's straightforward," I blurted out. I wasn't quite sure why they sent me here.
"But you probably won't see the bomb going off. The earth is too bright," he said.
???Earth brighter than an Atomic Bomb???
Confused, I asked, "So how do we know when to start the Bhangmeter?"
"You gotta talk to Gary," he said.
I guess everyone knew that Gary Masters knew everything about it.
I continued on into Gary's office. It was primitive, too. Same engineering surroundings as the rest, but neat. Perfectly neat. Clean. Not one thing out of place. And he had some kind of art tastefully placed on the wall.
"Is it really that hard to see a bomb go off from space?" I asked Gary.
To Gary Masters, the question itself was stupid.
"Of course it's hard. The earth is bright."
"But a nuclear weapon makes an extremely bright flash. Can't the satellite see the flash?" I asked, puzzled even more.
Even modern school children know that the flash of an atomic bomb can blind you instantly. Everyone I ever talked to who saw a bomb goes out of their way to explain how bright the light is. Everyone knows how the light of a nuclear weapon is so bright it even makes mountains in the distance look white.
"Sun's pretty bright in the daytime," he said.
Gary Masters saw that I was intrigued by the whole idea that an atomic bomb is nothing, compared to the whole Earth. But he still seemed a little annoyed, maybe interrupted from something important.
"The sensor that alerts us to trigger the rest of the hardware has a hard time deciding that someone just detonated an atomic bomb" he asserted, making sure he forced me to swallow this strange new fact.
"When you're staring at the whole earth, a measly megaton bomb is not a lot of extra light."
Gary knew how to make the light sensor that would trigger only when a sudden flash happened, even if it was just a little flash somewhere inconspicuous on a bright earth.
"So, how do I know the flash is not a bomb?" I asked.
"The Bhangmeter signal tells you it's not a weapon."
"So, why don't we just use your sensor every time. Forget about figuring where the sun glints are," I asked.
I really didn't want to do that geometry problem of figuring where the sun glints were. Dave thought that was fun. Not me.
In the driest tones of voice, with the least amount of glee, and with the "why are you asking such a dumb question" nuance in his facial expressions and word inflections, Gary told me "The Bhangmeter doesn't work so well when the bomb is too small or too big, and when it explodes high in the atmosphere."
That's all there was to it.
He had the problem all worked out. I took the data and the Bhangmeter lesson and went away.
Even though I thought the flash of an atomic bomb would be extremely bright, it wasn't.
From a satellite in space looking at a daytime earth, the light of an atomic bomb, or a meteor, or the sun shining off the ocean, they all looked close enough alike that I had to do hard work.
I had to go back and talk to Gary again a few times, to get it right. He always seemed to be more difficult to approach. He seemed defensive. He didn't seem to emote that glee that Tommy Thompson had.
He lacked that puzzle-solving smile that Dave Henry had. The tone of his voice seemed to say "why are you asking me?" and "why are you interrupting me?" or "what do you want?"
That was curious, because he was one of the most cordial engineers I knew.
And he would help whenever he could. His mannerisms were a puzzle.
The bomb light was a puzzle. All the movies and all the TV pictures of an atomic bomb going off portrayed it as the brightest thing anyone ever saw in their entire life.
Everyone I talked with, no exceptions, personally told me they saw things even when their eyelids were closed when they watched an atomic bomb go off. Everyone said the light was extremely bright.
It was a Secret how well Gary could detect atomic bombs, during the early 1980's.
I thought it should be a secret forever.
"We're trying to catch a sneakin bomb tester," joked John Mitchell.
Obviously. We didn't need a satellite to tell us if someone used a bomb like that during a war.
TV news camera's were everywhere in the world, and so were telephones. The satellite would be the last one to dial 911.
The lesson of the puny bomb flash stuck.
I was learning. What is big to us, is puny to Nature. The bright flash was not so bright, by comparison.
Walking down the hall, for a drink of water and a break to the bathroom I talked quietly to myself:
All that rattle and babble about the flashing light of a bomb, the sun glints, meteors.
"Dumb question" he says, with his face and his voice. Maybe.
200 megatons goes off in the jungle and nobody phones it in? Bull.
I guess only one thing's for sure:
if something as big as a nuclear weapon goes off, you might not see it from space.
-----
UFO's of Several Kinds
Charlie Zaffery told me "We see things we can't explain all the time."
Charlie's real name was Efstratios.
"Why do they call you Charlie?" I asked.
"Because nobody can speak Greek. That's my Greek name."
In a trailer full of paper, volumes of computer printout paper, bound in thick, really thick, 6 inch thick reams, with several desks and several tables and many bookshelves full of paper, and with charts everywhere. This was Charlie's place. He shared it.
Such a nice fellow, so friendly. And smart.
This was a most shabby trailer. It seemed that the clothes these engineers wore and the places they worked in matched exactly what people said about them.
Dirty floor. Torn floor coverings. Wires everywhere. Lamps held on the desk with C-clamps and tape. Power cords. computer terminals. Broken window latches. Torn mats on the stairs. Wood walkway boards dipping slightly into the mud path between trailers. Amazingly crude.
Most of what Charlie did was Secret.
"When they don't know what to do with the data, they give it to me." he said.
"I put them into the Zoo."
"What kinds of things?" I asked.
"Some of it is just space radiation." he replied.
Radiation? From space? He surprised me. I thought space was friendly, except that it had no air to breathe.
I began to focus on a new concept, and repeated it to myself as I walked down the hall:
"Sometimes it's the Van Allen Belts." he explained, referring to what disrupted some satellites and data.
"Sometimes the sun showers the satellites with high energy electrons."
"Can't you shield it?" I asked.
"Apparently not. That's not my job."
"How bad is it?" I asked.
"I don't know. Ask Brick." he said.
So I did, as soon as the opportunity came by.
One week Merry Peterson and I watched as a computer group working for some other project in another building connected the first 1024 hypercube parallel computer ever.
That nubmer,1024, is exactly 2, doubled 10 times.
They had connected together 1024 little computers. Each one was soldered on to printed circuit cards. Each circuit was about the size of a playing card and as thick as 3 stacked quarters.
Astounding though it seemed, each card was the equivalent to an entire PDP 8 I computer. Just a few years earlier, that computer would not fit into a microwave oven.
The computer cards were jammed into a box the size of an old fashioned, living room, tube TV, and wires were sticking out of the box connecting them to each other, so many wires that it looked like hair.
Rather amazing to us. So much computer power in so small a space.
Merry Petersen and I both got the idea that we should use a few of these in our space craft.
The occasion to see Brick Dumore arose. Brick Dumore was the boss of all the space satellite groups.
They called him "Brick" because his face would get red as a brick when he would get even a little excited. Herbert was his real name. His nickname was obviously a vestige of the cruel times when people called each other by nicknames, like "Shorty." He was shorter than me and walked straight as a rock statue.
He walked like the boss. Even though he acted firm about all kinds of things, he would still smile a lot and made common sense every time he opened his mouth.
I found him very easy to approach. His arrogance factor was missing. "Firm as hell, but not arrogant," I thought.
He was the Department Manager, the Boss's Boss and the guy who gets Big Bucks. Emery whispered to me one time "He is getting $83,000 a year." That's when the rest of us were only making $32,000, so that was a heck of a lot of money.
Brick Dumore took us aside and made absolutely sure we understood The Word. He was being very stern and unyielding, almost unwilling to think of new ideas. This was not like him.
I knew it would be ok because his face did not turn red as a brick at all. Brick said that shielding these things was too hard.
"Can't I just wrap some tantalum foil around them?" I asked.
During physics lab I had stopped some x-rays with just a thick tantalum foil.
"Now let me just tell you ... ." he started in, with the stern and clear intention.
I could just feel the intensity of the message he was about to lay on us.
"To shield that radiation," he started, pausing between carefully composed phrases,
"You need massive tantalum," he said, heavily emphasizing "massive" by saying it slowly and dramatically.
"the hardware will need to be completely surrounded," he continued, and paused,
"by heavy lead bricks."
Surprised, we got the message clearly. The shielding would weigh a whole lot more than the satellite.
Back in physics lab I played with lead bricks and made lead brick houses to shield radioactive bottles. Lead bricks are very heavy.
"Space radiation is just powerful stuff, very penetrating." he explained, like a physics teacher.
He was explaining, not scolding. And he was adamant.
"Space radiation is very penetrating." he repeated, using different words.
We went away deflated, but not depressed.
I liked the way he handled us. I thought we were some of his best thinkers. He just told us the facts.
Once we found out how intensely radioactive space was, we began to understand why our engineers used what we thought were primitive parts, old parts, electronics that seemed to be at least 10 or 15 years out of date.
I recalled how I had been puzzled about why I could go to Radio Shack and get higher performance electronic parts than what they used in the satellite.
We went to visit the engineers again. They always had interesting things to touch and marvel at.
"Of course they have to be rad-hard," said the red haired engineer who caught rattlesnakes for a hobby and tanned their hides for his belt.
"Rad" meant "radiation." "Hard" meant hardened against the effects of radiation.
The red-haired one was designing an elegant thermoelectric cooler for a space sensor.
The other engineer in the room, a relatively young, maybe 30 year old, computer hardware designer told us "the charged particle causes a short circuit in the computer chip."
He was talking about the cosmic ray charged particle that went right through the satellite, and through his hardware. The one that goes through the whole spacecraft.
"You get a micro explosion. The burnt parts cause an electrical short. The chip's power supply makes a spark through that short that burns out a piece of the chip."
And that was that.
"So, what do you do about it?" I asked. I could guess. Redundant parts, probably.
"You have to have multiple, redundant parts on the computer chip, and a way to check to see which parts died." he said.
Strange. And both of them would not let me go. They wanted to tell me about why they could not use regular old parts like everyone else in the computer industry.
"We have to use chips that are rad hard." asserted the younger one.
"We can't use those low power devices. We have to use the bigger ones, the old fashioned ones."
I had learned many months earlier that we used the old fashioned ones. I always wondered why we still used those feeble chips that took a lot of electric power. Electric power was very hard to generate, in space.
I had thought that the reason was bureaucratic. I had thought the worst of our managers, that they demanded we use old parts because they were the boss, and they said it, and we better damn well do what they said, or else "you're fired."
The younger engineer then proceeded to show me the special catalog of rad-hard parts. If a part was not in that special catalog, it would probably fry in space. No engineer in his right mind would dare put a part in a space ship that would wreck the space ship.
Our department manager, Brick Dumore, said it in a pithy sentence:
"Space is very radioactive."
Brick made sure I understood that fact in no uncertain terms. He knew I could figure out all the rest of the implications myself. He knew I would go ask the others about all kinds of details. I was a Physicist.
The whole exercise taught me a stunning fact:
Space is radioactive.
---
"Damn." I thought.
This meant we were stuck. We could not use high powered computers in space.
If we wanted to use high powered computers, or to let us stay in a space ship for more than a week or three, we would need to surround the ship with tons and tons of shielding.
The exercise taught me a design lesson
We need tons of shielding in space.
At least a ton for each square yard facing space.
---
Brick Dumore had told me
"Those meteors, they come
very
close."
He paused at "very." He paused at "close," as he looked at me with a smile that radiated "I'm confiding in you, because you have talked about this before."
"How close," I asked, "closer than the moon?"
His eyes lit up and volunteered, "Oh, yes."
I forgot that we were in a Brick Dumore's conference room. I forgot that we were just finishing with a small meeting. I forgot what the meeting was about. All I saw was Brick's expression. All I heard was that 70% of communication that is non-verbal. His face. How he stopped what he was doing and put himself into slow motion. How he focused just on me. The ominous moment captured my entire attention.
"How big?" I asked.
"Big Enough." he said. "Enough to do serious damage."
He emphasized "serious."
"How did you find out?" I asked.
"Oh, at a meeting. The astronomers got very concerned."
Then he seemed to shut off the spigot of data.
He acted like he had heard something secret and his eyes and his voice were telling me that some faceless people somewhere in an unnamed place knew something about how Nature did some things that were very dangerous, and nobody was saying anything.
And then he acted like he remembered that he was not supposed to say anything to anybody, and he just leaked it to me.
At first I thought "They are hiding things, like the flying saucer and UFO people said they would." Brick was definitely the kind to hide something if they told him to. If they would say to him "don't say anything to scare people," he wouldn't.
"How often do they come by?" I asked, pressing for more.
"Often enough. Go ask Charlie about that kind of stuff." he suggested, knowing that I would.
I could see he got control of himself again.
He knew me and my reputation for having a nearly insatiable curiosity. His suggestion was a blank check to ask Charlie anything, because Brick was the Boss's Boss.
"You mean they are keeping it a secret?" I asked. I kept probing.
"No, just our part." he replied. He resisted.
Puzzled, I went straight out to see Charlie.
Charlie Zaffery and Norm Blocker were in the trailer. The trailer with paper everywhere, C clamps holding half-broken light fixtures to a desk, with a ragged floor mat. The trailer with the dirty windows and wires and computer body parts piled up. This was Charlie's place.
Blocker was standing next to a desk, looking at the 15 inch wide, 11 inch high computer printout. He always seemed to be smiling, and his deeply coffee-stained teeth almost always showed through. This time his smile had an extra "I'm puzzled" feature to it.
Charlie was standing at his desk doing something with more piles of computer paper.
It was a nice, sunny day, as it almost always was in Albuquerque.
"Do you see meteors?" I asked Charlie Zaffery.
"Meteors are easy." he replied.
We then had a Secret conversation about how big and how often. The Secret was about how small a meteor we could see, and whether we had a satellite looking at any particular one. I blew all that off because I didn't care about that.
All I cared about was "Do I have to worry about being obliterated."
Then he explained the un-secret surprise part that I was looking for.
"Some of the meteors have as much energy as the atomic bombs we used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during the War," Charlie explained.
He told me how the meteors looked somewhat like a bomb going off in the sky. A nearby satellite sensor would see it. But he assured me we never reported them to the Pentagon in the middle of the night because Gary Masters's clever optical sensor device, coupled with a Bhangmeter, determined they were not atomic bombs.
"They have the same energy as an atomic bomb. But they're not bombs. They come from space." Charlie said, half impressed, half laughing.
I knew what that meant. It meant that the meteor fireball would be so hot it would vaporize anything near it, just like an atomic bomb.
"You saw them?" I asked.
"Yeah. They explode in the sky. But they're just not nuclear bombs," he said.
"I didn't see them, the satellite did." he said, correcting his imprecise statement.
Charlie often said things very clearly and simply. I always liked talking with Charlie.
The meteors Charlie was talking about were not that big. So it wasn't that awful scary. I was hoping for a whole lot more.
Since I was asking about it and seemed to be so interested, I got to be an occasional advisor.
The sensors saw some peculiar things and nobody knew what they were. These things went into the Zoo.
Charlie, Dick Spalding, Norm Blocker, Cliff Jacobs, they all got to look at the Zoo. The objective was to try and figure out what it was, whatever it was.
Not a single person ever postulated a "UFO." Not even one. Nothing looked like a UFO. The things in the Zoo were isolated, occasional blips no one could understand.
"So, how big are these bombs from space?" I asked.
"I d'uno. Like I said, like the bombs we used on Hiroshima." he said.
If that's all they were, I could just not get that interested.
I had been to the test site. I knew better. This was puny stuff.
If the meteors were big enough to wipe out everybody on Earth, now that would be interesting. I would definitely care about that.
But meteors only as big as atomic bombs?
That's nothing.
I blew this one off.
Brick was exaggerating.
--------------------------
Where was NASA?
I wanted to see a launch. Going to watch a space rocket launch and going to the Nevada Test Site to watch an atomic bomb had to be similar. They were exciting adventures someone else would pay for. I was looking for just such an adventure, and for a way to go on an exciting trip to NASA. If I would ever get to go to space, I had to get involved with NASA.
It seemed that Brick Dumore never mentioned NASA at all.
Nobody did. But many people talked about going to "the Cape," Cape Canaveral or Cape Kennedy, depending on who said it.
"How long have we been making these satellites?" I asked John Mitchell.
I was prodding him to tell me a story.
"As long as I can remember. Forever," he joked. "I don't know, 15 or 20 years."
Somehow his comment triggered an epochal memory. In 3 second a flashback, I remembered when I saw the very first satellite. It was 1957, when the Russians launched the first satellite ever to circle the world. It was such a big deal. They beat us. The Atheist murdering communists beat us.
About 5:45 AM on a cold, still dark morning in Alabama I looked for it. My buddy Pat Evans and I knew where it was going to be. He looked that part up. We were both looking up and walking on the sidewalk in single file towards the chapel. Then we saw it. I looked up at the dark sky as I almost always did, because at 5:45 AM it was so pitch black, clear and full of stars. I saw it move slowly, directly overhead, as bright as a faint star. I was walking on my way to the chapel with about 35 other 13 year olds at a Catholic Seminary in the unpopulated part of Alabama near the Chattahoochee river. The entire memory was vivid. That was about 20 years earlier than my conversation with John Mitchell.
I expected John Mitchell would tell me some story about NASA and Sandia.
"We even launch them ourselves." John said.
"We do?" I asked, a bit puzzled.
"We have a launch site out at Barking Sands, in Hawaii." he said, smiling.
He exaggerated a little. "We" meant a team at Sandia somewhat related to our group. Sandia launched its own rockets there, as well as others launching rockets.
What I didn't understand when Emery told the story of the atomic bomb that burned up on the launch pad was that Sandia had a launch site exactly at that site, along with whoever else launched rockets.
"We launch our own satellites, too?" I asked John Mitchell.
"No. I was just pulling your leg. Somebody else launches our satellite," John Mitchell said, laughing. "We just launch tiny rockets there."
"NASA launches our satellite?" I asked.
"Nope." He smirked.
Not NASA
Surprised, I asked what I knew could be a forbidden question.
"Who launches our satellites?"
"Somebody else," he said. He took great joy in letting me know only enough to let me conclude that "Some other unnamed entities of the United States Government" did the launching.
This was NOT NASA. This was Some Other Agency of the United States Government.
"Hey. Exciting," I thought.
Tommy Thompson
I walked around the corner and asked Tommy Thompson,
"You mean you don't ask NASA when you are going to launch?"
White haired, happy all the time no matter what time of day. Never wore a suit, always smiling, calm, excited about the science, excited about the engineering. Respected, taller, smarter, he was the key analytic sensor inventor person for the whole space group.
I didn't even realize that I could have been his descendant as an analytic sensor inventor person if I wished. I never did realize it. If I did, I would have matured faster, and my future would have been way different.
"Naw. We check with them to see where all the junk in space is, so we don't hit any." he replied.
"You mean they keep track?" I asked.
"That's what the IRN number is. They know about how big it is and where it is. But they don't know what it is." he explained.
The IRN number was up to 7000-something. That meant NASA was tracking over 7000 things in orbit, most of it junk.
A piece of junk out there would not fall down because it was moving too fast. By the time it would fall as far as the earth's surface, it would have already moved thousands of miles past earth's surface. The junk was all in orbit. Our own little asteroid belt. Instead of rocks, our asteroids were bolts, space junk and rocket parts.
"Why don't they know what it is?" I asked, wondering how NASA could know it was in orbit around Earth but not know what it was.
"They don't have the right clearances." he joked.
"Don't we have to use NASA rockets?" I asked.
"Naw. Sometimes we use their launch pads. Sometimes we launch from the other site."
Other site? I didn't know there was another launch site.
Back at my desk, working the coordinate transformations for a satellite sensor system, I looked up, stared right through the walls of the room as I thought about what these guys told me.
I have been working with OTHER space agencies of the United States Government.
more than one.
NOT NASA.
I now realized these guys might not care if I found a way to take 100 people to anywhere in the solar system, or to the nearest star.
I was not able to figure out what to change in my life to get to do space travel, so I had to let it go. I did need to find out more about what these "different space agencies of the U.S. government" wanted us to do.
----
Brick Dumore explained to me just how serious we took things.
"What happens if you aren't ready?" I asked Brick one day.
I was half kidding, half just curious. After all, we were working late every day, and the software was a whole lot harder than we thought, and we were hiring people to help us catch up.
A stern look came over his face. All seriousness replaced any smiling traces. His face got as red as a brick.
"If we miss a launch date," he said, authoritatively, and in a steady, low, firm voice, "they will put lead bricks in our place, to make sure the space craft is still balanced, without our hardware on it. Then they will launch without us. And they will never let us launch another thing."
"You don't
ever
wan tuh
do that."
he said, emphasizing every word as he looked right at me, not accusing me, just making sure I understand very clearly and in no uncertain terms.
"Boom" went the big, 50 ton sledge hammer, as it hit my attitude and changed its shape from whatever something it was into a flat thing, immediately. I guess I got the message.
"Don't Miss The Schedule."
The other message was clear,
too:
"Don't Joke With This Boss."
These satellite people were dead serious about the schedule and dead serious about making things that absolutely worked.
This was no Phasor Bank. I found that completely comforting. These guys were absolutely serious about making real things, not just studies.
Little did I know I was hitting a nerve, a sore spot.
But Brick liked me anyway. I was curious about everything we did, always trying to figure a way to make something work better or do something we could never do before.
Standing in Brick's conference room, I started at some artistically interesting, black and white, 2 ft photos of some kind of electron microscope image of something curly. Electron microscope pictures were always so interesting.
"What is this picture of? It looks like the filament of a light bulb." I asked Brick, as I pointed to one of several photos hung on the wall of one of the conference rooms. He had them where anybody visiting with no clearance could easily see them. They could not be all that much of a secret.
Perhaps the details are classified. But, this part is not. His face got red again. Then he told me, and some of what he said about a particular sensor design was classified.
The UNCLAS part was something like "two launches in a row the filaments on some lights burnt out, on our hardware. VERY embarrassing."
The lights were part of some of the hardware that illuminated the readout on a sensor control. When the lights burned out, the position of the sensor became unknown, in space, on some very expensive, very important satellite. It was like loosing 3 cylinders of a 4 cylinder engine.
We then had to use other means to find out which way the sensor was pointed, and the "other means" did not do a very good job at all. We looked bad. Since Brick was the boss, everything landed on him.
He was clearly speaking frankly to me, relating to me what we must deal with.
"We thought we had it fixed, and it happened a second time. There was some pretty high anxiety, that sinking feeling."
He was so honest about a very embarrassing, very visible, very expensive and unfixable failure.
"Oh yes. They understood. These things are very hard to control. But they were not happy." He smiled a bit when he told me, as he looked directly into my eyes.
He met the launch date, even if it meant partial failure.
I guess he was right. Everyone I knew, me too, did the opposite: We keep saying "wait" while we get it perfect." But all they wanted was "now."
I didn't expect this lesson:
Finishing now beats finishing perfect.
Why were we so interested in having our satellite tell us exactly where the bomb went off? Why were we so interested in being able to detect more than a few atomic bombs at once? Why did these guys not give a damn about NASA and space travel? Who were we working for?
----
We worked overtime and over lunch hours. All I saw for a solid year was my desk at work and the path to my car. After work I would come home, have supper and crash on the couch.
I would come to work at my desk in the far, back corner of the room, hidden from noise and the line of sight of people, and work continuously for hours. I didn't have much time to talk with anyone. I would usually eat lunch at my desk. Our whole software group was too busy for distractions. We even worked over the Christmas break. I had never done that in my life, unless one counts homework during college as work.
We were partly in this bind because the satellite sensor didn't work as simply as Tommy Thompson the designer intended. He had redesigned the sensors so the job of pinpointing atmospheric nuclear explosions would be easier. But a minor detail of the design ruined his plans. I had to make up for the minor detail with tediously figured software. This damn thing was complicated. It was not so easy as we wanted.
We were on a mission, to keep atomic wars from happening. The better we could make this satellite, the harder it would be for the Bad Guys to have an atomic war and win. This was the Ultimate Antiwar Activity Center.
Terri, my wife, had called me several times at noon to come home for a quickie. I laughed. I suspected she was serious. She caused intense daytime daydream fantasy distractions while I worked. I liked that. But I didn't go home for the quickie. That was very stupid. A dumb thing to not do. Terri never let me forget how I didn't come home for a quickie. Other guys bragged how they went home. Maybe they didn't have a pressing launch deadline. Why was I so dedicated to a satellite sensor?
"I should have gotten a lover." she said.
No satellite was worth that much dedication. But I didn't know it. I was dumb.
Marylee also called me a few times, wanting me to have lunch with her. She provided an additional, occasional daytime daydream fantasy distraction. I fantasized that she wanted more than just lunch. If she had called during my previous job, I might have snuck out, but I was too much Aspie to do more than just lunch. Aspies are notoriously faithful.
I fantasized on occasion that I might have done the naughty thing with someone other than Terri. However, Terri would definitely have known if I would have, because of the un-hidable, guilty expression I would have had on my face.
So I told Marylee the truth: "I can't spare the time to go visit you."
"Even just for lunch?" she asked.
"We are extremely busy," I replied.
And that was the truth.
----
Stan Dutler and I were trying to make the sensor do what Dave Henry wanted. I created the algorithms, he wrote software. What Dave Henry wanted us to do seemed to be a little strange. He wanted us to be able to track more than many simultaneous atomic bombs going off.
The hardware looking out a telescope at the whole earth would produce a lot of digital signals when something flashed like an atomic bomb. The satellite would relay the signals down to a computer we were programming. My program was supposed to decode the signals and figure out exactly and precisely where on earth the flash originated.
Dave Henry explained everything so clearly. Twisting his face with glee and using a engineering tone of voice indicating he was completely entranced as he explained:
"Your main job is to find out exactly where the bombs exploded."
I could understand how it was a fun challenge to find out exactly where, but why "exactly" where? I knew the secret number describing exactly what "exactly" meant. But I was a bit puzzled: if someone detonated an atomic bomb over your city, would you care exactly what part of town it hit?
And I did hear him say "bombs," not "bomb."
I asked Dave Henry "Why would anyone care exactly where they tested their bomb?"
"The hard part is doing that when there are 100 bombs going off." he replied.
I stood there, trying to act like I was following, when I wasn't.
¿¿ 100 atomic bombs all at once ??
"Ya wanna know if it hit far enough away from our missile silo that we can still use the missile inside" he said.
"Ohhhh." I said, as I finally realized what we were doing.
Now I really understood my job.
He did explain once that it was all nice and wonderful that we could catch anyone testing an atomic bomb in the atmosphere. That's what everyone outside the secret fence thought was the reason why Congress paid the bill.
When we would catch someone testing a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere, someone in the classification group would declassify some of the data. They would try to have someone tell Jane Fonda and some peacenik protesters from University of California at Berzerk-keley, and the protesters would go protest that the communists are being bad, making global mass murder weapons and polluting the atmosphere with their bombs.
The real reason was more war-like, like war monger-like.
"We want to know precisely how bad we got hit," he explained, wincing his face and pointing his crooked fingers at an imaginary map. Then with both hands poking all his long, crooked fingers down at some imaginary globe, he continued with a wince "even if it's raining atomic bombs."
This was not just the peace keeper device Curtis Hines was so proud of. This was a war machine.
"Where do you think they will shoot their bombs during a real atomic war?" he asked.
I knew the answer to that one. I had worked in a super secret think tank, in the Systems Analysis Division with Bill Goodlaffer. I knew that scenarios had the Commie Pinko Rapists shooting all their atomic bomb missiles at us all at once. Thousands and thousands of them hitting all the United States missile silos, all within minutes. They would hit us so fast we could not retaliate.
Wow. " ... shooting all their atomic bomb missiles at us all at once ... "
We really were in a cold war.
I knew that IF the Commies would NOT shoot all their bombs at us at once, then at least one of ours would survive and shoot Moscow.
At the time, I thought that those Commies didn't know how fierce we were. Garth Gobeli told me he would fly a megaton bomb in a private airplane to Moscow, himself.
Dave Henry wanted our satellite atomic bomb sensor to tell the Pentagon what missile silos were still ok and which ones were hit. Then the Pentagon would reprogram the surviving missiles and, as Bill Goodlaffer would joke, "...shoot those *!^%!#@ Commies back."
Good thing we had nuclear submarines. Nobody could know exactly where they were. They were just somewhere deep, out there in the oceans. Not even the Pentagon knew. The submarines would surely retaliate.
His deep voice smiled as he talked to me. He was completely intrigued by what our satellite could do. I could feel his deep voice emoting, emoting how he loved this puzzle. He knew that I felt this puzzle was fun, too.
"The job may sound simple, but the satellite is rotating in space, somewhere out there in the dark, 22,500 miles away, and has to look at stars to find out which way is up." he explained, wincing and moving his long arms like a satellite in space.
He was trying to move his hands to show me what I had to figure out. "You have to figure which way is up and precisely where the Earth is."
"Ok." I answered. "Doesn't seem to hard to do."
This thing was indeed hard to do. I had to think upside down, rotating, pointed somewhere else. And on top of all that, he wanted me to have the computer keep track of dozens of things that looked like just tiny sparkles and blips of the surface of the earth.
Dozens of atomic bombs all at once.
All I could think of was that
These guys want to keep on fighting wars after the world blows up.
----
"You should help us do a LAZAP," Tommy Thompson told me. From the way he said it, it sounded exciting.
He introduced me to the topic by asking me,
"How do you know if the satellite is telling the truth?"
"What do you mean?" I replied, wondering if there were spies intercepting the telemetry downlink.
In a brief flashing moment I thought of all sorts of paranoid hallucinations for ways that someone could change the satellite data before it would get to my software.
"How do you know how well the satellite would locate the atomic bomb?" he asked, gently setting me up so to help him on an almost over-night, overtime activity where we wouldn't get any overtime pay.
"You compare what the satellite said with where the bomb actually went off." I replied, thinking of the simplest possible explanation for a calibration procedure.
My calculations would use the satellite data to tell me where the bomb went off.
"What bomb?" Don Lazap interjected, after waiting for Tommy's line and looking right at me. Then after a well timed pause, letting me realize what he said, he laughed.
"Oh" I mumbled as I thought for a few seconds.
We had not seen any atomic bombs in the atmosphere for as long as I had been here on this job. We didn't expect the United States to shoot any. We didn't expect the Commies to test more than one or two in the atmosphere during the next many years. And we didn't want to see any.
He made me realize we didn't have any atomic bombs we might use to see if the satellite sensors were working correctly, or accurately, or even if they were working at all.
"Ok, so how do we do it?" I asked.
I knew he was leading me somewhere. But I didn't quite know where.
"We shoot a laser at it," Don Lazap instantly interjected.
" It fools the hardware into thinking a bomb went off." Tommy explained.
Excitement started to take over my emotions. We shoot a laser at it. Wow. I want to see this. I didn't know they did this. That's got to be fun.
We were going to shoot a powerful laser at the satellite. I could have suspected what "LAZAP" meant. But I just had to ask.
"What does LAZAP mean?" I asked Tommy and Don Lazap..
"Its a Laser Zapper. What else would it mean?" Don said, smiling, chuckling.
"Where is this laser?" I asked.
In a rush of thoughts, I wished he would say we get to go to some exotic location like the Nevada Test Site. I will get a big, expensive steak meal. Then we will go watch some pretty ladies dance around with no underwear again. And then go to work the next day.
Fantasizing, I realized "Maybe not." Maybe they do this here in New Mexico. I will get some kind of a nice trip to the White Sands Missile Range. South of here a few hundred miles. White sand dunes. Mountains to the east, with ponderosa trees. Whole forests of them. And Mysterious laser hardware.
"By the East Gate." he said, snapping me out of the fantasy.
"Really?" I remarked, disappointed.
"Can I watch?" I asked, hoping they would let me in on the fun.
"Sure, if you do some work while you're there." Don Lazap snapped back. Don sounded serious.
"I don't want you just hanging around getting in the way." he added.
He said it in a way that implied people must often come around, watch Lazap, do nothing, eat his popcorn and just get in the way.
I considered it an adventure. I presumed they thought it was work. But I could tell they really liked the idea of shooting a laser at satellites.
"We don't come back there until it is really dark," Tommy told me.
"Go home, have a good meal, get some rest. Then come back 10:30 pm or so, with a flashlight." he instructed.
"And bring a jacket. It gets cold," he added.
---
It was dark and the sky was clear above the semi-desert of Kirtland Air Force Base. In the crisp air I could see stars all across the sky. The city lights lit the sky a little, but not enough to matter. Without my headlights, I could not see enough to walk. It was pitch black.
They deliberately chose the blackest, clearest coldest night they could. It made for good satellite watching.
The LAZAP site was a square, inconspicuous, white metal-sided building about the size of 4 garages. During the day, anyone could see it on the way out the East Gate of Kirtland Air Force Base. Except this was night.
The building was located about a mile north of the glide path that commercial airliners take when landing from the east to the landing strip about 2 miles to the west. That meant it was also on the ascent path when a commercial airplane would take off from the west.
The building had some sturdy braces on its sides, and what looked like some kind of railroad track thing attached to it. It was obviously some kind of mechanical contraption.
Once inside, I saw the telescope. It was an aluminum-bar-ribbed, reinforced aluminum tube almost 2 feet across and 12 feet long. Don Lazap had mounted it with a few strong supports that folded down somewhat so it would not poke through the roof.
Don Lazap used the telescope backwards. He shot the laser beam backwards, so to speak, into the eyepiece of the telescope out the front of the telescope and into the sky. This whole contraption was inside a metal building.
The room was full of all kinds of optical hardware, such as mirrors and clamps painted pitch black, and oscilloscopes, meters, wrenches, pipes, welders, telephones, chairs, paper, junk and electrical things everywhere. This place was real a mess.
A metal room, as big as an two person office, with no windows at all, was crammed into the building at the north corner. Inside the room was the laser and its power supply. The telescope was at the south corner of the building.
Outside, an old fashioned radar sat waiting to rotate. This radar was the kind that looked like a ten foot wide push broom held up in the air, wrapped in a smooth tarp and painted green, and connected by a fat cable spinal cord to a green metal military house trailer next to it.
"So, how does the telescope point to the satellite?" I asked, looking around at the building.
I didn't see any astronomy dome here anywhere.
"We move the roof back." Don Laser said.
"What?" I responded, surprised. They laughed. Nobody ever expected the roof to move back, so they always got a laugh out of that question. Everyone asked how they got the telescope inside that building to see stars outside the building.
The roof was on wheels. When it was time to LAZAP, they moved the roof back. The whole top of the building was open to the sky.
---
Now it was time to shoot the laser and they pulled back the roof.
The night was so cold. Tommy told me we had no choice but to pick a cold, dark, clear night, otherwise we could not see the satellite. While waiting around I thought of all kinds of reasons why we were doing nothing and waiting in the dark. I thought maybe we would also have to wait till late at night for the satellite to get into the right position in the sky. Maybe we waited for the airplanes to quit coming by so often. I didn't know. It was too cold to ask why. The wind blew and chilled everything, and, I thought to myself, "it was freezing my eye balls."
The only place I could get warm was in my car.
I thought about that laser. The laser was so powerful it could blind 10,000 people all at once, if the beam were carefully split into 10,000 little beams and shined directly into their eyes.
I thought about the satellite. The satellite was out there in the sky somewhere. Tommy said "somewhat south and somewhat up." It was about 22,500 nautical miles away. I never did care much for knowing what star was what. North star. That was it. I wasn't sure where the geosynchronous belt was. It was just out there in the sky somewhere.
I could work the equations to point in the sky, but that was completely different. That was equations.
Then an airplane came by, landing from the east and approximately crossing our path. My thoughts raced.
What! Hey! This is NOT something the leaders of the laboratory want me to be talking about in public.
If that laser beam beams itself into the windshield of the airplane, the whole cockpit will light up 1000 times brighter than a flashbulb. The pilots could go blind instantly, just when they are landing.
The old fashioned Army Radar machine was turning its radar dome, scanning the sky. Some young guys were inside the green metal building, huddled around a glowing green picture tube radar screen. The tube showed that line scanning around just like I saw in the1945 war movies. This radar was exactly like the movies. It was real. The two guys inside were carefully watching that radar screen.
Each one was holding a button connected by a long wire to the laser switch. If either let go of his button, the circuit is broken and the laser won't fire. That's the safety mechanism. Anybody could stop the laser by just letting go.
Outside the radar shack, 3 different people were all bundled up in winter Eskimo suits. Two had binoculars. One had some kind of spotter telescope on an expensive tripod. All three were holding a button connected to that long wire.
We were still waiting.
Before he hooked up the laser, Don let me crawl up the metal ladder and peek into the eyepiece. Sure enough, there was a spot of light thing he said was a satellite. It looked like a star. The only difference between it and the other dim stars is that it was standing still. All the other stars were slowly moving past it.
I saw with my own eyes what they meant by a geosynchronous satellite.
This meant it was time.
Don Laser started the countdown. At zero, I heard a faint t-BOOMPt, with a slight pop to it. I didn't see a thing. No big red flash.
"Hey, I didn't see a thing." I complained.
"You are supposed to open your eyes at "fire", not close them." Don said, laughing. The others chuckled at me, too. I was the neophyte with a Ph.D. It made them feel good that they knew more than a Ph.D.
Tommy told me that "The normal thing people do is to hold their eyes wide open during the countdown, and then, just at the last second, right on 'fire', they blink, ".
I see. All during the countdown I was straining to hold my eyes wide open, with the cold air freezing my eyeballs. Just when he said "fire," I blinked. It was a natural reaction. Apparently, one has to be taught how to deliberately watch a laser shot.
"Train yourself to close your eyes during the countdown, 3, 2. 1, and open them on "fire." " Tommy instructed me.
An excited technician heard my trying to see it and told me "it looks just like an arrow going right for the satellite. Just watch." He was really digging it.
I tried. The next countdown began.
"3, 2," I heard.
I deliberately blinked.
"1" the countdown continued, as I deliberately opened my eyes and stared.
"Fire." I heard over the loudspeaker.
I didn't see anything.
"Why don't I see anything?" I asked.
"You aren't looking at the right place." someone else said, friendly, and trying to help me see it. He pointed to some stars in the sky and said "it goes right there."
I didn't know stars, so I didn't understand "right there."
"How come I can't see it?" I blurted out to the three technicians who were laying in portable picnic chairs, facing the sky.
"Well, the laser beam flash is so short that if you aren't looking at it, you don't see it," one of them said.
"You have to know where to look, or you don't see anything," another one said.
The first one took out his flashlight and pointed it into the sky for me.
"It's right there," he said, holding the pointed white beam so I could see.
"3, 2, 1 fire"
And nothing happened.
"Airplane." someone said.
The red and green lights of the airplane stood out. No landing lights, just the red and green lights at the tips of the wings. One of the spotters let go of his button when he saw the airplane
That's what they said, and I saw it work. If anybody let go of the button, the laser would not fire. And it didn't.
The airplane was way out of the way, down by the Manzano mountains, 30 miles away. Way out of the way. There wasn't any way they could have hit it. And the spotter was doing his job.
"3, 2, 1, Fire" the voice on the loudspeaker calmly spoke, sounding bored.
"I saw it!" I yelled.
I saw a flash, out of the corner of my eye. The next three shots, I saw a flash somewhere. Until I got the hang of it all I saw was a flash, way to the left, or up, or somewhere, but not straight out.
It took a dozen more shots, I finally started to see the arrow. It sure did look like the beam left the laser and shot, travelled, like a beautiful arrow, straight into the dark sky, right at the satellite.
No one could see the satellite without the telescope. But the laser shot right at it, and we could all see it shooting, like an arrow.
"This can't be" I told Tommy.
We could not be seeing the laser beam going out like an arrow. It's all over way faster than our eye could possibly see, and I complained, puzzled.
"It can't take that long to get to the top of the atmosphere." I tried to explain.
"You can't see a beam moving at the speed of light." I asserted, emphatically, trying to explain more.
I knew that the air wasn't any more than 20 miles up, and 40 miles across. The laser beam would travel the entire 20 or 40 miles in less than a 1/5 of a millisecond. Eyes don't respond that fast at all. That's 75 times faster than the frame rate of a TV or movie.
"Doesn't matter. It looks like it" the technician with the flashlight asserted right back.
He was right. It looked like it every time.
This was fun.
And when it was all over, I realized that I didn't do a thing. I got away with just watching.
---
This was so exciting that I brought my young daughters the next time we did it. Jennifer was about 10 years old and Alyson was about 8.
After I looked into the telescope we let Jennifer and Alyson see. Don and I let them crawl up the 8 foot flimsy aluminum ladder, in the dark and freezing cold, next to bare high voltage wires, C-clamps and sharp metal angle irons, in the freezing cold, so they could look into a telescope.
Neither could see much of anything except black. The eyepiece is like the eyepiece of binoculars. Unless the eye is up against the eyepiece and looking straight into it, one sees nothing, darkness, black. But they acted like they saw stars. They were brave and cold.
SAFETY HAZARD.
I realized this was a safety hazard. I am sure this would be forbidden. One can not place children in such dangerous situations.
It was dangerous. Someone could get hurt. But we were being very careful. I thought that those greenie extremist safety cops would just have to come out here at night and catch us. I wasn't going to tell them.
Besides, it was NOT that dangerous because the hospital was just 2 miles down the street, and we had flashlights.
---
The satellite designers and operators needed this LAZAP so much and it worked so well that they gave Don Lazap money. Don built a professional telescope system, complete with all the safety attachments included. He placed a 3/4 million dollar, completely electronically controlled telescope from France in a pristine astronomy dome building built with new construction blocks. No more old broken down used trailers. I smelled fresh paint and read the brand new shining serial number plates. A big, 12 inch pipe brought the laser beam into the telescope from a perfectly comfortable laser building next door, as big as 3 offices. The entire laser and a whole 3 ton table of optics sat comfortably inside that new building.
A comfortable, well heated trailer control room sat next to the old, removable roof building, now used for storing parts. We sat by consoles with TV screens showing what the telescope saw. We saw the stars on our TV screen.
A moment before LAZAP "fire," a mirror automatically turned and switched our TV camera out and guided the laser beam into the telescope.
The prettiest and biggest computer monitor in the whole trailer, complete with crisp, hi definition text, maps and bright colors, was a direct telemetry link to the Albuquerque Air Traffic Controller. The old, World War II radar dome still turned, the spotters still looked out for airplanes, but the Air Traffic Controller had a direct link to our laser.
Even though we had a TV camera to look through the telescope when the laser was not shooting through it, the telescope was fascinating. Don let me look directly into the telescope at Saturn one night, before we did the LAZAP. Saturn looked yellow. Smog yellow.
On another night we pointed at Jupiter's moons. Not much to see on the TV monitor, but spacey to do. We got to use a joystick to point the telescope around. This was so interesting that Danny Holloway brought some hot looking girlfriend out here to watch. She was interesting. I showed her whatever I could to keep her around. But it didn't work. She went off with Danny in the dark anyway.
My computer in the main building was connected directly to the control room. We computed calibration constants from the LAZAP signals the satellite picked up. Don Summers rand the computer codes. My job was to tell Don Summers what a good job we were doing collecting location data, recalibrating the software, and locating the laser flash using the satellite. I had figured all the algorithms. He got to make them work.
We did our job well. Our software calculated where the "bomb" the satellite saw apparently hit. The software would nearly always tell us that ""a big atomic bomb apparently went off about 2000 feet east of Don Summers and my office."
"Nearly" was a significant description of what went on. We noticed that the software would give us a wrong answer depending on what season it was.
"The sun is wrinkling the satellite" Tommy Thompson told me. Every day the sun angle changed on the satellite. It wrinkled, just like a cookie sheet in an oven. The satellite would wrinkle and unwrinkled every day, as the sun moved in the sky. Different parts of the spy satellite would get hot and then cool off. That would very slightly twist the satellite optical telescopes. When that happened, the software would tell us "a big atomic bomb just went off somewhere else." Bad dog.
"The wrinkles change with the seasons" Tommy said. Sure enough, every season was different.
When Don Summers and I included the calibrations for each season, we got gold stars. Good dog.
"You get to work overtime till you get it right." said Dr. Larry Ellis, our new boss. He joked, and he didn't joke. We didn't get paid by the hour. We got paid, and the job must get done.
It was obvious. I knew it without proof.
Everybody must be shooting lasers into the sky. The Bad Guys must be doing int. We can't be the only ones shooting lasers at satellites.
And I also knew: the target satellites were not blowing up, either.
I realized that I could do this kind of work till I retired.
----
Female Nerds and Geeks.
The software groups were becoming larger than the hardware groups, and they were beginning to acquire females. Lena, the secretary, was nice, smart, technically sharp, sharp looking, but a secretary.
And the new females coming in had degrees in Computer Science. Some had Ph.D. degrees. And each and every one of them were sharp, technically smart. They knew what they are doing and did it very well. They were easy to work with. They seemed to make the kind of software that worked, that one could read and understand.
The dominance of smart females made me question my core beliefs in the superiority of males. I wondered if I were hallucinating that their work might be any different from ours, superior different. I wondered: Are these females different from other females or from males? I found myself focusing on "us" and "them."
One of them, Amy Maxsmart, some days would wear the same kind of unkempt clothes as Don Summers, and with no bra, and her belly button sometimes showed from under the T-shirt.
I always liked her. She was so nice, and smart. And she always looked and acted nice to me. To me she was just like the girls at the University. Not unkempt at all, nice. To those older guys, well, too bad for them. They didn't know beauty when the saw it. They were chauvinist.
One time the silhouette of her nipples showed through her T shirt. She just had a baby and was breast feeding. One of the older guys made a comment to her, something about a "puppy's nose." But she didn't get mad. Mostly, she reacted just like everyone else. Except for one thing: she was a bit more skilled than the males. She understood the big picture of our software very well.
One time Ray Prior, who was working on a team I led, brought in some pictures of a naked lady I tore out from a Playboy magazine when he visited my home, as a joke. Ray was a most competent engineer type, and not even much of a Geek, I thought. He was worth gold on a team. He took the pictures to work and placed them discretely almost completely hidden in the recesses of the metal bookshelf of his desk, somewhat as a joke. He commented how he imagined that Amy would have him reamed for that if she saw them. He perceived her as tough. As a technical person, she was.
Amy was surprised when somehow the topic came up when I was talking to her. "I don't care at all. I wouldn't do anything like that to him." She was a little hurt. She was hurt that he would think of her as that mean. She thought of herself as one of us, not one of "them."
He perceived her to be hard. He interpreted the clothes she wore to mean Amy was a liberal feminist bitch. She wasn't. I knew her to be soft, because she was. She worked as long, smart and hard as anyone.
Gary Masters and Brick Dumore could care less. Gary and Brick were somewhat dismayed that the software was getting more money than the hardware, and the hardware was at the heart of it all. They were hardware guys.
-----
And behold, completely new offices appeared. Modern trailers with clean hallways, big enough for offices on each side of a hallway, with individual rooms. some offices had doors that locked. Each room even had a window. The entryways each had a clean, new aluminum metal step. Clean, new bathrooms. Computer terminals everywhere. Outside and away form the big huge bullpen building. Separate. Comfortable. My office even had two felt boards. That was status, and a window.
I kept my desk clean and I had a nice computer. This was great.
My new boss, Dr. Larry Ellis, smiled a big, wide smile and spoke with soothing tones of voice. I thought he could empathize with everyone he met. He got excited in a nice way about all kinds of things, technical or not. And Larry did NOT make people mad, like Dave Henry did. Dave never made me mad. But he sure aggravated some of the others. Everybody got along with Larry.
"I'm aggressive, but not ambitious." he once told me.
Sharp women with technical degrees were coming into the group fast and furious. For some reason, these females really seemed to be taking over. I thought it curious that they deserved what they were getting. This was NOT affirmative action. This was pure meritocracy. They were dominating by merit.
I should have been happy. But it was not turning out that way.
I got to work on a new and different satellite system, as well as the original one. I got to stand around and delegate for the late night LAZAP's. I got to be head of a small team, with Dr. Ron Schmitt, a really good mathematician, as one of the team members. I got to have Merry Peterson on my team, a physicist and mathematician who went to the same university I did, and almost at the same time.
One time, Merry was so full of mischief that she jumped on my lap to make our relationship look risqué to the Air Force, official visitors about to enter my office.
And I got to work with Jerry Van Slambrook, the guy who made networks really work.
Everyone seemed to get along with each other. Maybe I was dreaming, but I thought we all got along.
I should have been happy.
My office was in the Eastern set of trailers, with a wonderful window view of the mountains to the east. Debee Risvold is across from me, Marjorie at the end.
My social life went up a notch. Debee and Paul Beck convinced me to take up clogging, after hours. That was really fun. Every Thursday evening I got to go dancing with Debee. Paul would not show up that often. Debee clogged very very well.
Of course, Terri my wife didn't mind at all, that I would go dancing alone with Debee every Thursday evening. Terri was very open minded.
Terri knew. It was much less exciting than all that. If you ever watched cloggers, you would see that nobody gets to touch anybody else. Not like real dancing.
I should have been happy.
And I was unhappy. Something was missing. I was still going nowhere. Clogging with Debee was more fun than work. It should not be that way. Work should be more fun.
I could work here till I retired. The spy satellite topic was not about to go away. We were making hardware and ground stations for a war that we all knew was just not going to happen. We would all loose our retirement if it did. The Russians would loose theirs, too. Everybody knew it.
And I could feel that I would never do anything great working with spy satellites.
I liked the coordinate transformation part of my job. I liked the people, and the smart, genetically superior females. My home was wonderful. I could be as secure as I wished.
But there was not one thing here that was great.
· Spark Exploder
· A Spark Exploder, Space Dust Rocket
Unhappy with the meaningless job, I kept looking for ways to escape. I kept looking for a way to make a powerful rocket to let us leave Earth, to travel the solar system. Any clue would do.
My day job on spy satellites paid the mortgage. Space travel had to be just a hobby, a fantasy, a daydream vision.
Then, two friends gave me puzzle pieces, clues, that ignited my space fantasy.
The first clue: Merri Petersen, computer geek space spy working for me on my project, told me she knew of people who said the water in space was on the near earth asteroids. I didn't know what "near earth asteroids" were, but I believed Merri.
One could get hydrogen from water. Then we could fuel the NERVA propellant tanks. All we needed would be some water in space. Merri told me it was there.
The second clue; Dr. Gere Harlan, a physicist, excitedly told me how fast the particles exploded off his spark exploder. He said they went "5 to 10 kilometers per second." That really caught my attention.
Gere was so excited about it that he got me excited about it. I thought the "5 to 10 kilometers per second" number was way better than what NERVA could do. This could be a clue, I thought.
Excited and ignorant, I saw how his electric spark exploder could be simple. He used an electric spark to blow up dust. There was plenty of dust in space, on anything you landed on, so all the dust could be "rocket fuel", propellant for a rocket. We could have nearly unlimited amounts of rocket fuel.
We could inhabit the solar system. We could go to any planet we wanted.
Gere was making and perfecting spark exploders to detonate high explosives. They called it a "slapper." His exploder would be more safe than a blasting cap.
{{ image: simple slapper exploder, with dust flying off like rocket exhaust }}
All I would need was an electric generator and some dust. All the puzzle pieces were there! I knew people wanted to make electric generators in space because President Regan was paying for a Star Wars program. The Star Wars guys were figuring how to put high power electric generators in space. There was plenty of dust in space. I could probably land on any asteroid or on the moon and get all the dust I wanted.
{{ image of bag of dust from some space object }}
To make a propulsion system using Gere's spark exploder, all I needed to do was to put a pinch of space dust on top of an exploder like Gere said. Then I would have a simple rocket and a simple propulsion system way better than NERVA and we could take 1000's of people to Mars. It would be better because I could just "refuel" my dust bag anywhere along the way. Like unlimited gas stations in space.
We could start an Exodus, to leave Earth. We could inhabit space. Thousands of us at a time could travel happily to Mars, and beyond.
{{ image of bag of dust, electric generator, spark slapper exploder }}
All I needed was an electric generator that would supply 1,000,000 kilowatts of electricity to the spark exploder.
Woe is me. Nature was not on my side. Nobody knew how to make that kind of electric generator in space. The best they could figure, not do, was about 10,000 kilowatts, and it would weigh more than an entire NASA Space Shuttle. The best anyone actually did was about 40 kilowatts. That 40 was a lot less than the 1,000,000 I needed.
It would have been worse if I had stuck to it. I did not know that "... 5 to 10 ..." was no better at all than NERVA. I did not know my rocket science, but did not know it.
My wonderful idea was not going to work.
This was more childish than a high school senior project.
Space travel was screwed.
If I had done my homework, I would never have taken this path. The "5 to 10 kilometers per second" was not better at all. When you don't do your homework, you take wrong paths and don't know it.
That's exactly what I did.
· Comet Water from Dr. Marsha Neugebauer,
· and Don Summers' " ... clear profit"
Comet Water In Space
Every once in a while Nature is on your side. While we were working on our spy satellites, a lady named Dr. Marsha Neugebauer visited the National Laboratory from the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech. Funded by NASA, she would tell us about the comet Haley and about some kind of plasma related to comets. I went to hear her speak.
She would probably have clues. I knew of a great trick to use on such important people who present their work in public. I could trick them into volunteering clues and doing my homework for me.
