“What the hell happened?” I asked at last.
“You tell me,” Jake replied. “What’s the computer say?”
“The computer says all channels open-circuited about seven hundred microseconds after the main propellant valves opened.” I rewound the normal video and stepped through the ignition sequence frame by frame. In one frame the engine was there, in the next it wasn’t, just a handful of cables and thermocouple wire exiting stage left, and a few pieces of angle-iron support structure vibrating at odd angles.
Patti opened a locker and extracted four disposable hazmat suits plus four pairs of heavy rubber galoshes and gloves. David opened a couple of packages of chemical detector strips, and clothespinned them on the end of a long bamboo pole. Jake reached into the back of the locker and pulled out a three-lobed plastic boomerang.
David frowned. “You’re not actually going to try that cockeyed idea, are you?”
Jake grinned. “Hell, everybody knows I’m a crazy rocket scientist. I’ll try anything. Where’s the tape?” He proceeded to tape a couple of detector strips to the boomerang, then opened the bunker door.
David led the way as we headed outside. We cautiously rounded the earthworks, waving the pole ahead of us and checking the indications of the test strips frequently. As soon as he had a clear shot at the test stand, Jake hauled his arm back and let loose with the boomerang, which sailed over the stand, arched up, and returned neady a few yards away.
“There, see,” Jake inspected the strips and showed them to each of us, “not a trace. It works.”
David shook his head. “If I ever see a positive indication from that silly thing, I’ll believe it. I still don’t think it stays in the area long enough.” He resumed his slow advance with the pole.
Jake winked at me. “He ain’t never got a positive indication from the pole, neither,” he whispered.
The front half of the rocket motor had evidently torn loose from the mounts, propelling itself, the valves, the control system, the small propellant tanks, and my load cell into a strategically located arrangement of sand and plastic trash cans filled with water. The fuel left in the tanks was consumed when they burst on impact. The crater was impressive.
“Well,” Jake said as he fished the remains of the motor from the far end of the wreckage with a loop of cord he had rigged on the end of the bamboo pole, “rocket fuel is kinda like a chain saw. If it warn’t dangerous, it wouldn’t be very useful.”
Patti and I picked up a few shards of nozzle, which were all we could find of the rest of the motor. We secured the site, tossed the components into buckets of water to remove any traces of propellant, and drove in silence back to the barn.
Gathered around a battered but solid old oak table, I pointed to the wire imbedded in the nozzle fragments. “MHD, you kept saying—magnetohy-drodynamics, I kept thinking. You’re using the rocket thrust to develop considerable amounts of electrical power, if I am not mistaken.”
Jake nodded sullenly. “Something like that.”
“Electric power for what?” I demanded. “Thermal Emissivity, whatever that means?” I eyed the rest of the motor fragments, from which dangled a profusion of wire and electrical gizmos.
“Electric fields,” Jake said cryptically. “Just leave it at that. I don’t want to give any more away.”
I considered the evidence for a moment, and things began to connect. I nodded. The tiling was like some designs I had seen for thermonuclear propulsion systems that had yet to be built, yet it was clearly fueled by conventional chemistry. Or was it? Whatever his secret, clearly this engine was decades ahead of the engines being used to put anything else into space. The Shuttle main engines had some interesting turbo pumps and cooling systems, but were otherwise little different from those of the V2. Most other launch systems were merely refinements of engines developed in the ’50s or ’60s. Pegasus used solid rockets, the DC-X and Black Horse used Pratt and Whitney RL-10 engines from the Centaur, the X-34 would probably use Rocketdyne MA-5 engines from the Atlas, last I heard Conestoga was also using old engines, and the Air Force was launching most of its stuff on old Titans.
“Sorry about your equipment,” Jake said mournfully, indicating the load cell, about five centimeters shorter now than when I had installed it.
I shrugged. “Two hundred bucks on the surplus market. It wasn’t one of my good ones. It’s a tax write-off, like renting the plane. Make it up to me by getting to orbit, so I can brag I helped. However, if you don’t mind, I’ll just give you the address of the surplus outfit, and you buy and keep the replacement.”
“Fair enough,” Jake agreed. “How about the radiometer?”
“Looks like it survived untouched, although the cable was severed in three places. I’ll need to replace the cover window, but it’s cheap. The thermocouples are expendable anyway, of course.”
Jake shook his head as he looked at the shattered motor. “Who the hell do I think I’m kidding, tackling something like this, anyway?”
“The actual engine will have a forty to fifty centimeter nozzle, I think you said,” I pointed out. “This was your ten-centimeter prototype, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you read the piece by G. Harry Stine where he said something to the effect of you have to blow up the prototype, or you don’t learn anything?”
His face brightened for the first time in an hour. “Yeah.” Then he scowled again. “What exactly did I learn?”
I shrugged. “To take it easy the next time you try Pan Galactic Gargle-blaster.”
“Right,” he nodded. “Any chance you’ll be out this way again?”
“My customer in Seattle asked me to perform the same test for them in about a month. You take a crack at figuring out what went wrong, and let me know if you need any additional data taken, and we’ll try this again.”
We shook on it. By the time I took off for Seattle the following morning, the swelling in my hand was almost gone.
One of my customers back home in Virginia builds small satellites. My usual work for them is far more mundane than what I was doing for Jake, just proof-loading satellite handling fixtures, but it was enough to let me know the size and shape of their machines. They were well within the expected launch capacity of Jake’s proposed second-generation workhorse design. They had been paying something like $15,000 per kilogram to get the things launched, compared to the $600 or less per kilogram Jake expected to charge, so I agreed to approach them to see if they were interested in backing the project.
I showed their project director photocopies of some of the sketches and data Jake had sent me over the years, with projected costs and performance. Perhaps that was a mistake. In the space business, a lot of people don’t take you seriously if you don’t have money for slick four-color brochures.
“Just sketches? Not very far along, is he?” the project director said with a disdainful sniff.
“He’s nearing completion on his prototype aeroshell,” I pointed out, “and is running engine test burns. Compare that to those guys up in Vancouver who just offered a prospectus for a new launch service based on preliminary drawings alone, but who have yet to even decide on an engine design or a fuel system. Or the folks down the road who just announced their new rocket. Lots of slick brochures and art, but they don’t yet know if the engine will be parts from the Atlas or Russian Truds.”
“Looks like a rank amateur to me.”
“I watched that ‘rank amateur’ get 580 seconds of specific impulse on a test burn last week,” I replied.