I graduated in 1995 with a degree in aerospace engineering, and promptly put that degree to good use: my first job was moving mufflers from one side of a warehouse to another. After about a week there, I got a call from a former classmate who had got himself an internship at NASA-Johnson; they wanted those of us who’d worked on a student design project for a moon probe to come and give a presentation. So I told my boss “I’m taking next week off.” When I got back they promptly fired me for ditching work… I wasn’t exactly tore up about that. When you’ve just been given a tour of the innards of a NASA facility, shuffling mufflers seems *really* depressing.
So, I buckled down and put my degree to use getting another job: moving items off one truck and onto another truck at a UPS depot. I was the one non-union, non-management guy there. It was my task to see to it that high-value packages ($5K and up) got off Truck A and onto Truck B, but due to union regs I wasn’t allowed to touch it; I had to beg a union worker to actually carry the package, which of course they did in their own time. A spectacular setup. Truly a model of efficiency.
Anyway, one day (*roughly* this time of summer, so right at 20 years ago) a result of a Freedom of Information Act Request showed up in the mail from NASA: the Summary volume of the General Atomic Project Orion report for NASA. It was a revelation! I took it to work with me one day and read through it on my lunch break (it’s not like I had to waste time socializing during lunch, since nobody would socialize with the one non-management, non-union guy), and a thought occurred to me:
“You know, I aught to take that $1.00 3D CAD program I just bought on floppy disk for my DOS computer and draw up the 10-meter Orion, and write an article describing the concept. I bet people might buy something like that.”
That was the first time it had occurred to me to take a stab at writing aerospace history in that format. I’ve been poking away at writing about Orion ever since.
So the NPP book has been in development for twenty years now. So based on that… how long do you think it’ll take to finish Pax Orionis? Hmmm…