When a speaker gives a talk, the speaker wants people to ask questions and give them attention. No matter how important they are, they will talk with you when they are done if you ask them a question during question/answer time. They will recognize you because you asked them a question.
You just need to elbow your way to the podium as fast as you can, and immediately after they are done talking. Use your whole body to get in the way of the other people trying to do the same thing. This is a trick I learned from the Aerospace military industrial complex. It really works.
So, I did just that. I asked her some question, I can't remember what it was. And then when she was done speaking, I rushed up to the podium.
Would she know of anyone who knew were there might be water in space? A hunch told me she might know. I told her I wanted water, real water, not just the kind of water that is locked up in a sidewalk.
A sidewalk is a rock like a rock in space, like an asteroid. If you heat a chunk of your sidewalk in your oven, to as hot as the oven will go, it will crackle and spit, and some water boils off. Sometimes a rock in the middle of a campground fire pit will explode and hurt people, kill them even. That's how much water there can be.
"Not that kind of water" I demanded of Marsha Neugebauer.
I expected her to tell me there wasn't any.
Instead,
"Right here," she said
with an excited smile.
Immediately she pulled out a fresh, new picture only she and her friends had seen, of the Comet Halley. She pointed right to the white spot on the comet where the water was spewing off, making a clear vapor trail of fog in space.
\ comet_halley_bw.jpg
"Wow!" I emoted, totally surprised.
I became instantly serious about nuclear rockets again. I got all excited.
Since I could see with my own eyes there was at least some water in space, I calculated using water instead of hydrogen in the NERVA type rocket. That would make a steam rocket. I suspected it would not work very well.
You would think that putting water directly into a rocket would be simpler than having to first separate out the hydrogen and then freezing the hydrogen to minus 400 Fahrenheit.
I would use a rocket something like NERVA and use water steam instead of hydrogen gas as propellant. A rather simple calculation showed that the nuclear heated steam rocket would work about 400% times worse than NERVA.
At that time I had not yet learned to figure orbital transfers, so I did not know if the steam rocket was bad or extremely bad. I knew it was not good. I set it aside for a while.
However, the steam rocket was so simple I could not let go of it. I kept drawing it and looking for more accurate ways to evaluate it anyway.
Steam Rocket:
heat water using a small nuclear reactor. Guide the steam into a rocket nozzle.
What could be simpler? We would pump water into the nuclear reactor. The nuclear reactor would boil the water into steam at a temperature that would make the steam pipes glow bright-orange hot. The hyper-hot steam would expand in a rocket nozzle directly attached to the reactor.
I kept at it because Dr. Marsha Neugebauer and my coworker named Merri Petersen both insisted that there was water in space, and Merri told me who was working on it.
All excited, I told Don Summers how wonderful it was, instead of focusing entirely on spy satellites. I was the Project Leader and Don was my mathematician.
Don Summers, who was always focusing on work, on spy satellites, told me to my face, poking me in the chest as he said it:
"The conquest of space is going nowhere
until there is a clear profit."
Those were his exact words.
Unfortunately, he was so right that he tattooed this day in my memory.
· Forbidden Question at Vail
A Forbidden Question
Sometimes, you need to back off, relax and ask Forbidden Questions to make it all come together.
Relaxing for an Aspie can mean calculating rocket equations. I would rather do that than go fishing. Fish are slimy. The fish hook is dangerous and can hook your finger and make blood come out. Someone else's hook can snag your eye. They don't look when they wave that long pole with a hook on the end of the long string.
You can buy peeled fish in the store. You can't buy a rocket to take half the United States to Mars in the store.
On a ski trip to Vail one April 1987 I discovered a stunning way to use the energy and propellant of a nuclear rocket. It was completely puzzling, and it changed the direction of my career.
I was on vacation. This meant I could ask really crazy questions and figure their answers, regardless if the questions were stupid or crazy. I could ask Forbidden Questions and get away with it.
The Forbidden Question was: How hot should I run the nuclear rocket?
If you ask that question the rocket scientists will think you are stupid and treat you like a journalist or English teacher. If you are an Aerospace Engineer or Rocket Scientist and you ask that question in public, they will avoid you every chance they get because you would be a crank, quack, know-not. The answer is always "as hot as you can get away with." Don't Even Ask.
But, I was on vacation. It was my own vacation time. I was in the back seat of the car and Jennifer was driving. I could relax. And I could ask any damn question I wanted.
A very subtle difference between familiar rockets and this nuclear rocket was that the propellant was separate from the energy. The propellant is actually a coolant, like the radiator of a car. If your radiator clogs up and blocks the coolant flow because you didn't change the antifreeze like you were supposed to and it gunks up, then the engine heats up and can break. If you run the coolant too fast, because the little valve thingy in the radiator hose is broken and you don't know it, the engine never warms up and your car sputters and won't run smoothly.
I knew I could do this with the rocket. If I ran the propellant through the nuclear heater very fast, the temperature of the nuclear rocket exhaust would drop. I would use much more propellant than if I ran a small amount of propellant. What would happen if I did that?
It's a stupid question. The rocket performs worse. Ask a Rocket Scientist
But we were on vacation, and I was trying to launch everyone in the USA on a trip to Mars, 1000 people at a time. We were stopping at the nearest space gas station, loading up with water, or whatever, dust maybe, and then tour on to elsewhere. Mars was a low grade destination. But Mars was popular.
Since we only had to pay a lot of money to launch the space ship, without its propellant "fuel," just like you buy a car or truck, all we cared about was the cost of the launching the ship.
You never buy a car with a gas tank that holds all the fuel you will ever use in the car. That's stupid. But that's what a NASA rocket does.
That is why I asked the Forbidden Question.
Life is full of Forbidden Questions like this.
The propellant was cheap, dirt cheap, space rock cheap. It was on one of those near Earth Asteroids that Merri Peterson was talking about. Or, it was on a comet Dr. Marsha Neugebauer showed me.
I wanted to figure it out for myself. This was fun. The figuring was fun and simple.
So, in the back seat of the car, on the way to Vail Colorado from Albuquerque New Mexico, I asked:
What if you are not launching the propellant?
What if you are sauntering up to a space gas station, to a comet or near Earth Asteroid?
In that case, you only care how much if costs to fill up, and you know that is cheap. All you launched was the space truck with an empty tank. You did not have to pay for all the fuel it would ever use, like a NASA rocket does.
On a hunch, I wondered what would happen if I only cared about us, which was us on the rocket ship, and not about the propellant, the "rocket fuel."
This really was different.
When I finally figured out how to write the rocket equation with the energy source on the ship and the propellant at the gas station, separated, it was too simple. It was so simple a junior in high school could figure it, almost. It was so simple that I decided to find what number the answer would actually be.
Hot rocket? Cold Rocket?
I expected "hot rocket" because this was rocket science.
But it could also turn out to be "cold rocket" "lowest". When you change the rules, you could get a completely different answer. You often get a completely different answer. This could have been like that laser phasor beam I had worked on long ago. Long ago, I got "middle" as the answer.
Nature is always a bitch. She is almost always not on your side. That's what we should expect when we do this kind of thing.
Sitting at the breakfast table at Terri's cousin's home, finally at Vail, Colorado, our host Michael Roessmann handed me a cup of coffee and then started mixing the pancake batter.
My face was pointed into the calculator and a small piece of paper with the equation. My simple pocket calculator iterated the solution to the transcendental equation to 2 decimal places. I was done before Michael served me a hot pancake.
Surprise!
Completely unexpected surprise.
Nature was on my side!
The answer was not only "middle" and not hottest
rocket, but was even better.
It was a number that was about like what the steam rocket would deliver, bad as the steam rocket was.
If you only took high school science, you could do this.
The rocket equation was very simple:
d = V Ln ( (s + m) / s)
"d" is the "delta V" your rocket can achieve.
Bigger means better, and farther.
"V" is the specific velocity, the velocity of molecules of the propellant.
You will figure the best V. Bigger V is harder to do.
"s" is your ship.
You are in it. You bought it to ride in.
"m" is the propellant mass,
You buy it at some asteroid to fill up your tank.
"Ln" means "natural logarithm",
Use your handy, $5 pocket calculator
The energy E is as much energy as you can get out of the nuclear reactor or atomic bomb. The energy all goes into the rocket exhaust:
E = 1/2 m V2
That's it. All you need to do is find the V that gives you the biggest d.
Calculate.
You find out that V is about 2/3 times d.
!! Hey !!, Nature was on your side.
If the " 2/3 " had been 15 or some other large number, you would be screwed.
It would mean the best rocket would have to run really melting, vaporizing hot. Engineers would be right and would avoid you.
If the " 0.6 " had been 0.01 or some small number, you would be screwed.
It would mean you would have to buy the whole asteroid to gas up.
Anything greater than 1 means Nature is a Bitch.
But when it was just under 1, it meant you could run the reactor cooler, use a little more gas, and go a lot farther.
Nature was Mother, not a Bitch.
The absolutely unexpected and amazing thing was that the best specific velocity was about 2/3 of the velocity needed to get to wherever, like to Mars. To Mars, the particular answer was "steam rocket."
The steam rocket would therefore take a bigger payload to Mars than NERVA!
I was stunned.
I was so stunned during the day that instead of focusing on skiing, I fell and hurt my shoulder. It hurts when I raise may arm, to this day, 20 years later.
This was heresy. I was a heretic. But the equations kept insisting on the heresy. The equations kept saying that the best possible thing we should do to go from Earth to Mars was to use a crummy steam rocket, and definitely not use the super high performance NERVA rocket.
Subconscious Magic
Why did I ever ask that Forbidden Question?
Probably because my subconscious remembered something crucial.
Your mind works deep and it works when you don't realize it. Some brain surgeons after WWII found out by accident that if they tickled the right brain nerve, one would have a complete replay of a point in time, complete with background sounds and with the intense emotions of the moment.
It seems that the brain may record every single perception in our lifetime. It doesn't recall them so easy, but it does record, apparently.
In this case, my subconscious noticed that this problem was just like that laser phasor beam problem, and then it remembered the answer is probably a "middle".
I did not know that I had subconsciously remembered the lesson of the laser phasor beam. The subconscious remembered that the energy source had been a laser, and in this case it was the nuclear heater. It remembered that the mass had been the target itself, and in this case the rocket propellant.
It remembered the objective: bash it as hard as possible. Bashing a target to bits and bashing a rocket from Earth to Mars would be the same thing.
It remembered the question: do we energize most, middle or least? The answer was "middle."
Therefore, Magically, the Answer had to be "middle."
To my scheming, devious, subconscious mind, the only suspense was "where is middle?".
It was a coin toss whether Nature would be a Mother or a Bitch. For once she was Mother Nature on our side.
Magic.
---
We are all too busy to do our homework. If I had done my homework very carefully, very tediously, I would have discovered that those who designed electric ion rocket engines had discovered the exact same thing I did, but 30 years earlier.
The main scientist who did the work had died, so he did not talk about it much anymore. Therefore, I was not such a heretic after all, but no one knew it. Nobody did the homework. Not even NASA.
A steam rocket uses water that is stored in a very large bladder. Nuclear reactors heat the water, boiling it into super hot steam. Rocket nozzles use the super hot steam to propel huge payloads. It makes the simplest complete system in space.
· General Dynamics job
A Job At A Space Ship Company
The last thing I did at Sandia Labs as a Project Leader for Spy Satellites was to ask my boss's boss, Gary Masters, how I could do this marvelous discovery for rocket engines and space transport in his space department.
"You can't do that and work here," he said. It was epochal.
Instead of keeping a nice, secure, profitable job as a space spy, I gave up my job at Sandia National Lab, the nuclear weaponization facility. I left.
A former colleague, Dr. Dave Freiwald, asked me to be the Program Manager for a Satellite to Submarine, Laser Communication system program. The job was an adventure, a job in San Diego with General Dynamics, a company who made rockets and space vehicles for the US Government. I had joined the "Laser Systems Laboratory" of General Dynamics Space Systems Division.
Inhabiting the solar system was still just a hobby. My hobby goal was to find water in space, and then to get General Dynamics to get a contract to go there and exploit it, use it, make it work.
And then huge number of us could leave the planet.
I believed it completely. And my Forbidden Question was proof. It drove me, like Religion.
At General Dynamics, a space ship company, I looked for anyone who would know where water would be in space. Still, almost no one knew the answer. This was not a popular astronomy to do. Almost no one did it. There is no glamour in finding rocks or ice cubes in the solar system.
The problem was to find water minerals or ice in space, and near enough to get to and accessible enough to be useful.
I talked about it to anyone and everyone. I knew that I had a key to the game: a calculation that showed that steam rocket propulsion would be able to send many more people to Mars than anything yet proposed.
We could inhabit the solar system using a steam rocket, and I could back it up with my equation. That's what I thought. I was sure of it. All Visionaries are. We almost never know how hard it will be.
A Visionary fellow named Dave Nickerson heard me.
· Starship Submarine
· S2 CH 04 010-GD-bootlegging--En--.doc
Submarine Starship
The Submarine sailors of the United States Navy startled me. They were highly technical, highly intelligent, and they told me their submarines were like space ships.
It was middle of November of 1989. We were in Groton Connecticut, a the General Dynamics submarine factory. They called this place "Electric Boat." I was one of a few VIP's being personally escorted on a tour of the submarine factory. We were VIP's from Elsewhere, some other General Dynamics division. There were 120,000 people in General Dynamics.
It was as cold as one would expect on the east coast right next to the ocean with a wind blowing on a cold morning after a light frost. It was a clear day, but chilly. The sun was just rising over the buildings. I was really glad I wore my best, dark grey, cashmere overcoat.
This was my first time at a real, ship building, General Dynamics factory. Workers were lined up at the security gate to start their day making nuclear submarines.
Dr. Bob Geary was assigned to be one of our "Old Bulls," one of the Guardian Angels in charge of making GD LSL a rousing success. He had been a Vice President at General Dynamics, Quincy, before they closed it down.
"General Dynamics takes care of it's executives," he commented when we visited him, in a small, parking place office on the 12th floor of GD headquarters. He was waiting for something big to happen so he could take it over and run it. Somehow he didn't think we were going to fit his Vision, but he played along, most of the time sarcastically.
According to his sneers, we were wimps, effete, and not bold or brazen enough. He even said bad things in front of us about our boss, Freiwald, behind his back. I thought Geary was evil.
"Will the Program Manager for Satellite to Submarine Laser Communication from the Famous General Dynamics Laser System Laboratory, please step over here, ahead of everyone else trying to get into the submarine factory," Geary beckoned half joking, with a tone of thinly veiled, aggressive sharp sarcasm I clearly sensed.
The VIPs from GDLSL were waiting in the wrong line to get through Security. We thought we were just like everybody else. Everybody else was coming to work and there was a long line.
However, we were The Suits. That's what the Blue Collar workers called us. They were Blue Collar, Union. Because we were Suits, we got to go around the line and get special treatment.
"Suits." We were "Suits." The union workers hated the Suits. I did not quite get, it at first. From what I could see, most of the high up, Vice Presidents of General Dynamics I had met thoroughly resembled cheating liars out to clean your clock, eat your lunch, and get yours, whatever yours is.
By the standards of the places I had spent nearly 20 years around, like AT&T, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos National Labs, these guys were evil. The Suits were always aggressively finding ways to screw the workers. I had never met any group like these managers in my life.
I thought perhaps the entire industrial world might be the same. Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Caterpillar, International Harvester, Fruehauf, any big company with big competition and whose objective was to make money, they were all candidates for being evil.
In sharp contrast, the National Labs where Dave Freiwald and I came from were out to fulfill Visions. Here it was different. There seemed to be no vision.
After about an hour of introductions and feather fluffing, we began our day with a tour of a Big Boomer Submarine in the process of being built. The prospect of this excited us for days before we came here. None of us had been in a submarine. All of us came from science and engineering laboratories.
A young guy, younger than me, named Dave Nickerson had just started hanging around GDLSL, as an emissary from a Washington office. Dave Nickerson was the youngest of the Suits, younger than me. Some were ex U.S. Navy. There were many Washington offices. He liked GDLSL because lasers and satellites were flashy, more spectacular than a submarine. He had worked for the office of the president of the Electric Boat division here. He knew everyone and they knew him. He could walk through any door. He was befriending us, and we liked that.
"Please descend into this Starship Submarine, through this rather small, metal hole." Nickerson said to me, as we entered the Trident "boomer" submarine.
I noted that he used the phrase "Starship." Before we visited Electric Boat, Dave and I had talked about space.
The submarine was almost finished, but still under construction for the finishing touches. To get into the submarine I had to ignore the almost jagged, 3 inch around, 5 inch thick metal things, knob like things, round elbow things, big bolts and nuts and latches that work the hatch. The nuts on the bolts were as big as golf balls. Everything on this steel boat was massive.
"Try not to slip and fall 10 feet as you descend." he half joked.
We had to go through the ritual of entering like U.S. Navy submariners do, through the small hole in the top. I guess this hole was a bit like that round, hatch door the astronauts go through from one module to another. But astronauts float thru. Nickerson was joking.
I almost slipped. I really could have fallen 10 feet on to hard metal things. If I had a bad back or an arm in a cast, I would probably have had to stay out. This was certainly a physical place.
The workers must have been getting into the submarine some other way, because there were hundreds of them, all over the inside of this monster submarine, working with all kinds of tools and paint and wrenches and heavy cables. There seemed to be 3 or 4 floors on the part we were allowed to walk through. The lights were bright enough to clearly see everything.
Everything was made of metal. Walls. floors, hand railings, no matter what. Along every hallway I saw pipes and tubes bolted to the wall, with valves or switches connected every which way.
In some places I saw levers and rods, real mechanical devices, and coil springs 5 times bigger than what you would see under an 18 wheeler. No matter where I looked up at the ceiling, no matter where I was in whatever part of the Starship Submarine, I always saw more and different kinds of pipes and cables and valves, switches and more pipes, pipes of all sizes, pipes attached to the walls, going everywhere. This was definitely NOT like an airplane.
I had my best Pentagon suit on. We were scheduled that afternoon to meet with the President of the General Dynamics Electric Boat Division. We were all prepared to show how smart we were. Freiwald had us prepare piles of viewgraph overhead transparencies, enough to keep the meeting going for 10 hours. We were not dressed for this steel boat tour.
We were traversing a passageway-to-be that connected what looked like all 3 floors. I could see up and down to the other levels. There were plenty of lights everywhere. Workers were everywhere. They were painting and had scaffolds and boards and sheets on the floor we had to walk on.
When we walked by the white paint job these guys were doing, and when I saw the white spots of dripped paint on the floor, one as big as my hand, fresh like it had been just dropped as we walked by, I realized I was a Stupid Suit.
These guys would "accidentally" drop white paint on my suit, and I would look like a Dumb Suit in the Big Meeting.
There were also oily things around here, unfinished, dirty things. I started to watch out for everything, not to bump into anything, and to watch out above my head.
As we wandered through the ship, I watched the expression on the faces of the workers as we passed. They did not like us. I could see it.
Dave Nickerson was ahead of us, telling us about something or other. He reminded me of the conversations we had had before we came here.
Dave was always trying to find new things that would change the world. Dave found a way to access some of the research money of a new, General Dynamics division called the "Space Defense Initiatives Office," the SDIO. Dave worked there and was one of their thinkers.
Dave Nickerson and I immediately recognized we had a common Vision: Space. Space travel. General Dynamics and Space. We had talked about it several times before we visited Electric Boat.
Chuck Vollmer was his boss and liked the ideas Dave came up with. Vollmer was an ex air force fighter pilot, was the bold and brazen guy in charge of the SDIO. He was their General Manager.
Vollmer was describing his days as a fighter pilot. Flying a jet through live bullets was more danger any of us had ever seen. Vollmer fit the "ex fighter pilot" image perfectly. Nothing could knock him down as he zoomed at near the speed of sound, engines roaring, through live fire near the ground.
"I was drawing fire, so we can target them." he told me and a few other, gawking neophytes at an evening party at Dave Freiwald's house.
We had visited Vollmer's division often. Nearly every time we went to the Pentagon, Crystal City or Washington DC, we stopped at the SDIO.
I met Dave Nickerson at the SDIO. Dave Nickerson was fascinated by my completely new, never heard of before, novel and simple concept of taking 1000 people to Mars, or somewhere else in the solar system. He told me that what he really liked was the enthusiasm and passion I had, and that I would back everything I said with real data.
I kept telling him about how a steam rocket could take hundreds, or even thousands, of people through the solar system and especially to Mars. I excitedly told him how General Dynamics could be the one to initiate an Exodus to space.
I realized it really was different for him to interact with a whole group of people who were driven by Vision, instead of greed and power like the rest of General Dynamics.
As we were walking around the unfinished sub, I thought about the lack of Vision at Electric Boat, about how Vollmer listened to Nickerson, and what Nickerson had told me about a submarine.
"Hey Dave, you really think this submarine we're in is like a space ship?" I blurted out.
It was a series of thoughts all in my head and must have hit him out of the blue. I realized my question was complete out context.
"A submarine is like a space ship to Mars, you know." he shot right back. He was thinking the same thing I was about the Starship Submarine.
It took a few seconds, and then the other Electric Boat people volunteered the same story as Nickerson. At first, it was crazy.
"The submarine is like a space ship," said someone walking with us who used to be an officer on a submarine. He emphasized "is" and deliberately repeated what Dave said.
I could not believe these crazy, whako statements these submariner people were asserting.
How could a submarine be like a space ship?
I thought for a moment:
Submarines travel in the water, with smelly fish everywhere and gooey seaweed, and pooping birds sitting on the antenna. All you have to do to launch this ship is to have some lady break a champagne bottle on the front of the boat and let the thing slide off the rollers and splash into the water.
A submarine is **not** like space ship.
Anybody knows that. Space is space. Dark, empty, and you have to take off in a rocket to get there.
I walked a few feet and stared at some kind of submarine part, as if the conversation was just idle talk.
And after only a moment, an ex-Navy submariner who had been there spoke up, as if he was trying to convince me about a Starship Submarine, like Nickerson was saying.
"We traveled underneath the ice cap. Several months. Completely disconnected from the whole world. With no way to come help or get us if we just vanished forever," he bragged.
"How long can you stay under?" I asked.
"Indefinitely," blurted another fellow, immediately. Then the fellow thought for a moment, looked at the ceiling a bit and continued "except that we would run out of food."
I realized it could almost be true.
"If we really had to, the food could last 9 months," continued the fellow, clearly trying to be precise when speaking to Suits wearing their full Suit.
Watching that fellow work so hard at speaking precisely, I realized that our "Suits," which included a conservative tie, a dark suit, a white shirt, and wing tip shoes, were a uniform, just like the uniform that Navy people were used to. Our suits were the uniform, and the more we looked like someone from the Pentagon, the higher rank we apparently had. I had deliberately dressed like the highest ranking "Suit" I could find in Vollmer's office. My suit mentor was a retired General.
"Why do you think there are 117 people on the submarine?" Dave asked me, setting me up for his main point, I could tell. I could see the others, submariners, perking up. They all knew the answer.
"I don't know. Soldiers I guess." I incorrectly answered.
"Skill sets" said Dave, in his typically succinct way of proclaiming a truth.
"Each person has a function. Dentist, doctor, machinist, cook." he said.
"Just like space." he said, succinctly, again.
The submariners smiled, and they were all looking at me to see my reaction.
The ex-Navy officer with obvious status among his peers expounded on the way the Navy picks submariners.
"The nuclear submarine can travel essentially disconnected from Earth for as long as we have food and medical supplies. Or until we go crazy. And we deliberately choose people for submarine duty carefully, a special type that doesn't go crazy."
He look around, and his peers laughed.
"We make everything else we need. We wash clothes, mend the clothes, and communicate by radio or satellite when we get a chance.".
"We have at least one of every skill it takes to be independent. Some skills we have two or three of each." Dave asserted.
"Whatever it takes to have a complete, self contained society," the ex-officer said.
"What about an appendix operation?" I asked, always trying to probe the limits.
"We've done an appendix operation on a table. We are prepared for that." the ex-officer volunteered.
"Just like space." said Dave.
I could not believe it. They identified with astronauts.
From that point on, interacting with Electric Boat and the submariners became something directly related to space, not just a field trip tour.
The submarine seemed so spacious. It seemed like a visit to a small starship, something like a big spacecraft, like a tiny version of a small Starship Enterprise. As soon as we crawled into the entry hole, it was like entering a very advanced space station. It was clearly much bigger than any space station the astronauts were working in.
Gerry Dobson??whohuh?? at Sandia had told me a decade earlier that the submarines were completely cramped, highly claustrophobic things.
"No space between you and the ceiling. You have to squeeze when you pass someone in the hallway. Beds are one board wide." he asserted, claiming they were awful places.
It wasn't that way. It was a lot more like 100 big motor-homes, all packed and piled carefully together, connected together, with long hallways, and made of metal, heavy metal, and with all the furniture made of metal, and all with very expensive electronics.
The beds weren't as bad as they said. They were like wide shelves along a hallway, the submarine bedroom hallway. Two or three shelves of beds. Each with a little cloth curtain, like a hammock strap, so you don't roll out. The submarine didn't roll around continuously, like a boat on the surface. It travels deep, moving in practically still water.
It moved more like a spaceship than a rowboat. No one was sleeping there at the moment.
And I could see how I would hate it completely. I could not see how I could get myself into my favorite sleeping position, a fetal position. I didn't see any nice fluffy pillows, either.
We were slowly walking through the part of the submarine where the 10 foot wide, vertical long tubes hold the nuclear tipped missiles. Somebody was explaining something boring. I did not much notice the chair-sized space between the tubes until Dave pointed them out.
The space between missile launch tubes was like the space between neatly stacked water glasses in a cupboard.
Dave pointed to one of those spaces, one that had the chair and said
"Someone owns that space."
"What do you mean?" I replied, curious about the leading statement.
"Someone will sit there and read a book. And no one will touch his chair or sit in it or disturb what he has there. It is his space. Territory. That's how it works."
"17 laps per mile" volunteered someone who noticed how completely immersed I was in all these little nuances of their spaceship, the submarine.
"The submariners jog around this track for exercise. 17 times around is a mile." smiled one of our tour guide executives.
"You gotta get some exercise, or you get out of shape." he said.
"You could be out here many months at a time."
"And no jogger steps on the guy's foot sitting in the chair." joked Dave.
"I bet you are really glad to get out of the submarine and breath some fresh air after a few months in here." I asserted, trying to think of how I would feel if I were ordered to do this.
"Ohh, No. Not at all." disagreed a Navy person, submariner, just standing there, disagreeing with me completely.
"When you first open that hatch and poke your head out, you immediately smell the fish and decaying seaweed. It stinks out there." he said.
"Really?" puzzled, I answered.
"The air in the submarine is cleaned meticulously. We have to. We can't have bad air killing us, making us sick. That could sink the submarine." asserted a taller, quite clearly highly educated ex-submariner also working as a Suit for Electric Boat.
"Wow," I said out loud.
"Cramped up with 100 or so people for 6 months, and the air inside smells fresher than the air outside."
I was amazed.
They would not let us near the section where the nuclear reactor power supply was. That required a higher clearance than I had. If I had still been at Sandia, I could go anywhere I damn pleased on this ship. But, I left. So I couldn't. We only had Department of Defense Secret clearances. Wimpy clearances. Reserved for plain, military secrets. Couldn't even walk around a reactor.
They did let us tour a torpedo tube area. It smelled a little bit of oil and looked like it was blue collar machinist construction site. The room was all metal. The room was obviously the place where 10 or 20 foot long torpedoes would be loaded into the tubes.
A thin, mid 40's mechanic machinist with dark hair and dark, horn-rimmed glasses for the farsighted was fixing something metallic while sitting on a metal ledge of some kind. A 20 inch long, 1 inch thick, chrome plated, heavy duty, dirty steel wrench precariously sat on another metal ledge between him and me. As I passed I engaged him in some small talk, about how impressive this submarine was and how everything was so carefully put together. He seemed to refuse my attempt to connect.
I easily saw what would eventually be racks on which torpedoes would rest, waiting to be stuffed into those rather big torpedo holes. It looked like I could fit myself into one of those tubes, and with a tiny bit elbow room. The room was at least as big as a good sized two car garage. I did not see where the torpedoes were stored. The ceiling was somewhat low, but plenty enough room for the taller ones to walk. Pipes and tubes and levers and hinges, all made of heavy metal, were connected to every wall and ceiling space, and in this room, to chest high steel racks as long as a truck.
As I walked back towards the door, talking about something with the guy behind me, I moved my foot out of the way of the wrench that could drop on my foot. It was out of Sicilian paranoid instinct. Paranoia that they are out to get you. It's one of my genetic defects.
And the wrench fell, just as my foot went by. Not a lot of noise, just that heavy thunk. I looked up, and the machinist had his head turned away from where the wrench was, and then he looked directly at me, through his dark plastic horn-rimmed glasses.
"Wow. I could have hurt my foot." I exclaimed, smiling, to him, glad that I instinctly moved it.
He stared at me, somewhat distinctly very unfriendly, clearly disinterested, and said in a plain, monotone "must have fallen." He kept on working, like all of us were not there.
I was wearing a suit. And I realized what had just happened:
You are judged by your company.
---
As we looked out an executive window of a room on the floor where the President of Electric Boat had his office, we saw the skeletons of submarines-to-be and the place where they dry-dock them.
A big submarine looked like a whale as it slowly moved inland up the middle of the big river. Almost completely submerged, black, just a little of its black skin uncovered from the water, it looked a lot like a whale. It moved so slowly, again like a whale.
"How big is that? Looks long to me," I asked.
"Longer than a football field. That's a boomer," Dave replied.
They call the big ones the "Boomers." Maybe they call them that because the nuclear warheads make a big boom when they explode.
"How much does one of these things weigh?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't know, 10,000 tons. You can look it up in Janes. I remember one of those small attack subs displaced 3000 tons. These are probably 10,000." Dave replied.
"Janes" is a big, 15 inch long, 3 inch thick book of color pictures and details of military airplanes, boats, submarines, battleships, and weapons. When I paged through a copy I thought that most of the stuff in Janes would be secret. The details were amazing, down to the placement of bolts and rivets.
We were about to start our meeting. I realized that we were a group of Ph.D.'s and scientists, and our audience, all from Electric Boat, were not. To them, we were highly intellectual Scientists from the Laser System Laboratory.
One could tell by the mannerisms of the civilian managers that most were keenly aware that we were NOT their kind of suits.
Only the ex Navy people seemed to be intellectual. I sensed a kinship with them, as if they had the ethics of the National Labs, and had to work in the midst of evil one.
As we wandered away from the window with the view, a peg point branded itself in my mind-page of key data:
A Starship Submarine weighs 10,000 tons.
Our meetings went nowhere except to entertain and dazzle them with our engineering fantasies.
-----
Nickerson, Jokell, money, and the propulsive capture discovery
It was my passion for my Vision that did it. I inspired someone else, and he tried to make the Vision come true.
Dave Nickerson had come from the Submarine factory. The submariners felt a kinship with space explorers, at least because both kinds leave our world in self contained life support units, go where no one else can go, and then explore, alone, for a long time. They both leave our world, alone.
Nickerson was promoted to work at the "SDIO", a "space defense initiatives office." The SDIO had money for space things, exploratory things. Nickerson got us some money for us to show how a steam rocket might win.
And then, we could lead the way to inhabit the solar system.
Unfortunately, the space cadet Program Manager guy who got the money screwed it up.
And, it was rough getting my boss to go along with it.
After the whole episode, the space cadet casually gave me a clue that would make the concept practical.
---
Getting the first real money ever to explore a steam rocket started in late autumn at in the Sorrento Valley, north San Diego. The trees were green and the air was cool but not chilly.
The SDIO loaned us a few people for a day, from Washington DC, to help us explore all sorts of outlandish excursions from our only real business here at the Laser Lab. Our real business was to make and sell satellite-to-submarine laser communication systems. We had no business doing the unrelated things my boss had on the entire agenda.
The whole day, we did everything one would expect of good bureaucrat engineers working for General Dynamics. We composed pretty viewgraphs and nice charts, and we referenced the names of Important United States Navy Admirals in Washington DC.
Typical arrogant manager, our General Manager, Dave Freiwald, wanted our Lab to do all kinds of things for which we had no engineers or scientists to do the work or invent the work. He wanted to do things with not one single person who was an expert at what he wanted.
How does that work? With Big Corporation Money. Glad-handers, Pepsi Executives and other non-technical's infest big corporations and are oblivious to the harsh reality of engineering details and science principles.
With a typical, DOA dead-on-arrival move, Dave Freiwald brought his experts to the meeting: several marketing people, a couple of pentagon consultants, and some managers form other GD divisions that were not doing well, to "help".
"That's why he will succeed," I thought, sarcastically," because he doesn't need the engineers or scientists to imagine new things."
Many managers think they can always hire the scientist or engineer when he needs them. It's true, but only the kind of true how a lawyer would say it. You can hire a scientist or engineer whenever
you need them.
However, getting one who is expert at what you need and who can invent what you want is damn near impossible, damn near always. But you can hire one whose skills don't apply, any time.
During the meeting I could not help thinking in disgust, "You only need the managers and the marketing guys. Sell something you don't have, even if you have no idea if anyone can make it. Then go hire any old engineer to make it."
During this meeting we both had to think out of the box for General Manager Dave Freiwald. Neither of us had the technical skills Freiwald needed. Neither did Freiwald. Freiwald did not know what he was talking about.
Puzzled, I did wonder if maybe Freiwald really did now what he was doing. After all, he was the General Manager, and I was not.
All day long, none of us would tell Freiwald that his half baked ideas had already been considered, or not even considered because of obvious idiocy, or that they would not work. None of us could tell Freiwald anything. His ego was so big he would and often did explode at the any suggestion that he didn't know what he was talking about.
After the meeting it was clear no one here knew anything technical about what Freiwald wanted. His marketers told him so, told us so, and told us that our competitors did know their technical business.
Arrogant Freiwald ignored them.
That whole day gave me a bad, anxiety-derived stomach ache.
And no, Freiwald did not know what he was doing, and that kind of stupid management did keep us from winning any contracts.
An Epochal Memory
Every chance I got, every break, every free moment, I would talk with Dave Nickerson about how the calculations of the steam rocket showed we could completely change the way humans would go to space. I kept showing him how we could take a Starship Submarine to Mars.
"But we need a start," I kept repeating. I did not know Nickerson had any money. He just kept acting interested, so I kept talking at him with my Visions.
Then Nickerson made a move. He started telling me how he would go to Space Systems first, talk with their Managers, and then come to GD LSL second.
"You don't have money. Space Systems has money," he told me.
"The SDIO does have money for space," he asserted, "for concepts exactly like this."
"They do?" I answered, trying to get him to say it again. I hoped that making him repeat it would prod him to make it true, whether it was or not.
"After this meeting, lets talk," he confided.
The end of the day came slowly. I kept wanting to hurry the "...lets talk" part.
After the meeting and almost past suppertime, we were standing in the parking lot of GD LSL. The comfortable cool early evening air, clear blue sky, the blue-green eucalyptus trees with their leaves flowing gently in the slow breeze, the clean architecture of our lab combined to soothe our nerves.
This was an epochal event. It was excitement.
I was facing towards the SDIO, which was only a couple thousand miles due east of where we were standing. Nickerson worked at the SDIO. He was facing west and was facing me. I kept glancing towards GD Space Systems, just over the hill a few miles to the southeast. Dave kept referring to Space Systems.
"I can get you money to work out the concept," he asserted, smiling, and obviously tickled that he found an idea that could really work.
"The concept is to extract water from Deimos, moon of Mars, and then use it to power a steam rocket to take people between here and there," I asserted.
We kept talking about gong to Mars.
"We could take as many people there as used to come over on the steamboats, like the Irish and like may grandparents did," I added.
Dave Nickerson saw the entire concept and what it could mean for space travel. I was glad he could see it without spouting off fantasies, like most of those who dabbled in space concepts did.
"I will do it through Ed Coy," he said
Coy had been General Coy, now retired from the Air Force and working at SDIO. He would be the lead person.
Dave Nickerson did not figure out the engineering details much himself. I absolved him of guilt. Normally I would not absolve someone for not figuring the details. But Dave would get us money, and Dave depended on us to figure the details.
"So what if he doesn't compute anything. I don't know if he can compute, and I don't care. He takes the word of the scientists and he bets on people." I thought to myself on the way home, justifying everything Dave did.
Within a few weeks, Dave Nickerson actually did get the money. He really did convince Chuck Vollmer, the General Manager of the General Dynamics SDIO, to allocate $50 K to do a breakthrough, joint space project with the new Laser Lab and Space Systems Division.
This was just like the National Labs, where we would ask for the money and it would happen.
This was the way the story was supposed to go.
==============
No road is really smooth.
Our General Manager, Dave Freiwald, just could not stand the diversion to space topics. He didn't invent it. The diversion I brought was no more outlandish than his ideas. But he didn't invent it.
Freiwald wanted to be the boss of lasers that talk to submarines, and of things that he invented. He didn't invent what he called a crazy space water scheme. He treated this like I was doing a hobby on company time. He didn't like it at all. If he didn't' invent it, he just didn't care.
"Freiwald invented everything in the world," Vollmer sarcastically volunteered one day, commenting on how Freiwald projected his self image.
Vollmer, Dave Nickerson's boss, put up with Freiwald and saw my steam rocket project as new visibility, so he funded me. Freiwald got the credit for another $50 K of "breakthrough project" money.
We had to bootleg steam rockets.
To get the money, Dave Nickerson had to assign a Principal Investigator, a "PI". The PI had to be one that the Great General Dynamics preferred. Obviously, Nickerson had to pick someone to be the Principal Investigator who was already doing things for NASA. That left me out. To them, this would obviously be some type of a NASA project. Too bad for the inventor: I was at the wrong place, at the submarine communication place.
They guy he picked was a Ph.D. named Bruce Jokell, at the GD Space Systems Division.
Big Corporations will do that to you. They will take your idea and give it to the most deserving person they have. Obviously, the arrogant leaders know that the
deserving person could make something of your idea far better than you .The company says so. The chosen person is typically the more "experienced" one.
Typically, the "experienced" one is out of a job at the moment, working on company "overhead". This means they keep the person around as an employee, make him do odd jobs until they or he finds something for a day job.
The "experienced person" will get to tell everyone about your idea and they will actually get the credit, even though it was completely your idea. They will also get the money to do it and will get to tell you what to do and when to do it. You will be angry.
Does that sound like a good deal? Sure. Your idea gets implemented. It could be really good for the Big Corporation.
No.
It's like a fish should jump on your hook because it is good for the Life Form. Or like a deer with monster antlers should run up to the hunter, because hunters pay for keeping the predators away from the deer.
Sure.
That's what would have happened here.
Except that Jokell screwed it up and I would not give him the keys to get out.
----
Exofuel: exoatmospheric fuel
This should have been really exciting.
Three of us were in the big conference room at GD LSL, the laser lab, at the large, wood table in the center of the room. Each of us wore some version of a Pentagon suit. The lights were bright enough to read. The chairs were big enough for fat managers, big generals and the typically thin marketing guys, "Suits." The chairs were cheap, but very sturdy. The room was big enough for 60, and the three of us had the room to ourselves. That felt good. We felt important.
Dave Freiwald, our General Manager, was somewhere else and not making demands. People in the other rooms and labs of the facility were quietly working, making lasers for Satellite to Submarine Laser Communications. The weather outside was overcast and nice, as usual for the Sorento Valley, 25 minutes north of the San Diego airport.
Bruce Jokell, Ph.D., Rocket Science, the newly appointed Program Manager for my idea, was preparing for the first meeting with the players. The room was quiet. Bruce was sitting to my left at the conference table. Nickerson was to my right. We are talking about what we are going to do as a team. I was slightly surprised that Jokell had a copy of what I wrote about Deimos, moon of Mars, and space travel.
Jokell put his copy of my 2 page description on the table in front of him. I looked at his copy to see how it came out after Xeroxing. I saw and I liked my hand drawn, tiny cartoons of the moons of Mars and a nuclear rocket.
He didn't like the words at all. It was clear that to him, I was just a physicist, some guy from a laser lab, and he, Dr. Bruce Jokell Ph.D. was the rocket scientist connected directly to NASA.
Bruce was the Ph.D. Manager in charge of a real NASA Project. Someday it was supposed to have real NASA money and real people working for him. His every body movement was shouting at Dave Nickerson, the man with the money, "What does this Zuppero guy know? Why do we have to put up with him? Throw the laser guys out."
I could feel it, like heat.
Jokell just could not buy what I wrote about space travel. He was condescending and snotty about my coming up with anything having to do with space. It was obvious at our first meeting.
It was my fault. When I read what I wrote, what Jokell pointed out what I wrote, I saw that my writing did me in. I was minor leagues. My writing style clearly showed I was amateur at space topics. I didn't know anything about the rockets and missions of that time. To him, it was clear I obviously did not know anything.
"Of course," I thought, as if replying to his unspoken assessment, "he is pretty much correct. I only have one thing absolutely right. All the rest is made up."
The thing I had correct was the only thing that counted.
The arrogant Rocket Scientist was not smart enough to see it.
The only thing I had right was a key concept that could change everything. Physics is typically that way. One little thing here or there and everything changes completely. That's what I had.
And that is what I did not communicate clearly. Therefore, we were starting off on the wrong track.
I was too much of an Aspie.
Neurotypicals would have seen this, maybe.
It was true that I didn't know any details about what these guys were already doing. I didn't know much about manned or unmanned deep space planet probes. All I knew about were spy satellites and communications, and how to take 1000 people to Mars.
Bruce Jokell was a rocket scientist. I was a physicist. I knew he would have to abide by the laws of physics, but he didn't know it yet. I could tell I would win the technical battle, but might loose the real battle.
Fretting, I did not like that my own writing did me in. I had made up all kinds of marketing stories about what the new rocket would mean for humans occupying space. I did not know when I wrote it that I did not need to do that. I was too immature.
Hey, you, 4th grader!
"Only the key"
Write only the key!
Say "I don't know that part yet" or say "that part is not relevant" when they press on you for details that don't count.
You can win fast if you do that. You can loose like I did if you don't.
But, Jokell and I were both in the dark. Two Ph.D.'s, both in the dark. I was ineffective. He was arrogant.
I could see his deficiencies. He acted the way an insecure person acts. He acted like a lower level person in the midst of a swirl of powerful Corporate Bulls. That's what he actually was.
I could not see my own deficiencies, but I did know I was too timid, with my tail between my legs, the way an underdog perceives himself.
And we went on, even though neither Bruce Jokell nor I believed in the other.
We quickly agreed that we needed a title for this project. A nice title was not that hard to figure. We were getting "fuel" from outside our atmosphere. The fuel was water. Bruce would split the water and compress it and liquefy it into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Those were real fuels. But that seemed harder to do than my way, just using the water directly. Either way, we were bringing something liquid back from space, and we would put it into our rocket fuel tanks.
So the title would have the word "fuel" in it.
It was coming from outside the Earth, "exo" the Earth.
During my spy satellite days I learned the phrase "exoatmospheric burst," for an atomic bomb detonated outside the atmosphere. Our fuel was "exoatmospheric."
So, it was obvious, the name must be short for "exoatmospheric fuel":
"EXOFUEL"
I really liked my acronym. "Exofuel" I repeated to myself, 15 or 50 times, and thought a big smile while I thought it. I liked the image of lower case letters better:
exofuel
As we sat there, we made the plans for who would do the rocket science and who would say what to do. Nickerson designated that Jokell controlled the money, which meant Jokell was boss. Jokell brought Chris Cassell to do the rocket science. I got to have a co-worker title. Neither Jokell nor I was completely happy. I was not happy that Jokell got to be the boss of something that I clearly invented, and something that was the key to space travel in the solar system. He was not happy that I was pushing steam rockets.
Any rocket scientist could see that steam rockets were worse than cryo-fuel rockets. It was obvious, to a Rocket Scientist.
And I was a Physicist, and Physicists make the Rules that Rocket Science had to live by. I found a new rule: a steam rocket could be monstrously better than a their cryo-fuel rockets for some missions. Going to Mars was one of those missions. That was the first reason Bruce was not happy. He didn't know about the new rule I found.
On the other hand, I screwed myself when I fueled his second reason to be unhappy. It was my inability to write or communicate clearly. He could clearly see that I clearly didn't know anything about manned exploration of Mars or about any other deep space missions. He could see I was only familiar with military satellites in orbit around Earth.
This experience, where Nickerson is forced to give the brilliant new idea to someone who doesn't know the first thing about it, was how I learned first hand what the Evil Power Grabbers of General Dynamics do. Nickerson had no choice.
The General Dynamics system demands that the managers steal Visions from their Little Visionaries. The Little Visionaries are the ones who actually dream dreams and feel the exhilaration for us as we soar above our dull lives.
Then The Evil Power Grabbers go for the kill. They give the plum of a vision to someone who obviously has more skills than this Little Visionary. Obviously to The Evil Power Grabbers, one of their comrades has more connections to NASA than I do, since I am only a Little Visionary. Jokell is the comrade. Their comrade published more things on space than I did. His NASA resume was better than mine. So he got it.
I had screwed everything up, except the important thing. The only thing I did NOT have screwed up is the one thing, the most important thing, the world changing thing: my payload was about 1000 times larger and my rocket far simpler than anything known to NASA.
I was wrong when I thought that the rocket scientists had never calculated my propulsion scheme. They did.
They did not have water in space. I asserted I did.
That was the difference.
Without that, my scheme would not work.
Actually, I did not know exactly where to get the water in space. The only places I knew of to get water in space for sure were the comets, and I thought they were too far away. Maybe that is why the Rocket Scientists would not listen.
I started to go into depression. It was entirely my fault that they didn't see it. I was telling the story wrong. I knew I didn't know how to tell it right. I knew I didn't know how to fix my deficiency.
Reality also helped depress me. The word "probably" was the problem, as in "probably get the water by roasting the dust of Deimos." I did not know if the Deimos dust was as dry as a baked dust on a dry road, like the moon, or if it was a hydrated mineral, like regular table sugar, like what many asteroids were supposed to be. I just didn't know.
Depression set in, because if there were no water in space, everything I said would be useless. I began to despair, because Rocket Scientists were the experts, and I was only an outsider with nothing but fantasies.
Water on Deimos of Mars would be absolutely ideal for the occupation of Mars. Water in orbit around the Earth would be phantasmagorical, but that was a fantasy and I knew it.
I had calculated several different options and found out how Deimos of Mars was a perfect staging area, a stepping stone for Mars. The orbit was nearly perfect for optimal transfers.
Unexpectedly, Bruce Jokell also believed there was water on Deimos of Mars. His buddy had figured a way to extract the water.
Our exofuel program would figure a way to use the water it would extract from Deimos.
Bruce Jokell should have seen it.
Plodding Along
Our little Exofuel program went on, a few small steps at a time. The team would make contact only about once a month or so. A $50,000 R&D program was typically that way. It only paid for a few months of work, and the work had to be spread out so it would not interfere with the day job.
Chris Cassell at space systems division kept doing the work.
Every time we met, the Principal Investigator of the EXOFUEL project made it more clear. He was so full of himself that he could not see the key physics. No matter what I would say, Jokell would screw up the direction of the research focus. He screwed it up from the start.
He missed a factor of 1000 increase in payload. I could not believe he that he could not figure, but he could not figure.
Somewhat despairing, I began to hear myself echoing the words "Now we know: Rocket Scientists Can't Figure."
If he would figure, he would see that his knee-jerk approach would not work. But he insisted on his way. Bruce Jokell insisted that we make a space architecture that would extract water from the Deimos dust, separate it into hydrogen and oxygen gasses, then compress the gasses and freeze them to cryogenic temperatures into liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuels. This upset me every time I heard it.
So damn complicated.
That is not what we got the money for. We got the money to look at something really new and progressive, steam propulsion. We got the money to look at something that would permit us to simply skip over all the hard steps and all the steps that required heavy and expensive, inefficient machines in space, such as those electric water splitters. We specifically were not supposed to get the money to look at water splitters. It frustrated me every time I heard the details of how our team was looking at water splitters.
I tried to talk with Jokell about it.
"My buddy figured out how to roast the dust of Deimos with an electric heater. Then you get the water," Bruce Jokell explained to me, when I asked him where he got the data he claimed.
"When was this?" I asked.
Stupid idiot.
You don't need any electricity. You roast the dust of Deimos with a nuclear reactor itself. Electricity is hugely not efficient What a dumb shiphead.
"A year ago." Bruce replied.
"What does he do?" I asked, wondering how the guy splits the water.
"Then you split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and," Bruce went on.
"blah blah blah blah blah blah." was all I could hear him say.
I had already calculated that water splitter part. I waited until I he was finished with the water splitter part to start listening again. But he kept on going.
"Blah Blah you can read about rocket science on how water on the Martian moon can be converted into rocket fuel and," he continued, as I heard more blah blah blah.
"NO!" was all I could think.
"NO!" was all I could emote.
"This is Terrible," I thought.
Talking to myself as I walked to my truck to go home from work, I said "I think he doesn't understand. I can deliver a few thousand tons of water back to Earth orbit, from Mars. That's enough to send a small Starship Submarine back to Mars, full of people."
On another day, later, sitting on a plane to the Pentagon, I took out my calculator and figured once more, just how much a few thousand tons of rocket fuel was good for.
"That's more rocket fuel than what a dozen space shuttles weigh." I commented softly, aloud, and under the whooshing roar of the airplane cabin.
"And he is piddling around with a few thousand pounds," I thought, referring to the 20 tons or so of rocket fuel the Exofuel program was coming up with.
He is doing pounds and I am doing tons.
What an idiot.
I would see Nickerson nearly every time I went to the Pentagon. We used Nickerson's helpers. We had helpers from General Dynamics who knew how to get us in and out of the Pentagon and to see important Admirals. The helpers worked in the same group as Nickerson.
"I can't do much about it," Dave Nickerson said, when I explained in many ways what was going wrong.
He really could not do much about it. At General Dynamics, the Program Manager had the last say. Jokell was the Program Manager of the little R&D project.
"Get what we can out of it," Nickerson told me
Nothing ever goes perfectly. We always had to settle for what we could out of whatever we were doing.
So we did it Bruce Jokell's way, and I just somewhat gave up on Jokell.
Resigned to loose this battle, I calmed myself down.
I wondered if maybe it was me that was wrong. If I were wrong, I would change my ways.
Space Cadet Society
If it's your vision, keep it. Don't let the other guys intimidate you. You are the best promoter. That's what I learned, and I was glad.
A few weeks after coming back from the Pentagon on space laser communication business, our space enthusiast group, the "L5 Society," featured Bruce Jokell as a speaker at the local library.
Terri went with me that evening to hear the guy, "The Famous Dr. Bruce Jokell, Program Manager for NASA trips to Mars," would present an early evening talk in an entire a corner of the Poway, California library, with 40 grade school kids sitting everywhere, even on the floor.
"He is a really dull speaker," Terri whispered to me, as she became restless at having to sit through something so boring after she had spent a hard, long day at work.
She somewhat surprised me when she whispered that to me. I expected her to say he was a good speaker. Her disparaging comment prompted me to watch the responses of his audience closely. Her comment meant that his method was NOT better.
I watched the kids unconsciously reveal their boredom. They acted something like they were in school and forced to listen to someone speak authoritatively on a topic they knew little about. That was strange, because Bruce knew his own business well.
He put up a viewgraph with words on it. I saw he borrowed it from his day job work. I had a hard time reading it, and I even knew exactly what that viewgraph was about. The printing was small. The page was full of small print. After trying hard to read fast, I could see that his viewgraph detailed some of the Mars mission objectives and constraints.
That was one reason he was a poor speaker. He showed something nearly unreadable. What was readable was words and more words, but nothing striking.
No pictures.
Tiny words.
Then he put up another viewgraph. It seemed to be like a flow chart with little boxes and little lines going every which way, punctuated by tiny, unreadable words.
"This is a mission architecture diagram," he went on. That didn't work either.
"I don't know what point he is trying to make," Terri told me.
I tried to figure his point, too. From what he said, he was in charge of figuring some kind of living and working arrangement for people going to Mars.
I put myself into the shoes of the pre-teenagers in his audience. About the only thing he said that got our attention was how cramped it was going to be.
"You have to realize that 10 people are going to spend 2 or 3 years in a room about the size of this part of the library we are in." he said, waving his arm to signify the part we could see.
Some of us looked around the room. It seemed pretty big to me. I could not see the other side of the floor we were on. This was a public library in a San Diego suburb where there was a lot of money. It had a big second floor.
"People will get on each other's nerves," he said, reminding us of how annoying people can be.
"Just imagine you have to be in this same room for a month, with the people sitting next to you," he asked the audience.
"People sitting next to me?" I wondered.
I get it: you probably don't like people sitting next to you.
We all got silent. We were thinking about that. A few of us looked at, stared at, someone else in the room for a moment.
"People can really get on each other's nerves," he asserted.
He took us all into deep thought, I observed. That part of his presentation worked.
After a while, I wondered if he would mention what he and I were doing, with the Exofuel project.
He didn't mention my idea at all.
"Good." I thought, "He's not trying to claim it. It's mine."
