The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Taylor was getting impatient. One afternoon, he decided to make some rocket fuel, stove or no stove. Inside his lab, he filled a Coke can with his carefully measured ingredients. Then he put on his lab coat and his polycarbonate face shield and went outside with a propane torch and some tongs. “Part of me understood that it wasn’t the best thing to do with a torch,” he recounts. “But I’d already wrecked the stove, so I was thinking, What else can I do? At least I was outside and wearing a face shield.”

  Rocket candy is, of course, extremely flammable, and just about every guide to making it warns you not to use an open flame or any direct heat, since uneven heating can auto-ignite the volatile ingredients.

  “I was running the torch along the bottom of the can,” Taylor says, “and at the same time trying to mix it with a spatula, and—well, you know where the story is going . . .”

  When the fireball cleared, Taylor looked down and saw that the can was gone—vaporized. The explosion burned his hands slightly (he still has small scars) and took the hair off his arms.

  “But the worst thing,” he says, “was that I had spectators.”

  The “spectators” were his parents. Taylor had convinced them that what he was doing was safe, and they’d come to watch. True, he had worn his facemask and backed them away. But he obviously wasn’t doing everything he needed to protect himself. As responsible parents, Tiffany and Kenneth agreed that night, they needed to put constraints on their son’s experiments with fire and volatile chemicals.

  The next day, determined to maintain a strict and united front, they sat Taylor down. “But when we went to talk to him,” Kenneth says, “Taylor broke the whole thing down like he was on the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] analyzing some major accident.” In a point-by-point presentation, Taylor went over every aspect of his technique that had fallen short in terms of safety and then showed them the systematic plan he would implement to improve his methods and make them safer.

  “We went in dead-set on reeling him in,” Tiffany says.

  “But,” Kenneth says, “the truth is that we’ve never been able to.”

  4

  * * *

  Space Camp

  IT’S A SEVEN-HOUR DRIVE from Texarkana to Huntsville, Alabama, the birthplace of America’s space program. As Kenneth piloted the car, Taylor talked nonstop about the things they’d see and do at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, where they had signed up for a three-day program of hands-on science activities called Space Camp.

  To open up learning opportunities for Taylor beyond the immediate area, Kenneth had begun taking his son on educational road trips. They first went east to the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, in Florida, where Taylor talked with Richard Gordon Jr., who had walked in space on Gemini 11 and orbited the moon on Apollo 12. They traveled south to Houston to tour the Johnson Space Center, NASA’s center for training, research, and mission command and control. Then the entire family went to Cape Canaveral to watch a space shuttle launch. Unfortunately, the liftoff was scrubbed during the countdown’s last minute.

  Kenneth and Taylor were still several miles from Huntsville when they caught their first glimpse of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center’s imposing centerpiece, an upright, full-scale replica of a Saturn V rocket. They arrived just before noon and spent the next few hours exploring. Everywhere Taylor turned, there was something to discover. There was Wernher von Braun’s notorious V-2 rocket, the first manmade object ever to go into space, as well as his Mercury-Redstone and Jupiter-C rockets, which put the first American satellites and men into space. With his father trotting behind, Taylor darted from an Atlas rocket lying on its side as if resting up for another launch to the original Mercury and Gemini capsule trainers to a lunar rover. They peeked into rocket engines of all eras and sizes, and gazed up at the space shuttle Pathfinder, complete with its booster rockets and fuel tank. They ducked their heads inside Apollo 12’s Mobile Quarantine Facility, where returning astronauts stayed until doctors were convinced that they hadn’t come home with any moon bugs.

  Just about everyone who was cognizant on April 12, 1961, remembers the day human space flight became a reality. Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute trip around the Earth was an intensely symbolic benchmark in the space race, which had begun three and a half years earlier, in October of 1957, with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite. The American military had answered two months later with a heavily promoted live TV broadcast of the first U.S. attempt to shoot a satellite into orbit. As millions of Americans watched, the Vanguard’s booster ignited and the rocket rose a few feet off its pad, then it lost thrust, exploded, and toppled over into a fireball.

