Engineer Gets a Blast Out of Backyard Rocket
SARATOGA, Calif.--The good thing about having your husband build a rocket in the backyard is that you know where to find him if there’s a 50-pound sack of dog food to carry in from the car. The bad thing is that would-be astronauts and others who are helping with the project get the idea that they can flop down in front of the TV set anytime they feel like it.
“Sally doesn’t mind the rocket hardware (which litters the yard and garage of their suburban home) too much,” retired Navy rocket engineer Bob Truax said. “But when they (his helpers) start bringing their old cars around to work on them and don’t clean up the shop. . . .”
This is no mere vacation project that must be endured by long-suffering Sally Truax. Bob Truax’s bid to show that private space flight can be commercially viable has been under way for seven years now.
There are other groups that have worked on similar projects. (Two are Starstruck Inc. of Redwood City and a Houston firm called Space Services Inc., which managed to launch a 10-minute suborbital flight in 1982.) But Truax--because he works alone and at home--best represents the valiant struggle of the common man who is trying to show that space flight is not the exclusive domain of government agencies.
A Manned Rocket
Truax hopes to launch a human volunteer stuffed inside a space capsule no larger than a typical gym locker. The astronaut will sit atop a 25-foot rocket. The initial flights (starting with a launch near Oxnard that would go 65 miles up and 10 miles downrange to an ocean splashdown) are intended to prove that Truax’s rocket is reusable and economical. Then he wants to press on, building an enormous workhorse capable of carrying 1,000 tons of payload into the heavens.
When that day comes--NASA, look out.
The agency’s monopoly on the heavens will be broken, and Truax predicts hundreds of individuals and small businesses will scramble to build their own backyard rockets, hoping to cash in on the billions to be made from providing launch services cheaper than NASA can offer.
Truax is 68 years old. One potential investor has voiced the concern that the engineer may not live to fulfill his dream. But five years is all he needs, Truax said, for his scheme to fly on its own. “I should live that long. My mother, who lives in the back house, is 92,” he said with a smile that’s warm, and just slightly off kilter. It’s the smile of a man who’s persevered with a grand idea for a long time, despite ridicule and doubt.
Truax runs his personal space race, which
he calls Project Private Enterprise, in a low-tech domestic setting. On a recent morning, his wife’s keeshond dogs yapped in the side yard. His 18-year-old, Scott, mixed paint for the rocket’s fuel tank in the driveway. There was a basketball abandoned in the bushes; vines with bright red flowers climbed the house beside the front door.
Truax was in his office off the garage. He has pure gray hair that stands straight up on his head, and he was dressed as if he were going out to chop wood, in a soft flannel shirt and khaki trousers. He settled in behind his desk and began to tell a tale he’s told many times before.
In the mid-’50s, Truax was on loan from the Navy to the Air Force where he was busy running the Thor Missile Program. He went on to head various satellite reconnaissance projects. He also developed the submarine-launched Polaris missile.
Truax said he had been something of a “space cadet” ever since he was a boy and constructed tiny rockets from tooth powder cans. As an adult, however, the idea that took hold of him was not the usual dream of being a spaceman.
During the excitement of the early space launches, hardly anyone was worried about expense, but Truax wanted to know why going into orbit cost so much money. “I wanted to see space develop. I wanted to see colonies in space, and the thing that limited it was the cost,” he said.
Truax plunged into his own cost analysis of space flight. He originally guessed that the difference between the cost of space travel and city buses or other kinds of transportation must be the price of the fuel needed to provide thrust for the craft to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.
Cost Factors
However, he said, the cost of propellent to put a pound of payload into orbit is only about $6, while the price per pound for a shuttle ride is $4,000. There had to be other factors keeping the cost up. Truax eventually came to believe it was the very nature of the government agencies regulating the space effort.
NASA and Politics
“NASA has my sympathies,” he said. “They’ve got politics and personal inclinations to deal with. They’ve got people pulling and hauling at them--senators who want parts built in their state. Administrators who want to keep their jobs no matter what it cost. Divisions who want to hire more employees so they can go up a pay grade.”
He said reactions to his project from within NASA have varied: “Some of the higher echelon people say it’s a lot of rot--nobody can do something like that without millions of dollars. Some of the lower echelon people think I have the right approach.”
Truax retired from the Navy in 1959 and accepted a position at Aerojet General Corp. in Sacramento on the condition that he be given $1 million a year in addition to his salary to spend however he saw fit. He channeled the funds into research on the question: “How can we build a low-cost launch vehicle?”
Truax came up with a set of conditions for such a vehicle. It had to be big, simple and reusable--three words that have since become his mantra.
Since half the total cost of a launch is in preparation, he reasoned, a large craft that carries much cargo would be cheaper than a small craft that would require repeated launch preparation to transport the same amount of payload.
