Creating Science Non-Fiction
By: Jeff Hunsaker
Tags: Innovation, Curiosity, Creativity, Journey

Image by ParallelVision from Pixabay

Recently I stumbled across Daniel Scrivner’s podcast “Outliers” interviewing Dylan Taylor, CEO of Voyager Space Holdings. Within the first minutes, Dylan blurts out he first became interested in space watching Star Trek episodes with his dad at a young age. Me too!

I can remember watching Star Trek in the early 80s every day at 6 pm with my dad — especially during the summers. I credit my dad with fueling my curiosity with space but perhaps more importantly, science fiction.

As a junior in high school, my parents arranged for me to attend Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I may have been the oldest kid there but it didn’t matter. The experience was incredible. I played the engineer role and made a “repair” in a 25-foot deep tank with SCUBA gear.

I also distinctly remember being in a Shuttle simulator during an exercise that didn’t involve the engineer. Bored, I picked up the manual and started reviewing procedures. Suddenly, a simulated anomaly flashed into the dark cabin. Hold on, I just read about that. I yelled up to the pilot and captain, “Hey, you need to cycle these buttons to fix that.” They looked at me like I was from Mars. “Trust me, I just read about this.” Sure enough, that fixed the problem. When walking through the after-action review, the instructors said no team had ever addressed the problem that quickly. Fortuitous, I guess.

Afterward, I thought I wanted to study aeronautical engineering in college. Oddly, a more common path would have led me into the Air Force at the time. I spoke with an Air Force recruiter who informed me that my lack of 20/20 vision would keep me out of the pilot seat. He talked about an experimental operation though that sewed new lenses onto the cornea that I might get. (Remember, this is the late 80s…well before Lasik surgery.) Uh, no thank you. I’ll stick with contacts. I think I was too tall for the cockpit anyway.

Space as a career passed as pragmatism took hold and the Shuttle tragedies occurred. The U.S. space program faltered and politicians seemed resigned to suffocate progress.

Again, my dad fueled my intrigue in recommending great science fiction authors: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, and others. All of these were older authors. I began to realize a lot of the technology and science written about in these novels while science fiction at the time of writing, had since come to fruition.

Fast-forward through the space dead-zone (the 90s) and enter Elon Musk with SpaceX in the early 2000s. I suspect he (and others like Branson, Bezos, Diamandis) were inspired by some of these same science fiction authors. I would hazard a guess that they observed these ideas becoming reality and proclaiming, I am going to do this. I’m going to get to Mars. I’m going to take people into space. I’m going to mine rare and new elements from asteroids.

Truly amazing innovators are defiant. They suspend their disbelief of the impossible and near-will the thing into existence. If their inspiration comes from science fiction, their success comes from relentlessness.

A few years ago, my dad moved to Titusville, Florida. What’s right next to Titusville? That’s right: Cape Canaveral. My dad watches the SpaceX rockets go up (and return now!) all the time. When we visited last, he took us to the Kennedy Space Center and we even had lunch with a former astronaut. Swoon. Titusville has always been a boom/bust sort of town depending on NASA’s state. However, with all the private investment in rockets, Titusville is teeming with growth.

Throughout my life, the constant through-line remains space and exploration. Maybe it’s time to investigate a bit further. “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”