  In the heart of the duck-and-cover days of the Cold War, these events filled Americans with dread and confusion. How could the Soviet Union have come off the starting block so far ahead of them? Was it possible that the ideologically inferior Soviets were actually technologically superior? And if the Russians managed to seize control of space, what might they take control of next? Commentators speculated about the impending end of the American way of life and, perhaps, Western civilization itself.

  Catching up was a matter of both national security and national pride. The U.S. military commanded ever-increasing resources for aircraft, spacecraft, and a new class of weapons—ballistic missiles—invented by Wernher von Braun, the enigmatic German engineer who had been spirited out of his country by American intelligence operatives, who also stripped his biography of its pesky moral shortcomings. Credited as “the Father of Rocket Science,” von Braun left his Nazi past behind and eventually became technical director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, overseeing the town’s rapid transition from the watercress capital of the world to the sprawling, high-tech Rocket City.

  After the Vanguard disaster in December 1957, public hysteria and political pressure compelled the mortified military leadership to give von Braun the go-ahead to build the orbiter rocket he’d proposed years earlier. On January 31, 1958, within three months of the Sputnik launch, von Braun’s rocket blasted the Explorer 1 satellite into orbit. But the rising German American star had bigger things in mind. Shortly before the Soviets orbited a payload of 2,925 pounds in May of 1958, von Braun proposed building a superbooster, called the Saturn, which would be able to lift large loads of men and machinery into and beyond the Earth’s orbit. In 1960, the military leadership asked von Braun to take charge of NASA’s propulsion programs, and they gave his Saturn project the go-ahead.

  Things were abuzz on the ground too, as educators scrambled to bring American children’s math and science skills up to par with the presumably better-educated and better-disciplined Russian kids’. Worried teachers pushed their students to study harder, and Sputnik-inspired homework assignments began to pile up. School systems around the country introduced more challenging curricula, pumped up professional-development programs for science teachers, and poured money into upgrading long-neglected science labs.

  For the first time, nurturing the talents of the brightest students, who were suddenly seen as a strategic resource, became a nationwide priority. Educators realized that gifted children had special needs and argued that meeting those needs was America’s best long-term bet to catch up with the Soviets. In the 1960s, accelerated learning programs and whole schools for academically talented children sprang up all over the country. These programs quickly began to pay off as Sputnik-generation brainiacs rose from primary and secondary schools to college undergraduate programs and beyond. A surge of highly qualified science and engineering students filled university graduate schools, fueling an unprecedented increase in PhDs in the 1960s that wouldn’t peak until the early 1970s.

  Apart from its intensity, Taylor’s obsession with space wasn’t all that unusual. For more than forty years, American children named astronaut as one of their top-ten dream jobs, according to the Marist Poll. Space continues to beckon adventurous young minds in a way that more grounded pursuits (and they
are all, by definition, more grounded) can’t match. For boys, astronaut has been the number-one career choice for decades; for girls, it became popular after 1983, when Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space. The popularity of the profession began to fall in the U.S. only in 2011, when NASA announced that its last space shuttle launch was approaching. Paradoxically, astronaut continued to be named as a top-ten career choice among children in the United Kingdom, even though the British space program has always focused exclusively on unmanned missions.