Keeping It Simple
The second principle is “they (space craft) ought to be as simple as you can make them.” For instance, Truax said, don’t put wings on a vehicle if it can be brought down more simply another way.
This last decree contradicted the wishes of the influential astronauts, who objected during early space flights to the “Spam-in-a-can” approach in which the human rider would be nothing more than a hunk of cargo with no control over the vehicle. Even though he’s a pilot himself and can sympathize with the astronauts’ desire to have a hand on the controls, Truax maintains the passive astronaut approach “is the best approach by far.”
Going even further, Truax suggested eliminating the astronaut altogether. Manned flights demand a high degree of reliability, necessitating three and four backups for each system that might go wrong. An unmanned flight would be truer to the keep-it-simple rule.
Finally, Truax said, the launch vehicle should be scooped up from the sea, hosed off and recycled. You wouldn’t use an expensive automobile just once, so why a build a disposable space vehicle?
Applying these guidelines, Truax designed a spaceship called the Sea Dragon. It was bigger than the Saturn 5 moon-launch rocket. It was taller than the Washington Monument and about as big around. If built, it would be by far the largest rocket anyone had ever seen.
Stripped as it was of expensive experimental gewgaws, the Sea Dragon wasn’t going to advance the art of rocket building, but it was, if Truax calculated correctly, going to be able to haul loads into space at an incredible $6 a pound at a time when NASA’s going rate was about $1,000.
Selling a Design
But selling rocket designs is a lot like hawking screenplay ideas in Hollywood. A plan that takes years to develop may never take shape in reality. When no one wanted to build the Sea Dragon (they said it was too big and “technically uninteresting”), Truax made like a good screenwriter. He collected his blueprints and calmly proceeded with his dream on his own.
In the mid-’70s, daredevil Evel Knievel tracked down Truax and asked him to fashion a rocket-powered motorcycle. The machine would have carried Knievel across the Snake River gorge for his most famous stunt, if the parachute hadn’t opened at the wrong moment, plunging Knievel into the canyon. The foul-up in the parachute was not the rocket builder’s fault.
What Truax said he learned from the experience was that “the media will pay through the nose for exclusive rights to some fancy stunt.” He decided that if he was ever going to get private funds to build the Sea Dragon--still his ultimate spaceship--he was going to have to drum up interest in the scheme by putting a person into space. The networks would battle mightily, he figured, to be the ones to film the heroic flight of the first private astronaut.
Knievel was to be the man to ride the rocket, until personal legal difficulties caused him to drop out of the project. Then Truax put out the word that he was going to make some volunteer a member of the astronaut elite. Every space bug and inflated ego in the country responded, it seemed. He received 4,000 applications for the position of astronaut, including one from a record-holding roller coaster rider and another from a dog-sled racer.
Funding the Project
He told the hopefuls: “The first one to come up with $100,000 goes to the head of the line.” A Bay Area-based artist, Fell Peters, came up $60,000 short. Truax took his $40,000 anyway since his was the highest bid, and Peters, 26, is currently slated to be the Project Private Enterprise astronaut.
Money is the only thing that still stands between Peters and his astronaut stripes, according to Truax. The rocket builder has resorted in the past to money-making schemes such as gluing the stickers of local businesses to the side of the ship for a fee, “just like they do with racing cars in Indianapolis.”
Help From Investors
More recently, he’s depended on investors. A real estate man who believed in Truax put up $250,000. “A young man in a wheelchair who made some money in the stock market invested $50,000. That kept us going for the last year,” Truax said. The rocket builder himself has sunk $250,000 into the project. He said he’d mortgage his house to buy some more time, if his wife would stand for it.
Another $1 million would allow him to make the first test launch, he said. Another $2 million, and Truax is convinced they’ll have Fell Peters in space. After that, he said, there will be no end to the investors begging to get in on the project.
In the meantime, the prototype rocket sits partially under wraps in the yard where a big oak tree now and then drops a few dry leaves onto it. The rocket doesn’t cause much trouble. Many of Truax’s neighbors work in technological fields, so they’re sympathetic to what’s going on in the yard at the end of the cul-de-sac. Only a couple of times when he’s been riveting on the spaceship after midnight has anyone complained, he said.
His two sons who live at home pitch in occasionally if their father needs help, but none of his six children have gone into the rocket business. There’s no mistaking that this disappoints Truax. “Most of them (the children) turned out to be psychologists,” he said.
“People who design rockets (for NASA) have no idea how much a particular design feature will cost,” said Truax, getting back to his favorite subject. “So we go on and on just getting a bigger bang and never worrying about the buck.
“But now they’re beginning to worry more about the cost. They may listen to me yet. . . .”
