His eyebrows went up. “Jeezus, what is he burning?”
“He is reluctant to say. I can tell you it is a tripropellant, with an extremely sophisticated engine design.”
“He’s feeding you a line of crap,” the project director retorted. “Specific impulse of over 460 seconds just won’t work.”
“Used my load cell and data acquisition system, so I know the calibration was kosher,” I said, reaching into my briefcase for a copy of The Starflight Handbook and opening it to a page 1 had marked. “And if you’ll notice, liquid ozone with liquid hydrogen is known to give specific impulse of over six hundred seconds.” He looked at me with alarm. “Though that’s not the oxidizer he uses,” I added.
He flipped the book over to look at the title on the cover, and snorted. Evidently he was not familiar with it. “He’s building a damned bomb. What in hell makes him think he needs that kind of performance?”
“The technology Dr. Knoll is building is horizontal takeoff, horizontal landing, SSTO, fully reusable, quick turnaround, with a very high payload fraction.”
He laughed. “Another for-sure crackpot crazy amateur rocket scientist! He can’t possibly have any idea of what it costs to get into space if he thinks it can be done for six hundred bucks a kilo. Yeah, it’s possible to build an SSTO. You can use the hottest stuff you can find and the engine will blow up on half your launches, or you can lighten the structure until it breaks up on the pad, and you still won’t get a decent payload fraction. It has been conclusively demonstrated that the best SSTO design has two stages.”
“So you’re saying you won’t even take a serious look at a technology that might cost a twentieth or less of what you are paying for launch services now?”
He shrugged. “In the first place, launch services don’t cost me anything. The government pays to launch these satellites. What costs me is if the damned rocket blows up and Congress decides to cancel the program. I’m not ready to try any unproven launch system with a cockeyed new engine that hasn’t been used successfully at least ten times, and preferably more like a hundred. In the second place, I don’t buy from amateurs. Call me after you’ve launched our competitors’ satellites a dozen times.”
That was the end of the meeting.
I stewed all the way back to my lab. I realized I was being irrational by taking the rejection personally. After all, I was just a contractor, a peripheral figure, in the project. In fact, not only was I not making a dime on it so far, it was costing me money. Any reasonable view of new businesses in general, and space businesses in particular, would show 90 percent or more odds the venture would fall flat on its ass, with no skin off my back. And the project director was right, the project was amateurish, underfunded, and an order of magnitude or two below everybody else’s assessment of the problem.
Back home, I checked the mail, and found a copy of Flying magazine amidst the bills and junk mail. On the cover was a Lancair, a sporty composite kit-plane that had just won another cross-country race. The close runner-up, another sleek composite kit-plane, was flying formation with it. Third place, a half-million dollar, three hundred horsepower, twenty gallon per hour, commercially-built aluminum machine whose ancestor had first flown in 1947, had tagged along half an hour later, about sixty knots slower. Honorable mention went to another kit-plane that had been right behind number three, propelled by an eighty horsepower engine burning less than four gallons an hour.
I stared at the Lancair, whose graceful lines had taken shape in a garage or hangar somewhere. Not only was this plane home-built from a kit, its design was a refinement of a plane that had started from a clean sheet of paper, the dream of a knowledgeable “amateur” who had rejected the ancient designs offered by “professional” aircraft companies, and opted instead for higher performance at lower cost, using modern materials and aerodynamic theories.
From somewhere out of the back of my mind rolled a television expose of a small remote-piloted aircraft designed for battlefield recon, the prototype for which was built by a couple of amateur model aircraft enthusiasts for a few thousand dollars. The project had been usurped by a large corporation, who spent tens of millions developing a high-tech version that didn’t work as well.
Then, of course, there were the other amateurs, like Wilbur and Orville Wright, Robert Goddard, Werner Von Braun… Oh, just go through any good aerospace history book, and you’ll see bunches of good examples.
That was what had me so offended, I realized. My personal stake in this was a system that wasn’t ready to take a serious look at revolutionary new technologies, particularly if they were developed by amateurs, i.e. amatori, i.e. people who do what they do because they love it. My stake was also that access to space, and its incalculable bounty, was hog-tied by the enormous cost of getting into orbit. Even if Jake Knoll failed, his concepts were sound, and his results were promising. He, or someone else, could try again. When they finally succeeded, the payoff would be enormous.
And that gave me an appreciation of other amateurs: people like aviation pioneers Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher, and the countless nameless others who had tried and failed. Their names are in the same good aviation history books. Others learned from their mistakes and succeeded.
The follow-up tests, on a new engine with connections to allow me to monitor the mysterious “electric fields,” worked well. We uncovered the probable cause of the previous explosion, came up with a tune-up protocol that avoided it, did a number of full-power runs using Pan Galactic Gargleblaster, and got a specific impulse a smidge over 600 seconds. Then we did what G. Harry Stine said we must, we blew it up. Quite deliberately, we duplicated the conditions of the previous test, and turned the engine into smithereens, just to be sure we understood the problem. This time, we removed the expensive instrumentation first.
Shortly thereafter, Jake got lucky at an auction of damaged aircraft. The sale featured some cherries that got all the attention, and Jake drove away with the remains of a Learjet for $500. The plane had been involved in a fire during maintenance, which had burned the back half of it to unidentifiable junk, and took out the hangar in the process. The cockpit was intact, although it was an older model, and its maintenance logs were lost in the fire. Without a paper trail, the plane was essentially permanently unairworthy. Awash in better prospects, none of the other bidders bothered to look at it, even for parts, suspecting the ancient thing was equipped with junk. In fact, it had some very nice modern instruments and radios. Jake made his $500 back selling the nose landing gear to a South American parts depot, and equipped the cockpit of Dervish for free.
Some months later, I returned to witness glide tests of the aeroshell. The FAA had little problem with Jake’s request to do the unpowered tests under existing Experimental Class rules, especially with Dr. Gore, a qualified test pilot, at the controls. Of course, nobody said anything about eventual installation of rocket engines to them in the application. Jake sweet-talked a friend of his into towing Dervish behind a DC-3 cropduster that turned out to still have the original towing hardware it had used to pull a pair of Waco gliders to Normandy on June 6, 1944.1 got to fly as unofficial co-pilot of the old warbird, though I spent most of the time operating a video camera. We conducted the tests in Nevada, away from the curious eyes of neighbors, especially Fire Marshal Fredricks, who was still under the impression Jake was building a jet-powered speedboat.