I was impressed with Dr. (Captain) Chuck Gore. He’d flown F-4s in Viet Nam, in a flight that included Lt. Blood, Lt. Goetz, and Major Coffin. Sort of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, burning JP-4.
Jake couldn’t afford a series of ground tracking stations or access to NASA’s TDRS data relay satellites, and was hoping to use cellular phones and modems to communicate with Dervish over the Internet. Barefoot Jim and I managed to quash that idea, which was mega-illegal. Together, we hatched a scheme to use the network of amateur radio “digipeaters” to track the ship. Ah, radio hams, I forgot to mention them. Yes, another bunch of true pioneers who were the original developers of a number of modern technologies, who also love what they do. No strangers to space technology, they have put up a series of amateur-built “Oscar” satellites, at very low cost and low weight. They were becoming excited over an idea of Jake’s to build a 45 kilogram orbiting radio telescope to beat NASA at their own game, and were also keen on the idea of free launch services in exchange for the digipeater favor. They sweet-talked the FCC into acknowledging that since Jake was obviously an amateur, his ship qualified for an amateur radio station license. The Amateur Radio Relay League lined up a database of frequencies, access codes, and locations for digipeaters whose operators had volunteered, which was nearly every digipeater operator on the face of the Earth.
About this time, a friend of mine finished his all-wood, home-designed, home-built plane, the pride of fifteen years of loving work. I was prospering, and was able to buy his GlasAir, a composite home-built kit-plane he had put together when problems with the wooden design seemed insurmountable. I flew cross-country out to Washington to test the digipeater system, which worked with only a few, easily-remedied glitches. Jake studied my pride and joy intensely, declared it to be “OK for a start, but heavy as a brick. Soon as I have time, I think I’ll show this business how to build these things.”
Having proved Dervish’s basic airworthiness, Jake began installing life support and other systems. The term “off-the-shelf” has been applied to a number of “low-cost” space projects lately, with $150 million qualifying as cheap. Jake broke new frontiers in cheap, and deserves a new term. I propose “out-of-the-basement.” Funding what he knew should be a million-and-a-half dollar project out-of-pocket, every scrounging and cost-cutting measure possible was needed. Besides the stuff from the trashed Lear, pieces came from surplus catalogs, scuba diving catalogs, solar home suppliers, camping suppliers, amateur radio “hamfest” tailgate sales, and a cou-pie of local yard sales. Kenton Thurman had a plumbing and hardware store down the road in Wenatchee, and had written in response to a story entitled “The Pattern,” bragging about how his stores adapted to local needs. I called him on it. He found himself adding nickel tubing and aircraft-grade bolts to his inventory.
Testing the aeroshell and its systems in a vacuum was a tough nut to crack. Jake and his crew turned most of the inside of the barn into a huge test chamber by building a foam-cored composite vessel large enough to hold the craft. The test chamber was covered with cheaper automotive-grade fiberglass and polyester, and a slathering of concrete, but was otherwise similar in construction to the aeroshell. It sealed with silicone and bolts, the end cover dragged into position by George. The high-capacity vacuum pump was made from an old big-block V-8, turned by the power take-off of the old tractor. The chamber couldn’t come anywhere near the vacuum of space, but it tracked down the leaks, revealed an outgassing problem with the foam that could be compensated for, and proved the systems would continue to function to at least one hundred thousand feet.
We moved the engine test site to Nevada for the tests of the big engine. The little one had drawn too much attention from Jake’s neighbors. We had finally mounted the little engine on Dervish, which floated like a cork, and staged a demonstration on a large lake near town. Jake came up with a low-potency fuel mixture called “Molotov Cocktail,” especially for the purpose. It produced plenty of flame and fury, to the delight of Fredricks and the other town-folk, but Jake deliberately kept the speed down. We learned Dervish was an awful race boat. In spite of the truck load of sandbags we’d ballasted it with, it wanted to fly.
Then the problems started. No way was the FAA going to let us test a rocket plane. NASA just laughed and handed us a bunch of test requirements that would have cost a hundred million dollars to comply with. Jake tried the FAA again, proposing to put a jet engine on Dervish instead. No dice. We looked into moving to another country, but the cost was out of reach.
The project was technically well along at that point, but apparently up against a bureaucratic brick wall, the problems something I couldn’t help with. I drifted off to other projects, though I kept up the correspondence. Jake wrote less and less frequently, and seemed more inclined to discuss starship designs than SSTO development. I feared he was losing heart, but understood. It had been a hell of a long shot from the start, and the final obstacles were predictable.
The phone rang late one Friday night. It was Jake. I clearly remember his exact words. “Tom, get your ass out here right now, or you’ll wish you had.” Further, he would not elaborate, except that I was needed, with gear, on Sunday morning.
I bought a ticket on a commercial jet. I hated to let somebody else do the flying, but I evidently needed to get there fast. I rented the same old Cessna in Seattle, and boogied through the mountains to Jake’s farm. Jake met me at the airport again, this time trotting from a door in a hangar I had thought was abandoned.
He gave me a bear hug. “You made it! Let’s go. Lots to do.” I trotted to keep up as he headed back to the hangar at his usual pace. There, in the pale light from four brand-new explosion-resistant fluorescent fixtures, was Dervish. It seemed different somehow, almost… alive. Lights and soft noises emanated from it, and tangy and oily chemical scents filled the hangar. I noticed a patina of wear on its sleek skin.
I recognized Patti, David, and Dr. Gore. There were two strange faces. “Wired Tom,” Jake announced, “meet Baker Bret and Star-Spangled Sam.” Oooh, a nickname. I was actually a bona-fide Loyal Tech. I shook hands all around.
I gazed at Dervish. Dr. Gore was ducking, peering, and prodding all around it, a pre-flight inspection if ever I’ve seen one. “You’re going to fly it! From here?”
Jake nodded.
“This legit?”
“Hell, no!”
I noticed the registration number N214PW painted on the fuselage. “The FAA approved it to fly?”
Jake led me to the crew hatch, above which was stenciled “EXPERIMENTAL SPACE ROCKET—DANGEROUS AS HELL.” The aircraft dataplate from the Learjet was attached to the frame. “You’ve heard of outfits that build an airplane around a dataplate?
That’s basically what we’ve done. That’s the tail number of the original Lear.”
I shook my head. “That can ’t be legal.”
Jake grinned. “Sure cuts down questions when you file a flight plan, though.”
I shook my head. “Wait a minute, you’ve done this before?”
He nodded. “Flown it a buncha times down in Nevada. Found this little desert down in between the mountains that’s all Class G airspace. Class Go For It, uncontrolled, no nosy radar coverage, no traffic except the occasional drug smuggler, nothing but miles and miles of sagebrush and pinion pines.”