The nine-year-old tells the group that he designs and builds his own rockets at home in Texarkana. The other adults step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance. The guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender, overexcited kid who’s unleashing a torrent of PhD-level concepts in a deep-Arkansas drawl as if there weren’t enough seconds in a day for him to blurt it all out. And he wants-he needs-to tell everyone about it, about how acceleration relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the mix of kerosene and liquid oxygen that the first stage burned at six thousand pounds per second. Then Taylor raises his hand-not with a question, but an answer. Producing thirty-two million horsepower at full blast, the Saturn could accelerate a spaceship from zero to seventeen thousand miles per hour in eight minutes. Though the three-stage rocket is retired now, the guide says, it remains unmatched in its capacity to lift men and gear beyond the tug of Earth’s gravity. Churning out a million and a half pounds of thrust, it boosted America decisively past the Soviets, spiriting two dozen Apollo astronauts to the moon. The docent tells the group that the Saturn V is the most powerful rocket ever built. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s relentless appetite for knowledge. As they duck under its five exhaust nozzles, each a dozen feet across, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lift. The tour guide, a young woman, leads their group of parents and children along the 363-foot-long behemoth suspended above the floor. Late that afternoon, father and son step inside the building built to house the reclining rocket, restored to its Apollo-era readiness. But Taylor Wilson mostly wants to see the museum’s prize piece, the massive Saturn V rocket that launched mankind to the moon. Visitors can touch the scorched Apollo 16 command module, tumble-spin in a chair that mimics the frictionless vacuum of space, or command a mission in the space shuttle’s cockpit simulator. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.” Situated next to the northern Alabama complex where NASA engineers designed and built the rockets that propelled America’s space program, the center showcases the world’s most impressive collection of high-flying hardware. INTRODUCTION “PROPULSION,” THE NINE-YEAR-OLD says as he leads his dad through the gate of the U.S. I am an obsessive lover of all things nuclear and have a home amateur nuclear laboratory. Hi, my name is Taylor Wilson and I am 15 years old. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. MENCKENĪdd to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create-so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. QC774.W55C59 2015 539.7'64092-dc23 2014048519 v3.0516 Cover design by Laserghost Cover photograph © Bryce Duffy Photography Portions of this book originally appeared in slightly different form in Popular Science. pages cm “An Eamon Dolan book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. The boy who played with fusion : extreme science, extreme parenting, and how to make a star / Tom Clynes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clynes, Tom, author. The Neutron Club PART V A Field of Dreams, an Epiphany in a Box The Father of All Bombs We’re Just Breathing Your Air The Super Bowl of Science Scotch Tape Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Footnotesįirst Mariner Books edition 2016 Copyright © 2015 by Tom Clynes All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. CONTENTS Title Page Contents Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction PART I The Digger The Pre-Nuclear Family Propulsion! Space Camp The “Responsible” Radioactive Boy Scout PART II The Cookie Jar In the (Glowing) Footsteps of Giants Alpha, Beta, Gamma Trust but Verify Extreme Parenting Accelerating Toward Big Science Heavy Water Bright as the Sun PART III Bringing the Stars Down to Earth Roots of Prodigiousness The Lucky Donkey Theory Twice as Nice, Half as Good Photos Atomic Travel Champions for the Gifted PART IV A Hogwarts for Geniuses A Fourth State of Grape Heavy Metal Apron Birth of a Star
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