One Small Leap...The Mike Mason Story

By Craig Stevens

The son of an astronaut from the 1960s has a dream...a dream to fly in space. But what's a guy to do when a minor heart condition keeps him from ever realizing his most fervent desire to be a member of the NASA astronaut corps? The solution? Build his own spaceship of course. Here is the "true" account of the adventures of Mike Mason, the son of American hero Major Matt Mason. The story is presented as a first person narrative and describes the ship's inception and construction, and Mason's escapades and dealings with nefarious forces who would take his creation from him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Craig Stevens
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781386037934

Craig Stevens

Craig Stevens is the pseudonym for debut novelist Craig Simms. A computer systems engineer by day for a large software services firm and writer by night, Craig has enjoyed the science fiction and fantasy genres since he was a child. His favorite novelists include J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, H.G. Wells, Stephen R. Donaldson, Ian Douglas and Andy Weir. Craig holds a master of science degree in geology from East Carolina University. He and his wife enjoy calling the North Carolina coast their home.

Book preview

One Small Leap…

The Mike Mason Story

As told to Craig Stevens

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

One Small Leap…The Mike Mason Story

Third Edition. November, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 Craig Stevens

Written by Craig Stevens

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 | How it All Began

Chapter 2 | Build, Build…a Barn?

Chapter 3 | More Theories

Chapter 4 | Test, Test, Test

Chapter 5 | How Not to Build a Spaceship

Chapter 6 | Space…Really?!

Chapter 7 | That’s One Small Leap…

Chapter 8 | Space Truckin’

Chapter 9 | Red Sky in Morn’

Chapter 10 | Nosy People

Chapter 11 | Rocks in Space

Chapter 12 | Nosier People

Chapter 13 | Next Stop – Saturn

Chapter 14 | Bad Guys Suck

Chapter 15 | Wheelin’ and Dealin’

Chapter 16 | Jail Break!

Chapter 17 | Recovery

Chapter 18 | Go Here, Go There

Chapter 19 | Time is…Relative?

Chapter 20 | All Good Things…

Epilogue

Author Profile

For Cheryl – Always and Forever

Acknowledgements

Cover photograph of Proxima Centauri taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is courtesy of NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute.  Author’s note:  Proxima Centauri is the closest known star to our own - 4.2 light years away.

Introduction

Hello, in the summer of 2016 I was in North Carolina writing a novel that still hasn’t been completed when a longtime friend of mine by the name of Mike Mason made an unexpected visit.  He told me that he had a story to tell, all of which he claimed to be the absolute truth.  I knew Mike to be an honest man, so I agreed to hear him out.  Over the course of the next six days he described to me a most amazing story.  What follows is that story as told by him, with only minimal editing by me.

Chapter 1

How It All Began

Hey folks, I know you're probably going to think this is crazy but everything you read here is real, it all happened, really.

Now that I have that out of the way, let me tell you what happened, how it happened, when it happened and where it happened.

My name is Mike Mason; you might recognize me from my much more famous father, Major Matt Mason, the well-known 60s era astronaut who flew on Gemini missions 2, 9B and Apollo 3.  As a child, because my father was an astronaut, I had access to the other astronauts that most people could only dream about.  I remember visiting many of the Gemini and Apollo astronauts with my family during cookouts and other events.  It was great fun for me to listen in on the conversations about past and future missions.  From all this exposure I developed my own love of space and a desire to travel beyond our earthly bounds.  This desire eventually became my driving obsession and more than anything I wanted to become an astronaut like my dad.  You can imagine my disappointment when I learned I had a very, very minor heart condition that would keep me firmly on the ground.

Even though my dream of being an astronaut was dashed I still had a keen interest in everything space related, especially concerning propulsion systems - the things that make spacecraft go.  In high school and then in college at Kenosha State College I dedicated myself to learning all I could about rocket engines and alternatives to the solid and liquid rockets used even now.

I did my postgraduate PhD studies at Evanston Technical University, not to be confused with Northwestern University; I could never get in that place.  I wasn't at the top of my class and I certainly wasn't the best doctoral candidate in the physics department, but I did graduate with my doctorate with an emphasis in astrophysical engineering.  One thing I was really good at was the mathematics and there's a lot of it in physics.  If any of you young people out there reading this want to be physicists you better make math a priority because that's what it's all about.  Oh, you need a good imagination too.  Can you imagine someone with no imagination coming up with something like String Theory?

While at Evanston I began to realize that conventional propulsion systems were fine for localized space travel near the earth and moon but beyond that something new would be needed.  Space is big and the distances are absolutely immense. To get to any celestial body beyond Mars really will require a radically new way of getting there.  While I worked on my doctorate I began developing equations for different methods of moving a spaceship.  I did a lot of brainstorming and wasted a lot of time on some kooky ideas.  All of my earlier ideas were based on the precept of making a faster engine to get from point A to point B; none of these ideas panned out so I shifted gears and started looking at unconventional methods.  I kept all of this to myself while at the university; the last thing I wanted was to be labeled a kook by the people who would be deciding whether I received my PhD.