\ Deimos
Nobody asked him a single question about what he talked about. That got my attention. It showed that his approach to communicating was no better than mine. We were at least equals in that respect.
When it was all over, I introduced Bruce Jokell to Terri and told him he gave a nice talk. Then we left. The point I was trying to make was that I wanted to work as a team. I felt proud of myself for not telling him that no one could figure out what he was trying to say.
We could see it was dark outside and it must be 8 o'clock already. All kinds of street lights and cars and commotion greeted all of us as we stepped out of the library, and we were glad to get out of the meeting.
Alone, on the way to work the next morning, I fretted some more.
Talking out loud to myself, and not realizing that I was talking out loud, I fretted.
"Here he is, with my idea, and he gets the glory."
I retracted into deep thought, to see if I could find a solution to this problem.
I realized that the problem was that I was a new Program Manager in a new little division, a laser lab, doing Satellite to Submarine Laser Communication. The Exofuel topic was space, not submarines or satellites. There was a clear conflict here, and there is nothing Dave Nickerson could do about it. Dave could get the money, but he could not control all the political pieces.
Our monthly lunch meeting came up, and I went. I drove the15 minutes to the cafeteria where we met.
"Hey, we are going to Mars. The United States is going to Mars." Jokell blurted out.
He was happy, somewhat smiling.
"How is that?" I asked.
I had not seen any big announcement on CNN that we were going Mars. I didn't see any big hoopla on TV, or in the newspapers.
"Didn't you see. Bush declared that we are going to Mars." Jokell affirmed.
"So? What's that mean?" I asked, cynically.
"The President said we are going to Mars, so we are." he affirmed again.
"Ok. You believe it. Not me," I thought.
"Are they funding you?" I asked, because the government was not handing out any money to anyone, it seemed.
"No. Not yet. But soon," Jokell replied.
Jokell had been appointed the Program Manager for a NASA funded study on going to Mars. General Dynamics won the contract, and it would begin when Congress allocated the money. Congress had not allocated any money yet. General Dynamics didn't get the real money yet, just like we at the Laser Lab. We didn't get any real money either. But General Dynamics won the contract. We at the Laser Lab did not win anything yet. When the money starts flowing, they will get their share.
"Check's in the mail," I thought.
------------
When we are all done calculating our Exofuel Program, Chris Cassell calculated that Jokell's architecture would haul a puny payload, just like I told Jokell. Of course the answer came out rotten. What did he expect? I kept telling him that it would, and the steam rocket way would make it come out marvelous.
He had insisted we split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. His way yielded about 20 tons of rocket fuel. What good would 20 tons of rocket fuel be? We could launch that much from Earth in one trip.
Therefore, the exofuel project didn't get any attention. It was more of the same old dumb science stuff, with no payoff to us taxpayers, and no way to take 1000 people to anywhere but broke.
---------------------
I noticed that Chris Cassell could sure figure. He saw what I had figured and understood the results. He was being paid to do the work that Bruce told him to do and gave him a charge number for, and that was that. He was a junior person. I completely understood. He was smart, quick, and this guy was ok. He was my kind of rocket scientist.
If I were smarter, I could have fixed this situation. But I just didn't have the people and business skills.
After all, I do have Asperger's Autism.
I just didn't know how to interrupt and make the point to the key people. I didn't know how to get their names and call them or meet them on my own. I didn't realize that I could just call them.
If Cassell and I were to sit Bruce Jokell down and carefully lead him through the figuring, maybe Jokell would see..
We all knew why I would not help Bruce Jokell. This was MY vision. It could have been a Freudian omission on my part. If Jokell screws it up, then he does NOT get to steal it from me. So, I would let him screw it up. That way even though I loose this round, I can guarantee I will only give the Vision to Visionaries.
"Four letter words and a flipping finger signal to you, Bruce," I thought.
I could really begin despair at this point. I was not bright enough to point out the key facts clearly to anyone. I assumed they could see the key pieces. I assumed wrong. They were not like me, willing to figure fast and change direction quickly. And since the rocket scientists were generally not bright enough, nor as bright as I assumed they could be, no one saw. It was my fault. My personality was just too emotional, too off the wall, too un-professional.
-----
Something good did come out of it.
The smell of bulk lunch meat and the clank of rewashed silverware complimented the taste of those boiled peas and bland vinegar on the sterile salad. We were in a cafeteria at the General Dynamics Space Systems Division. The sky was grey, the temperature was mild, the cafeteria was half empty and most engineers were wearing their casual, non-hippie, non-beach-boy, not-a-Pentagon-suit K-Mart clothes. I saw many ties, many white shirts and a few sport coats. Bruce Jokell had a dark blue sport coat and tie, Chris Cassell had a tie, and I had my Pentagon suit on.
The three of us, Bruce Jokell, Christopher Cassell and I, were about to discuss our exofuel project and space travel over lunch.
We were eating while working so we would not have to charge our time against the exofuel charge number and make it run out of money. I was eating while working on manned space systems. I was bootlegging this kind of space topic, the manned variety. My boss the General Manager of the great and future glorious General Dynamics Laser Systems Laboratory, Dr. Dave Freiwald, scorned and scowled when I did this topic. It was what I invented, not what he invented. He could only focus on what he believed he initiated. I was supposed to be working unmanned, space laser to deep submarine communication space systems, which he found for General Dynamics. This exofuel was my space thing.
Somewhat like what first graders do, the three of us had been fantasizing together about the same space trip. We were off in a space ship carrying rocket fuel between Earth and Mars, trying to occupy the solar system. We were occupying Mars first. We wanted to be on the best kind of space ship we could find that would take us on our way back to Earth from Mars.
So, we were inventing it and then making it, make pretend, and then evaluating our work.
Our rocket had launched us away from Mars and sent us going backwards a little. It slowed us down so that we were going around the Sun a little slower than Mars was going around the Sun. We were going slower than Mars on purpose so that we would fall towards the Sun.
We started falling, faster and faster, somewhat towards the Sun and on a collision course with Earth. This was on purpose. We wanted to land on Earth, so our rocket scientist navigators were doing the right thing.
We were weightless, so all we felt after the rocket launched us away from Mars was nothing, weightlessness. This was going to be a long, 11 month trip.
All three of us knew that when we arrived at Earth we would be moving fast, way too fast top stop. We would need to do something to slow down. To stop at Earth, we had to do something powerful to slow us down.
Bruce asked me "Why are you using a heat shield? They're too heavy."
"Because you don't need any fuel." I replied.
We were both thinking the same thing. My version of the space ship has us stopping at earth by slamming into the atmosphere. The heat shield took the heat, and the atmosphere slowed us down. It was a tricky maneuver. We had to aim just exactly at the edge of the earth.
If we missed the edge of the earth altogether, we would fly right by Earth and be on our way back to Mars. But Mars would not be there when we got there. So we would be in an Earth-Mars orbit for decades, waiting each time for Mars to be there when we got to the Mars orbit. We better not miss the atmosphere.
If instead we aimed slightly into the earth instead of the edge, the air would push too hard on us. It would burn up our heat shield. The space ship would decelerate like a belly flop into a swimming pool from a 20 story building. Splat. Except that we would splat into a ball of fire. Spla-BAM.
But Bruce wasn't concerned about that. He trusted Rocket Science and the guidance mechanisms to do their job. He was worried about something else.
"So, how much would the heat shield weigh?" Bruce asked.
"I don't know. We would use the same kind of heat shield the astronauts used.
"The heat shield is too heavy and too big," he asserted.
"A heat shield?" I responded, sheepishly.
I could tell he had the heat shield data I was trying to find but couldn't. I didn't know where to look and he did. He was at the rocket science place and I was at the laser place. Nobody at our place knew where to find heat shield data. We didn't need heat shield for our laser satellites. Many people where he worked had the data on their shelves. I didn't calculate what it would take at all. I just thought it would work.
He caught me proposing to do something stupid, and I knew it.
Amateurs and know-nothings did what I had just done, all the time. I heard one Know-Nothing say "why don't you just move an asteroid and park it in orbit around Earth." Stupid. It is possible, but not doable. It is like someone saying "why don't you just build a concrete bridge across the Atlantic ocean and then we can just drive across." It is possible, but one can't do it.
My heat shield was almost the same kind of thing, and this time I was the proven Know-Nothing.
"We could maybe get them down to 15% of the ship mass, but they seem to be too big to launch in one piece. And then assembling them in space seems to be too tricky," he said, calmly, as if he had tried to solve this problem and couldn't and was wondering if anyone else had an answer.
Bruce Jokell was very friendly this time. His tone of voice was not condescending at all, even though he caught me being stupid. . Something must have gone right. He must have gotten laid.
I could not understand his mannerisms. I could read his voice like an open book. I could read his facial expressions and body movements, and everything was strongly indicating "completely friendly."
Then Bruce asked me "Why don't you try propulsive capture?"
That was rocket-science for "why don't you use a rocket to slow us down?"
"I could, I suppose. I'll have to go calculate that," I responded as I somewhat stared into the cafeteria, almost knowing that the answer could be ok.
His intuition was good. My intuition said "it could work."
During the time that I said "Yeah, I'll go calculate that," and then focused on eating some of the bland salad I recalled why it might work. I had used a steam rocket to get there and it worked just fine. It ought to work coming back. It took only a millisecond to realize that coming back to Earth was actually easier than leaving Mars. Earth is heavier than Mars, and that made the orbital maneuver work better.
"Maybe it will work," I blurted out after about 30 seconds of deep mental figuring.
I promptly stopped eating the rest of the cardboard meat and peas and the cold lettuce with that orange looking goo dressing.
"I have to get back to the Laser Lab," I said as looked at my watch, suggesting I was running out of time.
Bruce's body language was being even more friendly.
I got up and left.
---
I was anxious, but I had meetings at the Laser Lab, and they took all my emotional attention. As soon as I got home I started calculating, even before Terri got home.
Concept Space took over. this was like going into a dreaming-while-awake trance. I existed in another space, a space of pure logical calculations, and concepts.
The graduate student in my head watched as I walked into the spare bedroom to my desk. He said "This is easy to figure. The orbital mechanics and the nuclear rocket part are easy. I've done this kind of calculation on my cheapie pocket calculator from Radio Shack. This is really easy. Any kid in high school can do it."
I sat down and wrote the rocket equation for a ship coming back from Mars. I made the ship's rocket do a thrust as it came somewhat close to earth, to make us go into a highly elliptic orbit around Earth.
All I had to calculate was the total thrusting "delta-V" needed to make the rocket ship go into a captured orbit around Earth. If the number would turn out not too big, we would be able to do it. 5000 meters per second would be big, but doable. 1000 would be small. 3000 would be ok.
I had our rocket ship was coming in with 4000 meters per second above earth escape velocity.
To my surprise, the first step did not require much thrusting, about 800 meters / second.
Then I made the ship go into an orbit that touched the Geosynchronous orbit. That cost only 127 m/s.
This was easy. Any high school freshman could figure these rocket delta-V's from the equation.
Then the hard step: how much delta-V would it take to make the ship go into a Geosynchronous orbit? That turned out to be 1159 meters per second.
"Amazing!" I said aloud. The total was about 2,123 meters per second. That was not so much.
The next step was to calculate how much water the steam rocket would take.
"Amazing!" I said again. It only took a few key presses on a simple scientific calculator. The amount of water it would take would be about 2.2 times the mass of the space ship. Since I had assumed that water was plentiful, this was not so bad.
I could not believe it. This was so simple. Exceedingly simple.
All I had to do to make the whole thing work was to heat dirt or comets to fry or boil out the water. Everything else was just "run the steam rocket."
It really worked. Bruce gave me a key orbital maneuver concept.
Maybe the Rocket Scientist did know something after all.
When I did what Bruce said, I could use the nuclear reactor steam rocket for all the maneuvers.
"It worked like crazy. Everything worked," I told Terri when she got home.
She didn't know what I was talking about.
--
During the next few weeks I could not stop thinking about how well the steam rocket would work. Everything changed after this "discovery," because there was only one unknown: where to get the water.
Everything else pointed to ships as big as submarines.
I was sitting in a boring meeting at our big conference room about some engineering detail about some problem not related to lasers or space. I was a non-participant guest. Daydreaming overtook me.
Talking to myself, I had a conversation with someone from NASA who would fund my mission if I convinced him we could change the world and Occupy the Solar System. He had just objected to my using so much water for propellant.
"Yes, I know, we waste water by using a rocket. But I know we have plenty of water, unlimited amounts of water. You can go figure on a cheap calculator," I said to him, the imaginary NASA person.
Then I realized I had better figure it again. I had figured this many many times before, so I knew the answer. But I liked the answer. So I always liked to figure it again, because the answer always came out wonderful.
Sitting at the big conference table, I was one of about 15 people who had to listen, and one of the 14 who were not needed.
"How many Starship Submarine trips is that, between here and Mars?" I wondered, almost aloud, almost alerting the people in the meeting that I was doing something else besides listening to them.
I used my shirt-pocket scientific calculator to figure the amount of water we would get from my favorite moon of Mars, named Deimos. I assumed we would roast only 10% of the moon, leaving 90% of it intact. We would roast its dust. I assumed 10% of it was water, like some people said. That gave 1%, something I did without my calculator. I only needed to know one real number to do this: the mass of Deimos. I remembered it was about 2 trillion tons (2E12). The whole moon is only about 10 km across.
So I took 1% of 2 trillion tons. Since I was sitting in a meeting and supposed to be doing something else, all I wrote on my giant, yellow legal notepad they gave me when they started the meeting, was "20e9."
That was a cryptic way of writing 20 billion tons.
I let myself feel how good that answer was. It felt like "a hell of a lot."
"I wonder how many Starship Submarine trips that is?" I asked myself.
I had to figure again.
"Make it easy" I thought.
"Nickerson's Starship Submarine weighs 10,000 tons, give or take." I thought.
"It takes 10 tons of water for each ton of Starship Submarine to get from Earth to Mars and back, refueling at Deimos, Mars. That's 100,000 tons of water per trip. How many trips?" I asked myself.
"If we are going to Occupy the Solar System, we better get a very large number of trips," I said to the imaginary NASA official who was going to tell Congress how this changed everything.
"This is like an airport. Lots of trips per day, lots of people go for the trip." I repeated to him.
I didn't need my pocket calculator for that one, but it made the time go by easier to press some buttons.
"20 E 9 divided by 100e3 is," I said to myself, waiting to I punch the numbers into my calculator until someone said something that sounded like it could be calculated.
"200,000" read the calculator.
"200,000 trips" I said to myself. I smiled and nodded my head in approval. Maybe someone was watching me, and this looked like I was approving of what the speaker was doing because I calculated it.
"Wow!" I said, almost aloud.
If 1000 people at a time take the trip, that's 200 million people, or almost all the people in the United States of America.
Thanks Dr. Bruce Jokell, Famous Rocket Scientist from General Dynamics Space Systems Division, and Important Manager of a NASA trip to Mars Program, we could Occupy the Solar System.
Air Force Farce
"I know some guys up at Space Division who might fund us," Jokell told me about a month later.
That was exciting. All kinds of customers have money, a little money. Jokell had some friends in the United States Air Force who worked on new ideas. They were at Space Division, Los Angelis, California, about a 2 hour drive north of us. They had a little money. All we needed was some money from someone to prove that what we had was worth looking at.
Company politics always seem to work that way. No matter how much our marketing people would talk about some new idea, and no matter how much the engineers and scientists would claim it would change the world, not a single person would move to support it until someone else, outside, a customer, would pay real money, no matter how small.
That's the way it seemed to be, no matter what. If someone else paid money, no matter how small, the idea was worth pursuing. Otherwise, it was just words.
One more time I remembered what Dr. Al Lovelace told me about paying for Visions: "Bring Money"
"If you want a space mission, bring money." he told me, within one week of starting work at General Dynamics. He was the Big Boss, and he knew.
But to get money, one had to have marketing money. This was a government accounting detail.
Jokell talked Dave Nickerson into getting us some marketing money to go visit his friends at Space Division.
I had thought that we would just go, like I used to "just go" when I worked at Sandia National Labs. Until this trip, I didn't realize how the system worked. I thought that we only had to go up to Los Angelis, an hour or two ride. We would only be gone one afternoon. Why would anyone care, or even notice?
"No, this is business," Mike Moran told me. "We have to keep track of every hour we charge, or we can go to jail," he reminded me. Moran was our Comptroller (chief accountant).
I remembered that lesson. Moran, had once told me a story about time cards I could not forget.
"You can get a D in college for cheating and General Dynamics will hire you without even flinching, or asking why," he told me one day, as we were talking about how unethical General Dynamics seemed to be.
"I saw them do it," he asserted.
He saw them hire a guy with few skills who was also a known cheat. He was a warm body. General Dynamics had some government contracts that read "cost plus fee," so more people meant more fee.
I was shocked, but it was true.
Moran then told me about the work habits of General Dynamics engineers he knew:
"These engineers will try to get out of work every chance they get."
I told Moran our guys at our Laser Lab were not like that at all.
"All the engineers I know of would quit if you paid them and made them do nothing."
He was shocked, but it was true.
Moran was ethical.
"You can cheat 'em out of work, but don't cheat their timecard. That's their money," he said, sarcastically, about our employer.
So, to make sure we did not cheat the unethical ones, someone had to go get a few "Business Development" dollars to pay for us to go take a trip to the United States Air Force Space Division headquarters, just up the street a piece in Los Angelis.
We had to write a reason in the marketing money form, for the Comptroller.
"Our reason for going is: they are a prospective customer, and we will get to show them how much of a breakthrough this is for them."
I had worked with the U.S. Air Force while I was at Sandia. I knew first hand that the Space Division people were smart guys.
Jokell and I were trying to get along. Maybe we tried because we had to. I suspect Dave Nickerson, the guy with the money, had communicated to Jokell that he wanted me in the game, with my steam rockets.
Jokell had obtained a company car and we were driving on the long clean highway up to Los Angelis, a 1 or 2 hour ride, depending on traffic. We were both elated that we really were on our way to see the US Air Force Space Division, Los Angelis.
We were sitting in the car, not saying much, when Bruce broke the ice. He told me about how the girls he gets to date, now that he was divorced and in some group where he got to meet people, the "girls want to do it immediately." He did not use any explicit language.
"You mean they want to do it on the first date?" I asked him, using similar language,
"Right away. They don't want to wait." he said, not boasting, and with a tone that clearly suggested he would not mind waiting to find out more about them.
"Are they good looking?" I asked.
I had to ask. Jokell was a relatively handsome fellow, made good money in Aerospace, had a Ph.D., was a relatively straight arrow, no drugs, no dope, no violence, nothing bad. I would expect that ladies looking for someone like that would do whatever they could think of to get him.
"These are really good looking ladies," he asserted.
"This last lady I went out with was beautiful, smart, not off on metaphysics or psychic phenomena." he added.
I could not tell if he was bragging or making it up. Most males make things like that up. I envied him.
That did break the ice.
When we finally arrived at Space Division, Jokell delivered the presentation. He let me contribute 3 viewgraphs, describing the key discovery of the optimum in specific impulse. But he got to do the talking. He buried what he considered to be an obtuse point deep in a stack of overhead slides that would put anyone to sleep. And that is what we did. We put them to sleep.
All I saw was that he screwed it up again, by not pointing out the factor of 100 right away.
I thought there was a factor of 100 increase in payload. Our exofuel device would deliver thousands of tons. Bruce's way the way NASA and the Air Force would do it, would deliver tens of tons. That would make us a 100 times better than anything known.
That would be a breakthrough.
Where in our presentation did he show the breakthrough? Why should the guys at Space Division listen and do something?
Nothing we presented would do show it.
To his credit, Bruce actually did show my overhead of the rocket equation, the one that I figured when I went skiing at Vail, April 1987, and hurt my shoulder joint.
But he completely and entirely missed the fact that we are talking a huge, absolutely huge jump in payload. The Air Force would really want to know about a huge jump in payload.
They didn't get it from Bruce Jokell.
I can't fault him that badly. I never made my point either, or Jokell and everyone else would have gotten it.
----
I went to visit Bruce Jokell one last time before we had to deliver a final exofuel report. I was there on a Saturday, on my own time.
He was sitting at his desk in a rather open area in what a friend of mine called a "bull pen." The bull pen stretched longer than a football field and almost as wide. This was on the 2nd floor of a General Dynamics building where they kept Jokell, and probably some of the Evil General Dynamics contractors. This was one of the Bull Pens they put engineers in if they only earned a "D" grade in college, or if they got caught cheating and needed a job.
"You can work as little as you can get away with in the bull pen. This is Cost Plus Fixed Fee contracting, and you are a Cost. You earn the Fee by sitting here." I heard Mike Moran say, in my mind.
Jokell's small desk and little Mac SE computer un-impressed me, as the sun blinded my eyes through his cheap metal window shade. He didn't have much of an office. I had an office with a locking door. He was in a bullpen..
I was trying to tell him we need to find water in space, water ice, or space won't work.
My words, "Space won't work." didn't register and didn't communicate quite right.
"Won't work" meant "all we will get to do is send 3 guys on a Field Trip to Mars, at our expense."
All I could think of was some Sports Event in Space.
"We are doing this To Occupy The Solar System, Nickerson and I", I thought.
"What do you want, a big chunk of ice with 'Tony take me' scratched on it?" he mocked at me.
Scorn. disgust.
"Well, Yeah." I replied.
"You dull son of a bitch," I thought.
I left mad. His scorn made me mad. Jokell and I never did get along like buddies.
My kind didn't care about an adventure to Mars. We wanted to occupy it. And if we could not occupy because Nature denied us the resources, then that's that. We would go away.
I was thinking: if I don't get a big iceberg, space won't work and I won't care.
An iceberg was the only way we could leave the planet 1000 at a time.
----
Exofuel never went anywhere. Bruce gave me a copy of our thick final report to prove it.
· Dr. Jim Powell, birth of the Steam Rocket
Birth of a Steam rocket
Actually slinking and actually sneaking, I was making it happen.
It was a typically cloudy morning in Washington, DC. The Hyatt Regency, a somewhat expensive, business class hotel in Crystal City only 1/2 mile from the National Airport, provided me a courier bus to take me the 1/4 mile to the Metro Station, or to the airport when I needed it to. Sometimes you don't walk because it's too slow.
Crystal City was not a city. It was just a lot of brand new, high rise buildings in one mile strip near the Pentagon, including expensive hotels with shiny reflecting windows, and with all the main buildings connected by underground tunnels. Bureaucrats live here. They hand out money.
I dodged the light rain and drizzle when leaving the courier bus from my hotel at the south end of Crystal city and hurried into the tunnel to the Metro.
The Metro was always clean and safe. Sleek modern trains arrived often in the clean, safe, elegant stations, stations where the concrete walls were patterned with a modern architecture. The Metro was always perfectly clean. It fit the image of all the professional people who took it work, and fit the image of what a subway in the capitol of the United States should be. I was taking the Metro from Crystal City, in Virginia, to the Pentagon.
A courteous but clearly authoritative, approximately 55 year old, probably black, thin and clean-shaven Metro policeman politely informed me "there is no eating in this area."
I was eating from a bag of roasted sunflower seeds while waiting for the train.
"Oh, I'm sorry," I said, a bit startled as he brought me back to the reality of the clean tunnel of the Metro station. I was completely focused on trying to recognize every person at the Metro station. I was sneaking to the Pentagon and did NOT want to meet anyone I knew. Everything disappeared except the faces of the people at the station.
Immediately I put the food away. He knew I was lost in thought. I could tell he had seen my type many times. My type came from elsewhere, didn't know the rules and was typically lost and focused somewhere else, deep in thought.
I looked around and didn't see a single piece of paper or trash. The concrete pattern on the walls was clean, plain and pleasant. I sat on a perfectly clean bench. There were only two or three people wandering around me at this time. I missed rush hour. So far, ok.
I was sneaking, because I was not here on the business my boss sent me to do. That was yesterday. Yesterday we dodged the rain and took a cab. Yesterday, Retired Navy Captain Del Ritchhart was my guide and took us inside the Pentagon on General Dynamics Laser Systems Lab business. Del and I wandered around talking to Admirals and Captains about how wonderful an orbiting satellite would be, whose only mission is to point a laser towards earth. We explained how our laser would paint the ocean with blue laser light beams, digitally coded with secret messages for the submarines deep below. Everyone knew Del.
Today, Slinking and sneaking, I was also on my way to the same Pentagon, using the same Metro stop, and going in the same security gate. Only this time I was alone, completely on my own. I was on here for my own project, which my boss hated. He would probably get very mad if he caught me.
I was only supposed to be in the Pentagon to see Navy people about Laser Lab business, not to see the Air Force, Star Wars guys about manned space travel.
I made sure I didn't get off at "Pentagon City" stop. That was just a big mall. The correct stop was "Pentagon." This was stop for the basement entrance to the Pentagon. The Metro stopped here and only here, not to some place on the surface to a parking lot.
I went up the long, long escalator to the Pentagon from the Metro. The escalator seemed like a few hundred feet long and nearly straight up. One could get dizzy looking up the long tunnel. I looked at everyone who was coming the other way, to make sure I didn't know them.
I sat down by the old wood benches next to the bank of security guards to wait for my contact . The Pentagon security gate had a big waiting area with about 20 old fashioned wood-style benches.
I looked around and began to feel I was in a place just like the old movies about the Pentagon. Except that this was in color, not black and white. The old movies of the Pentagon were black and white. I started to daydream and imagine was really at the old Pentagon, during the 1950's.
It was always better to be early here. Del Ritchhart taught me that. Sometimes our escorts would get here early, maybe an extra 12 or 7 minutes ahead of time. That would mean we could get another 12 or whatever minutes with the people we were trying to influence or learn from. Everybody's schedule here seemed to be measured in minutes.
Every tens of seconds seemed like 3 minutes as I sat here, waiting, scanning everyone's faces to be sure I would not be recognized. There sure seemed to be a lot of non-military people coming here today, going to the Pentagon.
There were a lot of people going in and out of the security gates, too.
Clearly ethnic Americans, some with clearly Italian features, a disproportionally large number of American with African descent.
At least 3 fat ladies waddling around with apparently no schedule driving them, clearly badged for Pentagon security and passing through the security gates like they were Admirals.
Hot looking professional ladies in business suits moving with clear intent.
Lost souls in business suits from the engineering or science staff of some contractor far from California, looking around and gawking at everything and who have obviously never been here before and led by their perfectly groomed marketing goat.
Crowds of high school visitors on tour and dutifully following their barking military escort in Army green-brown uniform, holding his closely shaved head perfectly rigid with respect to his shoulders and his shoulders perfectly rigid with respect to the rest of him, and who was making sure they got the spirit of the regimentation of the Pentagon.
Colonels and officers absolutely perfectly groomed, with an equally perfectly groomed aid or two attending them. Three or four perfectly dressed males in dark blue suits with stripes exactly 1/2 to 3/4 inch apart and with the conservative tie and white shirt, walking with a clearly marked Admiral and giving him their "Elevator Speeches."
I was still sitting, waiting for Powell, entranced by the people going in and out the security gates.
As I sat there waiting for my contact inside the Pentagon to come out and get me, I fretted that every person who walked in or out might be someone I just met, and tell Del Ritchhart that they saw me. Del would tell my boss. And I would be in deep trouble.
I tried to look at everyone before they could see me, to make sure I could hide my face if I recognized them.
The security gate looked the same today as it did yesterday. So I fretted, because it reminded me that it was only yesterday when Del Richhart escorted me, and everyone knew him. When Del Richhart was a Captain in the U.S. Navy he had been their Official Navy Liaison to the "Hill." Everyone knew him.
Any contact between the elected officials on capitol hill and the Navy went through him, or else. Or else trouble for the Navy guy. No matter where we went, even when we would just be walking somewhere in the Pentagon, someone would run up to him and shake his hand and smile and make such a fuss.
That is why we hired Del. He knew everyone and could get us to see anyone. It went the other way, too. If he said "I don't feel comfortable with that" then that was a message that we better not go tell somebody what we planned to tell them. We would sometimes exaggerate.
The contractors made it a point to use people like Del Ritchhart to make contacts in the Pentagon. The good part was that if a retired Navy Admiral or Captain called up one of his active-duty buddies for an appointment, the buddy would almost always grant the meeting. That was exceptionally valuable for the contractor.
The bad part was that these retired fellows were the most ethical fellows I ever met. They were like fine-mesh filters. They would only let us through if what we were proposing to talk about was good for the Navy or the government. The retired fellows kept their reputations clean.
Dell was the same and kept us honest. During the last year, he went with us every time we went to the Pentagon. He sure introduced us to a lot of people. We met so many people that I had good reason to be afraid someone would recognize me and ask "What are you doing here today?"
Lucky for me, no one saw me.
Looking at my watch, I realized that I had only been sitting here about 3 minutes. It seemed like half an hour.
My mind started to wander back to rocket science. Technical daydreaming like this almost always reduced my anxiety and helped me prepare and get into the mood of impending meetings.
No matter how I calculated it, the simple steam rocket worked like crazy. Just
get some water and fly. So simple. "And it works," I said, almost
aloud.
The payloads are big, as big as a Starship Submarine. The propulsion is simple, just like a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine's nuclear reactor water heater, almost. The missions would be stunning, a 100 people at a time, in a Starship Submarine, going to Mars. A whole fleet of them.
I heard the noise of the Pentagon and saw the people again. I was back in my chair, back from technical rehearsing.
"Where is Jim Powell?" I thought. I had never met him.
"What does he look like?" I thought.
" I only know his voice," I thought, having only talked to him on the phone.
"What we need is someone who can design a steam rocket that everyone will believe," said a voice in my head, trying to sort through my strategic intent for the meeting.
Locke Bogart led me to Jim Powell. Locke was one of my colleagues at GD LSL. Dave Freiwald brought him in. The engineers at GD LSL thought Locke was nuts, evil, crazy, and a wild man. They didn't like him at all. Locke did come from a whole other universe, an alternate reality. They were right.
But not evil. Locke was everything they said except evil. Locke was good, ethical, and smart, definitely smart. He could see concepts at the speed of lightning.
Locke came from the part of the defense department that was supposed to come up with new ideas. He was trained not to see barriers, and not to follow arbitrary rules made up by arbitrary kings and despots in arbitrary bureaucratic structures. He did not fit at GD LSL. But Freiwald brought Locke to the lab the same as be brought me in. None of us fit with General Dynamics because none of us were evil, power mad and greedy enough.
Locke took one look at the steam rocket and figured all the relevant technical details in about 10 milliseconds. He listened to the arguments for water of hydration and ice in space, and in another 10 milliseconds, he knew we needed to find a way to get a simple space mission to find it. He believed the water was out there just from other data he his acquaintances had told him about. In a flash he had figured it to the conclusion. As we used to say in college, "Done. Simple." Like a physicist of the finest kind, like a Creating Visionary from the Wild part of the Defense Department. I liked that part of Locke.
Jim Powell told me over the phone he was arranging for us to talk with "Crazy Roger," Colonel Roger Lenard, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who was now in charge of a secret nuclear rocket program.
Dr. Jim Powell was also a Creator Visionary from the wild part of the Department of Energy, at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. Powell and Locke knew each other. They worked together. Both knew reactors and how to figure them.
Jim and I and Hans Ludewig had talked over the phone, and Jim came up with a design for a nuclear rocket engine that would work on steam. He faxed me a copy and I faxed Dave Nickerson a copy. We all saw the design sketch.
Another 3 minutes had gone by. It was already 5 minutes before I was supposed to be here.
Hans Ludewig and Jim Powell appeared at the security area. "Tall fellow," I thought.
Bearded, very pleasant voice, not fat, not heavy set. Long coat, like they wear in New York. Of course, Powell must be from New York. No suit.
Hans was thin, about my height, very German looking.
I never knew where I was going in the Pentagon. I was always lost. Someone else was always the guide. It was an old building. It seemed to keep feeling like an old building no matter how often I wandered through parts that were being renovated. The passages were perfectly marked, with coordinates any engineer or soldier could follow. The floor number and the indicator for the number of the inner ring were painted as a number-letter mark, clearly stamped at every turn and every opportunity where one could go the wrong way. But I never know how to navigate this place anyway. Powell knew.
Powell lead us downstairs, to a basement. I thought he was kidding when he said "we have a hole in the basement of the Pentagon."
This really was a basement area. It looked like it. It was jammed with offices and important rooms with conference tables and a projection screen for viewgraphs, just like the rest of the building. The Star Wars basement place looked old. The placards and the framed posters were modern. shiny and new, very professionally done, perfect. The letters and words that were placed on the wall to designate the name and function of the important rooms were also new. But this place was still felt old, like it was built back during WWII. At least it didn't smell old.
No matter where I went in this Pentagon there would be a security desk area with no windows anywhere, and three people in charge. There would always be at least one well dressed and very attractive lady, one very plain but interesting and attractive lady, and one grossly overweight lady who would waddle slowly at her own pace and who did not care who was in a hurry or not. I was just a face to that one. The three of them were busy processing my security clearance.
This was definitely a standard waiting room for security. But it was dark down here. Not very many lights. There was plenty enough light to read by because they kept lamps by the chairs, and that was it. This furniture looked like it was the very best you could find in the Thrift Store. I noticed how beat up and scratched it was.
It only took them a few minutes to show me I passed the security screening. My clearance was ok. Someone inconspicuously pressed a hidden button behind the counter as we approached so we could open the metal door into the more secure area.
Powell led us to a small room inside another, truly unimpressive and old waiting area, with another, uncomfortable, thin couch and hard chairs. Then Crazy Roger came in. His shortness and thinness surprised me.
Powell introduced me. I had heard of Crazy Roger but never met him till now. He was short, cocky, animated. Jim and Roger talked for a minute or two about something else. And then Powell talked to Roger and told him that this rocket engine would change the world, and all we needed was $5 K to document it.
"Sure." said Roger, "Tack it on to the something or other." he instructed. Jim was already doing a reactor design of some kind for some space propulsion topic. I did not know any of its details at all. But I clearly understood "Tack it on..." That was how many great ideas got funded. I vouched for the fact that the nuclear heated steam rocket will definitely change the balance of power in space. No doubt about that. "Whoever gets one first, wins," I said.
"We got the money," I thought, over and over. I was elated.
Jim was pretty smart. He told me in physics language how he had tested some nuclear reactor fuel beads that were supposed to go inside a gas cooled reactor. For some reason, he actually had tested these beads in red hot steam.
"You tested them at 1200 C?" I asked.
That temperature would make the pipes glow red hot.
"Yes, of course," he assured me.
This was odd. The gas in the gas cooled reactor that I thought he was working on was helium. Helium is one of the most inert gasses known. The reactor beads were designed to work in helium. Why would they test the beads in steam? Chemically reacting, red hot, highly corrosive steam?
The weird part of this is that the reactor fuel beads were not designed to work in water at all. Instead, Jim tested them in steam. I don't know why he did that.
I was sure glad, because this was precisely what we needed. It was real. We needed something real. A real test.
"The steam immediately oxidized the pellets and coated them with an oxide, insulating. They didn't leak for a few days. That means they'll work." Jim said.
I knew exactly how well that orange-hot temperature, 1200 K, would work in a steam rocket. It would work just barely fine.
Since Powell's fuel pellets survived, and since he knew the physics behind this fortunate Coincidence Of Nature, it meant we had found the key piece needed to design the nuclear heated steam rocket.
As we walked out, the philosophical graduate student in my head emoted a mini-fantasy.
"If you are an obvious Visionary, other Visionaries give you wonderful Visions as gifts, for free," the philosophical graduate student asserted, as we passed people in the Pentagon hallway who might have known me, but I didn’t care.
"He gave me his "particle bed reactor" vision, and I gave him the steam rocket vision." the student continued.
I realized that during this uneventful meeting, Jim Powell and Hans Ludewig invented a nuclear heated steam rocket to take 1000 people through the solar system.
Powell and Ludewig had other things to do, so we all went our own way. Someone led me out of the secure area, back to the Metro entrance area.
As I wandered around the news stand about 100 feet from the Metro door area, marveling at the different news papers these Pentagon people read and the 100 varieties of donuts they eat, I had only myself to talk to.
I was fantasizing:
"This invention is just like the invention of the steam powered ocean liner. We must have a steam engine first. I could not take 3000 Italians and Irishmen, fighting with each other all the way from Europe to America, and marrying each other's sisters when they got there, on a boat powered by sails. We needed a real engine, a powerful engine for the ship.
Sailboats are
nice, but they only take a few dozen people across an ocean, and the trip takes
too long. Columbus proved it. When we invented the steam engine and powered
ships with it, everything changed. The engine made the difference between a few
thousand pilgrims and a real mass migration. The same thing happens with space."
I wandered down the long, long escalator to the Metro station. Perfectly clean. Not a speck of dirt. Not a single piece of discarded paper or food wrapper. Discarded newspapers went in the garbage can, which was also in perfect condition. Nobody seemed to be talking.
I started talking to myself about Powell:
Powell understood instantly. Powell is no rocket scientist. He is a Ph.D. physicist. That's sure better than a rocket scientist. And he's a Visionary. He saw immediately what the engine would mean to humans occupying the solar system. I didn't have to explain. He knew. He even told me what it would mean.
People in suits were walking around the Metro station, waiting for a train. No matter what time of day I rode there were people like me in suits wandering around here.
I really liked this Metro. So quiet. So clean.
I was hyped and pumped up. All sorts of conversations were running through my head.
They say there are 10 girls for every 1 man in Washington DC. I don't believe it. I see many ladies here who are pretty and trim. I can count.
Only about 1 out of 3 ladies is NOT reading a book. I wonder why?
About 1 lady out of 2 is with somebody. Must be that there are 2 ladies for each male.
The Metro was such a nice ride. I had to check and recheck to make sure I caught the right one. I almost never went anywhere in Washington on my own. Del always told me which Metro to get.
I still had to catch the plane back to San Diego today. The Metro took me to Crystal City. From Crystal City I went to my hotel room. I have to watch for my stop because it came up fast, and I was running out of time.
My stop came up fast, like it was supposed to. I always got confused here. I always got off the Metro train at Crystal City perfectly ok. But the stop is completely underground and there are several ways to leave the Metro Area. They are all underground. They all lead to underground tunnels with newsstands, shops and places to eat. No road signs.
If I didn’t dally too long I would have 5 extra minutes to browse the shops.
I wondered "Now which way do I go?"
I only had myself to talk to. So I did, almost talking aloud:
I count 5 racks of dirty magazines at this newsstand.
I guess men away from home get lonesome.
I can buy a Penthouse.
There sure are a lot of others on this rack.
Hey, this is explicit. I'm buying a few of these. Hard to choose.
Across the aisle I see Italian food. Too bloating.
Two shops down. I see Chinese. I like Chinese food.
Crystal City underground was a Mall, all underground.
I was still hyped about the Pentagon meeting and now started talking, repeating myself, to myself, over and over.
There is plenty of water in space, but there is no hydrogen.
Water is di-hydrogen monoxide.
Separating out the "monoxide" is really hard to do.
Jim Powell understood in a millisecond.
Jim knew instantly, and so did Dave Nickerson and Lock Bogart.
We can now send 100 or a 1000 people to Mars on a Starship Submarine.
Every time I walked down the shining tile brick walkway the same memory came back. The movie "Dune" had people living deep underground in beautiful rooms, deep underground in tunnels.
Every time I walked this way I pretended I was in "Dune," modern day style.
The brick hallway had steps that changed levels and changed direction. I would always pretend these hallways were the tunnels of an asteroid, and I was moving through the tunnels.
I wanted to know: How would it feel moving through the tunnels inside an asteroid, in zero gravity?
An asteroid has in nearly zero gravity.
I had figured several years earlier that we would have to live deep inside the asteroid, in tunnels. We would need to have shops and working offices just like here in Crystal City, all in tunnels. We would live in volumes, just like the offices above.
In space, we would live in volumes, not on surfaces like on Earth.
How would it feel to almost float around the asteroid tunnels in zero gravity?
I pretended more:
These newsstands and food shops on both sides of me are what in this asteroid tunnel.
I need to give me just a little kick in the right direction, and I move,
almost without needing to push.
These daydreams about living in tunnels in asteroids were really naive. Jokell would have laughed at them.
The Hyatt Regency Hotel was new, clean, shining, majestic, with a huge volume in the great room when we enter. It's shining escalators going up at least 3 levels, up only half way to the ceiling. The see-through elevator goes up and down at least 5 levels and disappears into the ceiling.
Hurrying to my room I talked to myself loud enough that someone might have heard me.
This is spacey.
Marble walls.
Huge.
I want a house like this.
One really good perk working for General Dynamics was that they put us up in the best hotels. I could take an Admiral here for a meeting and he would feel completely comfortable.
---
Jerry Husler was a tall, blond, smiling fellow who looked a little like a football player. He had a deep voice and a friendly handshake. Jerry was our Director of Marketing. He and I had been talking to some fellows at the Defense Research Projects Agency in the Washington DC area about a secret communication system. They were on some higher floor of a 15 floor hi rise.
We had just finished telling these prospective customers something that would probably not work. It stretched our ability to deliver and would probably break the laws of engineering and physics. But Jerry knew how to make really professional looking handouts. So, even if the thing would not work, he made it look like it would work because he printed it on glossy, color handouts. This was the best of General Dynamics ethics.
We were looking out in the late afternoon light at the building next to the one we were in, with its rows and rows of windows .
"That building is about the size of the ice I would use for a space ship," I told Jerry. I explained the concept and how I would take as many people as were in that building to Mars, and how I could use water ice as rocket fuel in a nuclear heated steam rocket to get them there.
"It will work," I told Jerry. I kept telling anyone I met and everyone I worked with how it would work. My excitement about it would not stay quiet.
I couldn't stop talking about the steam rocket and how it would change everything.
"All we need to find is water in space, and everything will change," I asserted.
I owned the discovery, a real discovery, and I knew it. I could prove it. I could back up every statement I made.
"We could go to space wholesale." I concluded.
"Freiwald won't like your doing that space thing," Jerry asserted.
I would agree that Freiwald would definitely would not like my having stayed over an extra half day to talk to the Pentagon guys on my own space topic.
"Freiwald will hand you your balls on a platter if he ever finds out," Jerry volunteered.
"He doesn't have the power to do it." I responded, without even waiting to think about what I had just said. Freiwald had the power to fire me. But he didn’t have the power to change the laws of Physics.
Freiwald really didn't have "the power," because The Force was not with him.
I was completely confident, and even bold.
"I have something that will make the Laser Lab look silly." I told Jerry, smiling.
"I have something that will change the way humans go to space. Freiwald doesn't have anything like that."
I let Jerry know I was completely confident and had something real.
Jerry dealt in bullshit. Real things stopped him cold.
I didn't realize it immediately, but Jerry was testing me.
As we were waiting for the elevator and looking out the window of the 20 year old building, I realized Jerry was betraying my trust. He was telling Freiwald what I was doing, whenever he would find out.
When I told Jerry "he doesn't have the power" I was signaling inadvertently but forcefully that if Freiwald tries, I will succeed on top of him.
I inadvertently signaled to Jerry I was the one who had The Power. I had the power to hand them their own prized parts on a rusty platter.
Locke Bogart had taken a risk by introducing me to Jim Powell on GD LSL company time. Locke knew we had to risk our jobs to make real Visions come true.
Locke and I and nearly every Program Manager or executive who worked for or with Dave Freiwald learned to dislike the guy Freiwald. It was a shame, because Freiwald really tried. He tried hard. He was imaginative and thorough. He looked for loopholes for us to get extra perks.
I had liked Freiwald for many years before I worked for him, because he tried so persistently. But he just plain drove people mad. He drove customers mad. He drove his employees, his colleagues and his equals mad. He drove his bosses mad enough for them to move him out of their sight.
Locke Bogart only made some people mad only some of the time. But Locke would figure and Locke had Visions. Locke helped me bootleg steam rockets because Locke was a Visionary, too.
Now all we needed is water in space.
· Jim Arnold and the Near Earth Asteroid crowd
It really matters where you physically are.
What would you do if you really wanted to know something, and don't know where to start?
You would go where it's happening.
You have to be where it's happening. If you want to be a movie star, you can't be in Kansas or South Dakota. You have to move near Hollywood. It's the same with anything else. If you want to learn about space things, you have to move to the Aerospace Belt. That would be Southern California, along the coast. And that's where I had moved to.
Yes, it's nearly always hard to move to where it's happening. In my case, I had given up a good job with the government. I gave up a secure job and a great pension and a wonderful vacation package, 5 weeks a year. But I had been in Albuquerque, not Southern California in the Aerospace Belt. Nobody in Albuquerque knew where the water was in space.
If only I could find water in space, we would have something we could use to start exploring and living there. Humans could start leaving Earth. Where was the water? I was now in the right place, so someone here should know.
My day job in the Aerospace Belt was to get a space program going to make and launch satellites with lasers on them, to beam communication data to submarines lurking deep beneath the ocean. That day job let me meet all kinds of people who would know who knows.
My hobby job was to find the key for humans to leave Earth. I needed to find water in space.
You need to ask "who would know who knows?"
Then you get lots of answers.
If you ask "who knows where the water is in space?", then almost no one knows. You may as well be in Kansas, or South Dakota.
But if you ask "who would know who knows where there would be water in space?" then you get many answers. All kinds of people give you leads, and many of them are very good.
And that's exactly what happened.
I was in the right place, in San Diego working for a rocket maker and near to UC San Diego (UCSD). One of the things UCSD did was to have lunch meetings where people would talk about space. Different people from different places would come and talk about what they knew and did.
The campus of the University of California at San Diego had big eucalyptus trees, clean, well dressed and well fed students, nice cars in the parking lots and very plain but clean architecture. It also had old metal walls enclosing the labs and offices. UCSD had painted some walls a dull, dirty yellow.
I had to break away from work to go listen to the speakers UCSD invited. The California Space Institute, associated with UCSD, brought visitors to the campus to speak about space topics. I was able to get on their mailing list because I was a Program Manager of something related to space and satellites from General Dynamics. General Dynamics had money and very good connections, so they liked us to be there.
At one such meeting I listened as an astronomer talk about how his calculation showed the rings of Saturn looked suspiciously like the aftermath of a whole moon exploding, about 10 million years ago.
And after that meeting, I got to meet Sally Ride. Famous Astronaut Sally Ride was their new President. I wanted to meet Dr. Sally Ride. I think she was the first female astronaut. I figured maybe she could help tell the world about the steam rocket that could let us inhabit the solar system. "People would listen to her," I thought.
I thought she would be really interested in space. But to my surprise she was burned out about space. She was leaving space.
Sally Ride told me she was going to change her focus and do lasers. We laughed about it because I told her I wanted to leave lasers to do space. We talked about lasers a bit. I told her I had learned that the atmosphere of Mars could have an inverted population of carbon monoxide molecules. One can sometimes make lasers with gasses that have "inverted populations."
That could mean that the atmospheres of planets might be used to create an extremely high power, high energy laser in space, if we so arranged. We might be able to use the atmosphere of whole planets to amplify communication signals, for communication.
Or maybe, even more exciting and evil, we would use the lasers as extremely powerful weapons. We would fry errant enemies with lasers powered by the atmospheres of entire planets. The energized atmosphere of a whole planet would be controlled by super smart, very powerful Masters. We would stimulate the atmosphere to emit planet sized beams of energy, and focus them from outer space on to the surface of victim planets. It would be more powerful than any weapon anywhere.
Fantasy. But quite possible.
{{ images: Mars, with it's "inverted population" atmosphere, pulsing, glowing, just bursting with energy,
and then us: stimulating it to emit,
and then: BAM! a planet sized power beam shoots out,
doing Star Wars type damage ( ! ) }}
Now that would be a phasor beam project, for sure.
But that was lasers with an evil Star Wars twist, and I wanted water in space, completely different.
"Ah, you want to talk to Jim Arnold. He studies asteroids and meteorites." she said.
Jim Arnold was standing around right there among us, not saying much.
"Is there any water of hydration on an asteroid?" I asked.
When you ask a question, you need to use the right vocabulary. "Water of hydration" was the right vocabulary.
That question in plain language meant "would any of the asteroids out there give off water steam if we heated them?" If you cook cookies till they roast and turn black, water comes off. That is almost "water of hydration". If you cook Epsom Salts, water comes off. That is real water of hydration.
"Well, in some, yes there is." replied Jim Arnold.
Then I told Jim Arnold about the steam rocket and how it would push a big payload, bigger than anything we had yet invented. But it needed water. Huge amounts of water.
"You know there is a whole group of people interested in that. You ought to talk to them." he told me.
He asked me to follow him to his office. A small office in the Chemistry Department. In a building with dull painted metal walls and metal doors. In a dull building. On an upper floor with dirty leaves blown there from the wet ocean wind. He could almost see the ocean from his office. And then Jim Arnold gave me John Lewis's phone number.
"Talk to him. Tell him I said to call." he said, giving me the entre I needed.
When he walked out of his office to get something, I stood there focusing closely at the index card he let me hold. The card had John Lewis's number on it, the number Arnold gave me. There were more numbers on the card, and I copied one down to make sure I had at least two ways to get hold of this fellow. I kept phone data like Arnold did, but mine was on computer, not like his on those old index cards..
In those days, people used 3 x 5 inch, stiff paper sheets called "index cards" to store their phone numbers. If they lost the card, they lost everything. Nowadays, we use computers. If the disc drive burns out, we loose everything.
Arnold didn't tell me that he was one of the first people who analyzed the idea that there could be a whole lake of ice at the poles of our own moon. He never said a word that he was interested in finding water, too. He did not brag that he predicted ice on the forever dark poles of the moon. He never volunteered that he worked with the former head of JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, the NASA funded lab of California Institute of Technology.
He didn't say a thing about moon ice, even several years later when he would review my a paper on mining the local comets for ice. He just would not brag.
He started me on the right path. I thank him forever.
I went there, to a meeting at UCSD asking who would know who would know, and someone knew.
-----------
· Mayor of the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, and Space Solar Power catastrophe
· Mayor of the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, and Space Solar Power catastrophe
Echoes of what Don Summers had told me, verbatim, just before I had left a secure job rattled in my head:
"The conquest of space is going nowhere until there is a clear profit."
If getting all the electricity humans would ever need from space is not a clear profit, then what is?
The California Space Institute had mailed me a notice about a Solar Power Satellite meeting. That would be an interesting meeting. Getting electricity from a satellite should be "a clear profit." That's what I was looking for. They also claimed the world famous Carl Sagan and the famous astronaut Buzz Aldrin would be there.
This could be a very important meeting. We could change the world, entirely. No more oil wars. No more nuclear reactor problems. Free electricity from the sun, from space, for everyone.
We could save the world.
I showed up. A happy mathematician business man who said he wanted to be "Mayor of the Moon." hosted the meeting. His name was Dan Greenwood. Dan looked about 49 years old, taller, thinner, pleasant, wore a brown suit and was always smiling.
The famous Carl Sagan was supposed to show up, so I made it a point to be there. Some local San Diego rocket scientists and space scientists sponsored the meeting. Their program would set up solar power satellites and beam electricity down to Earth. Dan Greenwood's group would put solar power electric generators on the Moon instead of on satellites. Then they would beam microwave electricity back to Earth, and we would all be saved.
Someone had named this meeting "Lunar Power 1."
The first time I met him Dan Greenwood said
"Hey, lets generate electricity on the moon, using solar power, and beam it to earth with microwave beams. And it will only cost a Trillion dollars to start. What a grand idea."
Duh? He seemed to be a bit simple. These guys seemed like clowns. Were these guys for real?
It was early evening of a very pleasant, mildly sunny day in La Jolla, California. A gentle breeze blew from the Pacific Ocean, and green succulent plants were almost visibly growing and were already as tall as trees. Flowers were in full bloom. The La Jolla building had red tile floors, and the triple-wide, open doors leading to a garden-like walk that went directly to the beach.
Rocket science and the Navy picked a great part of the world. I was glad to be here.
The sun was still shining, and it was shining directly into my eyes. I was on the second floor, facing towards the west facing window, watching the sun setting lower and closer to the ocean. A rather pretty scene, I thought, as I looked straight out the window over the deep blue Pacific ocean at sunset.
I had to pay something atrocious for the meal, but it didn't matter. Carl Sagan and Buzz Aldrin were supposed to be there.
This was a perfect scene for a save-the-world project.
I didn't know exactly what the Astronaut Buzz Aldrin had done, but I sure knew about Carl Sagan. My wife Terri gave me one of his books for Christmas because it was about infinity and space. He was famous. He was on "Nova" and talked about "billions and billions of stars." People would listen to Carl Sagan.
I thought about how I would tell Carl Sagan about the steam rocket and how to populate the solar system.
I kept looking for Carl Sagan. No Carl Sagan. Dr. Bruce Jokell Showed up instead.
What a downer. Why would Bruce Jokell show up? I was still not comfortable with Jokell, because he was still wrong on using electricity for his rocket fuel, and I was an Aspie. Bruce and I stayed away from each other this meeting.
Dan Greenwood noticed that I would listen. Aspies will hyper focus on things. The reason I never got caught being an Aspie was that I focused on people. Most Aspies are like Spock and don't care about humanoids. I focused on Greenwood.
