Travis S. Taylor - The Rocket City Rednecks New American Space Plan

Baen Nonfiction

by Travis S. Taylor

Alien Invasion: How to Defend Earth

(with Bob Boan)

A New American Space Plan

by Travis S. Taylor, Ringleader of the Rocket City Rednecks

(with Stephanie Osborn)

The Science Behind The Secret

Baen Fiction

by Travis S. Taylor

One Day on Mars

The Tau Ceti Agenda

One Good Soldier

Warp Speed

The Quantum Connection

with John Ringo:

Vorpal Blade

Manxome Foe

Claws That Catch

Von Neumann's War

with Les Johnson:

Back to the Moon

To purchase these and all Baen Book titles in e-book format, please go to www.baenebooks.com

A New American Space Plan by Travis Taylor,

Ringleader of the Rocket City Rednecks

Copyright 2012 by Travis S. Taylor & Stephanie Osborn

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3865-3

eISBN: 978-1-61824-961-6

Cover photo 2012, Donnie Claxton

All interior photos 2012, National Geographic Channel. Used by permission.

First Baen printing, November 2012

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Electronic Version by Baen Books

http://www.baen.com

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CHAPTER 1:

WHERE IS CAPTAIN KIRK WHEN WE NEED HIM?

When I was a kid I watched Captain Kirk every afternoon when Id get home from school. On weekends we pretended to be Captain Kirk; there was always an argument on who got to be whom. I always wanted to be Kirk or Spock but everybody else did too. Every now and then I pretended to be Mr. Scott, but James T. Kirk was the one we all truly wanted to be.

In our backyard there was this huge pine tree. That thing had to be at least a hundred and twenty feet tall and was so big that my older brother and I could not reach around and touch each others hands on the other side. We built a platform up in the top of that tree and we would climb up that thing all the time. We didnt build that platform just to make our parents nervous or just to have a treehouse way away from everybody. No, that wasnt it at all. You see we were just outside the Rocket CityHuntsville, Alabama. When we climbed up the tree we could see everything in north Alabama, including across the river where the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center was. It was right there on the Redstone Arsenal where Wernher Von Braun started the whole space thing. When they would do engine tests across the river, we could see the smoke plumes. We could hear the roaring thunderous sound of the rocket engines pouring out exhaust and thrust, and it would rattle the windows of our house.

Man I miss those days. I miss that excitement. That roar into the unknown. I miss that feeling that we were going to go out there to the unknown and get to know it, tame it, and make it ours! That is what America is missing right now.

I remember being thrilled, just absolutely thrilled, to get to watch the rocket testing. It made me really feel like Captain Kirk. At one point, when I was about ten or twelve or so, NASA flew the new Space Shuttle Enterprise test vehicle into Huntsville, Alabama. It was parked out at the Space Center and I went and took pictures of that thing.

There was no doubt in our minds that we were going to get to retire on the moon. And our kids no doubt would be able to live up there or at least vacation there. And their kids were going to get to vacation on Mars. There was always the hope that somebody in those big government research programs was going to end up with a warp drive and we would soon be exploring Rigel 7, or Tau Ceti 8, or even Vulcan.

Kids growing up today have no clue how absolutely thrilling and exciting it was to watch Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on the TV in the evenings. And to feel it and see it. See itin the form of the current space programon the news in the afternoons. And just to know, by God, that America was first in space, would always be first in space, and that one day all of us would have the opportunity to go to space. That final frontier was ripe for the picking and it was Americas choice to pick. We were all going to be Captain Kirk!

So what the crap happened!?

When I was in high school everybody wanted to be a scientist, an engineer, or a fighter pilot so they could become an astronaut. If they didnt actually fly in the things, they at least wanted to work on em. Spaceships that America was building to take us to the final frontier were going to be a reality very soon, seemed like. When I was in graduate school there were one hundred and twenty students in the physics department at our local university. There were hundreds of kids and we had all the engineering curriculums. Now twenty years later theres about eight kids in the physics department. But at least the engineering department is still alive and kicking. Mechanical and aerospace do okay because of the big need for UAVs nowadays. But there is almost zero work being done on space vehicles.

I was peripherally on a program that NASA tried to do for about two or three years called Breakthrough Propulsion Physics. One bright guy at NASA named Mark Millis hoped that he could use enthusiasts, tenured professors, and graybeards across the country to, on their own dime mostly, work on concepts like warp drives and teleporters. It didnt last long because there was no money in there. I think throughout the total length of the program there were a few million dollars to be had for government, academia, and industry. Think about that. After overhead and taxes, a single person, whether he makes $50,000 or $100,000 per year, still costs the company, government, or university about $250,000 per year. So, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program had enough money to keep about five people employed per year. Two of them were at NASA, Mark Millis and his assistant. So, that left enough money to keep about three more people thinking about how to build a warp drive. The most difficult breakthrough physics in the history of mankind is not going to be accomplished by hiring three people.

But Mark was hopeful that wed all jump in there and start to work on these problems together even if there was no money. The thought was that if enough enthusiasm picked up maybe we could lobby for more money from Congress. The reality of the situation was that the only people who ended up able to work on the effort were the tenured professors, a few enthusiasts like myself, and thats about it. With no real money to keep people interested, the program died out. There was not enough enthusiasm from the general public to bolster and shore up the next generation in our American space program.

We had had a good start. Back when I was a kid, everybody knew the names of the Mercury Seven, the New Ninewho were the Gemini teamand every Apollo astronaut. Then there was a long hiatus of almost ten years before the Space Shuttle ever launched, and once it had, some of the enthusiasm came back. Most of the kids my age knew who John Young and Robert Crippen, Jr. were. They werent quite as strong as Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, let alone Neil Armstrong, but they were the new generation of astronauts. Of course John Young was famous from the previous era and we all knew that he was perfect to be the first commander of the International Space Station. After all, he flew on the first manned Gemini mission, Gemini 3, with Gus Grissom; he was the first man to orbit the Moon alone in Apollo 10; he commanded Apollo 16, walked on the Moon, drove the lunar rover, and