![]() When the shuttle Challenger exploded in January of that year, Powell watched the replays over and over again on TV. The funding for a prototype came from a major insurance company (Powell won’t say which one), and JP Aerospace actually was approved for a berth on the space shuttle Columbia in 1986. “We did the venture-capital thing for a while,” he said, “putting on the suits and ties and trying to raise money.” It seemed to pay off in 1986, when Powell designed a very small satellite that “looked like a coffee can with solar panels” and was designed to inspect larger commercial satellites for damage. ![]() But Powell never abandoned his quest to break into the space industry. NASA eventually abandoned the space-tug idea, just one of the many ways that expectations of the shuttle program would be scaled back over the years. John Powell inspects his Near Space Maneuvering Vehicle shortly before it is delivered to the U.S. “I guess that’s when they first realized we were only 17 years old,” Powell recalled with a laugh, and communication with NASA abruptly stopped. But things changed when a NASA official called to discuss the proposal over the phone. The agency seemed intrigued by Powell’s ideas, and there were several rounds of written correspondence between NASA and JP Aerospace. The space tug would ferry satellites and other cargo from the relatively low orbits in which the shuttle travels to higher altitudes and then would return again to the shuttle. They proposed to design and build the orbital transfer vehicle, or “space tug,” that NASA hoped would be part of its space-shuttle program. JP Aerospace got off to an auspicious start when Powell and his colleagues bid on a project for NASA. So, in 1978, Powell founded his own company, JP Aerospace, with the hope that he might leave his mark in space as indelibly as the Apollo astronauts had. Like many of his generation, Powell was inspired by the images of the astronauts walking on the moon and the promise that he himself could visit space one day. As a young man, he developed a knack for building things and earned a reputation as a sort of whiz kid in high school, when he built his own working one-man submarine. Space exploration is something Powell has dreamed about since he was 4 years old, when his mom used to help him make paper rockets. His ultimate goal is to be an astronaut on a spaceship of his own design. One day in the not-too-distant future, Powell hopes to climb aboard himself and go even higher. Indeed, the ship would be more accurately called a near-space craft, designed to explore the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere at the edge of space.īut for practical purposes, the viewer watching the videotape of the mission was, at least vicariously, an astronaut, hanging in the dark sky vacuum and watching the Earth revolve slowly by below. “Space” doesn’t officially start until you get 50 miles from the surface, twice as far as the upper limits of Powell’s airship. This, in fact, was the very curvature of our home planet. Approaching 100,000 feet, some stars became visible, and the horizon seemed to have a pronounced curve. A few minutes later, the sound of the wind faded to a whisper and disappeared altogether as the atmosphere grew too thin to carry sound.Īt 70,000 feet, the sky darkened to near black, although it was still mid-afternoon on the Earth’s surface. ![]() The voices stopped just as abruptly as they were heard. No gremlins here, just an onboard radio that someone from the ground crew left with the volume turned up, which picked up stray radio transmissions bouncing around the atmosphere. Suddenly, an unexpected and ghostly voice broke the quiet. But there’s rarely any air traffic over this lonely and alien-looking territory, making it a perfect place for Sacramento-based inventor John Powell to test his spacecraft. The winds began to subside once the craft reached 20,000 feet, around where the airliners fly. The sound of strong winds could be heard for a long while as the ship’s canopy was pushed about in the gusts. It was a beautiful day for a launch, with blue sky above and a desert of reds and tans, with spots here and there of dark-green sagebrush, shrinking quickly from view below. John Powell’s spaceship lifted off from its desert launch pad climbing at a steady, gentle rate of 1,000 feet per minute above Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. ![]()
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