Astrotwins — Project Blastoff (11 page)

“It's probably time I admit to myself that I'm never going to get around to refinishing this,” he told Scott and Mark when he lent it to the cause. “But it proves my point that junk is worth keeping around.”

The nylon parachutes came from a friend of Mrs. O'Malley's who used to be in the air force. Lisa could not only weld, she could sew, and she stitched them together to form the two chutes they needed.

When the police department in West Orange announced it was upgrading its radio system, the twins' parents agreed to liberate some of the old police radios before they were scrapped.

“Why is it you need radios again?” Mr. Kelly asked Mark as he handed over a cardboard box brimming with components and disconnected wires.

“For the project,” Mark said simply.

“Right. The project,” Mr. Kelly said. “And you're sure it's safe?”

“Dad,” Mark said, “even Scott and I couldn't blow anything up using old police radios. Could we?”

“If anyone could, it's you two,” Dad said.

The project taught them resourcefulness and building skills and something else, too: how to work as a team.

Different as they were, Mark, Scott, Barry, Howard, Egg, and Lisa had to get along. When there were disagreements, the twins kept in mind that each person
had something to offer the group and the project. None could have built a spacecraft alone, not even with all the time in the world. Experience taught them that doing something hard requires a skill called collaboration.

*  *  *

It was on a Friday in late August that Mr. Perez came into Grandpa's workshop carrying a sheet of titanium he'd been lucky to find at the junkyard.

“Where do you want me to put this?” he asked Howard, who was nearest the door.

“Oh, great, thanks.” Howard pointed to a section of the workshop where other metal sheets were leaning against the wall. “Do you need some help?”

“I've got it,” said Mr. Perez. He dropped off the piece of metal and surveyed the work in progress. “You know,” he said at last, “if I didn't know better, I'd say you're building a darned good replica of a Mercury capsule like
Friendship 7
.”

Lisa had been kneeling on the floor, soldering electrical connections in the instrument panel. Now she pulled off her work goggles, wiped the sweat from her forehead, stood up, and looked at her friends. Egg and Scott were installing a heat sensor. Mark was working on the antenna fairing. Barry was tightening a pipe fitting for the oxygen system.

“Guys,” said Lisa to get their attention. “Maybe it's time we let him in on the secret.”

The other kids stopped working and looked up. Taking her cue from Lisa, Egg spoke up. “Uh, sure. I guess so at this point.”

Lisa said, “That's exactly what it is, Dad. A replica.”

“A replica!” Egg and Scott repeated.

“Good word,” said Mark.

“It's not so much a secret from you,” said Egg. “Mostly, it's a secret from Steve Peluso. I'm going to enter it in the science fair, and I don't want him to find out in advance.”

Mr. Perez shook his head. “No, no. I won't say anything. It's just a science fair project, after all. I mean, you don't, uh . . . have any intention of launching it, right? I don't see a rocket anywhere.”

“I'm not gonna fly in it,” Lisa said truthfully.

Egg looked at Mr. Perez. “You probably think we're crazy, right? To do all this work?”

“I think your ambition is admirable,” said Mr. Perez, “and yes, a little bit crazy.”

Mark had a brainstorm. “Crazy—that's it! We can call our spacecraft
Crazy 1
!”

The kids had been looking for a name. So far they had rejected Jersey Jet, Greenwood Hornet, Leapin' Lizard, and Kellys' Komet.

“I get it.” Howard nodded. “Like, ‘That Mark, he is a crazy one.'”

“Sounds wrong somehow,”
Barry said. “The Mercury spacecrafts all had the number 7 for the seven original astronauts.”

“So in that case, how about
Crazy 6
?” Scott suggested. “For the six of us.”

“What about Grandpa? He helped,” said Mark.

“And Mr. Perez,” said Egg.

“Oh, you kids don't have to—” Mr. Perez began.

“No, Mr. Perez, we do have to! And anyway, that makes it better,” said Egg. “The
Crazy 8
!”

“It does have a certain ring to it,” said Mark.

“It does,” said Howard solemnly.

“Let's put it to a vote,” Egg said. “All in favor of naming our spaceship
Crazy 8
?”