Dan repeated to me at least a few different times that he wanted to be "Mayor of the Moon." From his mannerisms and the way he talked about how he would achieve that goal, I concluded he was not playing Hardball Politics like General Dynamics. He was playing back-woods softball.
My General Dynamics training sprang into action when I noticed a scary poster towards the south end of the meeting room.
"Never show anything that scares the customer away." I recalled Jerry Husler telling us, teaching us to be marketing types. Jerry Husler was one of those marketers you hear about. He would make things up, have them drawn up into very pretty brochures, and sell them. Then the engineers would have to find a way to make the crazy things work that Jerry had shown in his beautiful brochures.
Recall that Husler was our chief marketer and taught us a lot.
"Never show anything that scares the customer away," his voice repeated.
I saw "$1 Trillion" in big letters, as the cost of the program. I'm a customer, and that was about to scare me away.
"One Trillion dollars!," I said aloud, exclaiming to no one as I read the poster aloud.
I looked around. Nobody was listening to me, fortunately.
"Dumb. Real Dumb," I thought.
I had learned not to say "a Billion dollars," for our laser satellite. These guys were saying "Trillion.", a 1000 time more than a billion. At the Laser Lab we had done everything we could think of to drop the starting price of our satellite to well under $500 Million. That $500 million was down from the $2.9 billion we first proposed. Our $2.9 Billion scared the Navy people away. That was way too much. That was more than the price of a submarine. The entire Defense Budget was only $250 Billion.
Jerry's words echoed again: "Never show anything that scares the customer away,"
These "Lunar Power 1" guys were imagining that their program would cost 4 times more than the entire Defense Budget of the United States. And that was just to start the program.
That was Stupid. That will chase away any and all serious supporters.
I had decided to go to this meeting because I wanted to see a "clear profit" in space, and to meet Carl Sagan. Carl didn't show and the "clear profit" was a clear disaster..
This other fellow, Buzz Aldrin, was the one who actually showed up. I couldn't exactly place him, but I knew that his name sounded like he was one of the important astronauts. I had forgotten which one. I never could follow the names of sports figures.
I knew that Neil Armstrong was the first to set foot on the moon, and Sally Ride was a lady astronaut, whom I met here at UCSD (University of California, San Diego), and Harrison Schmidt was a Ph.D. geologist who went to the moon and tried being a Senator.
And I remembered exactly where we were and what we were doing when the astronauts landed on the moon. But I didn’t remember their names at all.
I had to think hard to remember Buzz's role.
I didn't meet them personally when they landed on the moon, so I didn’t know them.
I could not recognize them either, because the astronauts had bubbles for faces. I couldn't relate their space suit bubble to a person anyway. What they did was easy to remember, but not their names.
NASA focused on athletic adventures. I didn't follow sports or any other athletic adventure, space or not.
I was surprised that he was just a plain looking fellow no taller than me, with a light brown suit. He was so friendly that I easily started talking to him right away. I focused on Buzz because he knew what he was talking about, was excited and passionate about it, and people would listen to him.
We immediately started talking about going to Mars. Neither of us even realized that we didn’t ease in to the topic at all.
I told Buzz Aldrin about how I would power a space ship using steam, and how we would use a nuclear reactor to boil the water from the tank and turn it into red hot steam. I told him of the orbital maneuvers I would use to get to Mars and back. He understood everything instantly and instinctively.
Buzz told me how he would make his Mars space ship by having two astronaut capsules held together by a long, thousand foot cord, and that he would spin them. The spinning would create his gravity.
We all knew that without gravity, our bodies would loose bone calcium and we would have severe osteoporosis by the time we landed on Mars.
Buzz thoroughly earned his Ph.D. in Astronautics from MIT, judging from the things he said and the way he said them. I quickly figured out that he could and did figure. He understood exactly what I was talking about no matter what detail I mentioned.
About 10 of us sat down at one of several of the long tables in the room. I could tell from the kind of white tablecloth and table settings that this would be a rubber chicken supper. My objective was to sit by the people who counted.
Dave Criswell's 3 foot by 4 foot, white poster boards with the Trillion Dollar price tag were visible from every table in the room. I was facing west, towards the view of the ocean and sitting across from some oceanographer types and a very nice looking smart lady. Her name was Betty Walton.
When you go to meetings like these, they always serve some kind of thing they call "food" but feels like rubber. Typically it is hard boiled, rubber chicken, or hard steak.
You are not here to eat. You are here to elbow your way to the front of the line to talk with the key people. You can eat later. You are too fat anyway. That's what Jerry Husler barked at me during a marketing lesson.
Criswell, the speaker started describing how they would make electricity on the moon. This is why they brought us here. He told us that the solar power collectors would probably be located at the moon's poles because the sun shines there most of the time.
I was hoping he was going to explain "a clear profit."
Criswell told us how the solar power photovoltaic cells would energize electric power systems. The power systems would feed an array of microwave power converter devices on the surface of the moon. These devices would be like very efficient, microwave oven devices, except that they would beam their energy towards Earth.
It was grand. Dan Greenwood was smiling at the grandeur of it all.
I had picked up from Dan's language that Dan almost certainly had not calculated the details at all. I wondered how much detail was in Criswell's calculations.
I calculated the diffraction limit quickly, and estimated the smallest possible size of the transmitter antennae.
"They better be a hundred kilometers across," I thought.
The transmitters that were beaming the energy to Earth had to be "a hundred kilometers" across or the beam would spread out. I presumed they had calculated that already.
If you are any kind of Engineer, you would calculate statements like this in your head while they talked.
If you can't calculate like this, get out of the way. You are probably some political science major. You are not qualified to comment on global warming, electric cars, economics, space travel, medical procedures, or anything. Maybe you can comment on a good restaurant, but not on anything that matters.
"The power converters will feed microwave electricity to a 100 mile long antenna," Criswell said, as if on queue, "could be on the equator, or could be near the north or south pole of the moon."
Criswell had at least done his homework on the microwave antennae.
Criswell pulled out a picture of his lunar solar electric power scheme for earth. He had the moon, the Earth, and something strange, something that appeared to be a mirror in orbit around Earth. The mirror would reflect a microwave beam from the moon to the surface of the Earth.
{{ Image: the moon, the Earth, a reflector in orbit around earth, and a beam going from moon to reflector and from reflector to a spot on Earth }}
"That's nice," I thought, "he has to track something moving 10,000 miles per hour. His antenna is on the moon and its doesn't move. He has to change the direction of the beam entirely electronically, by phase control. That's going to be tricky."
Any engineer would tell you that this would be a bit tricky, at the power level Criswell was talking about. This was at the 10,000 Megawatt level, enough to power half of Los Angelis.
His voice and the words he used signaled that he did not do real things. Only calculation things.
"He has two things in space," I thought, "one on the moon and one in orbit close to Earth. Both are tough. Two miracles."
He would need 2 miracles to make any profit at all.
The good looking smart lady across from me involuntarily winced a facial expression when she heard microwaves would be focused on some spot on Earth. I could see she did not want to get cooked by a microwave beam some crazed geeks set up and whose beam accidentally wandered off target.
Criswell kept talking.
"Rectenna's on the ground collect the microwave radiation and convert it into DC power, anywhere on Earth, day and night," he asserted.
I heard him, but didn’t quite believe it. His antennae would collect feeble microwave radiation and little rectifier diodes would convert the energy into DC electric power. I could buy what he said if it were a radio receiver. But as an electric power station?
Maybe we will have satellite radios someday, but not a satellite power plug. If the microwaves are strong enough to power something, they are powerful enough to fry you.
"How dangerous would that be?" I wondered.
"The microwave radiation that hits the earth is do diffuse that you could jog under the beam and be perfectly safe," Criswell asserted, again as if on queue.
It only took a millisecond or so for me to complete the emotion.
I thought: "Hey, that's pretty good. What a nice coincidence. They figured it out and a microwave energy beam enough to power Los Angelis won't fry you when you jog under it. Neat. Did they calculate that right?"
"How big are these rectenna fields?" I wondered.
"These are not very big antenna farms, less than 5 miles across," Criswell asserted.
"Five miles across" is rather big. It's 16,000 acres, 25 square miles, more than the area covered by a San Francisco tourist map.
"This system will generate enough electricity to let everyone in the world use as much electricity as American's do today. All 50 Billion people," he asserted.
"Pretty simple," I thought. It all sounded pretty good. No nuclear reactors. Enough electricity for everyone.
"Fifty Billion People?" screamed a voice in my head.
"Where does he get that. That is 10 times as many people as we have on Earth right now."
I started to figure what it meant to have the population Criswell was using as his customer base.
Then, Dave Criswell proceeded to completely kill his project. Criswell chased everybody away with just one chart.
Not only did he point to that $1 Trillion placard, he started to explain it and draw attention to it.
He made the chart so Big, so impossible to hide, 3 foot by 4 ft, so no one could miss it. He talked about it, casually defending how just to start the program it would cost a $1 Trillion.
"Hey," I thought, imagining how to tell him, "that's ten to the twelfth dollars, as much as the entire USA National budget, $ 1 000 Billion, $1 000 000 000 000."
"That's almost as much as the United States collects in taxes," I mumbled, loud enough for the smart lady to hear me. She heard, but she was still wondering if the microwave beam would cook her.
His chart showed how it would cost way too much to make electricity this way.
For some reason, David Criswell insisted this would be cheaper and better than making electricity on Earth any other way.
"Why can't we use nuclear power?" I asked him, loud enough and blatantly interrupting enough that everyone could hear me.
"Because you need too many of them," he replied, instantly, as if he had calculated and really knew the answer..
I agreed. He was talking 10 kilowatts per person and 50 billion people. That would be 500,000 Gigawatts. A typical nuclear reactor power plant would generate about 1 Gigawatt. In my head I calculated that we would need 500,000 nuclear power stations.
"Yeah, you're right," I said.
way to make electricity that environmentalist extremists would let you do."
"You get everything you need from the moon," Dan Greenwood told me, smiling.
A friend of his agreed.
"You have an unlimited amount of silicon on the moon, in the sand," this fellow said.
Bull. This is stupid.
"This guy doesn't know anything," I thought.
Silicon and silicon dioxide, which is sand, are as different as sodium and sodium chloride, which is salt. Raw silicon doesn't just come pouring out of the sand. Raw sodium doesn't just come pouring out of salt.
Then I figured something that made the whole thing look silly. Criswell said that each power station would generate something like 10 Gigawatts. That is like 10 nuclear power stations would generate, but never mind. At 10 Gigawatts peer lunar solar power mirror station, that would mean about 50,000 antennae in orbit around earth. Each one is 10 or 100 km across. This is getting really nuts.
But, every time I had ever said "no, you can't do that," someone did it and made me wrong. So I shut up and tried to listen.
This guy was nuts. Instead of 500,000 nuclear power stations, he would need 50,000 of his solar power satellite mirrors. That's a huge number of monster things in space, and on the moon.
He must be a physicist. Completely impractical.
"Besides," he continued, obviously having been asked this question multiple times, "there is no other
Questions kept popping into my head. Practical questions.
"Why can't I just generate electricity in the Sahara Desert or Arizona, and then beam it around the Earth, like you do?" I asked.
If his mirrors would work all the way from the moon, then sure as hell they would work from close by, like from Arizona.
These guys are crazy.
I just could not buy it. Anything we would do on Earth had to be easier than doing anything on the moon. The moon is dry. No water. No air. But the Arizona is sunny 12 hours a day and way easier to work on that any place anywhere in space, no matter what.
Blatant and outrageous. Space projects are way too expensive, and he could prove it.
I wanted these guys to win, because I wanted us to be a space faring nation, a space-faring species.
He had to make it cost less, or Congress would ignore him.
I told Criswell to find a way to make the initial start cost less, way less.
"You can't get anyone to buy it if it costs too much." I told him.
"You're going to kill your program before it starts" I asserted, bluntly.
"It's all because of that chart. The Trillion dollars is way too much to start." I asserted again.
Criswell resisted, adamantly.
"Well, go ahead. Resist." I emoted.
"You wonder why nobody cares about this?" I thought, loud enough for Criswell to "hear."
"Well, Dave, we don't need solar power electric generator on the moon now anyway. If we need electricity to save our lives, we can use nuclear electric generators, and they will cost a lot less."
I realized that talking with Buzz Aldrin was the only good part of the meeting.
Ice Exploding on to Earth
Trying to meet anyone of value here, I came across a very mild mannered astronomer who got his Ph.D. by doing calculations on the atmosphere of stars. I wondered why that would be worth doing. We are not going to be next to a star for a million years.
Dr. Ted Fay was about my size, thin, apparently vegetarian. His day job was working for an aerospace company named McDonnel Douglas in Los Angeles.
"Where can I find water ice near Earth?" I asked.
Any chance I got I asked that question.
"The comets. I think a piece of ice hit Tunguska, Siberia" he replied.
Startled, I didn't believe him. How can ice exist in space and not evaporate away, from the heat of the sunlight?
"You mean there are pieces of comet floating around near Earth?" I asked.
"I think it could be." he said, not very assertively.
I did not believe. I thought that Ted Fay could see how much I wanted it to be true, and he was just patronizing me, telling me whatever made me feel good.
He said ice existed on small comets or comet pieces.
I wondered about his words: "comet pieces" and "small comets?" What small comets?
What was especially captivating was that he said "crashing into Earth."
That would definitely qualify as "close". I wanted water in space, close enough to use. Crashing into Earth was bulls eye close.
As we were getting in a car, leaving the meeting, he promised me:
"We will find you your ice."
I did not believe him. But he said it in such a strange, subtle, ominous way that I thought there really might be ice out there in the space near earth.
I had come to the meeting to meet Carl Sagan. I had come here for a clear profit. Instead, I meet some astronaut, and the clear profit is a clear loss. The meeting was useless, as I had expected. The people throwing the party wanted to do something that would cost so much no one in their right mind would ever support it.
It was clear that we would not need solar power from the Moon to save the world. We could save the world with nuclear power. We could use Arizona instead of the moon for the collectors.
Alternatively, the overpopulating civilizations of the world could kill each other off and save us the trouble.
I did not like this meeting.
Many years later I would realize:
It didn't matter that Carl Sagan was a no-show. Buzz Aldrin showed, instead. And Ted Fay showed up, who knew where the water was.
· Vomit in the Space Ship, and space is bad for us
· Vomit in the Space Ship
Supper with the oldest Russian astronaut
Just about everyone in those days had thought that people could live in space just like living on earth. Artists drew pictures of happy families with their happy kids and happy dogs with their tongues hanging out, all gently floating in a big space greenhouse as big as 20 football stadiums. Everything was green and neat, and everyone had a smile. Acres and acres of neat rows of crops were growing in the background, orchards with fruit on them, even. There was plenty of room and everyone was healthy and beautiful.
So, I was sure surprised when I found out that the zero gravity of space was bad for you. The local space society arranged for me to find out. That was not what I was supposed to learn.
This was the 26th of September, 1990. I heard some older lady say with an idealistic, naïve vocal intonation how this was "a beautiful San Diego evening."
This was not San Diego. We were in Escondido, 40 miles north of the San Diego airport and inland one range of hills, along the I 15 freeway.
“The World Future Society” blared the poster-banner marking the building of the meeting.
As I tried to find a parking space I could not help but notice how The World Future Society sure drew a crowd, of old people.
I saw old men wearing out-of-date suits and nice clothes, and driving older big cars that were in reasonable shape, with not too many dents and the paint still somewhat ok. The older women's faces showed excessive makeup and didn't hide the wrinkles. Some wore clothes that even I could recognize to be no longer in fashion.
“Only in California,” I remembered thinking when I first heard the name "World Future Society." Now when I actually saw the people, it was even more clear. I shook my head slightly from side to side and emoted a feeling that expressed "What a name for a social group. They really think they are part of the force that is changing the Future of the World."
“These guys are probably second or third tier has-beens,” I mused, “Ex Wanna-be’s.”
I wore my Pentagon suit. I wore my entire Pentagon uniform. I deliberately walked like I was someone who worked with the Pentagon and lobbied Congress. That was because I did.
It was a game. I could feel how the people here could tell immediately when they saw me that I was different from those old has-been’s wandering around.
The L5 Society made this connection for me. They are now called "The National Space Society." I liked the part where they had enough clout to make some kind of valuable connection. This demonstrated the ability of L5 to connect. It made me feel good that I joined the L5 Society. The L5 Society gave me a choice seat.
The San Diego L5 Society had acquired some interesting "positioning" tickets to the supper meeting of the World Future Society. The positioning tickets were a reward for some work the L5 society did for the World Future Society, and the reward was a few seats with designated positions of the chairs at a table, relative to where the invited speaker sat.
Hey you, 4th Grader, do this:
Make sure you get a choice seat like this, any chance you can.
The "L5 Society" was hard core space cadets. It was originally started by some people who wanted to make a space base at "L5." L5 is the name of a place in space, place number 5, and there are only 5 such places around a heavy celestial object. It's a convenient place to put a space habitat in orbit around Earth.
I walked around the banquet hall for a few minutes, somewhat lost and gawking at the old, wrinkled has beens. The room holding about 300 people was filling up. Then one of the L5 Society ladies found me and escorted me right to the special table. There were only six of us at the Russian Cosmonaut's table.
The waiters were preparing to serve some form of rubber chicken with fluffy, tasteless sponge desert coated with sugar glaze. The back wall of the stage was covered almost entirely by the silver-white projector screen. The podium was empty and waiting for the speaker to step up to it. The stage platform, up 3 feet off the floor, stuck out from the wall about 10 feet, and the steps up to it were only 5 feet from our table, to my left. My seat faced the audience. We had a prime spot.
The featured evening speaker, Cosmonaut Georgi Grechko, and some kind of aide / translator / guide person sat down at our table. Grechko faced me. The aide needed an extra chair. They forgot the Featured Evening Speaker would come with a Translator Aide Person. The aid spoke Russian. Grechko handed one of the stage attendants his box of slides, said something in Russian to him, and the aide said something English to him.
The first thing I noticed was that they called him "Cosmonaut," not "astronaut." The next thing I noticed was that he was just not very interested at all in either his audience or anyone at his table. It was like we did not exist.
We did not exist. He was trying to ask the aide, who spoke Russian, how to work the new video camera he just bought. He was asking in mixed English and Russian. He was clearly very captivated by the new toy. He was fondling it and fiddling with it. Then I noticed his English was not that good at all. No one with a ticket at this table spoke Russian.
The Cosmonaut finally noticed that we were sitting there at his table, staring at him. He caught on quickly. He looked at us and started to brag and name-drop.
I had been in this kind of situation many times. General Dynamics would set up a table and carefully place the important fellow, such as a United States Navy Admiral, with his one or two aides, and two or three of us who needed to talk with the Admiral, each in our appropriate places. My job was to talk to the important fellow. Get to know him. Engage him. Get him to invite me to his office early next week.
Someone who name-drops was also a familiar situation. The really big difference between this guy and meeting with a United States Navy Admiral was the name dropping. A US Admiral doesn't name-drop. The Admiral really does talk to the President.
I wondered "What do you say to an astronaut who can hardly speak English?"
He was trying to tell us about how he had just spent the day with Bert Rutan and with the super-high tech airplane Rutan had made. The airplane was like the one that flew around the world. We all knew about that airplane. That airplane made world history when it flew around the world. Most of us knew Rutan's name. He was the famous airplane inventor who made it all happen.
Grechko seemed at ease, and even as he bragged he did not seem that interested in us.
He passed around a 35 mm slide of something I found too hard to read and did not recognize. But one of the L5 Society people with me recognized it and acted all so-impressed.
I always asked questions. My question to him came rushing out of my mouth, driven by an instinct. I could feel what kind of person he was and what his mood seemed to be at the moment.
"What's it like inside a space ship?" I asked.
With no hesitation whatsoever, he looked at me and said
"Stink like barn."
His Russian accent came through clearly. But his human emotion of the humor of it all came through loud.
It took a moment for us to catch it. This guy was telling it like it is, with intonations of basic human body odors. Not prim. Not proper. Just plain bluntly human. Russian. Basic.
After a moment, I burst out laughing.
His instant answer and the smirk on his face added to the joke: I was not the first one in the world to ask him that question, either. But I didn't care. He looked at me and connected.
"I am oldest, grandpa, cosmonaut.
Am not that old.
Not in best shape,
but good enough,"
he said with a laugh, boasting a bit.
He seemed to change the subject, but he was now aware of me, and turned to me when he started talking, and then turned to the others to finish the sentence.
"Why does it stink?" I asked, looking directly into his eyes, and smirking a bit. He could tell I knew what to ask next. He was begging me to ask.
I could tell from the way he said first few words to us, and from what he said, that he was playful, not arrogant, and that he was certainly in charge, but not pompous.
He looked at me first again, and then talked to all of us at the table.
With a thick Russian accent he started:
"Young, astronaut,"
speaking in one word punctuations
"go, on, ship."
He continued, pausing just a moment, and then with his hands starting from his stomach and moving up and out, away from his face,
"and throw up."
He moved his hands away from his mouth one more time and looked at us, trying to communicate that slimy, smelly, awful stomach stuff comes blowing out their mouth, into a ship with no gravity, so it floats.
Graphic images of vomit floating weightless in blobs in a space ship startled us.
"Sch-tomahk sikh"
he said, with Russian accent. He meant "stomach sick".
The expressions on our faces instantly rewarded him. Our reactions were clearly why he liked to tell this story.
"I try to tell them."
he started to explain,
"They think,
what does old grandpa know?"
he said, referring to the young astronauts.
"But I know what to do,"
he said, speaking faster.
He moved his chair out, away from the table. Then he sat squarely in the chair.
"I sit on chair and grip tight,"
he said, as he reached down to the chair seat and pulled himself tightly into the chair, like his arms were tight straps clamping him to it.
He
tensed up and held on for a few seconds, clearly straining. He was not acting
and was actually showing us what he actually did, in space, in the astronaut
chair.
"I hold on tight for 10 minutes.
I don't throw up.
They do,"
he concluded, and then he laughed.
"Old guy know more than young punk."
he asserted, bragging and laughing a well rehearsed punch line.
"They have to be humble.
They throw up,
stink up ship."
"Can, not, open, door."
he added, waving his arms like trying to open a locked door in a small car. He was trying to make us feel like we were locked in a small car with obese, grossly vomiting adults, and he succeeded.
He wanted to make sure we understood that the ship smelled bad and that vomit without ventilation was one of the reasons.
"Ship stink like barn."
he said again, turning to me, and concluding a short story I gave him a chance to tell.
We finished eating the rubber bulk food.
Then the commentator spent a few minutes introducing him. Grechko proceeded to narrate a picture story to the crowd, showing Russian spacecraft of all kinds.
"I see your satellite."
he said as he held an imaginary sphere the size of a large grapefruit.
"Was so tiny"
he said, with a puzzled look, and then the look became deliberately puzzled.
"Tiny Payload."
"You, put, up, kilogram."
"We, put up, ton."
His humor was subtle but pointy.
He was referring to the fact that the Russian space vehicles launched a 1000 times more mass than ours.
One of the major points of his speech was that Russia launched far bigger payloads than the Americans, and he wanted us to remember that.
He was right of course.
"Stink Like Barn" I won't forget.
All the spaceships smell like a barn. Every astronaut and space ship visitor I ever met verified that. Every astronaut I ever talked to assured me the ship "stink like barn."
I learned that space was bad for you. When we are weightless, our bones loose calcium and our immune system does not work. Our bones become brittle.
I learned that even the Russian space ships are too small. They are like jails, dungeons, cruel and unusual punishment. Poop floats, too, by the way.
The meeting was great fun.
The message was depressing. We are the wrong species for space.
This was the first of a long series of disappointing facts about space that hammered me.
· Getting Fired because of "... no clear profit", Col. Simon Pete Worden and the White House
· Getting Fired From A Space Job
A Message from The White House
"The conquest of space is going nowhere until there is a clear profit."
Don Summers had poked me in the chest with his index finger while he said it.
He was sure right.
Sure enough, we were being fired. Our conquest of space, with our wonderful satellite to submarine laser communication system, was not needed anymore. The Cold War was over. Nobody wanted to send secret messages to secret nuclear powered attack submarines, not even with a super marvelous laser in space. No one wanted to send secret target data to secret "Boomer" submarines with a belly full of rockets, each tipped with a handful of nuclear bombs. The Cold War was over.
The Clear Profit was gone. And so were we.
But my timing was superb. When Professor Jim Arnold gave me the phone number of the Professor who wrote the book on near earth asteroids, I had called the number. Professor John Lewis answered and assured me that there were many near earth asteroids, many that were easy to get to with a rocket, and many whose dried-clay-like dirt would spit water steam when heated up.
Better yet, Prof. John Lewis liked my idea of a steam rocket. He liked it so much, he gave me the phone number of one of his ex-students. The ex-student, Colonel Simon "Pete" Worden, was now in the White House. I left a phone message for Pete Worden in the White House.
----
6 October 1990.
Everyone in our lab that morning had that blank stare of the doomed. Everyone mumbled idle talk, like the condemned. Everyone slowly assembled into the conference room. Everybody knew. The big oak table that would normally seat 6 or 8 very important managers on each side, facing each other, was moved way off to the side. The room no longer looked like the Big Important VIP Conference Room. It now looked like a room with 100 chairs crammed into a room that should hold 30, at most, and with the extra chairs squeezed along all 4 walls.
I wandered outside for a moment, before going in with the rest of us. The overcast sky was quiet and grey even though it was 9 AM. No wind, no rain, no sun, plenty of parking. I looked longingly at the place I got to go to every day. I knew it would change today. The entry to our building was a very pleasant, reddish brick stone, with artificial stone facades, smooth black rock panels for style, perfect, new anti-reflection glass doors, surrounded by green bushes, clean architecture, clean, new asphalt for parking, every tree and every bush neatly trimmed. The conference room door was 10 feet past the receptionist, through the electronically opened security door.
The pretty, 22 year old receptionist answering the phone and greeting visitors at the entrance of our facility was a temporary, sitting there only for this last week. As I wandered back, she told me how many there were in her family, where she was from, and some family history. I flirt a lot. I am an Aspie who focuses on people. Her story and her face were interesting. Her person was strong and confident.
Dr. Reg Lowe was our Vice President from the St. Louis headquarters of General Dynamics. He had announced this special meeting that we "all need to attend." Every one of us, every employee, was about to walk into the conference room to hear what Reg had to say.
We all knew why the Vice President from Headquarters commanded us to be here for this meeting, even though it was supposed to be a Big Secret. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The End of the Cold War was raging wild in southern California. There was no need for "Satellite to submarine laser communications" (SLC), and SLC is what we were all trying to do there, like it or not. The Navy had delayed funding our SLC program indefinitely and had no intention of spending the $3 Billion everyone knew it would take for a prototype system.
No Clear Profit.
Only a female technician permitted herself to cry. She was crying all the way in. She knew but was not supposed to know. I knew what Reg Lowe was going to do the night before because my boss, The Great Freiwald the General Manager, called and told me.
"We have nothing to fear," my Freiwald told me, because "General Dynamics takes care of its managers. We will all have a job somewhere in GD." he asserted, reassuringly.
Just as I was on my way into the meeting room, the pretty receptionist casually handed me a message. I was a bit startled when I saw who it was from. She didn't seem impressed at who it was from, and she was just taking messages. It was from "White House".
Colonel S. Pete Worden from the White House called me back. John Lewis told me to call Worden at the White House and leave a message. So a day before, I did. Amazing. The White House answered. Superb timing.
I walked into the jam packed conference room and sat in the back against the wall next to Bill Baker, the Department Manager head of the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Then Reg Lowe fired us all, the entire laboratory. Reg told everyone how we would get paid till January, how our benefits would be paid until then as well. To help us, GD was hiring a very well known, very effective outplacement service to help us all get jobs. Reg went and on and on and on.
I could not hear a thing during the whole meeting. I was smiling from ear to ear. I kept holding the message in my hand, on my lap, so I could glance at it, during the whole meeting, to make sure it was real.
All the message said was:
From: Pete Worden
Address: White House
As soon as Reg Lowe was done firing us all, I called the White House. Someone got Pete Worden. Almost as soon as I said hello I told him how to use a steam rocket to take huge payloads to Mars.
Hey 4th Graders, This Is Easy:
Moral of the Story: Contacts count.
You can meet anyone you need to meet.
Even if you are an autistic Aspie,
you can meet anyone you need to meet.
The only thing you must have is
passion,
passion for what you believe in.
· Ice In Space from Village of the Damned, and Periodic Comets
A Swarm Of Local Comets
When your daydream hobby job can change the world, and only you know it,
you will probably have some hard times.
Get ready for them.
The hard times are not that bad.
--------
Village of the Damned
It was sometime in the winter of 1990. I was out of a job and looking for one, and always wearing a suit. Every morning I would put one of my Pentagon suits. I would choose a pair of my black wingtip tie shoes and put on a clean, pressed white shirt and a power tie. I would grab my briefcase and drive to my office about 25 miles from the lush green hills and opulent Rancho Bernardo, CA, and park in a clean, multilevel cement parking structure. Did I say "my office"?
It looked like we were employed.
Every day I would walk into a brand new, 4 story building with a blue-green glass outside wall. I would take the elevator to the 4th floor, open the heavy, 8 foot high, 3 inch thick, beautifully polished and stained hardwood doors with expensive, 1 foot dimension big brass door handles. My feet would almost sink into the thick new carpet. Through those luxurious doors I entered the Offices for Fired Executives.
I would greet at least one well dressed young secretary, notice and appreciate her nice hooters, and then, I and at least a dozen other fired executives would disappear into the building, somewhere deeper, to the "offices". I would select a little cubby hole that would be my office for the day. I would scan the empty "offices" to find one with a window. Each office had a telephone. Some had a nice chair, and a few had a window with a nice view.
Then I would spend the day along with other depressed, fired Executives from all over San Diego, where every day we would feel the shame and total humiliation of being fired. We would look for a job from the Village of the Damned.
Every day I walked in shame. Being fired for any reason was Intense Shame and intense embarrassment.
Those of us from General Dynamics knew that when the new year started, our severance paychecks would stop.
All that we could be sure of was a telephone. Just a telephone. Everything else was a gift. The secretaries would professionally answer that phone and take faxes for us.
We were so lucky because we received this Special Executive Severance Benefit. We were the 5 managers of the General Dynamics Laser Lab. I was the only one who actually went to this office every day. I didn't know what the others did. Each of us was offered a nice, comfortable, free office, and we could count on free phones with free long distance calling, and a female voice to answer them for as long as it would take to get another job.
We even got special counseling services. Twice a week a different Ph.D. industrial psychologist would talk to us. One set of psychologists told us about the cycles of emotions of the Unemployed Executive. Another group would help train us on finding high paying work.
I would sometimes day dream out the window. I could not help it. After making a phone call, I needed time to think, to rejuvenate, to rest. Then, make another phone call.
Getting an office and phones at the Village of the Damned was a big a perk reserved only for being a fired executive of General Dynamics. The rest of the guys only got some tutoring on how to go find their own jobs from their base at home.
Then General Dynamics fired the guy who fired us. Dr. Reg Lowe, Vice President of General Dynamics in St. Louis, himself got dumped. He didn't expect that. Neither did most of the people in all of General Dynamics all over the United States.
The head of General Dynamics Space Systems Division, the great and honorable Big Boss, Dr. Alan Lovelace may as well have gotten fired. He was sent off to a small building somewhere in Outer San Diego, 5 miles east of any impressive buildings, in charge of 35 people. That was his punishment and humiliation for letting the Cold War end.
The Evil of 50 years of unethical behavior of General Dynamics finally caught up with it.
From a few windows in the Village of the Damned I could see rolling waves of real offices in the rich suburbs of San Diego. Offices of people with jobs.
Hunting Ice, Hunting for Work
Every so often, at least a once a week, I needed to escape, to go somewhere with some intellectual diversity. The University of California at San Diego was only 5 or so miles away. I went there because their library had a section on astronomy and space resources. I needed to find ice in space so I could melt it, to get water to fill the steam rocket fuel tank. I was bound and determined to get a job saving the world and starting the Exodus to Space, to Inhabit the Solar System.
If I could not find any ice, I would not get a job, I thought. I had to find ice. I knew it was out there, somehow.
At this point, during the autumn and early winter of 1990, the only place one could find ice with 100% certainty and on something with low enough gravity to be useful, was on little moons far away, deep in the solar system, out by Saturn.
Bullheaded, I would only settle for a space water station what would let my little steam rocket haul 10,000 tons.
The only places in space that would let one little steam rocket launch and blast off with a 10,000 ton payload, and 20 times that much water for propellant in the water tank balloon, would be a place with almost no gravity. The only places like that were little asteroids and tiny moons, like the moons of Mars. Those were the only ones I knew of with low enough gravity.
If you were a real, imaginative rocket scientist, you would see a flaw here, and would trump me, figure out the key to getting huge amount of water, and beat me. But no one did. Lucky for me.
Even though my rocket scenario was not the best, I had a plan. I rehearsed it over and over. I doodled little pictures of the plan while I searched for more people to call. I wanted to make sure I knew what story to tell.
It was like a daydream.
I would take a rocket to some valuable rock- or moon-place in space. I would heat the dirt or permafrost until the water steam would come out. I would condense the water vapor. I would collect 200,000 tons of water. Then I would put the water into a tank, the rocket fuel tank balloon bladder.
I know how to calculate how a small tank could hold a lot of water. A tank weighing as little as the payload of the Shuttle could hold 25,000 tons of water, or more. That would be a huge amount. The Shuttle payload is 25 tons.
I would load the payload on top of the rocket. Then I would turn on the steam rocket engine.
The nuclear reactor, no bigger than big pickup truck, would boil the water into steam. The steam would be so hot the pipes would glow orange. I would connect the rocket nozzle directly to the nuclear reactor. Just like the nuclear reactor and rocket nozzle I wrapped my arms around at Jackass Flats, Nevada, 20 years earlier. The steam would come out the back of the rocket and push the rocket.
The rocket would roar silently in space.
The steam rocket would have enough power to launch 25,000 tons
tons, not kilograms,
off places with low gravity, like a small water moon of Saturn.
The rocket would decelerate the space ship and the ship would begin to fall towards the Sun.
My computers would very carefully calculate how long to decelerate and in what direction. We would aim it so we would almost hit earth.
A million miles from Earth we would turn on the rocket and slightly change course so we would not crash into Earth, but just skim it.
Finally, just as we got somewhat close to Earth, closer than the TV satellite stations at GEO, we would turn on the rockets to full thrust. We would try to slow down enough to become captured in an orbit around Earth itself.
Then we would have delivered the payload, 10,000 tons of water.
I did calculate it all. We would bring rocket fuel to an orbit around Earth.
And then we could fuel the Exodus and Inhabit the Solar System.
"Inhabit the Solar System"
What a daydream. I daydreamed this every single day at the Village of the Damned.
And I needed was real data. Saturn had two little moons that were almost pure ice and were so tiny they had almost no gravity. I could see them in my mind-eye. I had seen actual pictures of the little Saturn moons named Iapetus and Hyperion.
They were awfully far away. They were at Saturn. But they were absolutely 100% sure sources of water. I could not find anyone who would assure me of water in space any closer than these moons of Saturn.
I was fretting. The water had to be on places with almost no gravity, or my little engine would not push hard enough to push us off. We needed water to be closer than this. I needed water somewhere near Earth. I was fretting over it.
I fretted and fussed, but the reality forced me to continue. I knew I had it. The math proved it.
I need water in space to run the steam rockets that will let mankind open the Final Frontier. I am sticking with steam rockets and space. I have something no one else has.
The trees in the University of California at San Diego parking lot were always green. Once in a while a little fog or rain would mist my face as I walked the path to the library. Most of the time pretty young college ladies would pass by. They would not notice me at all. They would not even glance. I thought it was because I had my Pentagon suit on and I was already getting old and ugly and had bad breath. That was all true.
I was just wandering around in the library. The part of the library I needed was well lit. Almost no students gathered here, and almost none were grabbing all the chairs. No computer terminals were here, to help me search. Dark, heavy wood tables were big enough to put 4 chairs around them, and for me to take an entire table for myself and to spread out. A coin operated Xerox machine was conveniently right there, by the books. This was the astronomy corner.
I was looking at each and every book on the shelf related to astronomy. Stars and galaxies didn't catch my eye. There were a rows and rows of them.
Ice in Space
And then I stumbled over it. “Long-term Evolution of Short-period Comets”
It was a binder, not a book. It's title had the words "comets" in it, so I dragged it out.
Strange title, too. I didn't know that "Short period" comets existed. The binder had a lot of comet orbit data, with pictures of the orbits. Some orbits looked like those symmetric patterns we used to see on the oscilloscope screens in old sci-fi movies. I saw rosettes and loops and curly squiggles.
Comets are water in space. That much I knew.
I did not expect what I saw before me. These fellows were describing a whole formation of comets between Mars and Jupiter. The authors were some Italian astronomers, "Carusi, A.; L. Kresak, E. Perozzzi, and G.B. Valsecchi" All of my ancestors are Italian. I didn't know Italians had done any science since the Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo.
Why don't we see all these comets, right now?
Apparently, most astronomers must have known about these comets but forgot about them. Or, maybe they didn't tell me because they thought everyone knew. Maybe only Ted Fay knew and maybe that was the reason for his cryptic message to me: "We will get you your water."
Just for the heck of it, I calculated the delta-V a steam rocket would need to develop to make a trip from one of those comets back to Earth. I didn't have the exact equation with me, but I knew how make a good estimate.
The binder had listed most of the periodic comets. They had even listed the orbital elements in a form that I could calculate the delta-V with my hand calculator.
Nature is usually a bitch. Most of us don't really expect anything to work out. Things almost never work out. But the calculation was rather simple. So, I picked one whose orbital data looked like it might be good, and worked out the delta V.
Surprise!
One of them turned out to have a reasonable value of delta-V.
Something worked out.
So I kept looking. Even if there were only one, I only need one to win. This 2 inch thick binder was full of pages, and they only used about 2 or 3 pages for each comet. So, there just had to be another that would be as good, or maybe better.
I started to figure the delta-V for each one that looked right. I figured it with a hand calculator, right there in the library, because I could not afford the time nor the money to copy the whole thing. It cost 5 cents per copy. I was out of a job and "broke." I had to be selective. There were about 150 comets. When I had figured about 5 or 10 of them I realized that many of them were ok.
"OK" meant the mission delta V was low enough that the steam rocket could bring payloads back to Earth. I started making a list and copying the best ones.
Totally Stunning!
All the comets had weird orbits. Carusi and his colleagues had calculated the orbits for times extending thousands of years. When they did that, they saw abrupt changes in the orbit anytime the comet came close to any planet. Some orbits were simply unstable. Many had Lissajou patterns for orbits, which meant they were stable, but their orbits around the sun would be shaped like roses or flowers, symmetric but not circles or ellipses like everything else.
I went home with a few that looked reasonable.
This meant that I found the water. Ted Fay was right. He knew there was water there. He told me the first time I met him, at the Lunar Solar Power meeting, "we will find you your water." I didn't believe him. But he was right. He knew.
All the way home my mind repeated like an echo:
I need to redo the calculation.
There is always a mistake somewhere.
Makes it worse.
Every time.
Don't get too excited.
There was no mistake. And as expected, the delta_V's were not quite as wonderful as I had hoped.
A few weeks later I convinced Ted Fay and his wife to meet me at UCSB and we talked about it.
Ted was right. We did find the water. I found at least a few comets that were close enough to be water stations for my steam rocket.
I could not believe it.
· Elevator Speech
Stalking Customers and the Elevator Speech
-------
Stalker at the Meeting
It was now early January 1991 in Poway, California, just 45 minutes from the San Diego airport. It was now official. All the Managers were fired, officially unemployed. Our paychecks officially ended December 1990. They cut off our money flow.
Fired or not, I was sticking to my Vision. I knew we could Inhabit the Solar System because I found where I could get the water. I saw the orbital data in the document at the UCSD library. Ted Fay knew all along his colleagues had found the water.
We had the key thing, the thing we needed most of all, abundant water in space.
However, I needed a job, a day job. Cutting the money flow was like someone numbed my arm with Novocain and then cut my wrist. During the first minute, nothing changed.
Strangely, nothing seemed to change when my paycheck died. The large, 1 inch brown olives we picked 4 months ago from the neighbor's tree were still curing in brine in the one gallon jars on the old wood desk in the garage. The eucalyptus trees in our yard, trimmed by the tree-trimmer guys so they would not be a fire hazard, still smelled the same when I crumbled a dark blue-green leaf and put it to my nose. The grass was still green. The two trees with the soft, peeling white bark were still growing. The 500 foot hill a few streets away was still charred from the scary fire that dropped ashes in my driveway and on my shake-shingle wood roof, and turned the sun blood orange-red. But they cut off my pay.
The weather was the same, mild and partly cloudy. The computer and printer were the same. Terri still drove 45 minutes to work, every morning.
No wonder people go broke. Everything around you seems to be the same after you have no salary.
Absolutely determined to find someone somewhere to employ me to take 1000 people to Mars, I kept repeating to myself that I had something no rocket scientist had: a steam rocket. And, I had a heretic's rocket equation to prove that it would increase the payload by at least 100's of times. Multiple times I checked the equation and its assumptions, and verified it was an absolutely correct equation.
Most significant, I had also signed up for a NASA meeting on Mars and asteroids. Contacts count. Professor John Lewis would be at that meeting. He knew everyone.
The meeting was in Tucson, Arizona. Jennifer was going to go back to college in Las Cruces, New Mexico after the Christmas break. She could drive me and drop me off in Tucson, Arizona, where the Space meeting was. That would save a couple hundred dollars of airplane ticket. I was going with her because it was on the way to the space meeting.
People in the space business went to these meetings, and I needed to find and meet them. General Dynamics taught me well on how to find and stalk the important people. For this I was skilled.
The Elevator Speech
If you want to change the world, you need to get your "Elevator Speech" perfect.
General Dynamics taught me the "Elevator Speech."
While Jen was driving us through the desert from San Diego to Tucson, the Elevator Speech, a lesson Dr. Frank Chesus taught me, replayed in my head. Chesus was the best of the Old Bulls of General Dynamics, I thought. He was definitely Ethical. He was once the Big Boss in Charge. He and I got along very well. I clearly heard him emphasize:
"You only have enough time to ride the elevator with him from the top floor to the bottom floor."
He looked right at me when he told me.
"You have to tell him such an interesting small talk story that he invites you to a real meeting, or tells you to call him on the phone."
For days before any meeting, we would practice our elevator speech. We would try it on people.
Stalking The Important Ones
General Dynamics held formal short courses for us the Executives on how to "stalk" people.
An Elevator Speech started with stalking the important person one needed to meet, such as a General or someone from Congress or the White House. The important person was someone who could strongly influence the awarding of a huge contract. A fleet of fighter aircraft or a new class of submarine could mean a contract for $30 Billion. For example, that would only cost the taxpayers $3 Billion a year, for 10 years, for a bunch of fast, 15,000 horsepower airborne race cars, called "fighter jets,".
First, go find out which important people are going to be there. Next, make it a point to learn the names of any important person who might even show up unexpected. Write the names down immediately. Then, look for one of those key persons. The person would most likely be an invited or keynote speaker.
A key point: physically move and position yourself so that the guy has to walk by you when he leaves the podium or gets up from the table.
Gerry Husler's imposing, commanding voice replayed in my mind. Husler was our Director of Business Development. He told me exactly how to do this. He was ordering me to do it.
"You better damn well make sure you are in his path even if you miss the free lunch. Get directly in his path. You can eat later. You're too fat anyway. Your job is to meet him, not to listen to him talk. You can talk to his aides. Refine your point based on what the guy says. Elbow your way in there so you are the one who gets to walk with him to the elevator. Got that?"
And then he smiled and laughed a bit. Husler was big enough to elbow his way around. I was smaller and had to resort to Kung Fu methods, fast walking and missing the meals.
Husler wanted me to elbow my way ahead of the more timid guys from other companies, our competitors. In this game, the successful ones push and shove to be first, to be the one the important fellow, the target, has to pass when he finishes. When he passes, we start walking with him and tell him a very short story, the elevator speech.
Chesus's voice mentored me again:
"You have something he wants. You know it. You have to tell him. There's something positively intriguing about what we're doing. He needs it."
Then Chesus instructed me to be absolutely sure I had done my homework and knew exactly what thing that General really needed and really wanted.
Husler commanded:
"If you don't know exactly what that thing is, get out of the way. You'll be shoved out of the way by someone who does."
Husler didn't laugh when he said that. He was serious as hell. He knew we scientists from the Department of Energy were typically timid, too timid for him.
"You don't just run up to the guy and blab. Find out what he needs," he commanded.
Husler paused and smiled a little and commanded again, "Captivate him with a little story."
Husler told stories a lot. They were mostly bullshit because Gerry would typically lie about what we could do or what we already did. But he told a good story.
The General Dynamics marketing guys taught us how to work a meeting where we probably did not know anyone at all. When I had that job, we were looking for a new market for a laser and we would show up at a technical meeting related to it. We would make sure we attend the general startup meeting.
Starting out with a blank page was not that hard:
1.) Pick the most carefully dressed random person who people are swarming around,
2.) Just walk up and ask them "Who would know the person here that knows the most about xxx whatever?"
That would get us a name.
We would also look at the speaker's roster and write down the names of anyone who looked like they might be important or influential. We would only know their status or position by the list of attendees. We would go find them and ask the same thing:
"Who is the one that everyone respects?"
Then we would go look for technical leaders, because the technical leader would know who has the money. The technical leader got there by knowing in great detail what the money-persons want. This technical guy would only work on important things, things that pay money.
Then the Stalking began. I heard the voice of an Frank Chesus telling me how to do it, without Gerry Husler's bulldog mannerisms.
Pick a guy on the list. Move a chair and park right by the door where everyone has to go thru to get in and out. If he's in there, he has to pass right by you. Ask anyone around you if they know what this guy looks like. You tell them "I only know the person's name and I am supposed to meet him."
Frank taught me like an old sage teaching a young warrior. I was a warrior to him. He liked me because I understood his ham radio language. He loved that stuff. He loved the technical work. He had risen to be the General Manager of a General Dynamics Division. And he always favored the people who knew something, and were not those marketing bullshiters.
The oversize pants of his conservative suit had impressed my wife who told me he was old, boring, poorly dressed and arrogant. But I didn't think so. I liked him and followed every move he described. He was sharp and he would teach me every chance he got.
"You spend a lot of time finding out a whole list people who might lead you to the kind of person you need. You don't know who you need. That's why you are there, to find them. You keep all the names at your fingertips. Most of the people on your list you never heard of before. If the person is important, lots of people know what they look like. If they are not important, you don't care and cross them off the list."
Frank Chesus was direct, but it was like learning how to fight to win. Husler would bark loud to make sure we got the message:
"You better damn well know precisely what you want.
If you don't, then don't play the game."
The desert of eastern California and western Arizona in the winter passed by my window as Jenny drove the old brown Honda packed to the bursting point with college stuff.
I started to fret and worry: "How am I going to pay for Jenny's college when my mortgage is $2,200 per month and I don't have a job?"
Jenny bought a 6 week old little Siamese kitty, and we paid the $100 for it. I fretted some more, thinking "Doesn't she understand? We are broke."
We weren't completely broke, but with no income, spending a dollar was like spending $20. I had learned that fact the hard way. If I would save 5% of my income, which is really hard and nearly impossible, I would be saving $1 out of every $20. To get $1 saved, I must make $20.
So, when I have no income, if I spend $1, it is like spending $20.
Fretting. Sweating. Uncomfortable. I had no income. And there was no one on the horizon who was hiring. Everyone in the USA was laying off technical people. Just like now, only then it was just technical people.
The little black kitty pooped a little black thing the size of an olive pit. Driving in the heat of the Arizona desert made the kitty black thing fill the whole car with smell.
It took my mind off of things.
This meeting would be the start of a deluge, a hurricane of new places in the space near Earth we could use to inhabit the solar system.
Prof. John Lewis, the professor who wrote the book on near Earth asteroids, was in charge of the meeting. He told me about it and invited me.
Long before we approached Tucson, Arizona, this January 1991, wisps of the sweet smell of sage, the faint smell of a cactus flower, the smell of dry saltbush pollen and the flowers of a yucca, all stimulated memory flashbacks, like hallucinations. The familiar smell was the same entrancing smell we got when we first moved to the cold high desert in Albuquerque, during 1970 when Jennifer was born.
As we approached the city, the outsides of the clean, white-brown stucco buildings surprised me with the sharp contrast of the blues and reds the architects used on the walls. The city almost looked like a surreal painting. The city was so bright and clean, even as we began to see it from 30 miles away. The sun seemed brighter than San Diego, and the sky was deep blue, not like San Diego at all.
She dropped me off and went on to college in Las Cruces. I was alone, and without a car, without the expense account to pay for anything, without a business card stating how very important I was. I was here, with nothing. On my own.
Knee-jerk training from General Dynamics took over. My only purpose at this meeting was to play the game:
"Find contacts who will give me a big contract,"
otherwise known as a Job.
Instantly upon checking in to the Motel, I put on my Pentagon Uniform, a dark blue suit with thin stripes 1/2 inch apart, a white shirt, appointed with a simple green-red-banded Pentagon tie, and my black wing-tip shoes. I went to the meeting before doing anything.
It was a huge conference room, as science meetings go. It seemed big enough to hold a convention of aerospace contractors trying to win a space launch contract. According to the roster, it was only a bunch of space scientists and engineers trying to get small, one or two person contracts. Proof that this meeting was feeble, small and unimportant was the fact that there were no booths with vendors, and there were no Pentagon brass wandering around.
The conference room must have held 1000 chairs. The conference seemed to be packed. There seemed to be people everywhere, and the room was full most of the time.
Professor John Lewis was the chairperson introducing speakers and sitting right up front. Professor John Lewis wrote the book on asteroidal resources. He was famous.
Lewis, John S. and Ruth A. Lewis, “Space Resources, Breaking the Bonds of Earth,” ISBN 0-231-06498-5, Columbia Univ. Press, New York 1987
This NASA meeting I signed up for had lots of the right kind of people for me to stalk, because Professor John Lewis told me who would be there and insisted I present my scheme at this meeting.
John Lewis was the fellow who gave me the phone number of Colonel Pete Worden, in the White House, and told me to use his name to get a return phone call. And I did get the return phone call. John Lewis was definitely one of the right guys to stalk. He was very quick and very smart, recognized by everyone to be so, and offered something more valuable than money: connections. He got me to speak with the White House.
Professor John Lewis was easy to approach, but the Professor was definitely not "easy." It was clear. Don't cross him even just lightly. He would eat you for lunch fast if you didn't know anything or if you wasted his time. He would tell you, fast. And he would not be kind about it.
Dr. Geoffrey Landis from NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland was my coauthor. He understood the steam rocket performance equations immediately. It was a simple knee jerk calculation for him the first time I showed it to him. He had a Ph.D. in some kind of rocket science.
Landis liked the idea of publishing the first paper on steam rockets with me. We showed how to get to Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars, from Earth orbit. Ours was a big space ship, about 30 times more massive than the Shuttle.
Jeff Landis is a Visionary, and he published science fiction stories to prove it. When I heard he wrote stories that people actually read, I gave him my Visions, too.
Jim Powell told me once, "If you find a Visionary, give him your Visions. You both win."
· Near Earth Asteroids galore
The lights of the conference hall dimmed. The movie screen behind the speakers' podium was big enough to show a movie. The overhead projector for our viewgraphs was a good one with good optics, so our viewgraphs could be clearly seen in the back of the conference hall. The hall was full from about the third front row to about the middle before it began to thin out.
My strategic position was just behind John Lewis, directly up front and close enough to ask him a question or two anytime I wanted. No one else was pestering him. "Good," I thought, "I have no competition."
Who would be the next few people to meet? Usually, the first session has the heavyweights who give overviews or startling discoveries. These would be the guys. Sitting next to John Lewis with no one else for three rows might make me look special and that might soften the abruptness of my walking up to them and starting a conversation.
Dr. Tom Gehrels took the podium and explained the near earth asteroid story. I had never heard this story, about asteroids swarming near earth.
With a stunningly clear presentation and with a distinct north European accent, he told the entire audience that regular astronomers called the asteroids "vermin," little bugs crawling across the photographic plate. To others they were bugs. To him and a whole group of people who worked here in Arizona, these were interesting, and perhaps even dangerous to civilization.
So close they can and do crash into Earth and cause a disaster.
He spoke so slowly, carefully and clearly that anyone could understand, even a physicist like me. Gehrels would be an important person to meet, I thought. He dressed rather casually for a meeting, like one would expect astronomers to dress.
The best part was his invitation to take anyone at this conference for a tour of the astronomical observatory at the top of the mountain in the middle of the night. Stunning! I was definitely going to see those telescopes.
A swarm of asteroids swarming around Earth's orbit.
· Ice, Deimos Ice,
Then Professor Frazer Fanale told the audience that 2000 feet under Deimos dust we would find ice. My heart began to pound. The only thing I needed to start an Exodus to Mars would be any kind of water on Deimos. Hydrated minerals would be ok. And Professor Frazer Fanale said "ice." Stunning.
