They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Dreamer Builds the First Civilian Spaceship

Chapter 1 Eleven years later, in the fall of 1997, when Gary told me he'd never been interested in the past or even in the present, that he'd only been interested in the future, I should have been scared but I wasn't, and I should have asked questions but I didn't. I'd just met the chronic and entirely self-taught spacecraft builder for the first time, and I took his statement as a declaration of taste, as if he'd never been interested in money or music, only hot rod cars. Most of what I knew about Gary I'd read in Halfway to Anywhere, G. Harry Stine's relentlessly hagiographic 1996 account of the alternative space movement, and I liked to imagine Gary drinking bright volumes of Gatorade at his rocket-building facility in the high California desert, the present filled only with Joshua trees and snakes, the future glaring like the white-hot sun. I imagined myself there, too, swimming in bean-shaped motel pools, living out of my car. Only later, after I'd moved to California and spent three years in Gary's vortex, did I realize what an odd, amnesic place the future is, and that by unmooring himself from past and present, he'd moored himself to nothing at all. In hindsight, of course, I missed many signals: Gary's near-constant references to Star Trek episodes, the near-total lack of successful aerospace experience on the resumes of his employees. But I was more porous than I knew, and that first trip to meet Gary got off to an auspicious start. I flew into San Francisco and drove south, as directed, on Highway 101, reaching a few miles later the junction of 92, a triumph of light, spirit, and engineering, a place where the ramps angled and arched in such a way that one could imagine driving from the freeway into the sky. Their geometry hinted at weightlessness. Their curves engendered hope. Instantly the ramps convinced me that Gary must pass this interchange every day on his way to work, and that he must more than occasionally wonder if that day, for once, the laws of physics might contain certain loopholes, if Earth might let him go. At least once, I felt sure, Gary must have indulged his curiosity, gunned his roadster up the ramp just to make sure the pavement generated nothing more than some trippy spiritual lift. Of course, he would have found himself not in orbit but on the San Mateo Bridge, on which he would have had to pull a tight U-turn and rejoin 101. From there the directions to his Redwood Shores office would remain the same: exit Ralston Boulevard, right on Twin Dolphin Drive, park in front of Suite 230C, and press through the tinted glass. I had come to visit because, for a complicated pastiche of political and economic reasons, a small window had finally cracked open on the possibility of civilian space travel, and, from what I'd read, Gary believed unwaveringly, perhaps even unprecedentedly, in the fulfillment such travel provided. He felt the American government had defaulted on the promise of cheap, regular access to space. He was seven when Sputnik flew. Nineteen when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. Twenty-two when Eugene Cernan left the last moon-dusted boot mark. And he still seemed not to have fully recovered from the magic of those memories, from the implicit, naive prospect that someday soon we would all be living in the ether, shouldering power-packs and wearing jumpsuits, in a better, higher, lighter world. Gary's peers included men with Ph.D.s from M.I.T. who had a hard time holding down jobs. One in particular, a man obsessed with the Star Trek spin-off Babylon 5, remained haunted by a grandmother who shushed him to sleep early on the night of Apollo 17, claiming you have school tomorrow, you need to be sharp, we'll be landing on the moon every day when you grow up. (Especially traumatic given that NASA canceled the final three Apollo missions, 18, 19, and 20, the moon shots deemed too expensive, the space race won.) Others gathered annually on July 20, tElizabeth Weil is the author of 'They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Dreamer Builds the First Civilian Spaceship', published 2002 under ISBN 9780553108866 and ISBN 0553108867.