“Aye!” said all six kids.

“Aye!” said Mr. Perez. “And thanks.”

They had a name, an astronaut, and a launch site. Very soon they would have a spacecraft. Only one big problem remained. They needed the rocket itself—the vehicle that would launch their spacecraft into orbit. And they needed a way to fuel it.

“I can't believe we're going to school a week before we have to,” Mark grumbled to his brother.

It was the second Monday in September. Along with Mrs. O'Malley, the twins were climbing the steps toward the front doors of Egg, Lisa, and Howard's elementary school in West Milford. The boys were spending their last week of summer at the lake with their grandpa so they could work on the spacecraft. Egg had asked them to come by that day to meet Mr. Drizzle, her science teacher.

“A school, not
our
school,” Scott reminded his brother. “It's all these poor kids who are prisoners, while we enjoy another week of freedom.”

Following at a reluctant distance, the twins walked down the first-floor corridor past the
school office. In spite of the number of kids who had trodden on it that day, the linoleum remained shiny and unscuffed, and everything smelled like a combination of floor polish, school cafeteria pizza, and paper fresh off the mimeograph machine.

Mr. Drizzle's room, Room 7, was at the far end of the first-floor hallway.

The door was open, and inside was a man seated at a desk. Two kids—Egg and a boy with curly brown hair—were standing before him.

The man's hair was gray and in need of combing. He had a beaky nose. He wore black pants, a short-sleeved shirt with a paisley pattern, and a blue-and-green tie. His translucently pale skin had a dusting of cinnamon-colored freckles. When the boys walked in, he nodded, but then he saw Mrs. O'Malley and stood up.

Meanwhile, Egg and the boy continued their argument at an ever-increasing volume.

“Enough,”
the man said at last. Egg and the boy were instantly silent. “Good afternoon, Mrs. O'Malley. Jenny told me we'd have visitors. I'm Mr. Drizzle.”

The twins had the same thought at the same time—they should've identified this guy immediately, based on his looks. Mr. Drizzle was the typical nutty-professor type.

“I hear you have quite a project, a secret project, for the science fair,” Mr. Drizzle said. “Now, don't worry. I'm not even going to ask. Just promise me you won't—”

“—blow anything up.” Mark and Scott finished his sentence for him.

“We won't,” Mark added.

“It's not fair,” said the scowling boy with curly brown hair.

“There's nothing in the rules, so it is too,” said Egg, and it was apparent this was the subject of their argument. “Tell him it's fair, Mr. Drizzle.”

“The rules are mum on the subject of collaborators, Steve,” said Mr. Drizzle.

Aha—so this must be the famous Steve Peluso, defending science fair champion. Mark and Scott sized him up and came to the same conclusion: He didn't look so smart. They were pretty sure they—that is, Egg—could beat him.

Steve shot the twins an evil look. “They don't even go to our school!”

Mr. Drizzle's voice was sympathetic but firm. “The rule book doesn't mention that either. Jenny has to write her presentation and make her display, but if she wants help on the underlying project, she can have it. When you won with your mechanized model of the solar system, you were using the work of other scientists—Galileo and Kepler.”

“Yeah, and your dad probably did most of the work for you anyway,” Egg said.

Egg's mom frowned.

“Sorry,” said Egg.

Mr. Drizzle continued. “Steve, you're welcome to recruit help yourself, if you want.”

Steve did not appear to be listening. He turned and headed for the door. “You know my dad's on the school board, right?” he said as a parting shot—and then he stalked off down the hall.

Mr. Drizzle sighed. “The whole world knows Steve's dad is on the school board. At the same time, he is a very bright young man. Now”—he shook his head, changing gears—“I know your project is a secret, but Jenny did say it has something to do with outer space. If by chance that means rocketry, I might be able to help. Rocketry's been an interest of mine since I read a biography of Robert Goddard as a boy.”

“Who's Robert Goddard?” asked Scott.

Egg slapped her forehead. “You know,” she said. “That rocket nozzle design we were looking at last week? He invented it.”

“No, he didn't,” Mark corrected her. “Gustav de Laval invented it for use in steam turbines. But Robert Goddard was the first to use it for rocketry.”