When this all started, I was an assistant professor of physics at South Central Michigan Technical College.  The name is much more prestigious than it really is.  It's really just a community college with technical programs in small engine repair, auto mechanics, and home appliance repair, but they do have introductory classes in the physical sciences including physics and when you need a job like I did 20 years ago then you take what you can get.

The college is located about 25 miles south of Coldwater, next to a lake in the middle of nowhere.  It's a really pleasant location, the lake is beautiful in the summer and the colors in autumn are magnificent, a perfect setting for a college.  The area also had available an abandoned 200 acre farm with a barn, just what I wanted.  Hey, I'm a physicist and I like to tinker with things.

So a year after I received my PhD I got the job at South Central and that's when I started working on my space-time ideas in earnest.  Just like at Evanston, I kept them to myself because even physicists can be kicked out of colleges for having ideas that are just too whacky for the establishment to handle.

The teaching job gave me plenty of time to work on the mathematics of my ideas.  I started with Einstein's general relativity equations (can't go faster than the speed of light, remember?), integrated Maxwell's curved space concepts, considered the Lagrangian, came up with some new equations of my own based on chaos and string theory and after 10 dedicated years of work I came up with what I considered a workable and practical theory.  Practical theory for what you ask? Why, just instantaneous travel over vast distances of space of course.

I don't want to go into the particulars of the theory because it would bore you to tears and you'd stop reading - something I obviously don't want you to do.  Just know that once I got the mathematics right, I was as high as a kite for about a week.  My students at college thought I had been smoking the whacky weed I was so happy.  The head of the department even called me into his office to ask what was up.  I of course couldn't tell him the truth, so I gave him some crazy mumbo jumbo about figuring out a new way to extract helium from moon rocks.  Yeah, like I had any interest in that.

Funny thing about the department head, he's related, albeit distantly to Albert Einstein.  You'd think if you were related to Einstein, you'd have some really German sounding last name but nope, his was Williams.  Go figure.

Chapter 2

Build, Build...A Barn?

Once I had finalized the equations it was time to start turning theory into reality.  I had the barn on the property but knew it wasn't in any shape to use as it was mostly falling apart.  So, I hired some guys to knock it down and haul it all away.  They thought I was nuts paying them to remove it because they said the barn wood was worth money, but I didn't care about that, I just wanted it gone.

After the barn was gone, I hired an architect to design and build a barn-like building; I didn't want to draw unnecessary attention to the building, so I wanted it to look like it belonged there.  I even had it painted barn red and bought a farm tractor to complete the effect. During the construction none of the workers asked any questions about the building, it all made perfect sense to them to replace the old barn with a new one.

I actually did do some farming on the land to further disguise the intent of what I was doing.  I plowed and planted corn on the acreage near the road so if you were driving by you'd just see a cornfield.  For all intents and purposes, I was Farmer Mike!

With the visual deception out of the way it was time to get down to business inside the barn.  The first thing I needed was a laboratory to test the concepts I had formulated so I built out a clean room for experiments as well as a machine shop to create the hardware that would be necessary.  This part of the project was really fun because it allowed me to get my hands dirty with lots of manual labor, something we physicists don't get much of in our primary line of work.  I spent a good deal of time and money at the local home improvement store gathering the building materials and tools for the lab and shop.  By the time I was done with construction the folks at the store and I were on a first name basis.

I built the interior walls of the barn such that they could be rearranged easily.  To do this I built six-foot sections that could interconnect with one another using end connectors that could attach at 90-degree angles.  This way, I could adjust the rooms of the barn for whatever purpose I needed.  It also allowed me to utilize one building and not several.  This saved me a good deal of money in construction costs.  I wasn't penny pinching by any means; I just didn't want to sink a pile of money into the barn.  After all, the goal was to build a spaceship, not a fancy barn.

When I set up the clean room, I covered the ceiling with thick plastic sheeting since the ceiling would otherwise have been open to the barn roof.  The sheeting was an inexpensive solution to the need for a ceiling, especially when I wouldn't need one in the other rooms I would be utilizing, such as the machine shop and fabrication room.

I would be using a great deal of electricity during the testing and construction of the ship and rather than build outlets into each wall section I just wired the barn with four main junction boxes.  From each junction I could run any necessary power cables, most of which were 220 volts.  I cut holes in each wall section to allow the power cables to pass through.

By the time the clean room and machine shop were ready for use the barn looked like a mad scientist's dream come true with power cables running every which way.  I had to be careful with every step I took so as not to trip on a cable.  But the flexible building concept seemed to work and I was now ready to start on the testing phase of all those theories I had developed.  The moment of truth was coming closer when I would know whether I was completely whacko or indeed a man of great genius.  I already knew of course that I was a genius; this would just validate that.  Okay, so I'm an egomaniac, is that a problem?