Ice on the most accessible, most useful moon of Mars
However, the ice would be 2000 feet down, under the surface. That's too far down. But Frazer then told the audience that the gravity was so small that "two of us could shovel the dust ourselves." His arms waved. His body motions showed strong emotions, and I caught on.
While at the Laser Lab I calculated what happens when humans would dig deep into an asteroid. The calculation showed that a typical frail human could literally throw 1 ton rocks right up the mining shaft. The gravity on a small asteroid or moon like Deimos is so small that a 1 ton rock weights about 30 pounds. Frazer Fanale was a mandatory guy to meet.
I stalked Frazer and maneuvered to sit next to him at lunch. He almost looked like an Italian. Maybe he was, but he was from Hawaii. He looked Hawaiian too. He had a brown suit, and looked slightly overweight.
His comments excited me so much I focused everything on asking Frazer Fanale about the ice. People were talking in the halls about the ice on low gravity places closer than the moons of Saturn, as if everyone knew about it. That was more than interesting. Frazier topped it by telling the crowd that ice would be right there on Deimos. I would tell the crowd how Deimos would be the best location from which to get off and on Mars from Earth. The combination of things was better than my wildest dream.
I wanted to go find Bruce Jokell and tell him "see, an ice cube with Tony Take Me written on it." I thought Jokell was there, somewhere. I saw his name on a roster, and somebody said they saw him. But I never bothered to find him. He didn't count. I was too busy.
At lunch, while eating rubber chicken and a vacuum-cleaner-dust type of gravy, Frazier told me why the comets had so much raw ice in them.
"The ice doesn't evaporate very fast on these things," he said.
He was referring to the dust-covered small things, roaming the inner solar system, like Deimos, one of the tiny moons of Mars, and those periodic comets this mostly side of Jupiter that I learned about only a few months earlier. He wanted to talk about the closer comets, the ones that mostly this side of Jupiter, the dark and close ones that are not as hard to access as other comets. We both saw we had a common interest.
"Why?" I asked.
I thought that because the sun is constantly beating down on them, the ice ought to evaporate. That ought to happen anywhere this side of Jupiter. I didn't understand.
"The dust on the outside is a Knudsen diffuser," he said, as if that was all he needed to say.
I never hear about a "Knudsen diffuser" and I never learned about it either,
"I forgot what it was, it was so long ago," I lied, hoping he would give me the one-line physics of it.
"The mean free path is greater than the pore size." he replied, with a one-line physics explanation. His statement proved we could communicate fast.
I still didn't know what that all meant. However, I did know what a pore size was, and I did know what "mean free path" meant, so I thought someday I could figure out what that implied.
"What does that do for you?" I asked.
I asked him to tell me anyway, even though I could certainly figure it someday, because it was quicker to ask than to figure it out.
"It's the perfect evaporative cooler." he replied. Aha!
Whoever lives in Arizona or Albuquerque New Mexico like we did, they know what that means. When the water evaporates off the sopping wet air filter, it cools the air. One can see these evaporative coolers all over the rooftops of Albuquerque.
"The 4 inches of that fine black dust on the outside of a comet is the cooler. That 2000 feet of dust covering Deimos is a cooler." he said, emphasizing that the "Knudsen diffuser" was working.
"It's a Knudsen diffuser. Makes the ice have a billion year lifetime on Deimos." he asserted.
He made it clear with very few words. The slowly evaporating ice inside would cool itself very efficiently and stay frozen solid for astronomical times.
"Oh, marvelous," I said, not knowing what else to say after he told me there was ice everywhere out there.
"That means the comets will be icy inside, you wait and see."
"You know that layer is not very thick around those comets," he volunteered.
"How deep?" I asked. If it's deeper than the length of a simple space robot scoop, it's too deep.
"I don't know. But the calculations show between 4 inches and a meter" he replied, using both English and metric units at the same time.
"It's covered with a sooty fine powder, like a black scab."
This could be a Coincidence of Nature in our favor. Water ice for propulsion. And unlimited hydrocarbons, like space oil shale.
We were done with the technical talk, so we could now eat and be humans again.
"So, how do you like being a professor In Hawaii?" I asked, thinking only of the young girls he surely got to watch coming to class or walking around. I imagined cute college girls with the little skimpy shorts, or maybe bare breasted, because of the heat, the humidity and they are in Hawaii.
He then told me something depressing about his personal life that was completely the opposite, and he ended it with " I'm having a rough time. "
I didn't know what to say.
Fanale had claimed that Deimos had ice on it. There was just no way to tell for sure. We needed a space mission to find out.
"Just speculation," I thought. But exciting.
However:
ice in orbits near Earth doesn't evaporate away. It hides.
Frazer Fanale was just the start.
· poison planet Mars
· ------
Mars, the Poison Planet
The sun was shining out side and the weather was warm and pleasant, early January 1991. But most of us spent the afternoon in the large conference room. All the afternoon presentations were given in this one room, unlike most technical meetings, where many presentations go on simultaneously in many rooms.
The entire afternoon session after the lunch with Frazer was about Mars. Different speakers kept talking about the Carbon Monoxide on Mars.
"They mean carbon dioxide, don't they?" I thought.
Carbon Monoxide? The Poison? I was not sure I heard it correctly. Did I miss something?
Mars air is carbon dioxide, nitrogen and argon, with no oxygen. So, something must be different. They are clearly talking about carbon monoxide..
Every speaker insisted that there was carbon monoxide the poison in the air of Mars. Monoxide, not dioxide. Deadly gas.
At the same time, they were showing that there was about as much oxygen in the super thin Mars air as there was carbon monoxide. There is about as much free oxygen as there is carbon monoxide.
This is scary.
Mars air is deadly poison.
People kept talking about how they had to keep the carbon monoxide from mixing with our air, the air we will breathe when we are on Mars, even if we make our own air. The technical presenters were describing details, too.
I finally pictured what would happen. I imagined what I would tell my audience when describing life on Mars:
I would start the little story with the unexpected warning:
If you pick up a bucket of Mars dirt and look at it in your room, you have to watch out for the carbon monoxide.
Then I would place them in a typical Mars situation, just like these technical presenters described:
Just imagine.
I am on Mars with a
sharp, mature female astronaut
sitting in a very spacious, cozy
Mars office tent space capsule,
4 feet on a side,
Hah.
Every presenter described tiny, tiny accommodations. All I could think of was "solitary confinement," when they described it.
Then I would describe a simple activity:
With a bucket of Mars dirt we just spent the afternoon collecting.
We're poking around in it,
My hands would show how we are plucking a rock out of the bucket, looking at it, turning it over, pondering it for a second, then tossing it aside and getting another out of the bucket.
And then I deliver the punch line:
And we start to get
a bad headache.
I get dizzy.
Both of us doze off,
our brains dull,
and we droop against the Mars tent wall,
where we die from carbon monoxide oozing out of the dirt.
The next speaker got up and detailed again how the air on Mars has a bit of carbon monoxide in it, "enough to poison and kill the astronauts," he said, "unless we carefully isolate our environment from the Mars environment."
The speaker then proceeded to show how he was dealing with it when collecting water for the Mars astronauts. The younger, 25 year old researcher fellow showed how he would generate about a 1000 kilograms of water every year, and would not have any CO in it.
I was not paying that much attention, because I was looking around the room for important people. So, when the guy was finished, I went up to him and asked him.
"How much water did you say you collected in a year?" I asked.
"About 1000 kg." he replied.
"A ton?" I responded immediately, because he confirmed what I thought I heard.
"Well, yeah," he said.
"That is not a lot of water. That's, uh, 250 gallons." I said, quickly computing the equivalent of 1 ton of water.
"That approximately one year's drinking water for 1 person." he said.
"They are nuts. They must not take a bath for a year," I thought.
That session was the last time I ever heard about the carbon monoxide risk again.
It seems this topic is just not popular, and maybe it is just not the right thing to say when we are planning to send astronauts to Mars.
Maybe this turned into a NASA cover-up, a conspiracy to cover up that:
Mars is a poison planet.
I don't think I am going to Mars.
---
· Oil Shale and Ice In Space
The long hallway was bright from the winter Arizona sun.
The Arizona sun brightly shined into the rows of windows of the long hallway to the main lobby. People were wandering from the conference room door, wandering towards the room with the poster presentations, and wandering to the lobby. There were not a lot of places for people to disappear. I was trying to make contacts, and everyone was right here, somewhere.
I kept asking everyone
"Who would know the most about the comets?"
"You need to talk to Gene Shoemaker." said nearly every person I asked.
"Where is he?" I asked. "Would you point him out?"
"He's around here somewhere." everybody said. But I never found him. All I managed to get were lots of names and phone numbers of people who would put me in contact with him.
One of them was Professor Larry Lebovsky. Larry gave a technical presentation about his research on the comet dust. He had all kinds of data showing that the comets contain water ice. Some more. Some less.
As I sat and talked with him he described exactly what the comets were made of. The comets are made of a very fine dust. The dust is some kind of hydrocarbon mix.
Like oil shale?" I asked.
Someone in the poster room, the fellow whose day job was with Boze, the loudspeaker maker, but whose night job was trying to get a job related to a Mars mission, that fellow said
"kerogen. It's kerogen. Oil Shale."
That fellow had said it authoritatively, but his day job was making loudspeakers. Lebovsky's day job was analyzing comets. So this was a key question.
" yes, like oil shale," Lebovsky affirmed.
He didn't make much of it. I thought it was somewhat weird that he just affirmed that the sky is full of oil shale, as much as we would ever want.
"And they definitely stay frozen," he affirmed.
"Did you hear Fanale, and how he said the ice would be on Deimos for a billion years?" I asked.
Yep. It's probably like Frazer Fanale says, at least over thousand of year time periods." he replied.
Some technical papers by Professor George Wetherill suggested the comets might stay frozen for 500,000 years.
"Maybe not because maybe they evaporate over that long a time. But they are definitely around as ice in space for more than many thousands of years."
Everything else Lebofsky said was not in common language, though, so only someone majoring in astronomy could decipher what he said.
I asked Larry where else I might read about this. Almost insulted, and very defensively, Lebofsky replied "I published 90% of the papers on the subject."
People did mention his name a lot, but only when talking about the subject he published 90% of.
He must be an expert in a very narrow field, I thought.
I was very glad I met him, because he asserted and confirmed with maximum authority just what I needed and wanted to know:
Comets are oil shale and water ice.
A thin, tall astronomy professor who talked, dressed and acted very important presented a paper showing definitively that a particular meteor shower was actually a shower of comet pebbles and dust.
This was news to me, even though it was common knowledge to the experts.
He told a little story about comets and meteor showers. It went something like this:
The comet pebbles and rocks that are mixed with the fine space oil shale dust and water ice come loose when the water evaporates and the dust flies off the comet. We see that stuff as a comet tail.
But the dust and rocks and pebbles do not have enough velocity to change orbit very much. So, the debris just migrates into a tube covering the entire orbit of the comet.
Earth flies through the tube, almost always when the comet is not there. All we see is a meteor shower.
When he was done with his story, he proceeded to derive the orbital mechanics of how one of the popular meteor showers was associated with a particular periodic comet. Apparently everyone knew about this but me.
This was intriguing, but I needed to find important people.
The halls were full of just the kind of people I needed to see. I made sure I talked to as many as I could possibly corner. I got as many of their cards as I could. Their cards would guarantee me that I had their telephone numbers, so I could call them. The cards would have the correct spelling of their names, in case they tried to hide.
Almost none of these attendees volunteered an email. Email had not yet caught on.
People mentioned the name "Ben Clark of Martin Marietta." People mentioned his name a lot, so I tracked him down. Then I talked to him about steam rockets. Clark was congenial. I should have been able to see in his eyes he didn't believe the steam rocket could beat any regular rocket he knew about. But I was focusing on meeting everyone important, regardless of whether they believed me.
Besides, I was out of a job and looking for one. I needed to meet anyone who might know of jobs. So I made sure to get his card.
Clark Chapman was placing himself in various strategic locations, where people had to pass by, and he was handing out an announcement of a meeting the coming July at San Jan Capistrano, on asteroids.
I signed up for his meeting. It didn't matter what it was about, it seemed to have the right attendees. And it was located just up the highway from where I lived. That was why I signed up.
As far as I was concerned, these were the comet people, and I was in the right place.
---
A boy who was being sex changed into a girl sat next to me on a very long drive to the telescope farm at the top of the hill at Kitt Peak, Arizona. I did not want to talk to her, him.
He, she, did not know anything or anyone and it was very clear. In addition, I did not want to flirt with a boy, especially a not so cute boy in very uncomplimentary girls clothes. I suspected and I did not know for sure whether or not she was really still part he. I just sensed it.
I was not discourteous to her / him earlier that day, and accidentally was somewhat seen trying to peek down her / his blouse to see if there was something female there. She was dressed in a 1930's, farm-type cotton dress, sorta with no class at all, like it was a boy putting on a dress from the attic, and with what looked like no bra. She acted somewhat like a boy. I had a strange aversion NOT to flirt with her, which is opposite to my personality. I usually can't help myself around females. I always flirt with pretty females. I can't help talking to smart females every chance I get. I flirt all the time, too much, says Terri. But not with this lady. Something not quite right. She must be a boy, I imagined. So I tried to check.
I was definitely uncomfortable, because he / she wanted to talk. The real problem was that I wanted to sit next to someone who knew something. I knew from his / her presentation earlier that day that he / she didn't know anyone, and didn't know about comets. This was sure a long bus ride up the hill, in the dark no less.
I did not find any smart, sharp, friendly females to flirt with, or I would have made sure to sit with them.
As we reached the top of the hill at Kitt Peak, all I could see was the flat roof, dorm-like homes the astronomers and their wives lived in. The astronomers who lived there pointed out their homes. One of them bragged about how they could walk a minute to get to work, and not have any traffic, and their wives would not complain when they stayed out all night.
Then we walked into a dome, in the dark. It was so dark I could not see the impressive majesty of the other domes.
This was a telescope dome farm. The clear black sky was a star-speckled ceiling stretching any direction along the horizon to any direction to the horizon. Stars were everywhere. It was as clear here as it was during that pitch black night during the mid 1980's back in the foothills of a desert near Albuquerque. Terri and I and our young girls
watched the stars from a stock-tank / hot tub with Bruce and Chris and their girls, and it was the only other time I ever saw stars that clearly and brightly in the night sky. That is why I was not surprised at the number of stars. I was glad it was a such a stunningly clear night, so we could see.
Dr. Tom Gehrels was so glad that we picked a time for the meeting when the moon was somewhere else. He told us to be thankful because this view was stunning.
We got to crawl up the ladder out the top of one of the domes. The dome had a metal ladder going straight up to the roof. It looked pretty dangerous to me. It looked like the only reason for that ladder and the hatch was to get to look straight up into the sky. Anyone who wanted got a turn climbing straight up, 20 or 30 feet it seemed.
I crawled up because it was my only chance to do it.
The night was rather cool, and the look out the top was definitely scary. I was still afraid of heights. This was almost like being on the top of a 1000 foot high radio antenna. When I got to the top, all I did was poke my head out enough to look straight up. My arms were too short and my hands were too tightly clamped around the ladder rungs.
I was looking straight up. But I didn't know stars. I could not tell anybody where in the sky to look for Mars, even though I headed a group at Sandia that would point telescopes from spy satellites. I did not need to see them because it was all equations to me.
Dr. Wolfgang Seboldt of Germany was totally puzzled and astounded when I asked him where Orion was.
"You can't see it?" he asked. "No. Where is it?"
It was directly straight up. It is the only thing I could see. I was looking right at it.
Inside the dark dome, we saw the thick telescope mounts, and the huge, 3 foot across metal elbow things that hold the telescope drives. But I did not see the chair and the eyepiece where the observer sits, like the Far Side cartoon shows. There was no place for a seat.
All I saw was a computer. Tom Geherles was so proud of his computer imager. Geherls had worked hard to get that star-watching, CCD video imaging device. The concept of a digital camera did not exist yet.
Nobody looked thru the telescope. A computer did. David Rabinowitz and Mark Elowitz demonstrated how the CCD array saw and tracked the stars. No photographic plates needed. We saw for our selves how the computer looked at the star pictures and picked out the moving things, so it could track them.
When the operators find a moving spot, they track it for as many days as they can. If the orbit they get for it is not in the asteroid or comet catalog, they get to name it. Rabinowitz and Elowitz were finding all kinds of new, near earth asteroids, at least one a month.
They were excited about their CCD imaging device because it made the search so much faster. In the old days, the astronomer would take a picture of some small part of the sky, and then a week or a month later take another picture of the same place. Then, they would try to see what is different about it. Literally. It was not so easy.
The whole process of finding near earth objects was very similar to looking at a picture of gravel on a road, and then a picture of gravel on the same road and the same spot 1 second later. The objective would be to find the little bug or ant that moved only a little bit among all the stones and dirt. They used to do that with their eyes. Their computer and CCD imager changed all that.
Now we could find new near earth objects several times a month, instead of years.
To these fellows, they are new asteroids.
"I don't know why they like these near earth asteroids so much. They are just rocks in space," I said to a fellow named Dave Kuck, who happened to walk with me through some of the tour.
On the way down the hill in the bus, I made sure I sat with someone who knew something. Dave Kuck was a mining consultant and wanted to get into space mining .
This was a twist. He had stalked me. He knew I had the ideal way to bring all that stuff he would mine back to Earth. He needed what I had. On the ride back I learned one reason why the moon is worthless, direct from a commercial mining consultant.
"The titanium on the moon is a mineral, not an ore. There is a difference." he emphatically and professionally declared, forming his words very distinctly.
"What is the difference?" I asked. To me they were about the same. If you find a mineral with lots of gold in it, you have gold ore. If you find a mineral with dirty salt, you have a mineral.
I did not understand. It was only clear to him.
I thought the difference between mineral and ore was purely emotional.
"An ore is relatively pure. A mineral is mixed with other things you have to separate." he explained.
About a decade earlier I had wanted to mine the moon for its titanium. In a very naive moment, I wrote in some notes what many know-nots write, that we could mine the moon for titanium.
But Dave Kuck said
"No, NO." It is mixed with too much of that other stuff, calcium and magnesium, that is way too hard to separate, profitably."
Another reason the moon was worthless, Kuck told me, was that there was no water to process the ore.
"The moon is much much drier than any desert anywhere," he asserted.
I never thought about it, but I guess he was exactly right. The moon is more than bone dry.
The next day at lunch with, Geoffrey Landis, my co-author, Wolfgang Seboldt was also amazed that people in the United States cared about Mars. He said no one in Europe gives a damn at all about space, and that includes going to Mars or the Moon.
"There is no interest at all." he asserted, in a strong German accent declaration.
"If we held this meeting in Europe, no one would be there. I am amazed at all the people here."
As the meeting came to a close, I concluded this was a very good meeting. This was my first publication of steam rocket travel to Mars. We found out about the water ice on comets that are always this side of Jupiter and moving slow enough to catch. And we found out that Mars has a deadly poison atmosphere.
What was really exciting was that the comets were a mix of water ice, something like very dirty coal or oil shale, and silicates. That would be organic permafrost dirt in space.
I had just learned how the space between here and Jupiter was full of water ice and organic dirt objects, any one of which would be a rocket fuel station and a place to stay.
We could inhabit the solar system.
Troubling, in the back of my mind, was that no one could point to a specific object relatively near Earth's orbit that I could use. Just as troubling, the water in the near earth asteroid rocks seemed to be in rocks, not dirt. As I walked along the sidewalk I thought
"if those little asteroids are rocks, it's like this sidewalk I'm walking on. No good at all. Can't mine a rock in space. Need dirt. Near Earth Asteroids might be like a hard sidewalk."
· Ice Ship One, from Village of the Damned
------
Make your space ship out of ice.
What could I do with Ice? In space, what could I do with ice?
The little rooms with a phone and a window in the offices of the Village of the Dammed masked our shame. Echoing over and over we all felt the same emotion: "We are worthless because we have no jobs." I could hear the guy in the next room telling someone on the phone how he is so very skilled and how much he wants to meet the person at the other end. He sounded so fake, so mechanical. I guess these offices were not that private.
At least the carpet was new. The chairs were new. The building was new. Sun Microsystems was filling the new building just like ours, but next door, with all kinds of cardboard boxes full of computers. They must be doing well. The sun was shining, the weather was nice. I had my Pentagon suit on.
None of that masked a strong anxiety: "I need to get out of here."
I sat there, waiting for the appointed time when I had to make a phone call myself, like the guy in the next room did.
I thought if I could not get a job, I might as well think about rocket science. A metallurgist back at Case Institute of Technology, when I was an undergraduate, made a remark one time that ice was as hard as steel when you got it cold enough. So, if there is ice out there in space somewhere, for example, on those comets, could I use it? To make a space ship? I wonder "How would I use it?"
Could I make struts and beams and space ships using ice? Space is sure cold enough. The ice should be like steel.
I wondered: How can I use ice as a cement, in space, for making space ships?
Hey, why not go to UCSC and look up data on super cold ice? That would help me see if I can use ice. I am out of a job anyway.
I wonder if I could make a spinning space ship and restore gravity, so we could liver there? We rode the Gyroton once, long ago. It threw me against the wall and kept me there. It was like gravity. The equations of motion clearly show that when the diameter of the big squirrel cage is big enough, one can not tell the difference between gravity and being thrown against the wall.
So, I could spin the space ship to throw the guys against the wall. That would create an artificial gravity. It had to be at least as big as a Merry-Go-Round or everyone would get dizzy permanently, and be seasick all the time.
The UCSD campus was always nice. It was only 20 minutes away from the Village Of The Damned and going there was a nice break. It gave me time to think.
They were digging up the campus. I had to walk around a ditch in the ground deep enough to bury a few cars with no trace.
This was relaxing, being able to think only about how to do something in space. Deep in thought, I detailed an ice-ship starship.
I would make a huge wheel out of ice, just like a tire on a car, only huge, 100 feet across. As big as a big airplane. Or maybe as big as 10 football fields, 1000 meters across. I would need to calculate how big across.
Can I really make it out of ice?
But who knows? Maybe it won't work at all. Ice might be too weak.
Nobody was around to hear me figuring and silently talking to myself. I was alone. Everything went on just in my head.
The technical library had almost nothing about ice. To figure this one out I needed someone to have measured just how much weight an icicle would hold before it broke. The picture would be to imagine hanging on to an icicle, with gloves on, with steel studded gloves to get a good grip.. Now try to figure out how thick an icicle it would take to hold you up. That was the physics picture.
What would the library's technical articles have for titles? What would the subject be to look them up? I had no idea and could only guess.
Only one, unused and old book had some measurements in it. Apparently no one cared about ice. San Diego does not have any natural ice. Someone had cut nice little beams from river ice, stream ice and lake ice. They were careful enough to measure how much air bubbles, dirt and minerals each piece of ice had. Then they measured how much pull it took to break them. I don't know why they took these measurements. They had absolutely nothing to do with space. They were going into streams and rivers to get the ice. And they had real data.
I also found a few technical papers on microfilm. There was just so little data it was almost not worth the nickels it took to copy them. At least I found out how strong the ice would be.
Once I had the data, so I had to go back to the Village of The Damned. The thought of it made me start fretting again, as I walked to the car.
I am still out of a job.
"Looking for a job is a full time job." said several people, picking up on a saying that seemed to make us feel somewhat better. The feeling of worthlessness was quite strong.
Making space ships out of ice is not part of looking for a job.
I have to get back to the office.
I am expecting phone calls.
As I was driving the 15 minute commute back to may office I kept thinking about it. The ice was pretty weak. I think that person from the Metallurgy department, when I was at college during the 60's, didn't know what he was talking about. Ice is weaker than a brick. He said it was as strong as steel.
I still did not know the answer. I still had to figure how to make a cage out of ice. I wanted the astronauts to be able to walk inside the cage and think it was gravity. Unless I did the calculation, I would not know which way to make the cage. I was driving, so I could not do the calculation on paper. I could only do it in my head. All I could think of was more questions I would have to answer, instead of making phone calls to get a job.
I wonder which way is better.
Do I put an astronaut house at each end of a long cable, like Astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, and make the cable out of ice? Or do I make something that looks like a giant inner tube, a giant car tire, and make the walls out of ice?
Will the walls be 50 feet thick just to hold 3 or 4 astronauts?
I have to do a vector statics problem to find out.
But was driving. Could not do it in the car. I had not done things like that in so long I could no longer do them in my head.
What a pain. If I did not figure this out, I would not know the answer.
I had never figured a wheel before. But it wasn't that hard.
If I were a sophomore in engineering school during 1962, I could do it.
All I would have to do is figure how much tension there is in a spinning tire, a spinning hoop,
and a spinning cable shaped like a thin bicycle tire.
What was the equation relating the strength of the construction material and the tension in the strands of a spinning wheel, holding it together and preventing it from flying apart?
I had to derive all the relationships from vector statics. Fortunately, the equations were not that hard. It was only rocket science.
When I got back to the Village of the Damned, my favorite office was still available. My favorite office with a new, dark purple thick carpet, a view of trees and brick 3 story office buildings with atriums built into the middle, covered by glass, like conservatories.
Instead of looking for a job, I started to daydream. Then the 22 year old secretary who dresses like a conservative but has a small tattoo on her ankle came by and told me that nobody called me and I have no faxes.
It was too late to call anybody else. It was 4 pm already.
With a piece of paper in front of me, it was easy. I analyzed it all in a few minutes, the rotating cage and Aldrin's two houses at each end of a long cable, both spinning in space. The vector stress and strain equations showed that it didn't matter if I made it like Buzz Aldrin did, two cages, one at each end of a long cable, or if I made it like a giant tire. I liked the tire because I could run around the inside for exercise during those long trips to Saturn. The tire would be as big across as a football field, as big across as a boomer submarine I had been in.
The tire would be more like a Starship Submarine, with the submarine bent into a hoop or tire and the nose connected to its butt. It would spin like a tire. The people would be on the inside, thrown against the inside wall of the tire as it spins. Then they would get up and walk around.
Of course, "getting up" would mean facing inward, towards the hub of the tire.
Once I wrote the equations, I had to put in the numbers, such as the strength of ice, how fast I thought it might spin, how much gravity I would want.
Suspense started to happen. What if it really worked?
When I specify how much gravity and how big it is, the equation tells me how strong the tire material must be to keep it together, to keep it from flying apart.
If it turned out that the tire was much smaller than a football field, then their heads would spin a different speed than their feet, and they might just get dizzy and throw up all tie time, like the Russian Cosmonaut Georgi Grechko said.
If I didn't spin it fast enough, their immune system would stop working, their bones would become brittle like chalk, and they would die.
I wondered what the answer would be.
I was thinking:
I can't go home now.
I have to finish this.
If I go home now,
I will probably
try to push the calculator buttons
while I am driving
and
crash into somebody.
I am
so close to finding out the answer.
Suspense was building, because I knew that if it worked out, we could make huge space ships easy. If not, oh well, I'd be home a little late.
My thoughts were racing as I fiddled with the hand calculator:
Will the ice
be so weak that the thing
flies apart?
like a tire made of wet clay?
will hold together?
Suspense.
Pushing the calculator buttons was like slow motion.
Rules of engineering were darting in and out of my head:
Be sure to put in
the right value for G,
gravity.
Do all the numbers in metric,
meters.
No mistakes.
I want to know the answer right away.
No Mistakes.
Make it one football field across.
Put in the number for the strength of ice,
the best one.
what was that best one?
the one with the strongest ice.
press the "equals" = key.
Suspense, in slow motion.
Hey!
It worked. The voice in my head said things to myself:
Just barely.
Just barely flies apart.
I had put in a spin speed that just barely made it fly apart. Since I could slow the spin down just by pushing calculator buttons, my mind said "it worked."
Almost as fast as dialing a phone number or selecting channels on the remote I thought:
Slow it.
don't spin it so fast.
Put in Moon gravity instead of Earth gravity.
Press Equals.
The answer was good. The strain on the ice was less than the yield strain I had just looked up at the university.
Wow.
This could work.
Just to see how bad it might be, I used the worst value in the technical paper they found for the strength of ice.
Sure enough, use bad ice and the ship flies apart.
Bad ice would not be strong enough to make an ice tire space ship. I could make the ship out of bad ice, but if I try to spin it, the ice would break and the ship would fly apart. I could use good ice and spin it, but I would only get as much gravity as I would get on the moon. That's not so bad. Probably enough to keep us healthy.
It would work.
As a reward for finding something startling, I allowed me to daydreamed a bit, to fantasize about what it would look like when the ship might break.
Maybe some meteor hits the ship and breaks it. The mind picture was fun. Sparkling pieces of ice tumbling in space, chunks of space ship slowly separating, slowly rotating and discombobulating against the dark vacuum, with stars in the background, astronauts floating with their mouths open and their eyes bloody as all the air rushes out of their lungs, the blood vessels in their eyes popping, the blood doing that cold boiling of a vacuum, leaving in frosty, bright red bubbles on their faces.
The parts would fly apart at the tangential speed, slowly, like a few miles per hour.
That was fun.
But if I used good ice and a backup, safety cable, we ought to be able to fix that.
I heard that humans needed at least half the gravity they get on Earth, or their bodies won't work correctly.
This triggered a flashback memory, to the first time that I heard that our bones can't take the zero gravity. I knew we would have to fix that if we would ever go to space. I had just fixed that, with the ice tire. But the flashback took over.
Flashback: Dr. Bill Bishop told me how our immune system fails. During the mid 1970's he came back from Washington DC to Sandia in Albuquerque to visit after he left Sandia and went to work for NASA. We were sitting at an expensive restaurant near the airport. He was visiting and he asked me to supper.
We were talking about those fantastic pictures the NASA space probe sent back from Mars. It was just stunning. I got all excited and told him that we could live there. I told him how I saw those Mars pictures that looked like dried up river beds. They looked just like we see from an airplane looking down at New Mexico when we are flying back to Sandia form Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site. The space probe also showed some kind of ice at the poles of Mars, and clouds.
"We could live there. It's another Earth." I blurted to him, completely excited, trying to convince him that NASA should try to go there.
Then I saw a tear starting to come out of his eye that he was trying to hold back. he was all emotional and choked up.
"You see." was all he could say. He was choked up that I saw that humans had found another Earth, and that we could go there.
That's why he left Sandia, to go to NASA and make a program to occupy a New Earth.
Bishop was there with me when Dr. Mell Merrit led both of us into the big hangar at Jackass Flats, a the Nevada Test Site, where they had the little nuclear rocket NERVA on a stand. He was there when Mell Merrit proclaimed "That rocket could take us to Mars."
Then he became technical again and he told me "With no gravity your immune system quits, and you die."
The astronauts learned that bones loose calcium. Bad things happen if I don't get enough gravity.
The Flashback was over.
I wondered where Bill Bishop was now. He had later quit NASA because their competent guys went away. That's what he said.
I tried to summarize as I started to put my things away in my briefcase to go home.
Dirty ice from a regular frozen river won't work.
Pure ice with no dirt and no bubbles will work ok.
Fantastic! With that pure ice, I could make a ship as big across as one or 3 football fields.
I knew that because I had calculated it quickly, I could have made a mistake. I would check the calculations, later, when I got home.
But it worked, and the new concept kept generating its own flashback all the way home.
I can make a Starship Submarine like a giant stadium, out of ice.
ice would work.
-------
· INEL hires me, and the comet book
\ S2 CH 06 014.0-marland-dc-.doc
charlou 11 killer_asteroids.doc
Department of Energy and Killer Asteroids
Mid May
INEEL hires me.
The plane was landing as I was about to interview for a job, after 5 months of no salary. And I found an error that might end the whole thing, Vision and all.
It was mid May 1991. I was sitting in a cramped window seat of a fully packed, small jet airplane on my way to Idaho Falls, Idaho. Looking out the window, I saw clearly how Idaho was still way out there in Badlands Nowhere, Northcold, USA. Bitter cold. Dreary. Clouds. Boring. I could see it. The hills and mountains below were clearly not the majestic Rocky Mountains.
I was travelling to a real job interview for the only rocket scientist job I could live with. With excitement and passion in my voice leaking through the "professional self image," I had told every person I called about the steam rocket.
I would even go live in Idaho if that is where I would need to go to make this Exodus Vision come true.
Everyone seemed to know that Idaho was both isolated from all the technical leaders, technical activities and all the valuable colleagues in the world, and cold. This was the least desirable locations of all the possible places to work. Dr. Roger Hagengruber and I visited Idaho Falls once, back in 1973. The place was a national laboratory of the United States Department of Energy. It was called "NRTS" in those days, for Nuclear Reactor Test Site. Then they changed the name to "INEL," Idaho Nuclear Energy Lab. Then they changed it again, to "INEL," Idaho National Engineering Lab. During the early 1950's, the Atomic Energy Commission located the buildings that housed the 52 nuclear reactors and a radioactive waste processing plant 40 miles west of the town. They deliberately located the site on a barren desert that was typically frozen a good fraction of the year. I thought it was a bleary place then. A colleague told me the bleary dreary part had not changed yet.
Of all the people I talked with on the phone, the Idaho guys were the only guys who had the right connections, the same connections I did: to Col. Pete Worden in the White House. That was my reason for talking with these guys.
Just to be completely sure of every detail of an impending encounter, I was doing just one more check, looking for weak spots in my story, while sitting in my narrow, uncomfortable seat on the packed jet airplane from Salt Lake City to Idaho Falls. It was the preparation for the battle: try one each of every variation, double check everything, make sure all possible questions are known and answerable.
I always calculated on an airplane. Just my calculator and me in the cramped seat, with nothing better to do. Calculate. Figure. Do the algebra to model things. I really enjoyed that kind of time alone.
However, something was not working out. Anxiety began to panic me.
The simple algebra was not showing clearly that my rocket was the best rocket. All I changed for this talk was adding a fuel tank to hold the fuel. That was all. It should not have made much difference. But the calculation was not working out.
My entire Vision depended on the fact that the rocket had a set of best operating conditions that were neither too hot nor too cold, but somewhere just right, in the middle.
The calculation was based on the fuel, the payload rocket ship, and a fixed amount of energy from my reactors. It was exceptionally simple. It was so simple I could do it on a single sheet of paper on a bouncing airplane. All I did was to add a tank to put in the fuel. For simplicity, all the previous calculations just had the fuel, with no tank.
When I added the tank, the equations changed a slight bit. But I could not manipulate the algebra to show the answer I needed. I needed the equations to say "there is an optimum that is not too hot, not too cold, but somewhere in the middle."
As I glanced out the tiny aircraft window I saw the grass and pavement. It was getting closer and closer to the airplane, moving by faster and faster. As our wheels touched down on the landing strip, I was still not finished figuring. It was supposed to be a quick check, and it wasn't.
This felt horrible. I had to stop and get off the plane. I did not like it. I needed more time. Did I overlook something fatal? Or was it just damaging?
I still didn't know the answer. For the first time in 4 years I felt doubt. Was the whole concept I conjured up of the "optimum rocket exhaust" baloney?
Waiting in the cramped aisle of the airplane, with everyone else also trying to get their luggage down and anxious to get out of the claustrophobic cabin, I started to panic.
Are the rocket scientists here at INEL going to laugh at me?
Did I pass up the other job opportunities in San Diego for nothing?
Will I go broke now? Am I finished?
Is this going to stop everything I dreamed of?
This is the interview for a job.
I have been out of work with no pay since Jan 1, 1991,
and it is May already.
I am using up money fast.
The mortgage is $2200 per month.
Terri's job just barely covers Jennifer's college.
The rest comes from savings.
In the calculations, I had been leaving out the weight of the fuel tank. When I was figuring how well my rocket would perform, I only calculated how much rocket fuel it would take, and left out how much of a tank I would need to hold the fuel.
Because I left it out, I got a wonderful answer. It was the answer I got back at Vail, 1987 when I hurt my arm skiing. But when I included the rocket fuel tank, its weight was proportional to the fuel.
Unfortunately, the tank does not squirt out the back of the rocket and go way like the fuel does.
OOOOhhhh. Bad.
The tank was still there, dead weight, and my rocket still had to push it, sopping up rocket fuel to do so. This was the first time in the 4 years that I had been figuring this that I included the tank.
Any real rocket scientist would have included the tank.
It was about 5 pm and John Rice was meeting me at the airport. John Rice had lived across the street from us in Albuquerque several years earlier, before I went to San Diego. And now he was working in Idaho Falls at the INEL and in the same group that I was about to interview. He was a still a rocket scientist, but not in the Air Force.
As he welcomed me I noticed that John Rice had not changed much since I last saw him. Idaho Falls welcomed me with its cloudy overcast sky and cold air. It was May and spring had long since bloomed and flowered in San Diego. But it was cold and bleary here in Idaho Falls.
John drove me for about 15 minutes through a part of town that looked like it was still in the early 1970's and still dirty from snow and mud. Trish, John's wife, was all smiles to see me. Their new home, with wood railings and smooth wood floors and fine carpet was warm, tight as a drum, heavily insulated against the cold.
Christina greeted me with a smile, and I almost didn't recognize her, she had grown so much. Trish served a hearty supper, and we talked about Albuquerque and what we had experienced since then. But all I could think of during the whole time was the calculation I had not finished.
Jon and Trish showed me to a warm and cozy room with a huge, fluffy bed in a fully finished basement, complete with a little desk, chair and a desk light. And all I could think of was the calculation I had not finished. Everything special about what I was doing depended on this. I must know.
I knew I had to be fresh the next day, but I had to stay up till I finished this. Instead of sleeping and getting a good rest for the interview, I was still trying to figure the equation, to see if the fuel tank screwed me.
At 11 dark thirty something, which was very late for me, especially after a long airplane ride and the hassles of getting ready for the high anxiety interview, I finally got the equation into some form I could test quickly, just to see if I was screwed.
Finally.
So, what is my answer?
I started to enter some typical weights for the rocket ship, payload, fuel and tank into the calculator. As I was pushing the little buttons on the calculator I could feel my blood pressure rising.
Suspense. Anxiety. I was tired, dreary, worn out. My ears were ringing. And time was starting to stand still.
And the Answer is...
I could almost hear the drum roll. And the numbers on the calculator worked out, somewhat.
Nature was kind.
I'm ok
My anxiety dropped a bit. That tank mattered, but not so much that I would be screwed.
I'm only partly screwed.
Those damn tanks do matter.
Often enough Nature had been mean to humans and animals. This time Nature was kind and it permitted me to talk about a steam rocket, as long as I would add some fine print, using some minor weasel words.
Good sense took over:
I have to sleep immediately.
I did.
But we had to get up too early, 6:30 am. That was less than 7 hours sleep. I was not fresh.
John drove me to the INEL, the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, while I watched a dreary cloudy sky and shivered from the freezing cold.
When a scientist or engineer would come to us for an interview, in San Diego, we would expect them to give a talk about what he does. It is a chance for us to see how he or she would project themselves in public, under stress. An interview is stress. So now it was my turn.
They billed me as some kind of important rocket scientist. That's what John Rice told Marland, that I was important.
The conference room held about 50 people. Not that many people came by to listen to me, first because it was just before their lunch hour and second because it was rocket science. About 20 people came in. It was pretty straight forward. I gave my talk.
One scientist spoke up as soon as he could sneak in a question. He knew all the details, he thought. He just had to show the audience how smart he was. He was that type. Warren Madsen, Doctor Professor Warren Madsen, always had to show you how he really knew his nuclear rockets backwards and forwards. He really didn't believe that water rockets could beat a hydrogen rocket. But he listened and didn't get too argumentative, and he didn't argue in public, either. He waited to argue until after I was done.
He mentioned "Rover" and "NERVA," and that got my attention.
Marland Stanley, John Rice and I rode up the escalator after my talk. It seemed to take a long time because I was stressing. The escalator zigzagged up the middle of a 4 story building with a hollow center and large skylights. I was going to talk with this Marland fellow.
I was fretting from the anxiety. My head was saying things:
If only I had paid more attention to this tank detail.
Tanks weigh a lot, which is bad for rockets.
My tanks don't weigh a lot.
I could have driven a big spike in my competitor's hearts,
if only I had been able to show them.
Show them how their tanks are huge and heavy,
and mine aren't.
I know this happens a lot to everybody.
screwing up.
not being able to show what's important.
The other guys know a lot about what they are doing,
but I know something that can change everything
huge,
completely huge.
Marland Stanley, my prospective boss, was a physicist, tall, smart, cocky and looked like a tall Anglo-Saxon invader, only from Kansas or Idaho. Marland and his group were going to make the 5 Megawatt electric power supplies in space for the Star Wars guys, the U.S. Department of Defense, DOD. That 5 Megawatts would have been huge, absolutely huge. This is enough to power 50 space stations.
Col. Pete Worden, United States Air Force, in the White House, was one of their contacts. Worden was my White House contact. Stanley and his group were also part of the NASA nuclear rocket program, to make the nuclear engines to take people to Mars. Marland had all the right programs.
We walked into a dark hallway and Marland swiped his special badge in the special security lock, and then punched in the special security numbers, and the door opened. We entered a room big enough to hold about 10 desk cubicles. There were two offices with doors off to the side. And a conference room large enough to hold 10 people around a table was at the end. The lights were an unfamiliar, somewhat orange color, designed to save electricity and not give off much heat. There was not a single window in any of the rooms.
Marland and I then sat alone in the conference room. Excited about my Vision, I told Marland about the steam rockets, and how a nuclear reactor could heat the water and boil it into steam. I explained how the nuclear reactor could be something like what they tested and developed for the U.S. Navy right, there in Idaho.
\ simple-nsr-2002.01.19a543r.jpg
These were the right things to say, because the one thing Marland really knew how to make were nuclear reactors to heat water and make steam, for the U.S. Navy. That is what the entire INEL was all about, nuclear heated steam generators to power submarines.
And I was here to tell him how I would just bolt a rocket nozzle directly on one of their devices, and make them all famous.
Then I reached over to the chalk board. He still used chalk, not felt pens. The chalk was a clue that they were a little behind the times there in Idaho.
\ simple-nsr+payload-2002.01.19a549r.jpg
Drawing a cartoon picture of a little rocket engine, a bag-like water tank and a payload on top, I showed Marland how we could take 500 people at a time to Mars.
Marland Stanley saw the entire Vision, the entire picture. His eyes told me he was experiencing a strong burst of excitement. His spirit came alive.
He saw a quantum leap. He saw how to transport 100 times more people than anything he had ever seen or heard of. And it was so simple that we could do the rocket science calculation in less than a minute, using just chalk on an old fashioned chalk board.
The payload was more than anything all of his NASA buddies put together had ever seen. Marland saw instantly how to completely out-do all the old timers who worked on NERVA.
\ rvr_ovrvwstmp.gif
Marland mentioned the ROVER fuel rods but didn't carry the baggage of the NERVA rocket crew, or of the NASA old timers. He wasn't part of that crowd. He was from the Idaho lab, where they did nuclear reactors to make steam, to power U.S. Navy submarines. Marland saw the entire picture right then and there.
He hired me on the spot.
But I could not start work till later, months later he said, because he didn't have the money yet.
Late spring on the campus, 14 May 1991, UCSD (University of California at San Diego). The air was wonderfully moist and warm, coming off the ocean just a short hike to the West. The sprinklers were still irrigating the newly planted ground cover along the path to the Urey Hall university library as Jennifer and I were trying to get past.
Other than that, it was like a little walk in the woods . Every campus I knew of had a little walk in the woods somewhere, mostly between the buildings. Not much of a walk because land was expensive. But a university always lets the trees be and the bushes grow up along some path, somewhere. Like a resting station. And, the sprinklers were still on and I was wearing a good Pentagon suit and black wingtip shoes, and a tie that would ruin instantly with any water spots.
Jennifer was with me. Timing it just right, we were able to run on the path just when the sprinklers were turned away and not squirting it. It's a trick that works most of the time. When it doesn't work because you timed it wrong, there is no escape from being squirted from two sprinklers at once.
Jennifer came along to help. I wanted company, she was home from college, and it was a nice day. As soon as we were in the library, I verified that sure enough, a few more of the comets
those Italian astronomers were looking at did indeed have very convenient orbits.
I had returned to the library again because I had to make sure of that.
I was preparing to talk about using these comets for water for my steam rocket, at a near Earth asteroid meeting this coming July.
I had talked to Ruth Wolf, USGS, Flagstaff, (U.S. Geological Survey) who works with and for Gene Shoemaker, on comets and their orbits. She was excited about what I was going to talk about, and she knew Gene would be excited, too.
Jen Xeroxed and I took home just a few more pages with a few more close comets.
Our work quickly finished, so it was time to go to the bookstore, get a snack and look around. There was always something interesting at a college bookstore. Mechanical pencils. Calculators. Ultrafine pens you can't get anywhere else. And most often, books. Real books. Not storybooks. One can get storybooks somewhere else. University bookstores had books with real depth.
Looking through the astronomy section of books, I saw one with a title I was looking for. It startled me. Like it jumped out and bit me.
Sure enough, here's one with "comets" in its title.
Huebner, Walter F. (Ed.),
"Physics and Chemistry of Comets,"
(Astronomy and Physics Library) Springer-Verlag, New York, 1990, ISBN 3-540-51288-4 and ISBN 0-387-51228-4 Springer-Verlag New York
I picked it up. The cover was pretty blue.
What a clear picture of comet Halley.
I started to page through it. It had real data.
I promptly went into a focus-trance and started to rapid-scan for all data.
This is intriguing.
Europeans sent their satellite to chase comet Halley,
Took pictures of it.
That was nice of them.
It was clear this was NOT NASA at all. It was Europe, without NASA's help.
Then a key piece of data popped out.
They collected some of its dust.
The sensor was a physical thing that caught the dust and analyzed it.
Hey, what is this?
I saw it was hydrocarbons.
How can this be?
This is carbon - hydrogen polymer chains, xylene polymer.
The Europeans found that the comet was made of something like kerogen, oil shale, dirty coal dust. Just like the young fellow working for Bose said, 6 months earlier at that conference in Tucson.
And what's this other stuff in there? Oxygen and Nitrogen?
I was reading that the comet was made of something that looked and felt like it was made from organic things.
And look at how much is there.
They gave the dimensions of the comet and the fraction of hydrocarbons. That was enough for me to calculate. There was always a calculator on my body somewhere. I immediately calculated and saw that the comet had more than 300 cubic kilometers of hydrocarbons.
The United States uses about 1 cubic kilometer of oil per year. I had calculated that one just for fun.
That's 300 year supply of oil.
Hey!
I realized that this comet could be something like an oil field in the sky.
And what is this nitrogen stuff? and the sulfur?
Their descriptions ... like pee.
It should stink.
But then I realized it would be more like dirty coal.
They're calling the stuff CHON,
carbon hydrogen, oxygen nitrogen,
and amines.
After reading the composition, I imagined the comet could be more like a dirty something, stinky, maybe something oily rotten pee smelling.
The comet was about equal parts superfine silicates, like clay, water ice, hydrocarbons, and mixed with about 1% of amines, like urea or ammonia or some kind of nitrogen compounds.
I started to laugh.
I bet the closest thing on earth to this stuff
is cat poo.
But frozen cold as dry ice.
And then I clarified my conclusion, to be sure that it was accurate.
Not dog poo,
dog poo is brown.
Imagining I was the speaker at some L5 Society meeting, I began to fantasize what I would tell them.
See here,
I would say, pointing to the overhead projection of my transparency,
- the water is the moisture
- the slimy is the silicates, the clay dust
- the black is the hydrocarbons, the organics
- and the stink is the nitrogen compounds.
and then I would say
"The closest thing on Earth to this comet is cat kaka in a dry ice cooler."
More data jumped out of pages scanned fast.
4 times blacker than soot in a chimney at night.
That was not a figure of speech. Data showed the albedo is 4 times darker than soot.
"Dad, can I have this sweatshirt?" Jennifer said, breaking my trance.
"What?" I replied, startled.
"Yes." I agreed, because it was fun to let her pick something out and buy it, as a reward for going with me. We all need souvenirs.
"The sweatshirt. It's pretty. I want it." she asserted.
"Ok. Lets go eat." I replied, as we went to the checkout, Jen with a sweatshirt and me with a prize comet book, and an Engineer-In-Training Manual. I was going to be an engineer now, at the INEEL, so I needed a refresher book on how to be practical.
As we were watching people and eating, my mind wandered.
Here I am out of a job,
and I am buying an expensive, $50 book on comets.
A technical book, yet.
This is crazy.
Well, maybe not.
Marland Stanley in Idaho says he is putting the paperwork through to hire me.
Technically, I have a job.
So $50 on a book is not so bad.
This was incredible. We humans had just found unlimited oil in space. Hydrocarbons. Stuff that looks just like dirty coal, very much like stinky oil shale.
I wonder where it came from?
---------
P.S. I never did ask if the "shale" was
"racemic" or not. If there are mixed right hand and left hand
hydrocarbons, they are not due to DNA as we know it.
That means the oil shale from space might not be exactly the same as ours.
· San Juan Capistrano, KT event, and the 3 Month Night
original: \ S2 CH 08 015-3-month-night-Di-.doc
\ 3_month_night.doc as of 2009.02.05
M:\azinc\PROZX\To Inhabit The Solar System
====================================
3-month-night-2000.11.01-A-.doc
from a file named: \ S2 CH 08 015-3-month-night-Di-.doc
also see http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/reports/spaceguard/sg_1.html
First International Meeting On Killer Asteroids
This NASA meeting only wanted to talk about killer asteroids.
"This is how the End of the World happens. It happened over and over, at least a dozen different times already," say a couple of them wandering about the meeting. This is how just about everyone died, back in the days when we were still prehistoric animals, before we developed into human people.
The sun was shinning gently into my driver-side window and the air was not too hot, not too cool. Almost no clouds in the sky and almost no wind, it was like it always was in southern California. All the houses I could see on the hillsides as I drove on the freeway to San Juan Capistrano had that clean, California look, where carefully groomed coastal trees wrap neat rows of curved streets on clean hillsides, and where all the cars are new and red tile roofs cover expensive architecture. I could see that everyone in San Juan Capistrano was well off. I could see their nice clothes as they drove by and walked the streets.
It was such a pleasant sunny summer day in this quaint little tourist town, where the swallows return every year on the same Spanish missionary holy day to the tiny, cobblestone Franciscan mission a block up the street. It was such a nice day to have a meeting just 83 years to the day after a 15 megaton bomb from space detonated without warning 4 miles above Tunguska Siberia, flattening an area of hills the size of San Diego, where I had just driven from.
All 180 of us wandered comfortably into the meeting room in the back of a tiny, light-colored half modern building with the impressive sounding name "San Juan Capistrano Research Institute." This space meeting had more near earth asteroid astronomers than I had ever knew existed.
I met the comet mission Program Manager from NASA whose program was cancelled. I talked with a few planetary atmosphere PhD astronomers. I met half a dozen of the recognized best space geologists in the world. I chuckled at seeing at least a dozen rocket scientists all looking for a new mission to some nice little new thing in the sky, like an asteroid or comet. I even met some of the journalists from the respected science and space magazines.
I had never seen that many journalists at a meeting of so few people, only 180 of us. It didn't seem like 180 people until the last day when they gathered us all together and made us all pose for a picture. That's when we were counted. The conference organizers were amazed at the turnout.
Almost no one wore a suit. This was very different from the meetings I had been to during the last several years. Earlier this year many of the same people attended the big NASA meeting in Tucson, Arizona. At the Tucson meeting, the German space scientists I had lunch with wore suits. Wanna-be space mission designers wore suits. The guys from the aerospace industry all wore suits. Even the professors wore suits. Only some graduate students, a few clearly rebel scientists and the young astronomers from Kitt Peak Observatory who stayed up all night and slept during the day wore casual clothes, at that Arizona meeting.
Important people who control expensive space missions wear suits. People who do research under contract to the important people all wear suits. If you are at the meeting you are one or the other, or you are trying to get money from the important people who control expensive space missions. So, why did I see almost no suits?
I wore my Pentagon suit. I always wore my uniform to these meetings. My dark blue suit with the 3/4 inch thin white stripes, and my wing tip black shoes and my Pentagon tie on a white shirt, clearly stated that I was a Professional Scientist and an important Program Manager with Visionary Ideas. My purpose at this meeting was to work the crowd and meet the Important People who control expensive space missions. I brought a New Vision, a new way of moving through the solar system, and a breakthrough in payload size. However, I could not figure out who or what rank these people were by their clothes.
A thin, interesting lady scientist astronomer from Eastern Europe caught my eye, partly because she was an attractive female, and partly because of the simple elegance and clean and simple lines of her light weight clothes. She put on a sweater-like light wrap when she left the building with several of her colleagues, and they all seemed to be wearing the simple, elegant but frugal clothes.
The foreign scientists I met at the other aerospace meetings seemed to all wear heavier, out-of-fashion, bulky wool things that made them look coarse. But these people wore clothes so frugal that I kept thinking, "they're poor and they come from Eastern Europe." Their names were unfamiliar. I never heard or read of them. This entire group of people was pretty much new to me.