“So no wonder I'm confused,” Scott said. “What's so special about it again? I must've been gimbaling the gyros that day.”

“It's wide at the intake and the exhaust—the top and the bottom—and narrow in the middle,” Mark explained.
“When the propellant goes through, it gets compressed in the middle, which makes the flow out the bottom end faster.”

“Supersonic, actually,” Egg said. “In other words, the nozzle makes the fuel more efficient so it provides more power.”

“So I take it your project
does
have a rocket component,” Mr. Drizzle said.

Egg nodded. “Look, if I tell you what it is, do you promise not to tell anyone?”

“She means Steve,” said Mark.

“Are you going to tell me at long last as well?” Mrs. O'Malley asked.

The kids looked at one another. So far, the only grown-ups who knew they were building a spacecraft were Grandpa, Mr. Perez, and—if he counted as a grown-up—Tommy. They had tried to keep the whole thing a secret, but they really did need help.

“It's up to you,” Mark said to Egg.

She nodded, took a breath, and told Mr. Drizzle about
Crazy 8
, leaving out one little detail—that they really did plan to launch it into space.

“We've solved a lot of problems,” Egg went on. “But we still need fuel and a launch vehicle powerful enough to put our spacecraft into orbit.”

“She means we
would
need to,” Mark clarified, “
if
we were going to put our spacecraft into orbit.”

“Right,” Egg said. “But since the goal is to make the project as realistic as possible, we want to be able to show there is a rocket that would work. If possible, we'd like to build that, too.”

Mark said, “In the Apollo program, NASA uses refined kerosene and liquid oxygen for stage 1 of the Saturn rocket, and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for stages 2 and 3. But we could never afford as much as we would need. Not to mention, there's a safety issue.”

“Because we don't want to blow anything up,” Scott said.

Mr. Drizzle stood, went to the blackboard, and picked up a piece of chalk. “To understand fuels, you have to understand some chemistry. Can anybody define ‘fuel' for me?”

Mark and Scott frowned. They wanted rocket fuel, not a chemistry lesson.

Mr. Drizzle seemed to read their minds and shrugged. “What can I say? I'm a teacher.”

Scott kept right on frowning, but Mark's know-it-all impulse kicked in. “Uh, a fuel is something that you burn to make something else move—like gasoline in a car.”

Not to be outdone, Egg added, “Or to warm something up—like wood in a fireplace.”

Mr. Drizzle nodded. “The burning, or more technically the combustion, of a fuel results in rapidly expanding gases. In a car, the gases make the pistons go up
and down. In a rocket, the gasses exit the nozzle, propelling the nose in the opposite direction. The idea behind a simple solid-fuel rocket is straightforward. What you want to do is create something that burns very quickly but does not explode. The fuels we're most familiar with—like methane, kerosene, and gasoline—are hydrocarbons, composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms.”

“Got it,” said Egg.

“Now, as it happens,” Mr. Drizzle said, “there is a solution to your problem based on something with a similar chemical composition: hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Have you kids heard of sugar propellants? Some people call them rocket candy. Most of them aren't as powerful as what NASA's using, but they're cheaper and a lot more stable.”

“Plus they probably taste better,” said Mark.

Mr. Drizzle made a face. “I wouldn't volunteer for the taste test myself. But I have been experimenting with some novel ways to formulate sugar propellants, and I've designed a single-stage, solid-fuel, lightweight, optimally efficient rocket and rocket engine. Smaller than either the Redstone or the Atlas, the Drizzle rocket delivers a major upgrade in performance over competing launch vehicles.”

“Whoa,” said Mrs. O'Malley. “If this teaching-science gig doesn't work out for you, you could definitely go into
used car sales.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Drizzle.

“But what's in your solid rocket fuel, anyway?” Scott asked.

“Sugar, molasses, powdered aluminum, and bubble gum,” Mr. Drizzle replied.

“Bubble gum?”
Egg and the twins chorused.

“That's what binds it all together,” he explained, “and then, naturally, there is a secret ingredient of my own invention, one whose chemical components I cannot yet divulge. NASA doesn't even have this one yet.”