  I wanted to be an astronaut too, of course. But when it came to bridging the gap between imagination and action, I had a radically different experience than Taylor. The idea of tossing time and effort into supporting a child’s hands-on pursuit of a highly improbable dream was something that wouldn’t have occurred to my mother or father, or to most parents in their circle. Even if my parents had had the resources, it’s hard to imagine them hauling me to Florida to meet an astronaut or to Alabama to bounce in a zero-gravity simulator. Nor would it have occurred to them to help me connect the dots between my aspirations and Newtonian physics or to locate mentors who could point out practical paths toward my goals. As for building and launching my own rockets . . . well, that would have been an amusing conversation. Real rockets, the ones that actually go up, were too expensive, too hard to build, too dangerous. Instead, my parents bought me an Apollo poster and a plastic Saturn V model, the kind you glue together and set atop a shelf. I found a scrapbook and pasted into it every space-related newspaper or magazine clipping I could find, keeping meticulous track of the race to the moon. That scrapbook was my pride and joy, but the unspoken message contained within it, and within my models and posters, was that space travel was a spectator sport—and that I was destined to be a bystander, not a participant.

  That, of course, is an entirely reasonable conclusion if the hard numbers of probability are one’s only guide. As of early 2015, only 541 people have been to space (which the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale defines as beginning one hundred kilometers—sixty-two miles—above sea level). Astronauts are a rarefied class. Even for those aspirants who get through the daunting prerequisites—engineering, physical sciences, mathematics, and (for those on the flight deck) at least a thousand hours of pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft—the odds are long. The notion that Taylor or any kid could eventually make a career out of exploring the cosmos firsthand is not very realistic. But realism isn’t what young children need. They need experiences that unfurl their dreams, especially those big, sparkling dreams that inspire them to explore and learn and discover and grow—and that often open up real-life possibilities.

  Wernher von Braun, for all the heavy ethical baggage he carried, seems to have understood this. During the final months that he was refining the Saturn V, his crowning technical achievement, the Father of Rocket Science was preparing to launch an ambitious educational project. Von Braun proposed building a museum complex that would go beyond showcasing his propulsion triumphs and preserving the hardware of space exploration. Years before the term interactive became a museum buzzword, von Braun envisioned a hands-on space camp to train children in science. As he imagined it, the camp’s active programs would encourage intellectual development in the same way that youth sports camps encouraged physical development. He reasoned that giving children an immersive introduction to the excitement of space exploration would inspire them to pursue careers in aerospace or other specialties of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects that American kids had studied with such zeal during the immediate post-Sputnik era but had since fallen behind in.

  Thus far, only two of the six hundred thousand Space Camp graduates have gone on to become actual astronauts. “But that’s not what it’s really all about,” says Space Camp’s former education-curriculum specialist Julie Hatton. “It’s about getting kids fired up about science. Children come in to be an astronaut for a day or a weekend, and they discover that they really like science. Then they go home motivated to do all sorts of things, whether it’s aerospace or engineering, or some other scientific or technical discipline.”

  The final stop on Kenneth and Taylor’s orientation tour was the massive building that houses the real, restored Saturn V, suspended horizontally above the floor. “You could actually smell it when you walked through the door,” Kenneth says, “even though they’d emptied the tanks. It smelled big and formidable, and it looked even bigger.”

  The father and son and their group of Space Campers followed their guide as she led them along the rocket, starting at what had been its top. The group peered up at the command module and the encased lunar module, then continued under the third stage and the longer second stage. They walked along the massive first stage whose tanks had held hundreds of thousands of gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen.

  When they arrived at the base of the first stage with its five F-1 engines, Taylor fell uncharacteristically silent. The guide was describing the engines’ specifications, but Taylor tuned her out, privately studying the huge exhaust nozzles. He cocked his head and peered inside, his imagination drawing him past the outer nozzle and into the turbine exhaust manifold, then deeper into the thrust chamber, where the oxygen and kerosene united and ignited, generating enough firepower to push the rocket’s fourteen hundred tons up and away from the Earth.

  It was, Taylor would say later, “the most exciting moment of my life.” In years to come, I’d hear him describe many moments of his life that way. But here, for the first time, the boy found himself in the place he’d long dreamed of: peering into the heart of propulsion incarnate. For the first waking moment since his son could talk, as far as Kenneth could remember, Taylor was speechless. He stayed that way for several minutes, studying the engines in silence. Then he turned and raised his hand.