Whom should I meet? My last employer taught me how to seek out and stalk the Big Boss, the General who controls the money and makes the big money decisions. We would be able to determine who the General of the group was by the clothes. The "General" meant either a real general or a very important person VIP of a company.
The markings of the uniform would indicate who they were and how important they were. The uniforms of all the people in the business sent the signals about who they were and their position. A sloppy suit meant a low position. Perfectly pressed meant an advisor to the high command, whether a company high command or military. A plain uniform meant a technician. I was taught to send the signals by wearing the right uniforms. And at this meeting, I could not read these signals. There did not seem to be any suit signals.
Almost everyone here seemed to be casual, unfashionable and clean cut. Not one single person wore after-shave lotion or cologne. Not one of them had bad breath, or shaggy hair, or pigtails, or a solid gold chain on a hairy chest poking through a half unbuttoned bright colored shirt. Not a one had torn pants. I saw every one of those signals at an oceanography instrumentation meeting in Hawaii, and another time at some technical labs at the Navy base in San Diego. Oceanography was far more physical than astronomy and space, I conjectured.
Everyone here except the Europeans was plain, bland, vanilla.
What a perfect day to talk about the near Earth asteroids that hit Earth every once in a while and make big holes in the ground, like that one we read about at Meteor Crater, Arizona.
The last big meteor to hit and explode that we know of happened on July 3, 1908, at Tunguska, Siberia. It blew up about 4 miles above the ground, in the air. If that meteor would have exploded above Los Angeles it would have leveled the entire city and its suburbs. Instead, it exploded in a remote Siberian forest, where it leveled 1000 square kilometers of trees. Lucky us.
I presumed we were here in San Juan Capistrano, California, because everyone could get here easily. It was also near to the Mt. Palomar telescope. It was close to the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Lab. It was right in the heart of Aerospace Country, a thick, rich belt from north of Los Angeles to San Diego. It was easy for me.
Why would those British fellows, those eastern Europeans and some Latin Americans come here? I didn't know there was any astronomy in Latin America.
Perhaps the organizers chose our meeting dates of 30 June through 3 July so that most of us could fit it into our schedules. Perhaps I didn't pay enough attention to what the meeting was about. Supposedly, the meeting was about near Earth asteroids.
The roster said we would get to hear about killer asteroids. I really could not tell by the random conversations of people milling around if that was the main reason we were here. General Dynamics taught me and other Program Managers to eavesdrop and carefully listen for common themes and rumors in the hallway, or restaurant conversations, especially the late night hotel bar restaurant, because that is where everyone would go after a long, annoying airplane ride.
General Dynamics taught us the Eavesdrop Game. It starts with the situation of an aerospace person on travel. The plane was always packed, the seats were always narrow, the space between the knees and next seat always caused the traveler to crumple. People were annoyed, legs were always cramped, the air had that air conditioner-cleaned smell, and the heavy luggage didn't quite fit. It's late, the hotel is somewhere else and the sign-in line is long. The uncertain receptivity of the people one must see too early the next day causes anxiety. After a few drinks at the hotel bar one can stagger back to the hotel room without having to flag a cab or wait or think. The effort and hurdles of the trip bond the traveling partners to each other. Alcohol and exhaustion loosens the tongue and increases the speech volume. So, General Dynamics taught me to shut up, listen and quietly take notes on what the poor, tired fellows are saying and don't know that I am listening while they sip their double vodka at the restaurant bar. I always took notes.
People would always talk to each other as if nobody else could hear them. What my aerospace mentors taught me was called "gathering G2," where you gather bits and pieces of information. Like a puzzle, when you put them together the secrets appear.
The game was not quite working at this near earth asteroid meeting like it did with the Pentagon crowd. There were no hard liquor drinks and no late night restaurants for this meeting. These people drank beer, not martinis or Chevas Regal, and they got together at the closest hamburger joint instead of going to an expensive restaurant. They were friendly, too. I had no trouble at all inviting myself to lunch with key players. The hamburgers tasted as good as a steak, to me. And I did not have to eavesdrop.
At lunch a fellow named David Morrison, who was obviously in charge even though he wore a casual shirt and business pants, was abrupt with me, hard to engage, and made it clear he would be intolerant of any bozo out-lier concepts or statements, regardless of who he was talking to. It wasn't just me.
This personality difficulty he had was typical of the smart ones. Also typical, Morrison seemed to be free of that annoying arrogance and smugness I often found in corporate bosses. Morrison lacked that need to control and manipulate people. However, he did demand preciseness and accuracy.
One errant word by anyone around him would trigger him to raise his voice. He was difficult, even with his colleagues. He acted like a public prick. And it was clear that he saw me as an application person, not a creator of new knowledge in the field of near Earth asteroids or astronomy. I could feel that to him I almost did not exist. I could feel how he put me in the category of "other," not mainstream. I could sense how I agreed with his categorization of me, because I was only a user of what these fellows discovered. I would only use the near Earth asteroids and comets, and he is in the business of finding them, finding out about them, and science.
Dr. Ted Fay and his wife Ann Fay insisted I stay with them instead of a hotel. He had an astronomy PhD. specializing in planetary atmospheres and knew just about every technical thing about the topic of asteroids, near earth asteroids and comets. He knew the name of nearly every single technical person at this meeting and knew many of them personally. I was low on money, and I just got hired to the Mars nuclear rocket science position at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Energy, but had not collected a paycheck yet.
Ted and Ann me offered me their home, and Ann Fay cooked a 7 course Louisiana meal. Ted was the one who told me "we will get you your ice" about a year earlier, as we were leaving the lunar solar power meeting. Ted and Ann met with me at the University of California San Diego library 6 months earlier when I found the data on those dark and close comets almost nobody seemed to know about and which had the ice I was looking for. These two had personalities that made instant friends.
The only G2 I could pick up anywhere was "near earth asteroids."
I was here because it was a meeting on asteroids, because the organizers accepted my paper, and because I made sure I would be there at the same time as the key person, Gene Shoemaker. I was excited about telling of my new way to haul huge, 10,000 ton payloads to and from near earth asteroids and comets.
Some of us were here to make spacecraft to go prospecting on one of those asteroids. Dr. David Bender, an older, retired rocket scientist, that I had met at General Dynamics was here because he was an expert at cosmic billiards. He would send a spacecraft past a moving planet or moon and arrange for it to gain or loose speed, with no rockets at all. He was bent, frail and soft spoken. Chris Cassell was here, too, looking for a Ph.D. thesis project. He was a young colleague who did the work for the Exofuel project at General Dynamics with me. Most of the other rocket scientists were looking for a new space mission. I was here to create one.
I felt comfortable here because I knew several of the people who made things happen and several more who knew nearly everyone and about nearly every topic. I felt like I could work this meeting like a good Program Manager and make the right contacts. I had done my homework, just like General Dynamics had taught me.
Before this meeting, I had talked on the phone with at least half a dozen of the key people here. John Lewis, the Professor who gave me the White House contact October 1990, was here and friendly. Prof. Jim Arnold from UCSB, who put me in contact with the entire near earth asteroid group, was here and very glad to see me. I didn't know what Gene Shoemaker looked like, nor what Glo Helin or Don Yeomans looked like, but I had talked with each of them.
Not one person mentioned that about 70,000 engineers and scientists just lost their jobs. They had worked in this southern California belt from Los Angeles to San Diego, before the cold war ended a couple of years earlier. Not a single person said a thing about that. At most of the other technical meetings, people recruited and other people sought new jobs. At recent meetings, during 1990 and 1991, smart engineers with Ph.D.'s were looking for a job. The only thing I heard about here was "near Earth asteroids."
The organizers seemed to have enough money. They served us expensive cookies and tasty fruit snacks once, during the time when we were scheduled to wander the front part of the building and read the posters and scientific papers pasted on boards, like a high school science fair. I noticed that not a single big aerospace company had a booth, and in fact, nobody had a commercial booth. The place was too small. Everything I saw was a theoretical concept or a measurement related to near earth asteroids and comets.
This was the "First International Near Earth Asteroid Conference." Dr. Clark Chapman expected about 30 people to show up, so he and a few of his colleagues booked this small place run by one of his friends, with small meeting rooms on the second floor, and a conference room on the main floor that was about the size of a typical 8th grade classroom in Idaho. Everyone knew this was no Mars conference. This was just a meeting of people who liked small, tiny, vermin asteroids.
Someone in Congress was paying for a few of them to be there and write a nice report about something or other. Nobody said anything in public about Congressional money. But I listened carefully and gathered G2. I heard that in the hallways. Nobody said anything about the money. The person who got the money, David Morrison, made a few unclear comments about some kind of report, but it was clearly unclear.
So, we filled the only meeting room when the first speakers started telling us the story of the one particular time 65 million years ago, when the world ended again.
Again?
Ended?
What? A totally unexpected shock.
The American professor spoke so plainly, without any emotion, so matter of fact, so dull that I almost missed it.
A British professor spoke with some emotion, mostly about how comets did violent things to earth and about how ancient humans tried to tell about and ancient history tried to record, and we should pay attention and get excited. I didn't get excited about ancient history. I still don't care too much about ancient history. The ancients were primitives. They didn't know anything. We know more than they did. They are irrelevant.
Victor Clube, from Oxford, was trying to tell us that comets caused catastrophes, often, and especially during times when humans could write. I didn't care much about that either. I thought I heard him say that when the Earth goes through the "beta Taurid stream" we would be hit by about 100 Tunguska explosions per century on Earth.
He said that kind of battering by these huge bombs caused the Dark Ages. He said that we are in a quiet period now and the cycle is 2500 years long. The beta Taurid stream is apparently a band of debris in the orbit of a comet, and we are not going through it now. He spoke with emotion, but we were not due for killer comets right now.
I don't have to be politically correct when I think to myself.
I can think anything I wish.
I don't care about this guy's
comet-crash story.
His comet-crash, ancient history stories were just not so relevant because the comets didn't cause the end of the world, and the rock layers proved it. Everybody could see the rock layers when they drive along the highway. I even dug for fossils myself along some roadway rock layers. The geological record is continuous from now to backwards in time to before slime worms were the only living animal on Earth.
Therefore, I ignored what he said about our needing to pay attention.
We lived through comet crashes just fine,
if there ever were any,
from before the time when we were lizard people,
or mouse people,
or cave people,
from then till now.
That's what I think
It was politically incorrect to say you didn't care about ancient history. So I didn't say it. I thought it, sitting there in the back of the room.
Sitting in the back of the room by the entrance, I could intercept any person going in or out. General Dynamics taught me to strategically position myself at the meeting, so I could meet whomever I need to meet. I could leave without being noticed. I could see who talked with whom. It was always useful to know who attracted all the people around them, and who worked alone. Most of the time, sitting there in the last chair, I had time to myself to think. Most people delivered such boring presentations anyway. Most of the useful things that went on at a meeting were not in the presentations. It was in the hallways.
These plain people in vanilla clothes talking in dry tones clearly expected that every single person in the audience knew the names of the rock layers, and that they were talking about the hot damp days when dinosaurs were big and the biggest mammals were like mice.
Gene Shoemaker, the charismatic leader of the comet and near Earth asteroid scientists, showed slides of his hand pointing to an inch thick layer in the rock layer formation on the side of a hill, somewhere in the world far from here.
I gotta listen to this guy,
what he says,
so I can talk to him
about what he talked about.
Gene Shoemaker told us he thought this was the layer of dirt and soot that was laid down during the one or two years after the comet or asteroid hit Chixilub, Mexico. He was showing a picture of himself along a river embankment and pointing to a layer of some kind of dust up to an inch thick and laden with soot. He was trying to tell us that this dust accumulated nearly everywhere on Earth.
He showed us a what he thought was a root embedded in the muck mud soot layer, which he said proved that the whole event happened suddenly, during something like just one year. He used words and emotions that made me imagine the soot from all the fires burning all over the world. He was trying to convince us that a big meteor hit, and that it caused global catastrophe.
It had only been a decade since a wild-idea kind of professor named Luiz Alvarez, who had won a 1960's Nobel prize for physics, and his son Walter had published a paper claiming that an asteroid blew up and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Gene was talking about it. Gene was interesting.
The Alvarez's measured the amount of iridium metal in that one layer that divides the geological era of dinosaurs from the next era where there were none, ever again.
I didn't know that,
that the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared,
so fast.
Iridium is very rare on earth, but is not so rare at all in a typical rock asteroid. The only place one could imagine getting all that iridium all at once is from a large, exploding asteroid. That's what they said.
That's what Gene was talking about, and trying to convince us. I remembered reading about that during the 1980's, and I did not think it was very important then. Even while Gene was talking, I still didn't think it was very important. Interesting, though.
I didn't know Gene Shoemaker was a geologist. I thought he was a comet astronomer. Everyone told me to see Gene about the comets. When I had talked with Gene on the phone, it was all comets. No dinosaur geology at all. No earth rocks. I guess Gene must have been helping these fellows tell the story and had gotten to tag along on some of their field trips.
It was interesting, but I didn't really care whether the dinosaurs died over a 5 million year time span or over a 5 000 year span. Who cares?
I thought they died by evolution, when something better ate their food and took over their territory. It was irrelevant. But, everybody likes dinosaur stories. Gene was trying to convince us that the asteroid made such a big bang that it started fires on Earth. And the fires were so intense and big that soot covered the whole Earth,
That dust-winter connection Gene made, using an asteroid that exploded like an atomic bomb, made me wander off and daydream. I had worked at a nuclear weapon laboratory for 18 years, most of that time working on spy satellites that look for atmospheric nuclear explosions, so I knew secret details Gene didn't.
Gene's use of words like "explosion" triggered me to remember sometime back during the Cold War that Carl Sagan talked about how world war with atomic bombs would stir up dust and cause a "nuclear winter." Sagan said blasting all that dust into the high atmosphere would change the weather into winter, no matter what time of the year we had our all-out global nuclear war. Sagan was trying to tell us not to have a nuclear war. He was trying to convince us that the atomic bombs were more than just very large explosives. He was warning us that we could change the weather.
But Sagan was an activist and almost certainly exaggerated the whole thing.
I was daydreaming because soot in the rocks was not related to a steam rocket to occupy the solar system, and I wanted them to hurry up so I could get my turn to tell my steam rocket story to the audience.
I didn't much care about nuclear winter because it was very clear that we were not going to have any global nuclear war. This is 1991 and the cold war was over. At least 70,000 of us lost our cold war jobs. Both the Russians and the Americans knew that whoever won the global nuclear war would still loose more than half of their own people, because the other side would immediately launch rockets to shoot back as soon as their satellites detected the other guy's rockets launching from missile silos. The winner's cities would be leveled, there would be no work, and all the retirement plans would be lost. Then the survivors like myself would blame, maim and slowly kill whoever pushed the button to "win" the nuclear war.
Only now, Gene Shoemaker was telling us that Nature Herself caused at least one "nuclear winter," without the atomic bombs, just with an asteroid.
He seemed to be telling us that here was some data suggesting that all those geological periods we heard of, with strange names like Permian, Cambrian, Devonian, Silurian, Triassic, Jurassic, all may have each ended abruptly, without warning, one bad day.
One day?
Stun. Shock.
Now that kind of thing would certainly be relevant history I would pay attention to. That could be scary. Gene's black and white picture of a root that got buried 65 million years ago was in a layer that represented just one year, just one event, not thousands or millions of years. That startled me.
When I would drive on a highway I would see the geological layers on the embankment where they cut away the dirt to make the road. We were taught to think that each layer represents thousands or millions of years. Gene was saying that instead of millions, this layer is just one year, a very bad year.
All at once?
One year?
He had many slides, all from different places. He was showing how the dinosaurs ended all at once. Only a few of scientists in the audience knew that it happened this fast.
A British fellow showed some similar pictures. A few more scientists with strange names showed slides of rock layers from all over the world, from places I never heard of, too many of them, and all with the same story:
"it all happened one day, without warning, when the whole world caught on fire."
Nobody had spread the word before this meeting that we were going to hear fantastic things.
Gene Shoemaker didn't tell me that about the meeting, and he and I discussed months before this meeting how I would use one of the many comets between Mars and Jupiter that almost no one else knew about. Only Gene and a small number of astronomers knew about those comets. That's what we talked about.
We didn't talk about dinosaurs and killer asteroids at all. I thought this conference was about using near Earth asteroids, and going to them with big space ships, and occupying them. I had discovered how to push those space ships. I could make and push space ships of the same size as the Queen Mary cruise ship. I could take 1000 people at a time to those asteroids, and I was going to prove it when my turn to speak came up. Even better, I was going to show them, the crowd of important astronomers, how I could extract and haul as much rocket fuel in one of my steam rockets as a super tanker could hold, like one delivering oil from Saudi Arabia to the United States.
I had a clear agenda: "Sell my steam rocket space ship."
Suddenly the words of the speaker, a professor, shook the ground beneath me.
He created an image of the sky above me burning. My heart rate did not raise. My breathing didn't change. It was like often happens that we hear something and it doesn't register. Only our subconscious mind completely and fully comprehended.
What he said jumbled all the ideas in my head something like tumbling raffle tickets in the rotating barrel cage with a handle on it. The professor was cranking the handle.
"Things change suddenly" read the winning ticket he pulled out of the cage.
"When the asteroid or comet hits, your 30 million year turn is over. A new species takes your place," he said.
The room didn't change. At the conscious level, he was just someone talking, telling stories. No one else in the room showed any emotion, either. No one showed even a single picture of a dying dinosaur.
The room was not even quiet. I heard a reasonable amount of low level commotion in the hallways. You could NOT hear a pin drop. It seemed that people were just sitting there like they were listening to the description of grass growing.
His words described a bomb fireball the size of Texas. And I guess everyone else was reacting like I did:
big bomb,
big hole,
bad weather,
meteor crater,
so what.
What he was saying was really strange.
He explained that no matter where you go in the world you see this boundary in the rocks. Above that boundary layer you only find small mammals, and below it you found dinosaurs of all kinds. I never knew that all the geological periods were so abrupt.
I didn't know that one year there were dinosaurs and the next year there were none.
The speakers really were showing us data that Earth apparently has another type of severe weather, Cosmic Weather.
The devastation is worse than the Bible's version of the End of the World. Their data suggested this had happened over and over. This one time 65 million years ago was just a particularly easy one to observe.
--------
Thrilling Story, but Dull in the Hallway,
Such a thrilling story going on.
Meanwhile, everything I heard people talking about in the halls was as boring as watching paint dry.
This was the first time in my life I ever felt a science story thrill me. It wasn't scary to me. It was just a really great, thrilling story. It had just the right amount of relevance. It could happen to me right now, when I walked outside the building. With less than a week of warning an asteroid big enough to end humans could explode on Earth and a new species would get to take over. Dogs maybe. But it probably would not happen.
This had just the right level of scary.
We were all in this story and it was real. It was the story I had been looking for. I had been a public speaker on space topics for two years. I had gotten on talk radio. I had spoken in public many times. I always wanted to communicate the excitement and wonder of what I was talking about. It was pretty hard to do with science. But this story sold itself. This story was starting to be really good.
This feeling was different from the mania that I would too often fall into, over some concept or idea. The Mania I experienced was a severe anxiety that would come over me. It was similar to 20 cups of coffee. I could not sleep. I would be restless and could no sit down. This was common and happened to many people. Emotions would overtake us, like crying, anger, sadness or shock. Mania would come over me when I thought I had invented something that would change the world. For example, I thought I found out how to make antigravity one Saturday evening during 1970, after a several, late night shots of whiskey. The extreme anxiety came over me. I could not sleep. There was no antigravity, only an incorrect minus sign.
This space story was different. I did not become excited or manic. I became completely attentive.
This was just one heck of a good story that I could tell school kids and audiences when I talked to them about my space ships.
I could not see the thrill in anyone else's face. It seemed like everyone was sitting through the words like it was just a meeting, just one more meeting, and we were here to talk about what spectrum they measured in their telescope, or the infra red data they analyzed from the NASA space probe. That was the only kind of thing I heard in the hallways.
The hallway blabber had everything except the exciting story.
"The orbits are chaotic." said Don Yeomans.
Yeomans was from the Cal Tech Jet Propulsion Lab, "California Institute of Technology." That was astronomer-speak for:
the objects in the orbits go around in their almost perfectly elliptical orbit,
and then one day, after they come close to one of the planets,
they suddenly change to a different orbit,
and they would do that often.
"The dynamical lifetime exceeds the physical lifetime of the cometary bodies." said George Whetheril. That was astronomer-speak for:
"The comets evaporate long before their orbit goes completely crazy."
"The infra-red telescope detected a clear dust trail in the cometary orbits that you can not see with a visible light telescope." said Dr. Professor Mark Sykes, passing out free beer, in a Hawaiian shirt, mocking the killer asteroid show that Morrison was putting on. That was astronomer-speak for:
"The comet orbit is strewn with debris, the whole orbit, not just where the comet is."
"I want to build and launch a multi-CCD scanner." said Dr. Coleslaw from the U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory in Livermore, California. All the astronomers wanted him to just go away. Just one satellite like he wanted would cost more money that it would take to fund all the astronomers at this meeting all at once for their whole career.
"What story do you think we should take to the people?" I asked Clark Chapman, the fellow who handed out the announcements for this meeting.
"I have no agenda whatever for what news we should take to the people. Scientists should only communicate facts." he asserted, bluntly, and looking at me with some sort of disdain for even asking that kind of question.
And that was that. I had asked him point blank. He told me point blank. I turned and walked away.
You know what Clark,
you can just go pay for your own research.
If you don't tell everyone,
so they will pay for what you do,
then they won't.
They will pay for what someone else says,
until they run out of money.
Get an agenda, or go broke.
But I didn't say anything to him.
Nobody was excited, nobody was manic, nobody was talking about the killer asteroid story in the hallways, and the speakers kept feeding me new asteroid or comet data, new facts. The data injected directly into my head and stayed there.
I walked back into the meeting room. The hallways were still noisy. People were still going outside and talking. I found a chair in the back, the left side this time, closer to the exit.
A shorter, thin, mild mannered science type professor in a plain, light-colored shirt was describing how the fireball was so hot that the nitrogen in the air burned with the oxygen. He said the burnt air mixed with water vapor and made nitric acid rain. That was sure new concept.
He described the dimension of a fireball as big as the state of New York. He described thick choking smog over the entire Earth.
I didn't know if I was hearing this right. I could see him if I moved myself just right because the chairs were all the same height, I was in the back of the room on a plain chair, and the people in front of me were taller than me. I was looking at my notes and hearing only his conversational narrative voice.
"When you breathe air with a little nitric acid in it, you cough and cough and choke, constantly."
He spoke American English, not British like some others, as he described how nitric acid rained all over the world and leached the poison heavy metals out of the mountain dirt and poured that poison into the streams.
Nitric acid rain?
meteor explosion causes
intense, global, thick choking smog nitric acid air.
I thought of that awful metallic taste of the well water, in Avon, Ohio, long ago when we were on the farm, drinking from our shallow well. I forgot I was in a chair in the back of the room. I forgot there were people standing behind me. I was tasting the metallic water. I was coughing the choking acid air in a real fantasy-like fleeting hallucination.
He was telling us about what happens when a mountain sized thing from space hits Earth. Nobody at the meeting knew whether it was a comet or an asteroid that hit. It didn't matter. It was big, massive, 10 or 15 kilometers across, and bigger than the center of any big city.
I couldn't see the speakers. The room was crowded with people. Many were standing in the aisle. I heard another speaker say that the smog and fires were so intense that the surface of the earth was dark. I thought of the darkness that came over our farm when we had one of those severe storms, during 1950's. He said it was darker than that.
"The brightest spot on earth was probably no brighter than a moonlit night."
Really?
Choking nitric acid air, fires, soot and smoke and dust so thick the sky is dark like moonlight?
"This lasted for few weeks."
"Then the dust reflected the sunlight and cooled the Earth. It started to snow. The snow lasted for 3 years." He kept describing the technical effects in terms I could understand.
Really?
"After the fires burned nearly everything and the intense smog choked nearly all the animals, snow fell and everything froze," he continued.
He was saying the words, but without the gestures and voice. He sounded like a college engineering professor reading a people-story to the class. No emotion, just clear, accurate descriptions.
"We estimate that everything over 50 pounds died."
Wow. I was not excited. No one seemed to be.
I was entranced. This was a super story. And it could happen to us right now, without warning.
But it won't, probably.
I thought that if an asteroid hit the earth it would just make a hole like Meteor Crater, Arizona. Just a big hole in the ground. Not so interesting. Or maybe a gash like the Grand Canyon. Or maybe an explosion like a Kraktoa. Blows a lot of smoke. Makes a big boom. Not a big deal unless you live next to it. We'll watch it on CNN while we eat supper.
But no, another British speaking, casual and plainly dressed, vanilla-voiced taller thin fellow described how the explosion was a searing, vaporizing, ultraviolet purple, white hot plasma, exactly like the inside of an atomic bomb, like a nuclear detonation, with a fireball big enough to cover a state.
He didn't use those words. He said it his way, and my mind translated it, because I knew more about atomic bomb fireballs than them. I knew the physics because I worked for 18 years at Sandia and I needed to know all about the physics of the fireball explosion. I didn't learn that much about making nuclear weapons themselves. I learned about what they did, so we could detect them and snitch on the sneaky atheist commie pinko rapist errant nations trying to detonate a weapon in secret.
As soon as he stated the meteor impact speed I was able to calculate the "energy per mass." All I wanted to do was compare it to a blob of high explosive of the same size. This was a sanity check that physicists do and that I would always do, while you were talking to me. I did it in a flash. I carried a calculator and used it to think with, like any other prosthetic device, like magnifying glasses or a telephone.
Physicists always made the sanity checks, fast. They used to do them in their heads, figuring in their heads. But now they do them with the calculator, while they listen. If someone would make a statement, the physicist immediately would do the quick calculation in his head and ask:
how fast,
how far,
how big,
how much,
should I care?
I squirmed in my chair. No one else seemed to squirm. The chair was uncomfortable. The staff brought extra chairs, different from the more comfortable ones up closer to the front. The hallway was still not quiet. People were still milling around. The building was not that big, with only one conference room and a hallway to a showroom.
The speaker droned on with some dry physics about the bolide energies.
Bolide?
new word.
Must mean meteor ball thing.
"Bolide energy" meant "the energy of the meteor." I understood instantly and completely, of course. Each speaker was feeding me a number here and a number there, each filling in a different piece of the puzzle. I had my Radio Shack, low cost scientific calculator in my hand. So I estimated:
how much
..... compared to high explosive.
In less time than the speaker took to finish the next sentence, I got:
10 times more than high explosive.
That was still not enough to make things interesting. I needed to know how much high explosive. Otherwise, it might only be enough to make a big hole in the ground. Or maybe it would only be big enough to wipe out Los Angeles, like the Tunguska Siberia event did, back during 1908.
Then he said "kilometer" size.
Easy one step calculation...
answer is 3 billion tons times 10,
I did not need my calculator for that one.
that's 30 billion tons of high explosive.
That is at least
10 times more than all the atomic bombs in the world.
Tell that to Carl Sagan
Very nice. Scary. Not exciting, just really 4-letter-word scary. This was a good story. And it was real, too. It could happen now, and it did happen then, and before then, and before then, again.
About 4 or 5 of these speakers, new names and faces I had never heard of, were describing something familiar to the atomic bombs physics I had worked with 15 years earlier. What they described was like what the spy satellites I had worked on just several years earlier at Sandia National Labs were looking for. Our satellites looked for the fireball when someone detonated a nuclear device, an atomic bomb, in the atmosphere.
The "bolide explosion" effects were nearly identical to a very large nuclear weapon detonation. Instantly I knew what they were talking about. After a few microseconds, a classified number of microseconds, the fireball acts exactly the same as if an atomic bomb made it.
Then, another plainly dressed and thin Ph.D. fellow described how the sky over the North American continent was like the inside of a fire-hot furnace. The exploding fireball blew white-hot lava into a sun-like bubble 150 miles wide and into the sky, splashing sheets and streaks of white hot melted rock and dust vapor high over the clouds.
He didn't use those words. My kind of language would be more than just the facts. It would be sensationalism. And since I could think anything I wished, I translated his facts into what I thought it looked like in the sky. I was fantasizing again. I could barely pay attention because of all the heat and fire in the sky.
And then someone mentioned the shock waves. That sent me into temporary hallucinatory fantasy again. I could see an image like those old 1950's Atomic Energy Commission movies of megaton atomic bombs going off. Sitting the in the chair in the back of the room, making room for one more chair as someone else wanted to sit, I was dreaming while awake, fantasizing, remembering my atomic bomb physics 18 years earlier at Sandia and Los Alamos, that the shock wave races out ahead of the fireball, at 10 times the speed of sound.
Someone said that the shock wave boom was so sharp and strong that a family of dinosaurs, moms, aunts and babies, were found laying there, with grass still in their mouth.
Probably lightning,
but you're telling the story, not me.
Keep talking guys, I'm listening.
That made me daydream some more. I knew what I would tell an audience:
"They died suddenly.
They could not hear it coming.
Everything that was as close to Chixilub Mexico as West Texas, where it hit,
was like sitting 10 feet from a hand grenade,
or, more like hugging a car bomb.
The sky was silent during the seconds it took to turn into white fire,
and broiled their faces.
Then suddenly without warning
the shock wave killed them."
That's what I would say.
Yeah..
Andy Smith from Kirtland Air force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico, was quietly taping the session with a little, black and white video camera he parked in the far right rear corner, as out of the way as he could get and still have a clear view. I wondered if anyone would care or if they were even smart enough to ask him to tape it.
Now I could see why the reporters were here. The conference organizers, probably David Morrison, were pushing their agenda. They wanted national press coverage of their findings. They were here to tell the world that the sky is falling and we better pay attention. If they would have billed the meeting as "First International Meeting on Killer Asteroids" instead of "near Earth" asteroids, no reporters would have shown up. Not real enough.
---
My Turn: A Monster Steam Rocket in Space
I had elbowed my way into that meeting to tell them how to bring back huge payloads from local comets using my steam rocket. I was there to lead mankind into space. But I had to wait my turn, till the end of the day. I was the last speaker. They were there to tell the world how the End of the World is a repeating event and how asteroids cause the catastrophe when they collide with Earth.
John Lewis introduced me with a compliment and told the audience this would be fun. However, the meeting was running late. I was the last speaker. The audience was obviously hungry. They were restless. I could feel that I needed to hurry. I tried to hurry.
After a full day of hearing the speakers tell of the killer asteroids, even I could see that I was just a user of asteroids, and their purpose was to find them, characterize them, and see if any were going to hit Earth. I felt somewhat crippled, out of place, like a puzzle piece from a different puzzle. I spoke anyway, because I had a breakthrough and I was going to tell it.
I showed how I would saunter up to a near earth comet, one of those 100 or so comets between Jupiter and Mars that everyone here in the audience obviously knows about because they are astronomers. I would dock with it. Then I would heat chunks of it and melt some of its ice. I would take the water and put it into a big bladder tank the size of a blimp or dirigible on my space supertanker rocket. Then I would use a nuclear reactor like what we use on a navy submarine to heat the water to superheated steam and run it through a rocket nozzle. I told them how utterly simple this was compared to those complicated schemes where one makes rocket fuel by using electricity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The surprise I showed them was a rocket that would haul 30,000 tons of stuff, which was more than what the total whole world had ever launched into space up to that time, and the rocket only weighed 200 tons, which is only about as much as two Shuttles. Gene Shoemaker was sitting right in the middle of the middle aisle, blocking the aisle, with some friends. I could see he was smiling and commenting with a smile. But everyone wanted to get out of there and go eat. So I got almost no questions and everybody left as soon as I put down my last slide.
Even though I felt like I didn't impress anyone, my colleagues were kind and complimentary. Prof. Jim Arnold told me that they reviewed my paper before they put me on the schedule and they thought I was right.
"We are heretics also." he said. That made me feel much better. When he told me that, I realized that I didn't elbow my way into that meeting at all.
I earned it.
Feeling much better about being part of the group, I noticed that some of the people there had names that were the same as some of the comets I had chosen to use for my steam rocket. I wondered, are they the same person?
Dr. Ed Bowell said "Yes, I have a comet named after me."
Holy Cow.
I just met somebody with a celestial body named after him.
He found it, so he got it named after him. That thrilled me
"Oh, many people pronounce my name in the vulgar way" Bowell said after I pronounced it in the non-vulgar way and asked him to pronounce his name for me.
This is the first time in my life I met someone who had a celestial object named after him. Then he said the Shoemakers had several comets named after them.
Wow.
this is exciting.
Just about any person can usually excite me anyway, but this is really exciting.
I 'm in the middle of people who have
celestial objects named after them.
I didn't know that Gene's wife Carolyn was a comet hunter, too.
Then I met Klim Churyumov. He told me he was delighted that I mentioned one of the comets he had found, to use it for rocket fuel.
"You mean you have a comet named after you?" I asked.
"Yes." he said, in some kind of European accent.
"Would you sign your name in my notebook?"
He looked at me strangely, as if I were an FBI agent or something. But my excitement over meeting someone with a celestial object named after him was so transparent that he signed the notebook with a smile. Then he invited me to the October Kiev meeting. He was from the Ukraine, USSR.
Victor Clube told me he enjoyed my presentation very much and gave me his Oxford address. When he gave his presentation, he told everyone about the shower of Tunguska events that hit earth every 2500 years. I didn't tell him what I thought about his killer comet fragment topic.
I still thought that if the bad thing isn't going to happen while I am alive, heck with it. Clube told us that we are in a quiet period, where we only get a Tunguska explosion once per century or two. His story was too weak.
Where is the imminent catastrophe?
Not enough right-now type of catastrophe
Clube was a delightful fellow.
Then I found out that Gene Shoemaker was a geologist who got his own money to go on his own field trips. Gene told me that at least one of the near earth asteroids was probably a comet. He said Oljato, one of the near Earth asteroids that the Native Americans could see, meant "moonlight water." He said they probably saw it when it had a tail, a comet tail. Gene knew before almost all the others that I needed water to make the steam rockets work.
I tried to get the reporters to write about my rocket. They ignored me because but my stuff was just not as much fun as the killer asteroid story. My story, a way to push space ships as big as aircraft carriers through the inner solar system, was not as interesting as a:
"killer asteroid that could end civilization
like it ended the dinosaurs,
suddenly,
one bad day."
--- -----
The leader, Dr. David Morison of NASA Ames, got the United States Congress to pay for the meeting, and Congress expected a report. He was going to give them a good one. At this meeting he was supposed to tell Congress authoritatively how the collision of an asteroid with earth would kill civilization and be like a reset button for the Earth. If this meeting went well, I heard in the hallways, the next meeting would be to examine what we could do about it.
It would be very much like David Morrison to command his speakers to deliver the facts, nothing but the facts, and only their calculations of what happened or would happen when a big asteroid collided with Earth and killed the dinosaurs. All they were doing here was droning on about what they were paid a tiny fee to deliver to him. The tiny fee he could give them was only the cost of the paper and postage, not the trip expenses.
Morrison was apparently delighted that 180 of us in the room were there to prove that what they said was "peer reviewed." He only expected the 30 leaders in the field to show up. His 30 smart fellows did the technical review.
The rest of them didn't seem to get very excited. The movie makers got excited. So did I.
· Drobyshevski's Exploding Moon
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The ice would burn.
I am so glad the Russians were communists for 70 years. They are such intense thinkers and superior engineers with such superior intelligence that if they would have been capitalists, they would have beat us completely.
The dull white light of the room competed with the sunshine leaking into the hallway from the San Juan Capistrano summer outside. We were wandering the hall, standing outside the meeting room on the second day of the meeting. People were milling around.
During the day, after my talk the late afternoon before on steam rockets, a casually dressed fellow in short sleeves came up to me, barely able to speak any English, and said:
"Eee you shood use heedrogen and oxygen for yoour rawket."
"How do you pronounce your name, again?" I replied.
That accent is clearly Russian.
Has to be.
"Drobyshevski, Ed, cawl mi Ed" he said, again and with a deep Russian accent.
"Ed Drobyshevski," I said.
not so hard
I pronounced it back to him with a somewhat good Russian accent. He was from St. Petersburg.
I got these rocket scientist types a lot. They always wanted me to do something stupid, such as getting the hydrogen and oxygen out of the water. I knew what this conversation was going to be like. I would spar with him and trap him, like I always did. I would quickly zero in on the key thing he didn't know about. I would snap the trap and eat his lunch.
Then I would typically find out that he would be a nobody, anyway. These types typically are nobody. Then I would look for somebody else more powerful to speak with. The powerful ones listen. I would probably waste time with this Drobyshevskii fellow, like it always is with rocket scientists. Rocket Scientists don't know much physics.
I started in on him:
"How do you get the electricity to make the hydrogen?"
This was a trick question, like a chess move. I was setting him up to trap him.
"Not generating electricity," he said, shaking his head "no," and pausing carefully to give me time to think about it.
What?
How?
How is he going to get hydrogen and oxygen without electricity?
His move countered mine and I knew it. That caught my attention. If they say "yes, electricity," they loose. I eat their lunch. These Russians play chess. Maybe he is tricking me.
"Where do you get the hydrogen and oxygen?"
"In the ice."
I didn't understand him. He came out of the blue with that. He got me. It didn't figure.
"How does the hydrogen and oxygen get there?" I said, speaking rapidly, excited to find out how the impossible would happen.
I stopped, and started over, speaking slowly, just one word, at a time, to help him with his very poor English:
"Gasses," I said.
and then after a hand motion describing gasses coming out, and a pause, I said
"How?"
I was trying to - speak - in - few - words, because he - no - speak - English - very - good.
"Electrolysis." he said.
That completely puzzled me. He said he was not generating any electricity. Where would he get the electricity?
And then he won the game. This was why the Russians often beat the Americans. They knew Physics. They knew Principles.
I did not completely understand his physics, but he explained. The only way I could describe what he said was to paraphrase the little story-tale he told. He told it in a way that was like translating physics into a 4th grade story language, and that made it understandable, even though his English didn't work:
Ice moon in orbit around Jupiter cuts through
electrically charged plasma of Jupiter.
It also cuts through
strong magnetic field of Jupiter.
This acts like electric generator, sending huge current,
like continuous lightning,
through whole ice moon.
Electric current decomposes
ice into hydrogen and oxygen.
Is exactly like just plain standard electrolysis that you can do in kitchen with battery and glass of water, where you make hydrogen and oxygen bubbles.
But ice of an ice moon of Jupiter is so cold that ice is hard like rock.
Hydrogen and oxygen gasses can't go anywhere in rock.
Gasses are trapped in extremely cold ice.
He paused to let me think about it. He had discovered that a moon orbiting close to Jupiter has continuous electricity shooting through it.
The electricity splits the water, for free.
The ice is so cold that the gasses get trapped there, for me to go use.
Slick.
Slick commie bastard.
If there is any electricity like he says, then he is right.
Then he continued, and I paraphrased his little story into my own English:
Remember you are out by Jupiter.
There is no Sun out there to speak of.
Is very cold.
Ice is so cold, is like stone.
Gasses are frozen in stone.
Hydrogen and oxygen can't go anywhere.
Just accumulate.
For millions upon millions of years.
In moon ice.
Pretty soon,
ice has so much hydrogen and oxygen trapped in it
that when you melt it,
gas could bubble off, and
gas would burn if you light.
He stopped again, this time watching my facial expressions and confident that he had my full attention. He just told me that ice from an ice moon of Jupiter would burn in a vacuum jar. Any physicist would be instantly puzzled and captivated.
"How much?" I asked.
"How much,
what percent,
hydrogen and oxygen,
in the ice?"
I asked again, trying to use as few words as possible to help him understand.
He replied
I calculated up to 12% of ice would be hydrogen and oxygen.
No air needed.
Pure energy.
His voice clearly showed he was excited and it was clear, even with his bad English.
Free.
In space.
Just what would want.
A whole moon of it.
But if you don't watch out,
ice explode like dynamite.
That's what happened to moon of Jupiter,
it exploded.
Wow. A fellow at UCSD talked about a moon of Saturn exploding, and making the rings of Saturn from its debris. This could be why it exploded. He was describing exploding, burning ice.
How do you like that. An ice cube would burn, with no air at all.
Wow. I was estimating and calculating in my head as while he was describing it. I knew how to relate the concentration of explosive gasses to the energy trapped in the ice.
"That much is like high explosive," I blurted out.
He smiled.
He waved his hands up towards the ceiling and started another story.
Moon of Jupiter exploded.
He told me that one time, long ago, a whole moon of Jupiter exploded. It blasted moon parts all over its orbit, making rings of Jupiter, like rings of Saturn.
You could see in daytime,
was so bright..
"Why?" I asked.
I always ask "why," without first thinking. It is a knee-jerk question I always ask.
I expected some collision explanation. I didn't really comprehend the fact that he had just explained clearly why.
"High explosive." he replied, immediately.
I thought he was trying to say it was dramatic and violent, like high explosive. His English was so poor I couldn't understand. But he didn't mean that.
He meant exactly what he said, that the ice was high explosive, and that it would blow up. This was completely new to me. I never heard of exploding ice.
Then he told me the rest of his story.
"In sky,
as big across as hand"
He spread all five fingers and stretched his arm out to show me that the ring around Jupiter would be as big as your hand at arms length,
in the sky, at night. Wow!.
"You would see in daytime,
daytime."
Gees. What a story.
He kept it up. He could tell by the excitement in my eyes that he had me entranced.
"One Tunguska every day."
Now he really had me. This is really fun.
Everyone at this meeting knew what a "Tunguska" meant. It meant 15 megatons worth of bomb, like what happened on July 3, 1908, at Tunguska, Siberia.
Drobyshevski explained
Huge cosmic explosion,
blast rock, debris,
away from Jupiter.
"Debris" means chunks of moon ice the size of football fields, and maybe some chunks the size of small mountains. He calculated that once free of Jupiter, some of the debris would end up in the ecliptic orbital plane. That's where we live. All the planets live in the ecliptic orbital plane. You live in the ecliptic orbital plane.
"Smashed into Earth."
Another stunning story. This was one stunning meeting.
Of course, all anybody cared about was:
How Big? and
How Often?
So I asked, and he said
"Tunguska,
one per day"
Not being able to speak a foreign language sometimes helps. You say only what counts. That's what he did. With a mere four words:
"Tunguska,
one per day"
He was telling me that a good fraction of this debris was on a collision course with the orbit of Earth. Some debris would crash into earth. So he calculated how much would crash into Earth and how big the pieces would typically be.
Lots of them smashed into Earth. One a day.
I translated for my self immediately:
A meteor with 15 megatons of bomb energy,
enough to level and melt an area as big as any one of the top 10 big cities in the world,
just like the one that hit Tunguska Siberia, 3 July 1908.
That one did some quick urban renewal on a 1000 square kilometers.
A bomb that big would drop randomly somewhere on earth roughly once per day for at least a year.
A 15 megaton bomb every day for a year, hitting somewhere on Earth, with no warning, at random. Too small to see in a telescope until it is too close to stop it.
Great Story.
And if I had any illusions about landing on an ice moon of Jupiter, I would have to imagine the whole moon as a bomb, and the ice as high explosive.
When you land,
don't strike a match.
Don't bang on the ground,
please.
As it turned out, the energy in the ice was probably low enough in most places that it would take a really big meteor crashing into the moon to trigger the explosion. And furthermore, if the ice would get "warm," as warm as the temperature of dry ice, the gasses would ooze out and it would not be so explosive. If the ice churns, like it apparently does on Europa, it would never get a chance to build up enough explosive gasses to matter much.
So, not every ice moon would be a bomb.
I personally did not know enough to comment on his assertion that the planet exploded.
I later calculated that any piece of space stuff would collect enough Galactic Cosmic Ray energy during 1 Billion years in its top 1 meter layer to dissociate the amount of gasses he said, and would definitely be ready to explode. That would include the ice, the hydrocarbons or hydrated mineral rock that one might find in the thousands of near earth objects between here and Jupiter,
I calculated that he could be right about at least some ice somewhere accumulating explosive mixtures. That meant at least some ice somewhere out there would burn. If you bonk it, it will detonate, explode.
Space is dangerous. Watch out. That smart Russian Physicist sure made me think carefully about it.
This turned into a great meeting.
· Buden's Nuclear Reactor Trick, and the horrible GCR
Buden's trick
Space is very radioactive
I would get more radioactivity in a solar powered, Greenpeace space ship to Mars than on a nuclear powered space ship.
And that's the truth.
------------------
We were attending the In-Space Assembly / Servicing Workshop, NASA Langley, 24 thru 26 July 1991. The weather was partly cloudy, sunny, and warm. There were soft-needle pine trees and green things everywhere, not like Idaho where we had just come from. It was more like San Diego .
We were walking east across the gravel stone parking lot, crossing some green grass. The morning sun was shining through clouds. We were walking towards a one floor auditorium-like building engulfed by tall trees. This NASA site did not seem to have the large, complex rocket engine test facilities like the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland had.
I was finally working, at the INEEL. I had been on the job for two weeks now. I was walking with Dr. David Buden, an expert and prominent person for space nuclear electric generators. He coauthored a book on space power. Anyone who wrote a book was important.
Buden had a deep, authoritative voice. He was taller than most, and impressive when he walked, looked at you or spoke. He wore a suit. He spoke slowly and clearly. And curiously, he was very easy to approach.
"Hey, I got a question for you." he started.
He would often start with a trick question that way, usually with a smirk and a smile in his voice that would cajole you into interacting with him.
"You're on your way to Mars,
and you have a choice of what kind of space ship to take.
You can take a space ship powered by a nuclear rocket,
or you can take a chemical powered rocket.
Which one gives the astronaut 3 times more radiation?"
And then he shut up, baiting me. We were walking casually over some mowed grass, towards that meeting building. He did puzzle me with the question. I stared at the green grass for a moment, trying to figure the answer.
"That's a trick question." I responded, halting for a moment.
I wanted to make sure Buden would think I knew at least something. I could not come across stupid.
Buden loved to ask this kind of puzzle question. I heard him do that to Marland twice, and to John Martinell. It was clear he would spend some time composing and rehearsing what he was going to say.
"Just from the way you are asking it, the answer must be the Greenpeace ship." I responded.
We were making nuclear rockets. So I could not figure why he would ask a question where the answer would be that the competition would be better, where the chemical rocket would be safer. He must be trying to show that the nuclear rocket is better, or he would not ask the question.
The Greenpeace guys would want us to use "no nuclear" in space, or anywhere I presumed.
The answer to his question must be that the nuclear rocket would give the astronaut less radiation than the completely green, totally safe, non-nuclear chemical rocket like the astronauts used to go to the moon. That does not figure.
Since Buden would typically respond in a calculated way, I had time, another second, to ask:
"So, why would the nuclear powered rocket give you less radioactivity? How can that be?"
"Well,"
he started, with a slight smirk that turned thoughtful, as he always did when he asked those intriguing trick questions,
"The chemical powered rocket takes 3 times as long to get there, so you get 3 times higher dose of cosmic radiation.."
"Oh?"
I was obviously puzzled.
"Space is pretty radioactive, you know."
He reminded me, he thought.
"No, I didn't know that space is that radioactive. How radioactive is it? Are you talking about a solar flare?" I asked.
I really did not know that space would be radioactive. I knew that the once every 11 years during a sunspot cycle the sun could spit out some solar flares that could be radioactive enough to give an unprotected astronaut a lethal dose.
Must be the flares.
"No, its not the solar flares. The Galactic Cosmic Radiation gives them a dangerous dose." he replied
"So, why is the nuclear rocket safer?", still puzzled, I asked.
"It goes 3 times faster. They are exposed 3 times less."
"But what about the nuclear reactor?"
"Oh, you shield the reactor."
No wait at all for that punch line. He had memorized and rehearsed it.
Then I remembered, it all came back. A few weeks ago a retired Navy officer fellow who hired on the same day as I did told us a radioactive submarine story in the lunch room.
Three of us were eating in the lunch area on the first floor, in the sunny corner of the first floor of the building. The sun was actually out. The retired Navy officer was going to have to work out at "the site," 40 miles to the west, and get up at 5:30 in the morning to go wait for a government bus to take him there. He was unlucky.
I was waiting for them to refill the container of that chili they made. The proprietor was a handicapped, older female. The government got a "3-fer" in her: 1) age, 2) physically challenged and 3) gender. Sometimes the lady hired rather attractive local younger ladies to take money and make the food. They were all nice, very friendly, and I liked all of them, even the older, uglier, nastier one. The proprietor somehow picked people that made you want to come and visit and leave money. But I liked the chili more than anything else.
Bruce Schnitzler knew about space. Space was radioactive. For every year in space, we would get 10 times more radiation than they let a nuclear garbage man get at one of the leaking spent fuel tanks at the Department of Energy over there at Hanford, Washington. And that would be under the old rules where they used to let workers get enough radiation every year to make some people's hair fall out, literally.
A year in space with the Galactic Cosmic Radiation would cause a 1% chance of deadly cancer.
Now that was dangerous. That was 100 times more dangerous than driving a car for a year. He impressed me with that.
The retired Navy fellow said he had a real story about radiation.
"I was an officer on a submarine where the radioactivity alarm went off when we surfaced." he said.
"What happened? Was there a bad leak?"
I asked, because everyone likes to hear a scary story that happened to someone else.
"No. There wasn't any leak at all. That's why we got into trouble."
That sure puzzled me. He had been telling this story quite a few times to sympathetic ears. I could tell. I was obviously sympathetic.
A person at the Nevada Test Site told me back during the 1970's that they made them drink a case of beer, as many cases as he could stand, free. The AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) paid for it when he got a dose of radioactive tritium. The beer would make him pee out the tritium. I thought it was tritium leaking when the submarine officer started telling me the story.
But there was no leak.
"So what happened?" I asked.
"The officer in charge forgot to turn down the radiation sensor when we surfaced. So the radioactivity detector went off."
he said.
He waited for enough time to see if we knew enough about submarines to know what that meant. Neither of us made any face motions, so he knew we didn't know.
"The regulations say you have to turn down the sensitivity when you surface. Cosmic rays set it off." he continued.
I caught on immediately, and understood why the guy got into trouble. The U.S. Navy is one Big, Regulation, everywhere and for everything, and especially on a nuclear powered submarine.
The Galactic Cosmic Radiation was reaching the surface of the earth. It was about 100 times less than in space, but it was still there, easily measured. And just a few yards of water completely shields it. So there isn't any radiation in the submarine.
Going deep under the water would be analogous to turning off the lights on the darkest night and looking for a glowing child's toy. Much easier in the dark. It was radiation-dark a few fathoms underwater. That meant they could turn up the sensitivity on the radiation detector and detect tiny amounts, way less than the background at the surface. They could tell immediately if even the very slightest leak occurred from their submarine nuclear reactor power supply. If the nuclear reactor would leak even just a few atoms, they would be able to detect it.
Navy regulations would tell them to make sure the radiation detector does not yell "RADIATION !!!" when they surface, just due to radioactive Galactic Cosmic Radiation. The regulation says "turn it down when you surface." The poor Captain of the submarine had to file a report telling why the radiation detector screamed "RADIATION !!!" because his team wasn't paying attention.
I asked him to verify what he just told me,
"So, 117 sailors get more radioactivity at the surface of the ocean than they do
cramped inside a nuclear submarine, next to an operating nuclear reactor, driving around hundreds of feet below the surface. Right?"
I would often try to repeat what someone told me in my own words, so I could quote them, especially if it had something tricky and opposite in it. This was opposite.
"Right." he said.
He seemed to be happy that he told me the story.
Before working at General Dynamics, with the United States Navy, I thought that all the nuclear reactors leaked some radioactivity, and that one had to breathe it or you would not get to go on the submarine ride.
Everyone would want to go on a submarine ride, so you would just do it and shut up. And of course, the radioactivity doctors decide out how much radioactivity they think you can have and still be ok, and that's what they tell you. So just do as you are told.
NO.
No, that is not the way the U.S. Navy has been doing things.
The U.S. Navy was the most safety conscious place I had ever seen, anywhere. They wanted that submarine so safe that one would get more radioactivity outside the submarine on the surface of the Earth than you would cramped up in the thing next to a nuclear reactor.
I snapped out of my flashback of a few weeks earlier.
We were here at NASA Langley, located in Hampton, Virginia. We were supposed to learn about in-space assembly. There was a lot of U.S. Navy facilities near here. We were just not near the heavy technical buildings. We were walking to a conference room.
We finally got to the building with an auditorium big enough for a couple hundred people. No fancy technology demos in the entrance. No fancy architecture. Most of the seats filled. A nice podium and stage. This was the working NASA, not the Public Relations kind.
Positioned in the back of the room, just like General Dynamics trained me, I met a few new people. I met Dr. Stan Borowski, the nuclear rocket fellow. He talked about his nuclear rocket ways to go to Mars. Buden introduced me to George Abbey the invited speaker, some big wig at NASA that Dave Buden knew and talked with. I met Ralph Eberhardt, the guy at Martin Marietta who led me to the Idaho job was there, and all I said was "hi". I met Theresa Kennihan, a pretty younger lady scientist that Dave Buden immediately started talking with, because they used to work together somewhere.