Chapter 3

More Theories

After the construction of the barn was done I sat down and began to think more about the whole system design and came to a quick conclusion that I would need lots and lots of energy to make this thing happen, like gigawatts worth.  Crap, where was I going to get that kind of juice?  It seemed like the only way I was going to generate that sort of power would be by using nuclear fusion.  Yeah, I know what you're thinking, ‘sure Mike, now you're living on Fantasy Island because that isn’t going to happen'.

Oh ye of little faith, you must know, where there's a will there's a way.  And I certainly had the will.  So I did some brainstorming and then some research and came up with a possible way to make it all happen - a compact linear fusion reactor.  It really wasn't my idea as such, I took the concept from what a U.S. aerospace company announced a few years ago but I tweaked the concept to really generate some worthwhile power.  How did I do that you ask using that really skeptical tone?  It wasn't a simple thing but I came up with an idea to get the chain reaction really humming by blasting the plasma with a high energy directed photonic beam, you know, a laser, a really powerful one too.

This project just seemed to keep getting bigger and bigger, it wasn't as simple as just slapping some spare parts together and voila, super amazing spaceship is done.  There was a lot of really tough thinking and doing involved to get this thing working.

So now I had to build a laser igniter, oh great.  After another round of research I decided on a gamma ray laser as they're really high power.  Gamma ray lasers are very, very rare, as in, they were only theoretical at this point, so I decided to build my own.  It was a good thing I'm a physicist as I probably wouldn't have been able to acquire all the parts needed if I was just some Joe Schmo.  I had a good contact at an equipment supply house through my position at the college who I knew would be able to get me what I needed without lots of questions.  Hey, I'm a scientist man; I do stuff with this sort of equipment.

To go along with the laser I would need a power source just to get it running.  I decided to use a shielded thorium ball; this would provide me with the electrical power via the radioactive decay process.  The great thing about using thorium is that it's actually pretty common (you accumulate it in your body and don't even know it) and we use it a great deal in scientific labs, so it would be easy to obtain from the supply house.  I would also be able to use the thorium ball as a power source for the other electrical components on board the ship.  It was a real win-win!

There was one other matter I needed to get figured out too and that was propulsion for the ship when it wasn't doing its instantaneous travel thing.  I couldn't rely on standard propulsion used in rockets; I wasn't building a rocket.  Instead, I had to come up with something else.  This took a whole bunch more time with the thinking cap on to come up with some new theoretical ideas.

In the end I came up with a new way to look at gravity.  I started by using Einstein's gravity work and sort of turned it upside down if that makes any sense.  The idea was to develop a concept that would act sort of like magnets with the same polarity, opposite poles attract and like poles repel, but using gravity.  The idea was to create a field around the ship that would create negative gravity, pretty cool, huh?

I was able to come up with a theory that looked like it would work.  I'd have to test it of course but I was pretty confident I was on to something.  Okay, I wanted to think I was on to something.  One thing that it would require was a lot of power, no surprise there; everything always seemed to need lots of that stuff.  My solution would be to use the fusion reactor; that would definitely give me the juice I'd need. One nice thing about the negative gravity drive or NGD as I began calling it, was that I would be able to control the re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere and not go plunging into it and burn up.  Re-entry is all about friction, which develops as a result of the unbelievably fast speeds at which spacecraft have always re-entered the atmosphere.  If you can slow that speed way down you don't have the friction so you don't burn up. The one other piece to this scheme was the generator that would create the field to modify space as you will, to allow the ship to move from one point in space to another.  This is the gizmo that would need all the juice from the reactor and it's also the piece I spent years theorizing about.  In a nutshell, the generator would create a quantum space/time field around an object (the spaceship), project the field using photonic variance induction and propel the ship along the field to the point at the far end of the field.  I called the generator the quantum field generator or QFG for short.  One thing I should mention regarding the quantum field, if it worked correctly it would pull the entry and exit points in space together, making the distance the ship would travel virtually nothing.

Chapter 4

Test, Test, Test

Now that I had a bunch of theories that I was pretty confident about, it was time to test them all out.  First, I would test the negative gravity drive, without that I wasn't going anywhere, not even out the barn door.  The test would be very small scale so I wouldn't need a lot of juice, I could use the 220-volt feed I had wired in the barn.  The first test was pretty simple too, all I wanted to do was create a negative gravity field around a small object (a small hunk of steel) and see if I could make it float in the air.  Pretty simple is usually another way of saying difficult beyond words and that’s about what this was.  I constructed a small negative gravity field generator and thought I could project the field around the hunk of steel but no way, just wouldn't happen.  What I did find out through a lot of trial and tribulation was that the negative field stayed local to the generator and wasn't projectable at all.  The field strength did vary with the amount of energy I put into it though so that was a good thing.  It seemed as though I was on the right track.

The negative gravity drive itself was not really small either; it was a cylinder about three feet long and 2 feet in diameter.  It had to be cylindrical in order to generate the field itself and it wasn't light by any means.  I