  Minutes later, as the docent ran off to fetch her boss, one of the parents asked Taylor why the second and third stages burned liquid hydrogen rather than the kerosene that fueled the first stage. Taylor explained that kerosene was capable of more short-term thrust, so it could get the rocket quickly beyond the dense air and high-gravity zone. But hydrogen has a higher specific impulse (change in momentum per mass), so von Braun chose it to propel the spaceship through the less-resistant higher altitudes. Taylor was answering another parent’s question regarding the comparative advantages of the Russians’ ballistic missiles versus the Americans’ when the director arrived, freeing the rest of the group to move ahead with the guide.

  “The director realized Taylor knew as much about rocket history as he did about the physics,” says Kenneth, “so he started calling in other people from around the museum, history folks and experts on this and that.” Kenneth watched and listened as his son held court with the adults. For the next forty-five minutes, they all went back and forth about the payloads of various rockets, about the European space program, about the progress of the Ares rocket (then under development in Huntsville but since canceled). They also talked about the Columbia disaster, which was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

  Taylor and Kenneth would have a great time over the next two and a half days working their way through Space Camp’s ultra-immersive activities. They’d strap themselves into a device that simulated the gravitational force on the moon and make giant bunny hops across the floor. They’d launch small rockets and join in group experiments. Taylor would take on the role of mission specialist during the final exercise, an orbital mission in the space shuttle’s cockpit simulator.

  After the Sunday afternoon graduation, father and son drove back to Texarkana, where Taylor told his mother and brother and grandmother that he’d had the most exciting weekend of his life. What’s more, he’d come home with a headful of ideas—for his rockets, his laboratory, and his future.

  5

  * * *

  The “Responsible” Radioactive Boy Scout

  AS ITS NAME makes plain, Texarkana spans the Texas-Arkansas border, just a few mile
s from the northwest corner of Louisiana. Texarkana has two of just about everything: two mayors, two police and fire departments, even two slogans—“Texarkana is twice as nice” and “Where life is so large it takes two states.”

  Set at the junction of four major rail lines, Texarkana reached its apogee in the 1950s. Tiffany can point out the site of the famous Hut Club (now called the Electric Cowboy), which her father owned in the mid-1950s when a young Elvis Presley stopped in for an audition. “My dad apparently was not impressed,” Tiffany says. “After a couple of songs, he threw him out. When Mom found out Dad treated Elvis that way she scolded him something furious. I think my dad might’ve been a little jealous of Elvis.”

  Once grand but now empty hotels haunt the downtown skyline, and along mostly empty sidewalks, young men wander aimlessly past boarded-up shop fronts. There are a few enticing barbecue joints, but other intermittent signs of commercial life are more dubious: Boll Weevil Pawn Used Cars, Edge-Texas Concealed Handgun. A first-time visitor can’t escape the impression that most of this twin-town’s good days are behind it.

  As you head north, out of downtown, the abandoned buildings give way to sterile strip malls backed by cul-de-sac neighborhoods that define Southern rural suburban sprawl. The Wilsons’ house, on a double lot with seven acres of lawn and groomed forest, seems far from downtown. You can hear a nearby interstate freeway, just barely, but in the intense heat of midsummer, what you mostly hear are the hum of central air conditioners and the chatter of sprinklers cooling large lawns.

  During the summer between Taylor’s third and fourth grades, new sounds began to bounce around the neighborhood. One evening, Taylor invited Tiffany, Kenneth, and Joey out to the backyard, where he dramatically held up a pill bottle packed with a mixture of stump remover (potassium nitrate), which he’d discovered in the garage, and sugar. He set the bottle down and, with a showman’s flourish, lit the fuse. What happened next—and it happened so quickly that no one had time to think—was not the firecracker’s bang everyone expected but a thunderous blast that brought panicked neighbors running from their houses. Looking up, they watched as a small mushroom cloud rose, unsettlingly, over the Wilsons’ yard.