Through the Eyes of Dreamers

David Griffith was born in the age of space and remembers the night he searched a starry sky for a moving dot of light that was the Soviet satellite Sputnik. It was 1957. He was 2.

At age 7 he stood with his father in the yard of their home and once more searched the skies, this time for American astronaut John Glenn in the space capsule Friendship 7.

He remembers his father saying with breathless wonder, “There’s a man up there, son, flying around the planet. . . .”

The wonder wasn’t lost on the boy. He was, after all, a child of the Space Age, growing up as humanity pressed against the invisible barriers that held it to this shiny blue planet.

He watched Saturday morning space cartoons as a little boy, and as he grew he found himself locked into the news that chronicled our reach for the stars, a reality far more intriguing than the whimsical fiction of any cartoon. At age 13, the year before Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon, Griffith launched his first rocket.

“It was an Estes Model Rocket,” he says, seated in the back room of his Monterey Machine Products shop on a side street in West Covina. “It didn’t go very high, maybe 2,000 feet, but it was the beginning. . . .”

What it did was lock the boy and later the man into an interest that remains all-consuming and that may yet take a part of him up there, as a poet once said, where dreams live.

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Griffith, 43, is co-owner of the machine shop that subcontracts small fasteners for manned space flight vehicles. But that’s only part of his life. What matters to him most is that he also builds, sells and launches rockets on missions that reach ever-higher toward his dreams.

They range in size from 5 to 12 feet. The highest that one has traveled so far is 17,000 feet. The next one, he hopes, will reach 40,000.

Griffith isn’t alone in his quest to breach Earth’s boundaries. Amateur rocketeers around the world are involved in the same futuristic effort, spurred in part by a $250,000 prize awaiting the first of them to build a rocket capable of carrying a 4.4-pound payload 120 miles to the edge of space--633,000 feet--by the year 2000.

It’s a contest sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation, a group created to encourage nongovernmental, civilian participation in space exploration. Its goal: cheap access to the cosmos.

A self-taught rocketeer, Griffith figures he’s built more than 1,000 rockets over the years. The first, at age 18, was constructed from plans printed in a magazine. The others have come from acquired knowledge.

He shows them in mock-ups on the wall of his plant and in photographs that capture them blasting off into a desert sky, sleek, bullet-nosed missiles trailing up toward the clouds.

Griffith figures it would take 2,000 pounds of thrust to power a rocket 120 miles. So far, his engines have only managed 500 pounds of thrust. He laughs at the comparison. “I’m still crawling,” he says.

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Rocketry is not something he takes lightly. At Walnut’s Mt. San Antonio College he studied electronics and was offered a job by General Dynamics as a microwave technician.

But his interest was in rockets, not microwaves, and he refused instant security for a larger goal: a way to make money and at the same time continue building the vehicles that would rise ever closer to the stratosphere. Running a machine shop, with its sophisticated computerized equipment, offers that opportunity.

One would imagine that dreams of space would involve an ambition to be among those who will journey to Mars and beyond, but Griffith has no desire to do so. He’s content to build the machines that contribute to the effort and is only half-kidding when he says, “It’s dangerous out there.”

There is, however, a genetic quality to dreams, a linkage that connects the generations of humanity one to the other and carries the voices of poets and the visions of builders into new centuries.

Griffith’s daughter Sydney, at age 6, already talks of going into space someday and is filling her young life with books that augment imagination and fuel the desire to reach higher.

Her father doubts that he will be able to build the rocket that will win the $250,000 civilian space prize, but prizes aren’t what the dream is all about. “It’s just that we have to keep exploring,” he says. “It’s in the genes. We’ve got to see what’s behind that other hill.”

Or in this case, beyond the stars.

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Al Martinez’s column runs on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com