Adair details the test launch at White Sands, where his rocket accelerated so rapidly that witnesses thought it had exploded. NORAD tracked the vehicle as it traveled 456 miles northwest to Groom Lake, better known as Area 51. Upon landing at the secretive base, Adair was escorted past his own rocket and into the central hangar, where he encountered former Nazi rocket engineer Dr. Arthur Rudolph among the officials present.
The episode also revisits the Space Islands concept from the prior week with Gene Meyers, as Adair confirms the engineering feasibility of converting shuttle external tanks into orbital tourist stations. He discusses the physiological effects of reduced gravity on the human body and explains why NASA has resisted cheaper alternatives to the International Space Station.
Key Moments
First backyard rocket hits 12,000 feet at age 12: Adair describes growing up around NASCAR machine shops with Lee Petty, becoming a machinist by 12 with access to liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, methane, and nitro. His first backyard rocket left the yard at 3,500 mph, burned a football-field-sized hole in the grass, and reached an altitude of 12,000 feet measured with a homemade plywood-and-protractor sighting rig.
Blackmailing Congressman Ashbrook to fund a fusion engine: Adair recounts cornering Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio at a campaign event and threatening to go to the press unless Ashbrook funded the materials for a new engine - an electromagnetic fusion containment engine, the same approach Soviet Tokamak reactors used. The money came through, and a teenager began building a fusion-powered rocket.
Landing at Groom Lake and the descending hangar floor: Adair describes flying into Groom Lake in 1971 on a black DC-9, seeing his recovered rocket on the desert floor with parachutes, and being driven into the center hangar - where the entire concrete floor descended on enormous worm-screw lifts about 200 feet (20 stories) into a vast underground bay big enough for half a dozen 747s, with an SR-71 Blackbird under construction nearby.
Standing on the engine: neural-network circuitry and 100-million-degree plasma: Adair walks across the surface of a watermelon-on-steroids-sized fusion engine, sees a four-foot blast hole where a fail-safe shut down 100-million-degree plasma in a nanosecond, then realizes there is no wiring anywhere - instead a brain-stem-like trunk of fluid-filled tubes branching out into a neural network across the hull. He concludes the technology is not from Earth.