And at an adjacent urinal just outside the meeting room I met this vaguely familiar guy carrying a lunch-pail sized box with a telephone attached to it, and also carrying a 2 inch thick, 6 x 8 inch organizer.
"You look familiar. Are you Buzz Aldrin?"
"Yeah, hi." he said.
I had just met him last fall, at Dan Greenwood's meeting. He somewhat remembered me. Amazing.
That proves the adage I learned at General Dynamics, for Program Managers who have to position themselves to get to influence customers:
"You have to be close enough to use the adjacent urinal."
At this meeting, Dr. Buzz Aldrin told about his ways to go to Mars.
All day long I kept recalling what Buden said about the GCR:
"1% chance of cancer for every year in space."
Buden's casual retort:
"We shield the reactor."
----------------
19910714 ISAS 91: In Space Assy/Servicing Facility Workshop 24-26 Jul 91, NASA langley, Bionetics Meeting Support Div, Attn: ISAS-91, 2 Eaton St, Ste 1000, Hampton VA 23669, charlie cockrell chmn, buzz aldrin cycler, george abbey inv. spkr, stan borowski, buz sawyer hq safety, jim russell aerobrakes, george nederauer, dave buden, ed dean, ralph eberhardt, (dick coleman ops, dr. john buckley heater, kevin mccoy gd, roy decker telerobot
· Teller Nuke-em
Space Power Symposium in Albuquerque
The well-planned-for meeting of nuclear rocket scientists where Big Money and Big Deal Excitement was supposed to happen, was just a shark fest with blood in the water and no shark food. And the completely unprepared-for meeting of killer asteroid people up the street, with feeble space rock astronomers trying to proclaim the sky was falling, now that could change the world, without a falling sky.
I learned I could move killer asteroids out of the way.
Unfortunately, I would not figure out how to do it a 100 times better than my competition until now, almost 20 years later. Nature tricked me. I am too old now and nobody cares.
It was winter, early January 1992, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The weather was nice, compared to Idaho, with a nice warm 35 or 45 degrees, mostly cloudy, no sun, but a nice evening.
Everybody who counted in the space power and propulsion game was here in Albuquerque and the Department of Energy, manned space travel meeting. The important ones were especially not at the other, NASA meeting up there at LANL, the famous Los Alamos National Lab. People came to this meeting from all over the world, including the Russian nuclear rocket inventors.
We were all feeling the excitement of making the nuclear engines to go to Mars. We all wanted to make the electric generators to power everything in space. Professor Muhamed El Genk of the University of New Mexico hosted this meeting, like he did several times before and I didn't know it. I would have gone if I would have known. On the surface, it looked like he sure knew how to draw a crowd.
But behind the curtain: Money. Most of the crowd were the aerospace contractors looking for Big Time Government Money, just like during the Cold War.
I followed the money.
If we went to Mars, the cost would be something like $100 Billion. That's as much as a fleet of 30 big nuclear submarines. That's $40 per year from every man, woman and child in the United States, for 10 years. Sharks from the Military-Industrial complex were in this water. The real draw was the taste of blood in the water: money. None of us would be here if there weren't huge money dangling in front of our eyes.
The Russians had already done the nuclear rocket experiments very well 2 decades earlier. They copied what we did, but definitely not how we did it. Theirs could be much better, judging from what their technical guys told Marland and me and others at INEL. The Rooskies wanted our money, too. The Cold War ended. Now we were friends and they were broke ex-commies.
The USA had already tested the basic nuclear heated, hydrogen propellant rocket, two decades earlier. Our nuclear rocket would be a repeat. Theirs would be new.
President George Bush had declared that we were going to Mars, so I guess we were. Everyone wanted Bush's money.
I wanted to attend that other, NASA meeting, as well. The other space meeting was different entirely from this one. Dr. David Morrison at NASA Ames had convinced someone in Congress to pay for two meetings on killer asteroids. I went to the first meeting, where world famous scientists declared that near Earth asteroids were a real danger to mankind. The second meeting was looking for ways we could prevent the asteroids from hitting us.
My motel was downtown Albuquerque, a 2 minute walk to the convention center. My hotel room was a historic, 3 story building about 50 ft x 100 ft in dimension, from the Spanish days of an earlier century, a true part of history. The somewhat thin, stained wood doors were small and rather short, because the Spanish were rather short. The lock on the original knob was a 4 inch square piece of black metal hardware designed for a large, classic antique key. The room was rather small, but I could feel how it was a perfectly preserved and maintained original, pre 1900's room. I liked the feeling of the Spanish type of New Mexican ambiance. The wood and the window and the hallway all felt good.
Soon after dark, on the first floor in the reception area Marland Stanley, John Rice and the rest of them from INEL came to my hotel for a drink, and to meet some others. The entire INEL space division was showing up at the Space Power Symposium here.
Marland and the rest of them had modern rooms. They got rooms in the new, 50 story hotel with modern architecture and a dark and shiny stone facade, because they reserved early. They were teasing me, telling me I left my wife back in Idaho in the biggest blizzard of the decade. I laughed.
"No I didn't," I said.
"Terri asked that you call her." said John Rice.
"Sure." I replied. These guys knew I was rather gullible.
John had talked to Trish, his wife, and Trish talked to Terri. I guess they weren't kidding. Wasn't snowing when I left.
Sure enough, the blizzard was so bad that Terri almost got lost and stranded trying to find her way back from the mailbox. The description of that situation would be a little deceiving because the mailbox was down the hill 210 feet. The only neighbor was at least 500 feet away, further down hill. Up the hill east and behind us was no one, for about 10 miles until you got to the outpost town called "Bone" that had no telephone lines and was proud that you got to use their genuine, stinking outhouse that did not use chemicals.
Down the hill at least 6 miles away was the town, glistening and shimmering in the chill air. The wind nearly always blew hard, uphill, towards the east, 50 mph. The water in our toilet bowls went up and down, often, most any day you choose, because of the wind flowing over the house.
Terri told me that it was just towards evening, the snow was waist high and the blizzard wind was blowing so hard it was hard to tell which way the house was.
“I thought I was going to die here, up to my waist in snow. I almost couldn’t move, up the hill.” she complained.
I guess it was true that she almost got lost in the blizzard.
The people at this rocket science meeting were the guys who wanted taxpayers to pay for sending people to Mars and to use nuclear powered rockets to do so. I was definitely one of them. This was an important meeting, because this faction knew how real the idea could be to send people on missions to "deep space."
NASA called anything past the moon "deep space." I called that "the solar system," and the solar system is not deep. Another Galaxy is deep.
The guys here at this meeting also knew that if we would not use a nuclear rocket then we would be stuck here on Earth with the terrorists and tax collectors until Greenpeace quit. Hopefully, Greenpeace would not quit, and we would be able to use nuclear rockets to travel the Solar System.
I found out about the meeting here too late, too late to publish, but I did prepare something. I had with me a written hard copy of a paper on steam rockets. Just in case. You should always have a written copy with you. The normal rule was that to go to a meeting one must present something, give a talk on something, and publish it, to prove you actually did it and other people saw you do it. I had just gotten hired several months earlier, so Marland gave me an exception.
We from INEL were really popular because we would be handing out money, when it came in. We were deciders. We would decide who would design and make the nuclear rocket.
Aerospace contractors swarmed around us, trying to influence us. Our group would get to choose who would make what nuclear rocket part, and how much money they would get. At General Dynamics I was a contractor. Now I was one of the deciders, not one of the contractors.
I saw people elbowing their way to talk with me, and some recited their own elevator speech to me.
Exciting.
This was how most of the government contracting I knew of worked. The government would hire people who think of themselves as smart and whose only real qualification was that they had a high opinion of themselves. I would not name names in public, and I had seen many of this type.
Usually, the Boss somewhere higher up would dictate to hire someone, by name. So the underlings do, and they hire some more people from within, choosing friends and whoever was standing around. I had been with Sandia, a U.S. Government National Lab, and I was standing around, so to speak, so I got chosen. My group of government guys got to choose. Great system.
We were evaluating everyone here. Our "national lab," INEL, was slated to test the nuclear reactor engines out at our semi-desert site. What we wanted and needed was the smartest and best contractor around.
The government has to have people to really do the real work. I saw immediately that these contractors knew a lot more about the nuclear rockets than we did. And we were the choosers. If we chose the not-so-smart or not-so-good contractor, then things would go wrong, schedules would slip, costs would rise, everyone would look stupid, and Congress would get mad and take our money away.
Then, I would be stuck in freezing cold Idaho with no one to buy my house and no job. What would I do?
Would you want to be stuck in Idaho with no job? You would have to become a Latter Day Saint before you could even be considered for ranch or farm work. I would be too far from anywhere to look for a job. I made damn sure I looked for the smartest, most competent contractor people I could find.
Immediately after the last presentation of the first day, everyone filled the lower floor hallway. Loud talking, everyone greeting old friends, meeting new ones, talking about everything. Everyone was crammed into this first floor area.
Dave Buden from our INEL group was sitting in a chair right in the middle of the crowded display area, with bright TV lights in his face, getting ready for a TV interview. He was trying to get popular support for the Government to make a hydrogen propellant, nuclear heated rocket.
I carefully watched everything he did and how he did it. I wanted to get on TV myself and tell my story. He was doing it and did not even know that he was showing me how, by example. I was trying to get converts to the steam rocket. I needed to know how to do this. I was really watching closely.
It seemed easy. Dave had a yellow pad with his notes on it, so he knew exactly what he was going to say. He was practicing right there in the chair. It was very simple. He was helping the reporter lady who was about to ask him questions. He had to ignore all the people standing around.
There would always be all kinds of people standing around because the TV wants them as "atmosphere," even though they are distractions to the talker. The lights and camera seemed like just another thing going on. I could barely hear him when he was talking. The TV people interviewed the Russians, too.
We were too busy to watch the TV news report of this space meeting. The TV people said they would send him a copy, so we could see it when we got back to Idaho. Nobody said anything about the interview, so it must not have been such a big deal.
The next morning was relatively cloudy, unusual for Albuquerque, except that this was January. The winter month. The weather was different all the time, but it was not a bad form of different, like Cleveland.
The smell of pinon smoke from the Albuquerque fireplaces was so enchanting it invigorated me. Albuquerque and New Mexico were always enchanting. The smell of desert cedar and pinon was like some kind of fairy dust that made the whole state "enchanting," just like their yellow, New Mexico license plates say.
"I can't remember a single day of bad weather in Albuquerque." I would declare, to people in San Diego who said theirs was the best weather ever. This was better weather. And I was quite ready for a day of stalking at a meeting. I would get to use my skills.
Crazy Roger's Secret Nuclear Rocket
Certainly the flashiest event was the presentation about the secret nuclear rocket. The big, Defense Department, nuclear rocket secret had been leaked almost a year earlier, and the perpetrators were now giving their public, unclassified technical talk.
The second floor, large auditorium room had a long, 40 foot podium, and seemed to have about 1000 chairs. 40 seats wide, 25 rows deep. There were probably 3 seats left, somewhere. I was standing in the back by the door, where everyone had to pass me to get in. I was looking at all their name tags to see who was there. I was stalking.
The speaker was a notorious, "Crazy Roger" Lenard, Colonel, U.S. Air Force. This was the guy who gave me and Jim Powell $5 K to document the nuclear heated steam rocket. He was my benefactor. I liked him. But he had a reputation.
Marland Stanley did not like him at all. Apparently, Jim Powell and Crazy Roger Lenard said or did something that the Department of Energy bureaucrats didn't like.
I saw one of the DOE Bureaucrats, whose name was familiar, standing in the back, about 20 feet away from me. He was younger, maybe younger than me, thin, slightly taller than me, rather good looking, and he walked confidently, not arrogantly. He was well dressed but had a light color suit, not Pentagon style suit at all. He was probably not that bad, because he knew enough to stand at a strategic location.
Crazy Roger began bragging about the performance of the formerly-secret rocket. Everybody in the audience wanted to know about it. He showed some viewgraphs that almost showed secrets. He was careful, but he was close to the edge.
The room was standing-room only. Roger was talking like he knew science. He didn't. He was in charge, but he didn't know science or engineering very much at all.
He was telling the audience "40" megawatts per liter. But he didn't know enough to realize that the "40" was about 10 times more power than what it would take to melt the rocket engine. If he would have said "4" he would have been credible.
That "40" Roger was bragging about was huge. It meant he could get about 50,000 horsepower out of a quart of nuclear reactor rocket. Some physicists in the audience besides myself immediately figured what it meant.
That 50,000 horsepower would too much power in such a small volume. Everyone listened even though it was crazy, because Roger was entertaining. That was why they called him "Crazy Roger."
Besides, no one was going to let him actually fly one of those nuclear reactors in our atmosphere.
I imagined a car like that. About 1/5 of a teaspoon of engine would give 50 horsepower. I compared it to an airplane engine. 1 quart would give the same power as and an L1011 or a Boeing 747 jet engine hanging in the big pod from the wing.
Marland and the INEL engineers had several different kinds of measurements showing 3, not 40, would be pretty good and pretty much all one could safely do.
Any more than that and the data and calculations show it would melt, or it could melt at the first jostle. Even "3" would mean 4000 horsepower per quart. These were all astoundingly hi powers.
I knew this detail because I needed my steam rocket to produce at least 1 or 2 megawatts per liter. I found out we could do that, because the technology had been tested.
Of course more was better. I would have loved more, like 10 or 20. But, data showed we could not.
Everyone knew Crazy Roger exaggerated. Not everyone knew how much. Marland did. Marland always had a nasty word to say about Crazy Roger and his buddies. Jim Powell is one of his buddies.
"You are judged by your company," the saying goes,
and my "company" was Jim Powell.
It is always that way. You are always treading between your bosses and other bosses at war with each other.
Actually, that was why Marland and the INEL did not like Roger. The DOE paid Marland and the INEL was to dissect the aftermath of Crazy Roger's experiments, and the results were not what Crazy Roger was saying. Marland told Roger, but Roger wanted to cover it up. So, Marland told the Department of Energy chain of command.
It did NOT get covered up, but only at the Secret level where it belonged. And, we didn't say a thing in public. Saying much more in public would probably be close to being secret, and we did not want or need to divulge secrets, or even get close.
Just outside the door I saw someone with a name tag "Steven Aftergood." I knew the name.
Aha.
He is one of the "Anti's".
Anti-nuke.
He is on my list of people to meet.
Steven Aftergood was part of the Federation of American Scientists, FAS. He was thin, not wearing a suit, had black hair, dark rimmed glasses, about the same size as me, and almost looked like a graduate student in law or business. He was taking some kind of notes on a question someone asked Roger.
The FAS people are "anti" most of the scary things we wanted to do. I agreed with pretty much of their arguments. The FAS was mostly reasonable. Marland did not like them.
"Hi. Got a minute?" I asked, not loud enough to disturb Roger's presentation.
He made some motions, so I told him I could wait till questions were over, because I saw he was taking notes.
When Roger was done, I asked him:
"What do you think of using a nuclear rocket to go to Mars?"
I expected he would let us do it, "depending" on things. This group of anti's were usually reasonable.
"If you do it safely, it's ok." he replied.
See, just like I thought. We exchanged some physics and engineering language about safety, which described "depending." No adrenalin at all happened between us.
"What do you think of Crazy Roger's rocket?" I asked, knowing I was poking a hornet nest with a stick.
Adrenalin started to appear in his face. His face got a bit red.
"You can't run an open reactor in the air." he said, holding back emotion.
He tried not to use emotion in his language. It leaked out with the throbbing of his neck arteries.
Then we had a probably somewhat classified conversation about that nuclear rocket of Roger's. Aftergood had access to some secret data, and I think he should not have had that access. I did not tell him. It thought something he found out may have been Secret, Restricted Data. But one does not let on. That would be "confirming or denying," and I had a Secret Clearance I was not going to spoil. NOT Good. I would know if he knew, and I was not going to tell him.
And Aftergood was reasonable.
When I told Marland who I talked with, he smiled a bit, and with a hard-to-hide worry on his face, he said "The Enemy."
Then I reminded him how Crazy Roger paid $5 K for Jim Powell and I to document my steam rocket.
"Boy, you do hang out with the Enemy." he said.
"Hey, they got connections." I replied.
All four of the connections were present at the meeting:
- the Anti's,
- the Department of Defense (DOD),
- NASA
- and the Department of Energy (DOE).
Both the FAS (anti) and Crazy Roger (DOD) are the enemy to all of: Marland, the INEL, DOE and NASA.
Crazy Roger hated the FAS, NASA and Department of Energy. They all hated each other a little bit.
I thought each one was ok. They were all different. I didn't care if Crazy Roger lied a little. I could work just fine with all of them..
Crazy.
Everybody who was anybody was here, and I was busy meeting as many as I could. General Dynamics had trained me on how to work a meeting and stalk. I had come from the Military Industrial complex. I fit. I fit perfectly. I met everyone I could and wrote their names down. My entry in my computer proved it:
920105 SpcPwrSym92, Space Power Symposium, Albuquerque, New Mexico, January 5 approx, 1992; aftergood, steven allen, george angelo, joe barnhart, dennis belogurov, al benjamin, ben bhattacharyya, samit borowski, Stan buden, dave Clark, john coomes, ed dagle, jeff ernst, don finn, dr. tom finger, harry fragola, joe gallup, don george, jeff haloulakos, bill hooker, oniel jacox, mike & wife kaltenstein, bonnie keaton, dr. paul kelley, jim lenard, col roger x leonard, ray ludewig, hans martinell, john mathews, dr. bruce mc kee, john nozette, stu oderman, mark olsen, dr. chuck pavshoock, dr. vladimir a. pelaccio, dennis picker, nancy powell, jim presentine, roger ratliff, jim rawlings, pat artist, rieb, marvin & barbara, redd, larry rice, john roy, dr. don segna, don stanley, marland stepnoi, dr. nokolai n. ponomarev stillman, gene struthers, dick warden, col pete walker, jack watts, ken wuchte, tom zavadowski, richard zubrin, bob
Focus, Focus, Focus:
The bottom line was that the FAS would let me use a steam rocket to travel the Solar System.
Coincidences Are Not Random
And then coincidence happened. Calculated good luck coincidences.
Walking in the lower level hallway looking for someone important to talk with, Jim Powell showed up. Of course. I should have put 2 and 3 together. His Star Wars Program Pentagon Boss, Col. Roger Lenard was here giving a paper on the nuclear rocket. Powell invented Roger's rocket.
As soon as Jim saw me he blurted out:
"Hi Tony!"
He smiled and we both were very happy to see each other.
Immediately he asked: "Are you going to that Los Alamos meeting on killer asteroids?"
"Well, no. I wanted to go. But I told somebody, Don Yeomans from JPL, to talk about my concept to move killer asteroids out of the way." I replied.
This was my excuse for choosing not to go there and be here instead.
"How would you do it?" he asked, meaning: "how would you move the asteroid out of a collision course with Earth?"
"With our steam rocket." I replied.
Jim was obviously very much interested because he was the steam rocket co-inventor. This would make him look very good.
"How much delta V do you do you have to give the asteroid?" I asked him.
In plain language that question meant "How hard a shove do you need to give the asteroid so it won't hit Earth?"
"Surprisingly small." he said, in his scientist-curious tone of voice. "Only centimeters per second."
In plain language that answer meant if we could change it's speed by only the speed of a turtle, literally, it would miss Earth.
I already new the answer. Anyone could do that calculation with a simple scientific calculator. I was baiting him, setting him up so I can win something.
I just wanted Jim to reassure me that I was using the correct numbers. If that "only centimeters per second" was really the right answer, I could do it. It didn't take me long to figure this. I had done this before and the numbers worked out. I had already figured that a steam rocket could move a 1 kilometer space rock by 10 centimeters per second. We both had figured how changing the typical orbit of a near earth asteroid by only 10 cm/sec would be enough to make it just miss earth if it were going to hit.
I had my handy pocket calculator programmed to do this. Very simple. It is just like the problem we are all here to solve, to go to Mars and back.
I showed him right then and there how our steam rocket could blow enough steam through its rocket nozzle to move a 1 kilometer, killer asteroid by 10 cm per second. .
Jim Powell was delighted.
"I'll take you up to Los Alamos, my self, in my car."
"But I need a place to stay."
"You can stay at the motel I’m staying at, in Santa Fe. They have room."
"I'm not registered at the meeting." I begged, knowing that there was always a way to get in, especially if you know someone.
"I'm the chairperson for the propulsive deflection session. I will put you there myself." he bragged. That was a key session.
My boss, Marland Stanley, was all for the deal and authorized my change in plans on the spot. I was glad he authorized the deal. My emotions were glad.
Bureaucracy had to do that you know.
You can't just have
people just going anywhere they want on government money,
you know.
You have to have a nice bureaucratic reason.
Why did Marland like the idea of me going off with the enemy? The thought crossed my mind as I was asking him. And I had a ready answer, but Marland was there ahead of me.
Marland already knew the reason: Jim Powell was the key scientist for Crazy Roger's super secret Pentagon's Star Wars nuclear rocket, and those Pentagon guys had tens of millions of dollars. We both knew the reason:
Money. Sharks. Blood in the water.
So, Jim Powell and I sat there in the basement underground hallway that connects the convention center to a hotel 100 yards away, on a convenient, fat old flea market sofa they dragged in just for this meeting, and figured what we would say.
I had to scrounge a picture of a nuclear heated steam rocket from the technical paper I conveniently brought. We made up a viewgraph, and that meant we had a presentation for the meeting. I was official because I would present our work in public.
Late that afternoon we drove up to the motel in Santa Fe, 2/3 of the way to Los Alamos. I got a room at the same motel as Powell. There was snow and ice on the hillside road, and Powell's rent-a-car almost got stuck.
We needed some spirit-food to fuel us for the next day, so we got burritos for supper.
The Santa Fe, New Mexico, burrito's were better than anywhere else. The reason was that they were made Tri-Culturally.
New Mexico was about equally populated with 1) Gringos (white honkey guys like me), 2) Spanish (not Mexican) and 3) Native Americans. Tri-cultural.
If you mix the cooking style of all three you get 1. gringo high grade, low fat beef and pork, 2. Spanish chili peppers and spices, and 3. Native American beans and flour tortillas. The Gringo's brought the idea of expensive ingredients. The Spanish brought spice, and the Native Americans brought substance.
-----------
Los Alamos National Lab
The Nuke 'Em Meeting
Why were we here?
To intercept near earth asteroids headed for a crash with earth.
To prevent a Cosmic Catastrophe.
To save the world.
Yes, to save most of the people in the world from a slow death by starvation.
Obviously, we are here to nuke 'em.
It was now time for the second meeting, the meeting on how to deflect celestial bodies out of a collision path with Earth. They were holding the meeting at the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL), in New Mexico. LANL was just up the street 100 miles from Albuquerque. It was a sunny day in Los Alamos in January. The weather was just right, with just a little snow here or there. We were at the Los Alamos National Lab, at our meeting in second floor area above what seemed to be a public access library. A nice, clean architecture, nice, rather modern furniture, clean, clean floors and walls. This was not one of those old buildings erected during the 50's and 60's.
Now why would anyone hold a such meeting at the lab that invented, and specializes in atomic bombs? Of course, you hold it there because everyone there thinks you can just blow up the asteroid with an atomic bomb. These scientists focused on using atomic bombs to save the world from cosmic destruction. The scientists I knew from LANL who did this seemed to be mostly non-connected, pure scientists.
I knew how to deflect the asteroids without using atomic bombs.
The asteroid guys didn't have any connections worth much, nor any money. That was why I didn't press Marland to let me give a paper here, at Los Alamos.
I expected to see Don Yeomans here, from the Jet Propulsion Lab of Cal Tech. All during the Albuquerque meeting I had pondered that Los Alamos meeting, because I had sent Don Yeomans a short, email note on my steam rocket and how it would do a non-bomb, killer asteroid deflection..
On the second floor where the meeting was held, somebody was checking who was allowed into this meeting and who was not. Two hall monitors were standing in front of the meeting room door. They were scientists I had seen before.
Jim Powell insisted that I be let in. The main hall monitor resisted. Fortunately for me, it only took a few insisting sentences. I recognized the fellow, but I could not remember his name at the moment.
This was a well manicured attendance. I didn't see any crowd trying to get in and being turned away.
These guys were serious about not letting just anyone in. I thought they would let in anyone who cared. But no, they were carefully screening.
Once I got in I could see that every one of the people here had to know something about the topic. I recognized most of them. Our peers had to certify that each and every one of us here could and did figure, often, and accurately. That was sure different. Screening for competency.
"If you can not figure, you can not be here."
How nice, that each of us has to be a Certified Reliable Figurer.
What a concept. If what you figured was heresy, that would be quite ok. I saw a few of the heretics here.
Somebody started off the meeting by reviewing the San Juan Capistrano, first meeting. I remember all about this San Juan Capistrano meeting because I was there. It was epochal and life changing for me. So, while they were talking I was going to review my presentation.
The speaker caught my attention when he started talking about killer asteroids. That part was the fun part. He said when the killer asteroid hits it causes at least one global winter to last all summer, preventing crops, and starves most of the world. Everybody here knew that. We all know that if one of the bigger near earth asteroids hits, that's what it would do.
Everybody here knew the probabilities, too. It only happened about once in 100 to 300 thousand years, at random. He was saying at random. Of course at random. What else could it be? He said over a 100 year lifetime, your chance of dying by killer asteroid would be about 1 in a thousand or 1 in 3 thousand.
I knew he was cheating with his descriptions of those numbers, just to get Congress and the Journalists attention. I should compare this to 1 in 2 for dying by cancer or heart attack, or 1 in 100 for dying by car crash, or 1 in 300 for dying by guns. He said 1 in 10,000 per lifetime and then compared that to an airplane accident. He was playing with us.
"We have to deflect those killer asteroids." he said.
On that we could all agree.
That's a blackboard behind him.
Chalk.
How primitive.
A brand new building, and they have a chalk board, not a felt board.
Professor Reines was the head of the physics department when I was at Case. He was here, at Los Alamos. I could not resist and just had to at least say hi to him.
He smiled when he saw me, as if he recognized me. Then he told me "You're making quite a name for your self."
I could tell he made that up. It was so obvious. Nice of him, but obvious. He could barely remember me. He remembered my face, like we all remember student faces. He personally had got me a solid state pulse height analyzer, to replace that old 3-refrigerator wide, always broken vacuum tube one. He was head of the Physics Department the whole 8 years I was there, but 30 years earlier.
Here, he introduced me to his son, who as also standing next to him. Reines still did not have his Nobel prize for finding the neutrino. He would get one someday, we all knew. Reines was there to listen. Lots of Los Alamos scientists got to listen. They guy at the door didn't stop anyone with a Los Alamos or Sandia badge.
I should have shown my INEEL badge. That was the good part about these National Labs. One could wander around and glean gems of knowledge about nearly anything.
I was deliberately meeting everyone I could who knew about the near earth asteroids, and everyone who knew how to nuke them out of the way. After all, we were at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the place where the atomic bomb was discovered and invented.
I wrote some of their names in my notebook:
920105 NEO Interception Jan 92 ahrens, dr. thom cratering barnhart, dennis leep vehicle @phillips bowden, lt. col joe SAC bowel, ted boyer, keith burke, jim canavan, gregg chapman, Clark cox, andrew geherls, tom hammerling, p. helin, glo hills, dr. jack jenkins, lyle kinsey, jeffrey lemke, larry maise, george marsden, brian maryniak, gregg mendleson, edgar meyer, harris nozette, stu ostro, steve powell, jim prosnitz, don rather, john reines, dr. fred remo, dr. john richter, john shoemaker, dr. gene solem, dr. johndale super orion stern, dr. martin tagliaferri, ed teller, dr. edward 5006 tholen, dave tillotson, brian yeomans, don
The Gigaton Bomb
"We should make a gigaton bomb, said Dr. Edward Teller, Father of the H-bomb." wrote the Journalists, deliberately lying about what he said.
They hid behind "Freedom of Speech" to lie and manipulate. They could not figure things. That's why they became Journalists. On the other hand, they did chose a more interesting job, given their handicap.
All of us in the audience were focused on trying to find out just how big of an atomic bomb one would need to push a killer asteroid out of the way.
A thin professor in a suit from California or the east coast, I don't remember which, was showing a viewgraph of an asteroid, and off to the right of his asteroid was a tiny dot of a bomb.
He said that since asteroids can be made of dirt, rock, iron or oil shale, and you did not know which, you had somewhat of a problem. You had to vaporize and explode some of the surface of the asteroid to make the killer asteroid move. But how?
Without saying so, he made us think "What if it's made of rock? What if it's iron or nickel? Are we done for?"
Then he stated explicitly: what we really needed to do was to explode the bomb deep inside the asteroid. We all knew we could not do that, and he knew too.
I had learned about the "explode it deep inside" during my Sedan Crater visit at the Nevada Test Site. They buried the bomb 100 or so feet deep in the desert sands. The buried bomb blasted a 1000 foot crater into the Earth. But the same bomb 100 feet above the ground would just make a shallow depression.
He said what I expected, that if we could bury the bomb into the asteroid, that would move the killer asteroid out of the way.
Then he asked some key questions:
"how are you going to land on the asteroid?
And, how are you going to drill into it?
A drill rig doesn't work in zero gravity and a vacuum,
and it is too heavy to take there anyway."
I understood the part about landing on the asteroid. I learned this at Sandia, too. All I needed to know was how fast the asteroids were typically moving relative to a rocket we would send there, and I did know. Unfortunately, they were moving way to fast.
The problem was that the rocket bringing the atomic bomb was typically moving too fast towards the bad asteroid. When the rocket would try to bury itself into the asteroid, it would, instead, smash so hard that it would break the bomb. Worse yet, the crash speed was so fast that whatever the bomb was made of would turn to vapor. It would not be a bomb. It would be a gas of vaporized bomb parts.
It was not like the movies at all. One can not just land on a random asteroid. The rockets don't have enough fuel to slow down enough. They would need as much or more fuel as it would take to launch them from Earth. Imagine that one, in space. A launch rocket as big as we see at Cape Canaveral (Cape Kennedy) just to land on the asteroid.
If you don't do that, then the spacecraft smashes so hard it turns into exploding purple-white-hot vapor. That's why it is so hard to intercept an asteroid.
The actual speed when the two meet is typically between 5 and 30 kilometers per second, as a "closing velocity." That speed is higher than the typical speed of burning rocket exhaust. That is why the rocket becomes vapor. The speed is therefore "too fast".
While he was talking I was imagining how I would say this, instead of him saying it.
I would say
"This is NOT like dropping a TV set off the top of a big building.
It's much worse.
Its worse than trying to land on the highest power bullet fired from the highest power rifle pointed right at you.
It's even much worse than flying a supersonic jet fighter as fast as it will go, straight down into a concrete driveway.
It's much worse. ."
The actual speeds of what I would say are real numbers. But I was naive. Nobody cares.
He was the one talking, not me.
That's why Captain Kirk and Spock could not really land a shuttle and drill rig on an asteroid. They would turn into purple-white-hot vapor first, and blow up in a brief flash..
So what are we going to do?
How are we going to save the Earth?
I was wondering what he was going to propose.
He continued:
"We are forced to detonate the atomic bomb just the instant before it hits the asteroid. It will vaporize some of the asteroid surface, hopefully dirt and rocks. Then we can use another bomb we conveniently send right behind the first, to blow up and vaporize the rocks we just stirred up. This would impart the required momentum to the asteroid."
I imagined that I would have said "It would give the bad asteroid a good whack." But he was the one talking.
Then he said "it could be made of iron or some other very hard, dense material."
"Oh, no!"
I panicked.
"What if the asteroid is just
solid nickel and iron,
or just a solid hard rock.
What happens?"
I thought, with no answer. I could see others in the room thinking the same panic.
Then the professor showed us the bomb energy and the resulting momentum figure, and proclaimed with loud and clear frustration:
"You can't move this asteroid with an atomic bomb,
because you would need
about a gigaton atomic bomb."
In zero milliseconds everyone knew that half the Earth would starve to death. They all saw his numbers. They all understood. We were doomed, and we all knew it instantly.
A "gigaton" is a 1000 megatons, a million kilotons of atomic bomb. All the nuclear power of a missile field all in one bomb.
If anyone here couldn't figure that one, they would not be allowed in the meeting. We were all here to shoot atomic bombs at the killer asteroids, and now the physics shows it won't work because our atomic bombs are too puny.
Half the world is going to starve during a year of deadly food wars.
But in zero milliseconds flat, the Father Of The H-Bomb Himself figured it. I knew what he was going to say, because I was thinking the same thing.
I was one chair behind and 2 chairs to the left of the aging but intellectually sharp Dr. Edward Teller. I was arranging to talk to him, of course. You might say I was stalking him. I wanted to talk with him again. He's the one who told me and Terri a dozen years earlier that Dyson's Orion "took way too many bombs."
"Yes, we can too make a gigaton bomb."
I thought, as Dr. Edward Teller immediately stirred out of his front row chair.
I worked a similar problem for my bosses at Sandia Labs, for Bill Goodlaffer and Bob Kadiddlehopper, back in 1970. They asked me to design an atomic bomb powered rocket delivery system, to deliver a 5 Gigaton Bomb to blow up the whole evil empire all at once. I knew one could make a 5 Gigaton bomb.
Dr. Edward Teller, The Dr. Edward Teller, Father Of The H-Bomb, computed everything in his head, lightning speed.
In the front row, to the left of the viewgraph machine, and no one sitting on either side of him, he slowly stirred and started to pull himself up.
Of course, everyone else stopped talking. This was the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb speaking. The guy responsible for starting the Lawrenece Livermore Laboratory, the Famous Dr. Edward Teller, the one who snockered President Regan into trying to make an X-ray Phasor Beam to kill Commie Pinko Rapist ICBM's with a single atomic pop.
He grabbed on to his 2 or 3 inch thick, slightly crooked tree limb cane, stripped of bark and polished smooth and fitted with a hand sized leather mitt, to lift himself up. He was shorter than me and somewhat bent over, and his eyes were bad. He always wore an expensive dark suit.
He hoisted himself to a stooped stance by leaning on crooked cane. He slowly turned to his right, to the room jammed full of experts and with people standing in the back and against the walls.
With a thick Hungarian accent he slowly pontificated:
"Ve mus not exclude
unlimited
energy."
"Ve CAN make
Gigaton Bomb."
He leaned on his cane and tipped down slightly when he said "can." He slowly looked to his right and scanned eye contact to each in the crowd.
His emotion was clear, and he emoted it with the assertive head and body motions of an old wise one:
"To save humanity itself, we must not just give up,"
I knew immediately he would be misquoted.
\ teller-edward-1994-science2001.11.23pp1657.jpg
The Professor from Somewhere was almost certainly right. It really would take a Gigaton atomic bomb. Even worse, the asteroid was going to hit us with 1000 Gigatons of energy. Meanwhile, our 1 Gigaton bomb was puny by comparison, even though it was literally big enough to wipe out the entire state of Florida and break windows in Michigan, if it accidentally blew up on launch from Cape Canaveral.
This would be a tough choice for us. We could make a Gigaton bomb, and take a chance on blowing up half a continent if there would be just a slight mistake when we tried to launch it into space. Or we could let the asteroid hit.
Another choice: we could hoard food for 260 Million Americans, and protect it with 1000 nuclear weapons in our missile silos and 10, 000 more somewhere else, like on nuclear submarines. One would expect starving Russia and China to start bombing us with their nukes, and they would not stop till we gave them our food.
But we were at Los Alamos National Lab, and most everybody here knew we could just toss an atomic bomb at the Killer Asteroid. It would be simpler. Why else would we be holding the meeting at Los Alamos?
------------
Medusa, the Atomic Bomb Powered Rocket
A new face appeared and started to talk about what looked like an Orion Starship propulsion.
Look at that.
Sure enough,
someone here really is talking about Orion and atomic bomb propulsion.
Dyson's Orion was what got me interested in space in the first place, 25 years earlier.
That is really far out.
He is telling us how he will shoot atomic bombs behind his rocket ship and blast the asteroid with the rocket.
The rocket itself was his explosive. That was clever. He would smash the rocket itself into the asteroid.
The fellow was Dr. Johndale Solem.
I could see from his figuring that Johndale's rocket would use way too many bombs. I could see now what Teller meant when he told me 15 years ago that it would take "way too many bombs."
Immediately after this session was over I went right up to meet Johndale Solem. He, Keith Boyer and someone else got all excited that I cared and they told me of the modern day version of Orion, which Johndale called "Medusa."
Medusa?
Three of them crowded around me told me that this was the real way to make an Orion nuclear rocket.
"You mean it could work?" I asked.
Then, all excited, they told me the Medusa Story.
I would have to tell Jim Powell that "Medusa" story, later. It was too exciting. But later.
neofuel And The Steam Rocket Alternative
Now it was my turn to talk.
Teller wasn't there when it was my turn to talk. He skipped out. I wanted Teller to hear me and see how smart and clever I was. I wanted him to hear me tell how to move the comets out of the way using a steam rocket.
Jim Powell did me a real favor. He gave me a time slot that was just wonderful, perfect. Not the first talk after lunch, because that is when everybody is about to fall asleep after eating. Or maybe they come in late because they took a long-lunch. And not the second talk. He gave me the third slot of the afternoon, just when everybody was back awake and at their peak. That's when Powell and I got our chance to speak. Of course, Powell's guy went ahead of me. He showed how a hydrogen propellant, nuclear heated rocket would deliver the bomb to the asteroid fast.
I had a very simple message. "Let a steam rocket push the killer for 3 months, and it will move by 1 meter per second, missing Earth."
I needed some fraction of a megaton of water to do this. It should have been obvious to everyone there where I would get the water, but it wasn't. I thought everyone in the room knew about the periodic comets, and how one can find one just about wherever you needed. So getting water from them, half a megaton of it, would be simple.
But no, the only ones there who knew about the dark and close comets were Glo Helin, Gene Shoemaker, Tom Gehrels, Don Yeomans, and maybe one other. Almost everyone else didn't know what I was talking about. I failed to communicate because I never told them about those periodic comets.
Nobody I knew of had a picture of these comets and their orbits. I only had the data that I got from the University of California at San Diego library. And the data was just tables of orbital elements.
Everyone who listened to me could only think
"Comets? They move too fast. How are you going to dock with one of them?"
They didn't know, mostly because I failed to show them. I wish I had a picture of the dark and close comets. It would have said it all.
Figure xxx. The Dark and Close comets. We can nearly always find an accessible comet close to where we need it. The comet has plenty of water ice for us to melt and use in our steam rockets.
My picture was simple: park a nuclear heated steam rocket on the asteroid and turn it on.
My nuclear heated steam rocket would have a chunk of ice that we would melt into water and put into the nuclear reactor. The reactor would heat the water to steam. The steam would go out the rocket nozzle. The rocket would produce a force, and it would push the killer asteroid out of the way.
No one there questioned me about how I was going to dock with the bad asteroid. They should have asked. I would have choked.
We had all just been reminded that morning how one could not land on the asteroid so easy. And now I was proposing to land a Megaton on the asteroid.
I would have choked on the correct question.
On the other hand, no one there knew enough about the problem to ask me the right question. This was the first meeting in the world of such experts on such a topic.
If they would have asked how I would dock with something moving at 10 km/s relative to me, I know now what I should have told them then. I would not have been smart enough, but I should have been. So should they.
Every damn one of us was effing stupid!
It should have been obvious to all those smart fellows in the room. If I were carrying 500,000 tons of water I had just removed from a comet, why not just let it smash into asteroid? If it turns into white hot vapor, that will sure give that killer asteroid a good whack. That would move it, like everyone in the room wanted, and it would be exceptionally simple. Furthermore, the calculation was so simple anybody here could figure it, probably with no calculator at all.
But I failed.
It was entirely my fault that no one took it seriously.
First, I should have told them about the periodic comets, and how many there were out there. First. So we could all see what I saw.
Second, I should show them how a single nuclear heater could nudge a megaton chunk of ice or dust or a bag of rocks and pebbles, into any nearby orbit because you could always find a comet in nearly any orbit. You would not need to nudge your giant ice cube very much.
Third, I should have shown them how much an asteroid moves when you hit it with half a million tons of mass moving at those speeds. It wasn't that hard, but I didn't do it.
They took me as seriously as they took Johndale Solem. Johndale Solem would hit the asteroid by smashing into it with his rocket.
You think maybe there are not enough comets to assure you that you can find a convenient one?
How about the near earth asteroids? They are much more numerous, and much easier to get to. At least several people at this meeting knew exactly how many there were and just how easy they were to get to.
We were all stupid.
-------------------------------
The space relatively near Earth is filled with near Earth objects, a good fraction of which are water-bearing.
We all failed.
And we could have saved Earth without using atomic bombs.
After everybody told their favorite way to deflect an asteroid, we got together and summarized what we found out. When the report would come out it would say that we might under some conditions be able to move small asteroids from hitting a big city, if we hit the asteroid with atomic bombs.
Bad News: the report also should show how even if we have 5 years notice, we could not deliver a bomb big enough or fast enough to move a 2 km asteroid out of the way. It will hit. Most of us will die.
Supper at Teller's Birthday
It was Edward Teller's birthday. What a coincidence. Glo Helin named a celestial body after Edward Teller for his birthday. I had lunch with Glo and Shoemaker and we ate hot New Mexican green chili, served in a Los Alamos cafeteria. We talked about steam rockets, of course, and how those comets were just not that hard to get to. Shoemaker had calculated it, and would fax me the equations. They both knew there were a whole passel of comets between here and Jupiter, all the time. I never realized there were so many so close.
Glo and Gene understood what I was trying to do.
And that evening, Glo presented Teller with his birthday present.
"People will remember you as a celestial body, in addition to your great accomplishments"
She was so diplomatic.
Since Glo Helin discovered it during 1989, she got to name it. She named it 5006 Teller.
Teller gave a speech that seemed like it was prepared for the occasion. Maybe she told him, maybe not. But he is good at giving on-the-spot speeches.
I talked with him a little after the supper and speech. He thought we should tell everyone our secrets about the atomic bomb. He thought secrets hindered mankind.
I never dreamed I would meet Edward Teller here, or that I would meet someone who worked on a modern day Orion and claims to have made it work.
· Medusa: the New Dyson Starship of Johndale Solem
The Medusa Story,
I called it The Solem Sail
"How long will it take before we get an ounce of antimatter?" I asked Jim Powell.
I could make a million bomb Dyson Orion Starship with a million specks of antimatter. And that way Dyson's Orion wont take too many bombs anymore.
---
We were driving back to Albuquerque after the meeting. I saw white top mountain ranges 20 to 50 miles away any direction I looked. The sky was overcast. I saw red walled, brown walled, and black and white walled pumice and lava plateaus in every direction. If I didn't mind walking 1/2 mile, or 5 miles, then you might say they were everywhere within walking distance. The air was so clear that hillsides 5 miles away looked like they were only a few blocks away.
We could both easily see the trace of the Native Americans before us, the black smoke of their fire pits in the cozy dig outs in the cliff wall of a 300 foot high, pumice plateau.
It took 2 1/2 hours to get to the airport from Los Alamos. When we started on the road to Albuquerque, the horizon stretched out to 150 miles in nearly every direction, and the air was clear. When the sun goes down, the sky would nearly always turn red and painted with splashes of clouds at this time of year. The vastness and color of New Mexico took over. The nearly grassless hillsides by the road sometimes put me to sleep.
Jim Powell and I were talking the entire trip. I started talking about those guys who figured out how to make an Orion Starship. I was telling Jim Powell about the conversation between Johndale Solem, Keith Boyer and me.
This was the Medusa Story.
"We were in the conference room, during the break, just after Johndale's talk. I ran up to Johndale because he talked about atomic bomb propulsion." I said.
"I asked Johndale Solem if he knew about the Orion." I told Powell.
"Johndale Solem was the one who told us about the atomic bomb propelled rocket to move a killer asteroid. He was the one who said his rocket itself, smashing into the asteroid, was the bomb. Nice idea." I told Powell
"Of course. But it had serious problems." Powell countered,
"Yeah, but Johndale started to get excited, because someone took his atomic bomb propulsion serious." I said.
"His rocket isn't the thing that got my attention. He told me about Medusa" I emphasized. Then I started talking.
I never met the legendary Keith Boyer till now, standing next to us. I only heard of him. I was so surprised to see him in real life. He was so short, so old. I thought he was some imposing figure, from the way people talked about him. This old wise one got all excited when he saw that I understood all the key bomb secrets that make the Orion work. Maybe I used some key phrases that let him know I knew Secret Restricted Data. I don't know. I forget. He could see from my questions that I knew about some details, and that I had figured it.
Keith. Johndale and I started talking about Medusa, the right way to do Orion, right there, on the spot, right by the chalk board of the main meeting room. We stood there and the room emptied. We were all totally focused. We didn't notice we were alone till we were done.
I couldn't help but be focused. Finally, after 22 years of searching, I found the guys who knew exactly how to make space ships go really fast.
Solem had the most amazing way to make atomic bomb propulsion work.
I was telling Jim Powell about this encounter, and not letting him say anything. But Powell wasn't even trying to interject. I think this was the first time he heard the details. Powell had figured Dyson's Orion Starship, too. This was new. He was driving and listening.
"Boyer volunteered and interjected that Johndale had figured it out. Boyer said Johndale did it right, and turned the Orion inside out. Instead of a "pusher" like Freeman Dyson figured, Johndale used a puller.
Dyson would have the bomb go off behind you. Johndale had it going off ahead of you. Figure that one."
I tried to bait Powell into volunteering how in the world that would work. Common sense says that if the bomb goes off ahead of you, it pushes you backwards.
But Powell just kept listening, so I volunteered the answer:
"He's using something that looks like a parachute, but BIG:
1 or 10 miles across."
As I motioned "BIG" with outstretched arms, my left hand nearly hit Powell in the shoulder, and I almost distracted him from driving.
I tried to give Powell a clue. He was still driving, and shook his head once just a little, meaning "No, don't know."
"Jim, you have to imagine what this is like. There is this huge parachute in space, one or five miles across. He has you sitting in this tiny gondola space ship, 10 miles away."
I have one hand open like a parachute, by the right front window of the car. I have my other hand closed like a fist, meaning a gondola, reaching behind Powell into the back seat. This is supposed to show that he and I are very far from the atomic bomb.
"And instead of parachute strings, he used 1 or 20 mile long bungee cords. And instead of a megaton bomb like Dyson did, Johndale uses a 20 ton bomb, tiny. He calls it "Medusa." "
My right hand was a parachute, and my left hand was the gondola, and the motions were of a gondola being yanked by a bungee cord.
"At the end of the parachute bungee cords he has this shielded gondola full of atomic bombs and scared people."
I laughed as I said this. I sure as hell would be scared out of my mind that the bungee cords would snap, or that the bomb would go to full yield and blows up the parachute. Then we would screwed, in space, lost forever.
"A tiny atomic bomb goes off two miles from the parachute. That's way far away from us. The atomic bomb completely vaporizes everything around it, which is only the bomb's parts. There is nothing for miles. This is space. Half the vapor of the bomb parts explodes right into your parachute. The other half blows away into space. "
I am moving my hands like a parachute. I am exploding a bomb with my fingers.
"By the time the exploding plasma atoms and debris hit the parachute they are just fast moving stuff, so they just push it. What's really neat is that don't blow it to bits or vaporize it."
We both understood. That was all there was to it. The bomb goes off behind the parachute. Far enough away so it doesn't melt it. The parachute strings are bungee cords and yank us along.
"The good part of that is that the thing can get up to 50 km per second." I said.
In plain language, that meant one could go to Mars in a few weeks.
We looked at the hills in the distance. The Sandia mountain peak, 30 miles away was just above Albuquerque, which we could not see because it was 1000 feet below the horizon. The Earth is curved that much. But we could see the mountain, so we knew Albuquerque was there.
We could see the mountains over by Socorro, another 50 or so miles beyond Albuquerque. Socorro was a mile below our horizon, again because the Earth was round. But we knew it was there.
We saw Mt. Taylor to the west 50 miles. They mined Uranium there. We cold almost imagine the radioactive sparklies sticking to the insides of the lungs of the miners. All we saw is a dark silhouette, because the sun was setting to the west. Down the hill was some green, away in the distance, by the Rio Grande. Everything in between was barren dirt and rocks, and some juniper trees. Once in a while some pinon trees.
We were passing Indian Pueblo's.
"Tiny bombs. The tiniest he can make them." I exclaimed, out of nowhere.
Powell knew what this meant, as if by telepathy.
An atomic bomb almost can't be made smaller than about a kiloton, a thousand tons worth of high explosive. A thousand tons is enough to blow up all the high rise buildings in San Francisco.
"He as to be careful. If he doesn't watch it, he will get a kiloton. Then his parachute and the gondola and everything will get nuked." I joked. Powell laughed.
We both know this was very possible. It's a little like the clutch of a race car, exploding. Every once in a while it happens, it explodes, and blows up the driver, almost without warning, and just when the car and engine is going as fast as it can.
What Johndale and Keith Boyer conveniently forgot to tell me, even though they knew, was that it's too hard to make an atomic bomb that small, 50 tons worth. I knew. It was so hard to keep the bomb from making a tremendous big explosion that about 1 in 20 would accidentally blow up with 1000 tons, or more. But I had listened to them anyway. It was too much fun.
Then Powell defended the concept. "You're 10 miles away in a tiny gondola. You only intercept a very small part of the bomb debris, and the gondola has a shield facing the bomb, so you don't get any radioactivity, either."
"That's pretty clever what Johndale did." I said. "The bomb atoms and electrons and vaporized stuff whacks the parachute but doesn't blow it up. He catches atomic bomb vapor. Then he has a parachute yank on the 10 mile long bungee cords, with you at the end. Clever."
"And then you start to sling towards the parachute." says Powell.
"Yeah, and if he doesn't hurry up with another bomb, you will fly right through the parachute and break it. Now you're screwed." I shot back.
"So he's tossing atomic bombs out of his gondola towards the parachute. He's got to time each one to go off just when the parachute and you are in the right place." He said
"Over and over, every few seconds or tens of seconds, another yank. This can go on for days. Probably kind of annoying when you try to get to sleep." I said
"He doesn't go that fast. 50,000 meters per second for a space ship. You remember 800,000 was his killer asteroid deflector. That's not going to any star. We can do 10,000 with the rockets everyone back at that Albuquerque meeting wants to make for you, right now." he observed. He was right.
I was calculating on my pocket calculator. He said 50,000 meters per second. How long would it take to go to Mars? It took a few seconds to figure.
"So, to go to Mars can be a 1/2 month trip instead of 3 months? And going to Jupiter is 6 month trip, even using this Solem Sail." I said, looking at the answer on the calculator.
"Well, it sounds exciting. But it takes too many atomic bombs." he said. He was right. I got mad at Dr. Edward Teller a dozen years ago when he said that to me, but he was right.
"Wait. I made a mistake." I exclaimed. "I'm off by a factor of 4." I forgot. If your rocket can go 50 km/sec, and if it has to accelerate till the halfway point and decelerate the other half, the average speed is 4 times less.
"Mars is 70 days." I said. and after changing the distance to figure Jupiter, "and Jupiter is 2 years."
"Well, it's an exciting visual. This is sailing in space, on the wind of atomic bombs." I said.
We were both evaluating. We were both looking at the sky and the horizon, and the 150 mile view. We were passing Indian Pueblo's. They used to live in the best part of town, by the river, on the nearby cliffs. Then we came and pushed them around. Now they make jewelry. We were passing a big silver and turquoise sales building the Indians, Native Americans built.
"I guess Johndale figured the details, Boyer kept checking his work. It's probably right." I said.
This was thought provoking.
"You don't really need atomic bombs. You just need fast moving vapor. Right?" I asked Powell.
"Sure, but how do you get the vapor? You need an energy source." He replied.
"He really wants a smaller bomb." I said.
"If Johndale could find a smaller bomb, his sail would not have to be 10 miles across." I explained.
Powell and I would both like to make the space ship to take people to Jupiter in a year.
"I got plenty of dust, asteroid dirt." I said, out of the blue.
Powell couldn't read my mind that much.
"We have plenty of asteroid dirt. If you toss a hundred pounds of dirt out there instead of an atomic bomb, and then shoot a speck of antimatter into the center of the dirt pile, through a little hole, you get something like a one ton explosion. The dirt gets vaporized." I explained.
"I suppose." he said.
I guess he was not reading my mind. So I asked Jim Powell about antimatter. It would give him a chance to think about it.
Then I explained, what I thought was more clearly, how a dirt and antimatter Medusa would work.
"Antimatter would make real neat micro-bombs, so Johndale would not have to use big atomic bombs and waste most of the fissionable material."
"Oh, yeah." he replied.
Powell understood. The antimatter mixing with a tiny bit of dirt makes pure energy. The energy would vaporize the rest of the dirt. Powell and I both know that to get the bomb to make a nuclear explosion you have to use as much plutonium or uranium as it would take to make a real bomb, enough to blow up a city. You have to choke the bomb to keep it from fissioning the uranium. You end up wasting almost all of the fissionable material.
Assuming he understood me, I went on and on about it.
"With antimatter, I could use a garbage-can-sized ball of dirt, throw a milli-gram, grain-of-salt sized piece of antimatter into it, and it would blow up like Johndale's atomic bomb. That would be antimatter propulsion with dirt for propellant."
"Yeah." he said. I thought his words implied "very good."
What I wanted to know was when will we have enough antimatter to make a space ship? Will it be in my lifetime? Powell knew about antimatter. So I asked him the key question.
"When do you think we will get an ounce of antimatter? Anti hydrogen maybe." I asked.
He started figuring. He was mumbling aloud about something, some friends of his, the rate of their progress. Then he got the answer.
"We will probably be able to do that in 50 or 60 years."
That was too long, too far away. Even my daughters will be old when that happens.
"Keith Boyer was emphatic on how Johndale discovered how it scales correctly." I commented.
We were both a little let down. We both didn't care that much because it would be too far in the future before we could get a ride on a Medusa. Besides, there is no way I'm going on that thing. I don't even go on Disney rides. They totally terrify me.
Boyer told me "The sail thickness stays constant when you make the sail bigger."
I knew that was a profound statement. That meant that if you figure how to make a small one work, then the big one will work the same. Animals DON"T scale properly. An ant carries 20 times it weight. I carry 1/5 my weight. An elephant can't carry 1/2 his weight. Animals don't scale.
"Johndale said 800,000 m/s for one of his machines." I recalled, and said to Jim. We were almost at the airport.
"So, how long would it take to get to Pluto?" he asked, motioning for me to figure it on my calculator. Pluto is 40 times as far as earth, so, about 30 seconds later, "86 days." I said.
"That's not bad. 3 months to Pluto." he said.
'No, wait a minute. I'm off by 4. It's really 347 days. A year." I interjected. I made a mistake.
So, we left it at that. When humans get a few ounces of anti-hydrogen, they can make a bungee cord - mile-across parachute space ship that will take them to Pluto in a year. And they will poop their pants the whole trip, hoping the cords don't break and the parachute doesn't rip.
Steam rockets to Mars seemed more realistic.
· Griffin says "Jobs", not rocket fuel in space
"Jobs" said Ms. Senator to the future head of NASA
They want the money, not a Vision to leave the Earth for new worlds. I thought leaders were supposed to bring their Visions to the people and then lead us there. That is not how it works. "... a clear profit ..." he said.
Test Area North (TAN) at the INEL was a bit chilly, but at least winter was finally over. After all, it was May 29 already, 1992. The sky was overcast. A wind was blowing dirt sand at us as we walked from cars to buildings. TAN was abut 52 miles north west of town, placed there because the water table was 210 feet down through a few layers of rock and because only the elk and antelope would get irradiated if one of the thick concrete buildings would crack and spill something, or if something blew up.
Dr. Mike Griffin was visiting from Code X, NASA Headquarters, to look over the hoped-for future site of the completely enclosed chamber to test a full scale nuclear rocket. At one of our facilities we showed him a modest sized reactor concrete dome inside of which we would turn on and run the real nuclear rocket. We showed him a whole building made of 3 to 5 foot thick concrete with walls designed to shield radiation.
Griffin was appointed to the Assistant Administrator of NASA for Space Exploration job because of his brazen ability to get things done, as demonstrated on his DOD Star Wars job. Colonel Pete Worden in the White House had something to do with that appointment. He was cocky and confident, rather young and thin, and smart. This was not a good combination in Washington because I sensed he clearly lacked the necessary "treacherous" and "manipulating" character traits.
INEEL arranged for Mike Griffin and I to have some face time at lunch, by having me bring the Blimpie take-out lunch from town. We were waiting for the others to join us and were looking out a doorway window at the dull, grey sky and at the isolation of the mountains off to the west. I was anxious to show Griffin how we at the INEEL discovered something that would make him look good.
"Did you know that there is rocket fuel on Apollo and Icarus?" I asked him.
I took him by surprise.
"Oh," was all he could say at the moment, because I started with the elevator speech immediately.
"It could change everything," I claimed.
"We could bring something back from space, for humans," I said.
I blew part of my speech because I had practiced saying "bring something back for the human race."
"There are these near Earth asteroids that are accessible," I continued.
I blew it again, by not creating the mental picture of a swarm of near earth asteroids in orbits near Earth. He needed the mental picture of these objects flying around space, everywhere, near us. He didn't know what Apollo or Icarus were. He didn't know what "near earth asteroids" meant. "Apollo" was the name of space missions. "Icarus" was a strange word. I blew it again. But I kept going.
I was drawing a little picture on the back of a piece of paper that showed the sun, the earth and a near Earth asteroid which I called "Apollo," and then was pointing to it as I talked.
"We could bring back rocket fuel to Earth orbits." I concluded, successfully executing a badly delivered, short elevator speech.
He looked out the doorway window again, at the mountains and the desolation of the treeless miles in between. He was restless and distracted.
"They don't want rocket fuel," he said with clear and obvious intense frustration.
Not expecting such a strange answer, I was puzzled.
"What do they want?" I questioned.
"Jobs."
"Jobs?" I said, and I became momentarily distracted and looked at the mountains like he did.
"What do you mean, "jobs"?" I asked, a few long seconds later.
"All she cares about is how many jobs she can bring in to her district," he replied, still staring at the distant mountains.
"Who?" I asked.
"Mikulski," he replied.
He meant Senator Barbara Mikulski, Maryland, where the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is located.
"You mean they wouldn't care about something that could bring back rocket fuel, unlimited rocket fuel that could completely open up space exploration?" I asked.
"No." he replied. He was not terse with me, but he did seem distracted.
He didn't volunteer anything. I found it hard to talk to him because he seemed so distracted.
I can just puke.
No wonder he's frustrated.
Mikulski thinks we're just jobs.
Not something that adds to the nation,
just jobs.
Not occupation of the solar system.
jobs.
Sucking taxpayer money
for high paying, well educated supporters,
for her campaign.
I can puke.
We wandered nearer to the meeting room.
My 8 foot dish antenna and my satellite signal receiver a few weeks earlier had picked up a CSPAN broadcast of a congressional hearing. I recognized the hearing room. I had been there. I had also just heard Griffin speak at a recent space meeting. So I stopped to see what was going on. Griffin was on the stand, answering questions. He shot back answers instantly. Crisp answers. The inquisitors could not trap him. He was good.
"I saw you on CSPAN at a hearing," I said, as Griffin was putting money into the candy vending machine while we waited for the others to get back and meet us for lunch.
"You answered them so instantly, like they couldn't hurt you," I continued.
"Uh," he acknowledged, as he banged his hand against the machine, to help dislodge the stuck candy bar.
"How did you do that?" I asked.
The he smiled like the cocky young guy from the DOD he was.
"They couldn't ask me a question I didn't know the answer to," he asserted, proudly, not arrogantly, but definitely cocky.
"How did you do that?" I asked, now imagining how theatrical, obtuse, manipulating, treacherous and lawyer-like the Congressional Inquisitors can typically be.
"I did my homework," he replied, tersely.
"I knew what I was talking about." he added, which did not give me much more in that direction to talk about.
He impressed me when I saw him on CSPAN, and he impressed me here the way he said "did my homework." I saw why both NASA and DOD wanted him on their team.
He paid me for the meal because NASA could not take gratuities from contractors. I was insulted, because we were NOT "contractors." We were a United States Government, Department of Energy, National Laboratory.
I never cashed his $7 check. I kept it as a souvenir.
\ S2 CH 16 023-1-yeomans-b-.doc
Errors Happen, Plan on it
Don Yeomans error
"The relativistic term made me get an error. I retract the Apollo and Icarus water statements," said Yeomans.
------------
It was late May, 1992. My office was in the middle of the bullpen, inside the secret area and in a room one could only get in with special access. My computer was a MAC SE, complete with connection to a network that included email. This was first class, especially for Idaho. The orange-tinted light fixture provided almost incandescent lighting but without the heat. The fixture took up a lot of room in my small office. It had an 18 inch cube metal box for a base and then the light was some kind of dome bulb almost as big as a zucchini squash, and all somewhat concealed under an 18 inch box about 4 feet off the floor. We had no windows anywhere near us.
I was getting ready to go to a space meeting, "Space 92," and I had my paper on space resources ready to present. Just one more time, checking everything, I called the one person at the Jet Propulsion Lab who was about to publish some data showing that there was water on a near Earth asteroid. I called Don Yeomans to ask him one more time about the find.
But he recanted.
"I'm not going to publish that," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
"I found an error," he said.
"You mean there's no water?," I asked, which was the only thing I wanted to know.
"I don't know about that. But I made an error. The relativistic term made me get an error."
He didn’t want to talk about it.
I had just based a space resource paper on there being water on Apollo and Icarus. I based it on Don Yeomans calculation that the orbits of these two objects were slowly changing. Don had concluded that water vapor was slowly squirting from the hot sides of these two near Earth asteroids. The squirting vapor would act like little rockets, and would be moving them ever so slightly, changing their orbits. They would be comets in disguise.
That was just what I wanted. It also fit with what Gene Shoemaker told me, that "Oljato" meant "moonlight water" in some Native American language. Oljato was another, similar near Earth object.
But now, he retracted it. I was lost. Depression started to come over me. The orange light and the tiny computer screen, the Spartan office with no door, open to the others, the drab, 1970's chair and banged up file cabinet all came home to roost. I was stuck in Idaho, frigid Idaho, 1970's Idaho.
Water in space was nowhere close. I was screwed. I told important people about this, too. Like Mike Griffin at NASA Headquarters. Now he would know that I didn’t do my homework properly. I would look bad. Very bad.
Nothing counted. If there were no water, if the closest water were some far away place deep out by Jupiter or Saturn, or some comet satellite of Jupiter, then this was too far out. This space steam rocket thing would not work.
And I was stuck here in Idaho.
I had to publish the Space 92 document with simply incorrect statements about any water on Apollo and Icarus.
---
\ S2 CH 18 024-schmitt-fingernails C.doc
schmitt-fingernails
Bloody Fingernails in Space
The "Space 92"Meeting:
·
I expected space to be wonderful. Instead, space is awful. Horrible. A person can go crazy trapped inside a painful space suit.
--------
Denver was warm, compared to Idaho. The sun was shining brightly. The sky was relatively clear. It was May 31, 1992, and the American Society of Civil Engineers was hosting "Space 92." We were in a standard, somewhat modern convention building, which meant it had hotel rooms, a bigger conference room and a dozen smaller conference rooms. I was ready with my technical paper, even though the particular near earth asteroids I chose were not the right ones. I was ready for making contacts.
The place was full of rocket scientists and space cadets. Meetings were going on simultaneously in several rooms at a time. One had to choose which meeting to go to. I had to choose between meeting people and going to meetings. I chose to meet people.
Rather quickly Buzz Aldrin and I met and he introduced me to Chauncey Uphoff. Chauncey liked solar sails and was all excited about little tiny space vehicles that would perform far better than a rocket. Buzz took care of and fed Chauncey's cat once, and that was how Buzz introduced him. But Buzz earned his Ph.D. in rocket science. He quickly switched us back to solar sails.
The three of us discussed solar sails for nearly half an hour in a seating area in the main area right in front of the main conference room. Uphoff showed how a solar sail would actually beat other kinds of rockets because of the acceleration you might be able to get. Sun power would work. We sat there talking about orbits and flinging through the solar system on sun powered sails. Chauncey said problem was that no one could make the sail.
I didn't get it. Why should Buzz or I become interested in a space transport that can never take an astronaut anywhere? The solar sail would work ok for small things. But when the payload is 5000 tons, the sail would be bigger than an asteroid. Way too big.
Dr. Jim Blacic and Dr. David Vaniman, the Los Alamos scientists who wrote a book on moon resources were there, and I talked with them. I talked with Dr. Robert Zubrin about his way to go to Mars. Dr. Steve Gillette and Dave Kuch were there, trying to find a way to get into the mining and mineral extraction business in space. Steve Howe from Los Alamos was there, working nuclear rockets.
Congress labeled the Mars program the "Space Exploration Initiative," SEI. This was not just about going to Mars. This was about Occupying the Solar System. This should have been exciting. But something was missing, something I could not pinpoint.
I talked with all kinds of people, but not one of them had any money. No one seemed to have the kind of Congressional contacts needed to get the Mars program going. We seemed to be missing the Generals and Admirals of the game. Where were the Big Guys? Where were the important Senators?
All I saw were people with ideas.
The most interesting people were those who had actually been in space, on the moon.
Pry Off His Fingernails
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, the last guy on the moon, was speaking in one of the smaller conference rooms. The room was the typical smaller dark conference room with no windows and stuffed with uncomfortable, metal fold up chairs. The lights were down but not so much you could not see. The projector light was bright enough to permit reading your notes or a book, if you were bored. Jack Schmitt wore a brown-ish suit and looked just like a boss businessman or a higher level Pentagon official. He was wearing a power uniform. I walked in after he had started and stood in a stalking position by the door.
I was surprised at how few people were in the room. I would expect that the room would be full. Everyone wants to meet somebody who walked on the moon. But there were all kinds of empty chairs, maybe half the room., maybe 3/4 of the room, maybe 40 empty chairs.
He was telling the college kids, young guys it seemed, space professionals and younger engineer types, about what actually happened out there in a space suit and about what it was like inside a space suit on the moon. Schmitt had a Ph.D. in geology and had been a United States Senator. And he was really enjoying talking to young rocket scientists about working on the moon. He was going to tell us all about it.
I expected he was about to tell us how they jumped and hopped around and how much fun it was. I didn't care about that.
"Your finger muscles really get knotted up. Your fingers must really work hard. Being in the space suit is like being inside a fully inflated inner tube. Try bending an inner tube when it's inflated. You're on the inside. Bending it is really hard to do." he explained, clearly, authoritatively.
I see.
That's why tires work,
why inner-tubes full of air hold up a car without going flat.
you're inside one.
Never thought of that.
"The reason the space suit looks like that, all puffed up, is that it really is all puffed up," he explained.
He stuck his arms out like we see in the moon photos. Then he bounced them up and down a few inches, still straight out as he explained it.
I can smell the inner tube
right now.
I bet if he farts
he smell it instantly.
I got the picture and understood the physics. It was 4-th grade simple. The space suit was inflated with air so the guy inside can live. That means the glove for the fingers is inflated, too. So when you want to bend a finger, you have to bend something that is inflated and wants to stay rigid.
my nose itches.
what if his nose itches,
itches bad?
what does he do if he sneezes?
How does he wipe the snot
off the face thing?
""Your finger muscles get really sore."" He said,
"After "4 hours of doing that, your fingers need a day to rest."
Then he said the fingernails lifted off because the glove wasn't quite correct.
Did I hear him right?
Torture?
"My fingernails lifted off, because the glove wasn't quite fitted right to my hand." he explained.
"Didn't that hurt?" someone up front asked.
I piped up from my stalking position by the door and asked him that, too.
"Sure it hurt." he said, without much more thought about it.
Then I asked him before the others did,
"What did you do?"
"What do you want me to do?
Call NASA and ask them to send up another glove?
There's no Kmart up there you know."
He answered just like that, instantly, a wisecrack, a well prepared line.
Lots of people must have asked the same question, because he answered so well and so fast.
When I went up and talked to him after he finished, I asked him to explain in more detail about his fingernail torture experience. I wanted to be able to tell that story to every audience I could.
Aldrin pooped his pants to be allowed to go to the moon. Schmitt had his fingernails pried off .
I'm not going.
---
Each meeting with person who actually went to space was a lesson. This time it was
"Space suits don't work very well and can torture you."
Each reality lesson about space, those where we would actually have to live there and experience the lesson, got worse every time I heard one.
Space was supposed to be nice, good, wonderful, great to explore and live in. Instead, every person I talked to who had actually been there had some new set of bad things. Aldrin had to poop his pants to go to space. Grechko the cosmonaut had to breathe the other guy's floating barf.
It was dangerous, too. The rocket guys still don't have a rocket that has made a 100 launches in a row without a crash.
This reality lesson with the one-time Man In The Moon, Dr. Harrison Schmitt, taught me that if your space suit caused excruciating, torture and pain, too bad.
This was bad news.
I just didn't find anything at this whole meeting that would get me excited.
----------
Background
920600 Space 92 Amer Soc. Civ. Engr. Denver 31 may - 4 Jun 92, aldrin, dr. buzz bini, dr. dante n. blacic, dr. jim cheney, dennis cutler, andrew hall dewys, dr. jane eberhart, dr. ralph English, elizabeth erb, dr. r. bryan finn, dr. tom gertch, richard e. gillett, dr. steve (griffin, dr. mike) happel, john a.howe, dr. steve jenkins, lyle jones, carleton h. jr., keller, rudolf kuch, dave leonard, ray s. mayer, jill steele nowak, dr. paul s. post, jonathan vos pryke, ian reinhold, dr. ralph r. sadeh, dr. willy z. schmitt, dr. h. h. jack schulz, jon sharp, laura spencer, johns s. stuart, dr. james r. sture, dr. stein takagi, kenji uphoff, chauncey van hoften dr. james d. a. vaniman, dr. david t. white, wayne n. jr willoughby alan j. (worden, dr. pete) zubrin, dr. robert
· Shoemaker's nea comet asteroid
S2 CH 19 025-shoemakerfax-Cc-.doc
The Asteroid Is a Comet
It was the middle of July, 1992. Idaho was experiencing it's 2 or 3 weeks of summer. My office still had 1970's furniture and Idaho Falls was still in the early 1970's. We had been here in Idaho just about one year. We were still in culture shock.
Nothing was happening at all with SEI and the Mars missions. And nobody knew of any water or ice in space that I could get to. All the water was tied up in space dust.
Mark Sykes and I had gotten together to talk about it. Mark was a Professor at the University of Arizona. I had met him at the San Juan Capistrano meeting when he was passing out beer and making jokes, mocking the meeting that David Morrison was holding. Mark did the analysis of the new, NASA infrared telescope data. He was the one who had the real data on the dust trails of comets and asteroids. He also knew that these objects were concentrated natural resources in space. He was passionate about the near earth objects being valuable.
Mark knew that some of the space dust related to some of the near Earth asteroids had water. It was chemical water, not liquid water. The technical term was "water of hydration," which in plain language meant that one could roast the dust to release steam. He knew there were many near earth asteroids out there where we could do this. I didn't know.
I should have been excited because when we had calculated how much water we could get from just one little near earth asteroid, we got more than enough to send a city to Mars. But I wasn't excited.
Who could be excited by rocks in space? The near earth asteroid crowd of fringe astronomers kept passing me rumors that there were comets and little chunks of comets orbiting around near Earth, and these were ice, real ice. That's what I wanted. But they had not come through with their rumors.
Mark Sykes, Mike Jacox and I decided to tell our colleagues about how we could use these newly discovered space resources, and how to make affordable probes to get there and do prospecting. We prepared a technical presentation for the American Nuclear Society, the "ANS." We picked the ANS because Jacox had a dual mode, nuclear rocket and nuclear electric generator that would power and push the prospecting vehicle around the solar system.
Sykes, Jacobs and I explained how we could get water from near Earth asteroids. We were scheduled to publish it at the Jackson Hole meeting this August, 1992. We were planning to tell the audience of rocket scientists that we could go to near Earth asteroids, roast them in an oven like we use to bake bread or cookies, and water steam would come out.
We would then tell the audience "If we just used the water in the INEL nuclear reactors already designed to use water for the nuclear submarine fleet, why then we would change everything. We would be able to bring back huge amounts of rocket fuel to Earth orbit and fuel an exodus. We would be able to occupy the inner solar system."
Sykes was excited, passionate. Jacox could see a way to get money for prospecting missions that would use his dual mode, nuclear electric generator, hydrogen propellant arc jet thrusters and nuclear heated hydrogen propelled rocket. Jacox was excited.
And, I could see it was going to be a hard life, trying to convince people to visit rocks in outer space to get rocket fuel. Mike Griffin from NASA didn't care because the Senator from Maryland didn't care.
Zuppero, Anthony C; Michael G. Jacox and Mark Sykes, American Nuclear Society, Regional Jackson Hole Conference,
"Bootstrapping Spacebased Infrastructure with Recently Observed Water Objects in the Space Near Earth,"
"Bootstrapping Spacebased Infrastructure for manned and unmanned activities," Nuclear Technologies for Space Exploration, Jackson Hole Wyoming, 17-21 August 1992, Sponsored by American Nuclear Society, Idaho Section, NTSE-92, Vol III, pp 625 - 634
Then Gene Shoemaker called and said "Hey Tony, we just found your ice."
He told me that Ted Bowell discovered that the near Earth asteroid 1979 VA was in fact the same object as comet 4015, "Wilson Harrington." He said it was easy to get to.
Seconds after I hung up the phone I looked up 1979 VA and calculated how accessible it was compared to the periodic comets I had been using. All that mattered were two speeds that quantified the accessibility.
The first speed was how fast the rocket would have to go to leave the comet and change to an orbit that intersects Earth. I called that the "rendezvous." The second speed was how much the rocket would have to slow down when it got as close to Earth as it could. I called that the "capture."
The near Earth asteroid space scientists had already given me a table of orbital elements for the NEA's. So, comparing 1979 VA to the comets I had been using was as simple as cutting and pasting in a spreadsheet.
Amazing
1979 VA: 0.1 km/s to rendezvous, 3.0 to capture
compare to Comet P/Finlay: 0.3 rendezvous, 3.8 capture
Immediately I knew what this meant. It was the most accessible comet known, and it was also accessible. That 3.0 number was like what we would need for a fast trip to Mars.
I immediately ran into Marland's office.
"Shoemaker called. He found the water. 1979 VA is a comet." I blurted out.
That had to be gibberish to Marland, unless he was reading my mind. But, Marland was used to my skipping most of the middle steps, taking giant leaps, assuming the listener has all the key facts I have and is thinking just as fast as I am, and stating just the final answer, so he acted like he knew exactly what I was talking about.
"What's that mean, we can send a buncha people to space?
Fuel up your steam rocket?"
he asked, looking up from his MAC and smiling a bit, but not turning his head, and not wanting to let me know I was distracting him right in the middle of his concentrating on something.
"Yeah, probably." I answered.
"Shoemaker said Ted Bowell was looking at some past slides of "1979 VA," a near Earth asteroid, so he could get a better orbit for it. When he went back to the Mt. Palomar archives of 1949, he saw it all right, but it had a tail. That meant it was a comet, not an asteroid. When he checked with Brian Marsden at the Smithsonian, sure enough, it was Comet Wilson Harrington. It turned out that Wilson and Harrington had seen it first, so it was named after them, "periodic comet Wilson-Harrington." They had been getting it wrong all these years after 1949 because it didn't show its tail ."
"So what's that mean to us?" Marland somewhat interrupted at his first opportunity.
He was typically hardnosed and abrupt when scientists or engineers would bring up something esoteric.
"Well," I started to reply, knowing that I had to find a way to make the mere discovery of water ice something that would translate into money soon. It would take a manned mission to a comet to make a difference. But I plowed on anyway.
"The comet is close. I calculated it's orbit. We can haul a huge payload back to Earth orbit. The is the rocket fuel we've been looking for."
I made my case, I thought.
"Oh, Really." he replied, as he failed to stir from staring at his Macintosh monitor.
He didn't see it yet. I kept talking, mostly because I was so excited, not because I could make a good case for getting money soon. I had to focus. "Focus." I had an instant flashback.
"Focus, focus, focus."
Gary Masters said, back at Sandia.
My boss, he was.
Marland's like that some.
Gotta focus.
"The comet is 1/3 water ice. We heat it with a small nuclear reactor heater."
I pointed to somewhere outside Marland's office. Somewhere out there was a model of a small nuclear reactor heater. It was no bigger than a 30 gallon garbage can. Mike Jacox was selling a reactor that was just exactly that big. It would heat a thermionic electric generator and it would heat hydrogen for a rocket. It would do both. It was a "dual-mode" system. Several of the nuclear rocket people had been part of designing and analyzing the reactor. So, Marland could picture that in his head.
"Then we condense the vapor and get water. We put the water in a rocket fuel tank. We make steam with a nuclear reactor."
Marland could understand that part with no trouble at all, because that is what the INEL had been testing and working with since the INEL started during the early 1950's. The nuclear submarines use nuclear reactors to make steam, run the steam through tiny nozzles next to turbine wheels, and that powered the submarine propellers.
"Then we send it back to earth. When we get here, we turn on the steam rocket again to slow us down and get into an orbit around Earth."
Marland could understand that clearly, because that was exactly what a return trip from Mars would be like. And he was chartered to test the nuclear rocket engines to do that.
"But the payload is huge. 3,000 tons."
Marland had heard me say numbers that large many times. Any number between 1000 and 10,000 was huge compared to anything anyone had launched.
"10,000 tons. 30,000. I calculated that," I added, nearly immediately.
During the San Juan Capistrano meeting about a year earlier I showed Gene Shoemaker and his crowd of killer asteroid buddies how a rocket would do exactly that, bring back a range of payloads. Some configurations brought back 3000 tons. Some brought back 10,000 tons. One huge space truck even brought 30,000 tons at a time from some periodic comet. Only this time with 1979 VA it was far more realistic. Comet 1979 VA was far easier to access. Gene Shoemaker called me and told me because he knew it was far easier to access. Gene Shoemaker had also given me the most accurate orbital transfer equation, to calculate the access delta-V.
Marland could see why I was excited. The payload of the Shuttle was about 26 tons. 3,000 tons was more than about 100 times the Shuttle payload. I finally got through to Marland. He stopped what he was doing. He gave me his full attention.
"Is this real?" he asked.
"If Shoemaker isn't lying to me, it's real." I replied, hedging my bets.
Hesitating, because I did not know for a fact how real it was, I had to rely on Gene Shoemaker. I had been fooled several times before during the last 20 years, by colleagues who I thought were smart and said something I liked and believed, but were wrong.
"This comet is so accessible we could bring as much rocket fuel back to earth orbit as we would ever want. We could occupy the solar system," I replied, loosing my focus and getting excited again.
It was an immaturity defect in my personality. I would get excited instead of acting like a leader.
"Are you sayin it's like finding oil?" he said, stopping a bit and trying to generate his own version of the marketing blurb he would have to use to his bosses.
"Well, yeah." I replied.
"I did the calculations. We could bring back 10,000 tons at a time. That's more than what we have launched since the history of space." I continued.
My numbers kept changing. 3000 tons. 10,000. 30,000. I had calculated mission variations that gave each of these. I might have sounded like I had not calculated the payload and maybe was pulling it out of thin air. I started to formulate how to be more specified.
"So it's a big deal?" Marland asked, ignoring the different numbers.
"I think so. It's what I've been waiting for since 1987." I replied.
"So what are you going to do? You gonna make something of it?" he asked.
"I'm gonna try," I replied.
I called Mark Sykes. He got excited and went to his computer. He calculated the orbit of 1979 VA. He put the sun in the middle, plotted the earth's orbit and earth, the comet's orbit, and the comet. Then he sent me the data and a picture.
This is weird.
Must be mistake.
Orbit intersects Earth.
Then I realized why Ted Bowell had been looking at 1979 VA. It looked like it would hit Earth. The comet missed Earth by less than the width of the line used to plot the orbit. That was also why the comet was accessible. Every 4.3 years it would pass close to Earth.
I told everyone I met what happened.
"Hey Chuck, you won't believe this," I said to Chuck Olsen, Dr. Chuck Olsen, nuclear reactor fuels expert.
Chuck's cubicle was across from mine.
"These guys found the water in space to run my steam rocket," I exclaimed, excited.
"Yeah? Where at?" he replied, always smiling, always seeming to be curious.
"On a near-earth comet. They were trying to find a better orbit for this near earth asteroid, and it turned out to be a comet. How do you like that?" I stated.
"Can you get to it?" he asked.
He heard me talking to Gene Shoemaker because his desk was less than 4 feet from mine. He knew it was a comet. He knew enough about comets to know that most are too far away or too hard to get to. And he surmised that "near earth asteroid" meant it was "nearer than a comet."
"Well, yeah. I calculated it. You can bring back a huge payload to Earth orbit. Rocket fuel. Water."
"You gonna do something with it?" he asked.
He also heard me tell Marland I was going to do something. He was curious, because he wanted to make the fuel elements for a nuclear rocket fuel, and he had spent most of his life making steam generator nuclear reactor fuel. He wanted me to win so he could have fun again, making nuclear reactor fuel.
"Oh, yeah. This'll change everything." I asserted.
John Rice's desk was 10 feet from mine. Talking with him for about an half hour, I told John Rice the whole story, from start to finish. John wanted me to succeed because then he could do what he like, to formulate all the safety related documents and requirements.
Tom Hill had been at the INEL long enough to know that facilities more than anything else determined where new work would go. Building a new facility to do anything always took many years when the government did it. A year to get the money, a year to get the plans approved, a year to get bids from contractors and a few more years to build it. Then add a year or three if the cost seems to be big, because Congress had a habit of delaying it till a better time. So, whoever had the facilities right now would be ahead of the others.
Tom Hill wanted me to win because he knew the INEL had the only facilities where the steam reactor testing could begin right now. All the other work had gone away and the facilities were practically idle.
John Martinell wanted me to win because he loved space. He had spent a year at DOE headquarters working with the people in the Program Office who would work with NASA to spend the money. John wanted to see something really neat happen for mankind, and occupying another planet fit his dream. John was also in charge of some INEL space work.
When I saw Ted Bowell, the one who found it, he told me "I was trying to get better orbit data for the near earth asteroids. I went back into the Mt. Palomar records to see if I could get a previous sighting."
If Bowell could find out where the asteroid was in the sky a decade or century earlier, with moderately accurate data, then he could put that into his computer and get a much more accurate fix on where the asteroid was moving.
With an accurate fix, he could predict a lot better where it would be in the near future. He wanted to know if any of the NEA's would hit Earth in the next 100 years. The near earth asteroid "1979 VA" had an orbit that came close to Earth.
"I went back into the (Mt. Palomar) history slides and picked out the slide where 79 VA should have been during 1949, and I saw it."
He motioned how he pulled the slide out of the drawer and then did a double-take.
"I said "whoa." I saw the tail and knew it was a comet."
When I talked to Brian Marsden he said "Yes, it was a comet seen by Wilson and Harrington. I don't know why I missed that."
Marsden felt a little guilty that he had not checked to make sure that the NEA orbits were not something others had already found, named and claimed. Marsden was the Director of the Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marsden had a reputation for knowing the details of every comet ever discovered.
Gene Shoemaker introduced me to Alan Harris. Alan had looked at 1979 VA with a telescope.
"I was looking at it. It was always a strange object," he said.
"You mean you were looking at it, you saw it? What did you see?" I asked.
"Well, no. I was using a photometer. I had trouble with it. I thought I was doing something wrong, or maybe something was wrong with the photometer. I kept getting erratic results, unpredictable," he explained.
"So, what was going on?" I asked.
"Well, as soon as I found out it was a comet, everything became clear. We were looking at parts of the comet's tail, something long and wispy, sometimes taking up the whole field of view, sometimes not," he explained.
"You were looking at wisps," I mused.
"Are there any more?" I asked.
"Don't know." he said. He didn’t much care about using NEAs for anything or about steam rockets, but he was definitely friendly.
Gene Shoemaker faxed a copy of the 1979 VA / Wilson Harrington comet. I showed it to everyone and gave them a story, a story of steam rockets and water and Occupying the Solar System.
Years later I realized: I was stupid. I was calculating how many comets were easy to get to from Earth. All I needed was a gas station to fuel up on the way to another comet. Two steps in stead of one, and the mission would have become simpler. What a shame.
\ nec Wilson_Har'ton 50_in eps-r.jpg
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Near-Earth Comet Hydrocarbon / Rocket Fuel /Resource Candidates
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at Earth |
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A.U. |
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deg. |
yrs |
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km/s |
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0 |
50 |
100 |
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neo-comets |
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km/s |
km/s |
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lo |
med |
hi |
yrs |
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1979 VA #4015 |
2.64 |
0.62 |
2.8 |
4.3 |
8.19 |
0.1 |
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1 |
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3.1 |
4.64 |
6.14 |
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3.0 |
4.50 |
6.00 |
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P/duToit-Hartley |
3.01 |
0.60 |
2.9 |
5.2 |
8.59 |
0.6 |
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11 |
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3.9 |
5.52 |
7.15 |
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3.3 |
4.89 |
6.52 |
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Oljato |
2.18 |
0.71 |
2.5 |
3.2 |
7.65 |
1.74 |
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4.41 |
5.74 |
7.07 |
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2.66 |
3.99 |
5.33 |
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P/Tempel-Swift |
3.18 |
0.64 |
5.4 |
5.7 |
8.95 |
0.5 |
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8 |
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4.0 |
5.78 |
7.53 |
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3.5 |
5.25 |
7.00 |
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P/Haneda-Campos |
3.29 |
0.67 |
5.9 |
6.0 |
9.12 |
0.4 |
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4 |
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4.0 |
5.86 |
7.67 |
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3.6 |
5.43 |
7.24 |
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P/Barnard1 |
3.07 |
0.58 |
5.5 |
5.4 |
8.73 |
0.9 |
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24 |
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4.2 |
5.92 |
7.59 |
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3.4 |
5.03 |
6.71 |
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P/Blanpain |
2.96 |
0.70 |
9.1 |
5.1 |
9.10 |
0.6 |
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9 |
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4.2 |
5.95 |
7.75 |
|
3.6 |
5.40 |
7.20 |
|
P/Finlay |
3.64 |
0.70 |
3.7 |
6.9 |
9.36 |
0.3 |
|
2 |
|
4.1 |
5.99 |
7.88 |
|
3.8 |
5.68 |
7.57 |
|
P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak |
3.10 |
0.66 |
9.2 |
5.5 |
9.17 |
0.5 |
|
7 |
|
4.2 |
5.99 |
7.82 |
|
3.6 |
5.47 |
7.30 |
|
P/Howell |
3.15 |
0.55 |
4.4 |
5.6 |
8.69 |
1.2 |
|
37 |
|
4.5 |
6.18 |
7.85 |
|
3.3 |
4.99 |
6.66 |
|
P/Schwassmann-Wachmann3 |
3.06 |
0.69 |
11.4 |
5.3 |
9.41 |
0.6 |
|
10 |
|
4.4 |
6.31 |
8.22 |
|
3.8 |
5.72 |
7.63 |
|
P/Hartley2 |
3.40 |
0.72 |
9.3 |
6.3 |
9.54 |
0.5 |
|
6 |
|
4.4 |
6.34 |
8.29 |
|
3.9 |
5.86 |
7.82 |
|
P/Denning |
3.80 |
0.70 |
5.5 |
7.4 |
9.55 |
0.5 |
|
5 |
|
4.4 |
6.34 |
8.30 |
|
3.9 |
5.87 |
7.83 |
|
P/Wirtanen |
3.12 |
0.65 |
11.7 |
5.5 |
9.42 |
0.7 |
|
12 |
|
4.5 |
6.39 |
8.31 |
|
3.8 |
5.73 |
7.64 |
|
P/Swift |
3.73 |
0.65 |
3.0 |
7.2 |
9.33 |
0.8 |
|
18 |
|
4.5 |
6.40 |
8.28 |
|
3.8 |
5.64 |
7.52 |
|
P/Lexell |
3.15 |
0.79 |
1.6 |
5.6 |
9.05 |
1.1 |
|
32 |
|
4.7 |
6.44 |
8.22 |
|
3.6 |
5.35 |
7.13 |
|
P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko |
3.51 |
0.63 |
7.1 |
6.6 |
9.33 |
0.9 |
|
23 |
|
4.6 |
6.51 |
8.39 |
|
3.8 |
5.64 |
7.52 |
|
P/Lovas2 |
3.57 |
0.59 |
1.5 |
6.7 |
9.07 |
1.2 |
|
35 |
|
4.7 |
6.53 |
8.32 |
|
3.6 |
5.38 |
7.17 |
|
P/Neujmin2 |
3.09 |
0.57 |
10.6 |
5.4 |
9.12 |
1.2 |
|
36 |
|
4.8 |
6.60 |
8.40 |
|
3.6 |
5.43 |
7.23 |
|
P/Kushida |
3.78 |
0.64 |
4.2 |
7.4 |
9.39 |
0.9 |
|
27 |
|
4.7 |
6.62 |
8.52 |
|
3.8 |
5.70 |
7.60 |
|
P/Forbes |
3.35 |
0.57 |
7.2 |
6.1 |
9.07 |
1.3 |
|
43 |
|
4.8 |
6.64 |
8.44 |
|
3.6 |
5.38 |
7.17 |
|
P/Tritton |
3.43 |
0.58 |
7.0 |
6.3 |
9.16 |
1.2 |
|
40 |
|
4.9 |
6.68 |
8.51 |
|
3.6 |
5.47 |
7.29 |
|
P/Wild2 |
3.44 |
0.54 |
3.2 |
6.4 |
8.90 |
1.5 |
|
57 |
|
5.0 |
6.69 |
8.42 |
|
3.5 |
5.20 |
6.94 |
|
Adonis |
1.87 |
0.76 |
1.4 |
2.6 |
7.13 |
3.20 |
|
|
|
5.55 |
6.73 |
7.91 |
|
2.35 |
3.53 |
4.71 |
|
P/deVico-Swift |
3.41 |
0.52 |
3.6 |
6.3 |
8.86 |
1.6 |
|
69 |
|
5.0 |
6.77 |
8.49 |
|
3.4 |
5.16 |
6.88 |
|
P/Kopff |
3.47 |
0.54 |
4.7 |
6.5 |
8.99 |
1.5 |
|
61 |
|
5.0 |
6.80 |
8.57 |
|
3.5 |
5.29 |
7.06 |
|
P/Clark |
3.12 |
0.50 |
9.5 |
5.5 |
8.90 |
1.7 |
|
75 |
|
5.1 |
6.88 |
8.61 |
|
3.5 |
5.21 |
6.94 |
|
P/Brooks1 |
3.09 |
0.57 |
12.7 |
5.4 |
9.36 |
1.2 |
|
39 |
|
5.0 |
6.88 |
8.77 |
|
3.8 |
5.67 |
7.56 |
|
P/Tempel1 |
3.12 |
0.52 |
10.6 |
5.5 |
9.04 |
1.5 |
|
66 |
|
5.1 |
6.90 |
8.68 |
|
3.6 |
5.35 |
7.13 |
|
P/duToit-Neujmin-Delporte |
3.44 |
0.50 |
2.8 |
6.4 |
8.82 |
1.8 |
|
80 |
|
5.2 |
6.92 |
8.62 |
|
3.4 |
5.12 |
6.82 |
|
P/Spacewatch |
3.14 |
0.51 |
10.0 |
5.6 |
8.99 |
1.6 |
|
71 |
|
5.2 |
6.93 |
8.70 |
|
3.5 |
5.29 |
7.05 |
|
P/Boethin |
5.01 |
0.78 |
5.8 |
11.2 |
10.30 |
0.4 |
|
3 |
|
4.8 |
7.03 |
9.25 |
|
4.4 |
6.67 |
8.90 |
|
P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova |
3.04 |
0.82 |
4.2 |
5.3 |
9.07 |
1.7 |
|
74 |
|
5.2 |
7.04 |
8.83 |
|
3.6 |
5.38 |
7.17 |
|
P/Tempel2 |
3.11 |
0.52 |
12.0 |
5.5 |
9.19 |
1.6 |
|
67 |
|
5.2 |
7.07 |
8.90 |
|
3.7 |
5.50 |
7.33 |
|
P/Biela |
3.53 |
0.76 |
12.5 |
6.6 |
10.02 |
0.7 |
|
16 |
|
5.0 |
7.09 |
9.21 |
|
4.2 |
6.37 |
8.49 |
|
P/Harrington |
3.58 |
0.56 |
8.7 |
6.8 |
9.37 |
1.5 |
|
59 |
|
5.3 |
7.18 |
9.08 |
|
3.8 |
5.68 |
7.58 |
|
P/Kohoutek |
3.54 |
0.50 |
5.9 |
6.6 |
9.02 |
1.9 |
|
89 |
|
5.5 |
7.24 |
9.01 |
|
3.6 |
5.33 |
7.10 |
|
P/Tsuchinshan1 |
3.54 |
0.58 |
10.5 |
6.6 |
9.53 |
1.4 |
|
50 |
|
5.3 |
7.24 |
9.19 |
|
3.9 |
5.85 |
7.80 |
|
P/Denning-Fujikawa |
4.33 |
0.82 |
8.6 |
9.0 |
10.23 |
0.7 |
|
13 |
|
5.1 |
7.27 |
9.46 |
|
4.4 |
6.60 |
8.79 |
|
P/Giacobini |
3.54 |
0.59 |
11.4 |
6.6 |
9.63 |
1.3 |
|
46 |
|
5.3 |
7.29 |
9.27 |
|
4.0 |
5.96 |
7.94 |
|
P/Wild4 |
3.36 |
0.41 |
3.7 |
6.1 |
8.55 |
2.5 |
|
114 |
|
5.7 |
7.32 |
8.94 |
|
3.2 |
4.86 |
6.48 |
|
P/Tsuchinshan2 |
3.60 |
0.50 |
6.7 |
6.8 |
9.13 |
1.9 |
|
88 |
|
5.5 |
7.35 |
9.16 |
|
3.6 |
5.44 |
7.25 |
|
P/Schaumasse |
4.07 |
0.70 |
11.8 |
8.2 |
10.23 |
0.8 |
|
19 |
|
5.2 |
7.37 |
9.56 |
|
4.4 |
6.59 |
8.79 |
|
P/Brooks2 |
3.62 |
0.49 |
5.5 |
6.9 |
9.06 |
2.0 |
|
96 |
|
5.6 |
7.37 |
9.16 |
|
3.6 |
5.36 |
7.15 |
|
P/Faye |
3.78 |
0.58 |
9.1 |
7.3 |
9.58 |
1.5 |
|
56 |
|
5.4 |
7.39 |
9.36 |
|
3.9 |
5.91 |
7.88 |
|
P/Schorr |
3.54 |
0.47 |
5.6 |
6.7 |
8.95 |
2.1 |
|
102 |
|
5.6 |
7.39 |
9.14 |
|
3.5 |
5.25 |
7.00 |
|
P/Swift-Gehrels |
4.39 |
0.69 |
9.3 |
9.2 |
10.15 |
0.9 |
|
25 |
|
5.2 |
7.39 |
9.56 |
|
4.3 |
6.51 |
8.68 |
|
P/Takamizawa |
3.74 |
0.57 |
9.5 |
7.2 |
9.58 |
1.5 |
|
58 |
|
5.4 |
7.40 |
9.37 |
|
3.9 |
5.90 |
7.87 |
|
P/Shoemaker-Levy7 |
3.56 |
0.54 |
10.3 |
6.7 |
9.47 |
1.7 |
|
72 |
|
5.5 |
7.45 |
9.37 |
|
3.9 |
5.78 |
7.71 |
|
P/Kowal-Mrkos |
3.77 |
0.48 |
3.0 |
7.3 |
9.05 |
2.1 |
|
101 |
|
5.7 |
7.49 |
9.27 |
|
3.6 |
5.36 |
7.14 |
|
P/Schwassmann-Wachmann2 |
3.44 |
0.40 |
3.8 |
6.4 |
8.62 |
2.6 |
|
123 |
|
5.9 |
7.50 |
9.14 |
|
3.3 |
4.92 |
6.56 |
|
P/Reinmuth2 |
3.53 |
0.46 |
7.0 |
6.6 |
9.02 |
2.2 |
|
108 |
|
5.7 |
7.50 |
9.27 |
|
3.5 |
5.32 |
7.09 |
|
P/Giclas |
3.65 |
0.49 |
7.3 |
7.0 |
9.19 |
2.0 |
|
98 |
|
5.7 |
7.53 |
9.36 |
|
3.7 |
5.50 |
7.33 |
|
P/Bus |
3.49 |
0.37 |
2.6 |
6.5 |
8.57 |
2.8 |
|
130 |
|
6.0 |
7.64 |
9.27 |
|
3.2 |
4.87 |
6.50 |
|
P/Reinmuth1 |
3.76 |
0.50 |
8.1 |
7.3 |
9.36 |
2.0 |
|
97 |
|
5.8 |
7.70 |
9.59 |
|
3.8 |
5.67 |
7.56 |
|
P/Shoemaker-Levy2 |
4.42 |
0.58 |
4.6 |
9.3 |
9.71 |
1.7 |
|
73 |
|
5.7 |
7.71 |
9.72 |
|
4.0 |
6.04 |
8.06 |
|
P/Mueller2 |
3.50 |
0.41 |
7.1 |
6.6 |
8.87 |
2.6 |
|
124 |
|
6.0 |
7.77 |
9.49 |
|
3.4 |
5.17 |
6.90 |
|
P/Helfenzrieder |
2.66 |
0.85 |
7.9 |
4.3 |
8.93 |
2.6 |
|
120 |
|
6.0 |
7.79 |
9.53 |
|
3.5 |
5.23 |
6.97 |
|
P/Shoemaker-Levy4 |
3.49 |
0.42 |
8.5 |
6.5 |
8.99 |
2.5 |
|
116 |
|
6.0 |
7.79 |
9.56 |
|
3.5 |
5.30 |
7.06 |
|
P/Gale |
4.95 |
0.76 |
11.7 |
11.0 |
10.71 |
0.7 |
|
14 |
|
5.4 |
7.80 |
10.17 |
|
4.7 |
7.12 |
9.49 |
|
P/Harrington-Abell |
3.86 |
0.54 |
10.2 |
7.6 |
9.68 |
1.8 |
|
83 |
|
5.8 |
7.84 |
9.84 |
|
4.0 |
6.00 |
8.00 |
|
P/Spitaler |
3.69 |
0.42 |
5.8 |
7.1 |
8.99 |
2.6 |
|
119 |
|
6.1 |
7.85 |
9.62 |
|
3.5 |
5.29 |
7.06 |
|
P/SingerBrewster |
3.46 |
0.41 |
9.2 |
6.4 |
9.01 |
2.5 |
|
118 |
|
6.1 |
7.86 |
9.64 |
|
3.5 |
5.32 |
7.09 |
|
P/Helin-Roman-Alu2 |
4.07 |
0.53 |
7.4 |
8.2 |
9.56 |
2.0 |
|
95 |
|
5.9 |
7.87 |
9.84 |
|
3.9 |
5.89 |
7.85 |
|
P/McNaught-Hughes |
3.56 |
0.40 |
7.3 |
6.7 |
8.93 |
2.7 |
|
128 |
|
6.1 |
7.88 |
9.63 |
|
3.5 |
5.23 |
6.97 |
|
P/Russell4 |
3.51 |
0.37 |
6.2 |
6.6 |
8.72 |
2.9 |
|
138 |
|
6.2 |
7.90 |
9.57 |
|
3.4 |
5.03 |
6.70 |
|
P/Metcalf-Brewington |
3.92 |
0.59 |
13.0 |
7.8 |
10.10 |
1.5 |
|
64 |
|
5.8 |
7.98 |
10.13 |
|
4.3 |
6.45 |
8.60 |
|
P/Neujmin3 |
4.83 |
0.59 |
4.0 |
10.6 |
9.90 |
1.8 |
|
79 |
|
5.9 |
8.01 |
10.09 |
|
4.2 |
6.24 |
8.32 |
|
P/Kowal2 |
3.44 |
0.56 |
15.8 |
6.4 |
10.06 |
1.6 |
|
68 |
|
5.9 |
8.01 |
10.15 |
|
4.3 |
6.41 |
8.55 |
|
P/Jackson-Neujmin |
4.14 |
0.65 |
14.1 |
8.4 |
10.44 |
1.2 |
|
41 |
|
5.8 |
8.05 |
10.32 |
|
4.5 |
6.82 |
9.10 |
|
P/Shoemaker-Levy6 |
3.85 |
0.71 |
16.9 |
7.5 |
10.71 |
0.9 |
|
28 |
|
5.7 |
8.05 |
10.42 |
|
4.7 |
7.12 |
9.49 |
|
P/Ciffreo |
3.74 |
0.54 |
13.1 |
7.2 |
9.90 |
1.8 |
|
82 |
|
6.0 |
8.06 |
10.14 |
|
4.2 |
6.24 |
8.32 |
|
P/Kojima |
3.95 |
0.39 |
0.9 |
7.8 |
8.97 |
2.9 |
|
135 |
|
6.4 |
8.13 |
9.88 |
|
3.5 |
5.27 |
7.03 |
|
P/Grigg-Skjellerup |
2.96 |
0.66 |
21.1 |
5.1 |
10.63 |
1.1 |
|
34 |
|
5.8 |
8.14 |
10.48 |
|
4.7 |
7.03 |
9.38 |
|
P/Perrine-Mrkos |
3.56 |
0.64 |
17.8 |
6.7 |
10.55 |
1.2 |
|
38 |
|
5.8 |
8.16 |
10.47 |
|
4.6 |
6.95 |
9.26 |
|
P/Lovas1 |
4.36 |
0.61 |
12.2 |
9.1 |
10.30 |
1.5 |
|
63 |
|
6.0 |
8.19 |
10.42 |
|
4.4 |
6.67 |
8.89 |
|
P/Shajn-Schaldach |
3.83 |
0.39 |
6.1 |
7.5 |
9.04 |
2.9 |
|
137 |
|
6.4 |
8.21 |
9.99 |
|
3.6 |
5.34 |
7.12 |
|
Ceres |
2.77 |
0.08 |
10.6 |
4.6 |
7.33 |
4.53 |
|
|
|
7.00 |
8.23 |
9.46 |
|
2.47 |
3.70 |
4.93 |
|
P/Bowell-Skiff |
6.27 |
0.69 |
3.8 |
15.7 |
10.54 |
1.3 |
|
45 |
|
5.9 |
8.25 |
10.56 |
|
4.6 |
6.94 |
9.25 |
|
P/Shoemaker3 |
6.59 |
0.73 |
6.4 |
16.9 |
10.78 |
1.1 |
|
33 |
|
5.9 |
8.30 |
10.69 |
|
4.8 |
7.20 |
9.59 |
|
P/Gehrels2 |
3.98 |
0.41 |
6.7 |
7.9 |
9.24 |
2.8 |
|
131 |
|
6.5 |
8.33 |
10.17 |
|
3.7 |
5.55 |
7.39 |
|
P/Klemola |
4.92 |
0.64 |
10.9 |
10.9 |
10.48 |
1.5 |
|
55 |
|
6.1 |
8.34 |
10.63 |
|
4.6 |
6.86 |
9.15 |
|
P/Harrington-Wilson |
3.43 |
0.52 |
16.3 |
6.4 |
10.03 |
2.0 |
|
93 |
|
6.2 |
8.35 |
10.48 |
|
4.3 |
6.38 |
8.51 |
|
P/Arend-Rigaux |
3.60 |
0.60 |
17.9 |
6.8 |
10.53 |
1.5 |
|
60 |
|
6.1 |
8.43 |
10.74 |
|
4.6 |
6.92 |
9.23 |
|
P/Vaisala1 |
4.89 |
0.63 |
11.6 |
10.8 |
10.52 |
1.5 |
|
62 |
|
6.1 |
8.44 |
10.74 |
|
4.6 |
6.91 |
9.21 |
|
P/d'Arrest |
3.44 |
0.62 |
19.4 |
6.4 |
10.69 |
1.3 |
|
48 |
|
6.1 |
8.45 |
10.82 |
|
4.7 |
7.10 |
9.47 |
|
P/ComasSola |
4.26 |
0.57 |
13.0 |
8.8 |
10.26 |
1.8 |
|
84 |
|
6.3 |
8.46 |
10.67 |
|
4.4 |
6.62 |
8.83 |
|
P/Shoemaker-Levy5 |
4.22 |
0.53 |
11.8 |
8.7 |
10.04 |
2.1 |
|
100 |
|
6.4 |
8.48 |
10.61 |
|
4.3 |
6.39 |
8.53 |
· First INEL papers on steam rockets, and the White house 3 times
· \ S2 CH 20 026-first-papers-Ab.doc
first-papers.doc
on 1979 VA
Telling About The Water In Space
This was a rocket science meeting, a nuclear rocket science meeting.
It was August 17, 1992, and it was a normal, cold summer day in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Mountains above us, hid the east and west horizons, making Jackson Hole a cold place all the time. The ski slope trails were easy to see because they looked like the mountain had been given a shave. The green grass and the gray rocks looked nice together as a color combination. The ski lift was taking regular people up to sight see. A constant stream of busses were arriving at the Snow King hotel to bring the rocket scientists, nuclear rocket scientists.
Down the street a mile or so my motel shared the parking lot with a convenience store that sold 190 proof grain alcohol. Full sized pickup trucks with waist-high, foot wide knobbed tires and 30 year old, thin, mostly clean shaven males in jeans, spotless cowboy boots and an unwrinkled cowboy hat driving them seemed to be as common as pigeons in Cleveland. Humiliating to Americans, tourists speaking Japanese or German dominated the downtown sidewalks leading to sto