Back around 1985 I stuffed a crayon drawn spaceship into an envelope with a note explaining how much better it was than the Space Shuttle because mine was blue (making it fast like the Blue Angels and police cars) and had headlights (space is dark!). Crazy, I know, but I was six. Anyway, back then I’d heard of this Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California. I didn’t know the exact address but figured there couldn’t be many jet propulsion labs in Pasadena so I decided to wing it and limited the address to:

Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, California

No street address, no zip, and no clue whether it’d work. To make matters even worse though, I also didn’t have a stamp. However, I had heard one could tape a quarter onto an envelope and the postal service would take care of it, so I did that, and snuck it into the mailbox the next morning. It must have been the most ragtag effort the postal service had seen outside of Christmas letters to Santa.

I ran to check that mailbox daily for two months, hoping NASA would see things my way. And they did. My Mom, of course, happened to get the mail that day and was more than a little curious about why her little six year old was getting mail from NASA. But there was my drawing, with a note from Public Affairs thanking me for my idea saying they’d made a photocopy and given it to the engineers who found it very interesting. They made one mistake though: they encouraged me to keep working on it.

Well, I did. It was the 1980s and my parents worked for the US Department of Defense and Justice, so right when other kids were asking how the toaster worked, I was asking about the things in my life: submarines, torpedoes, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear reactors, oh, and check kiting. My parents were probably sick and tired of it but I loved it. My dad and I eventually exhausted everything he could get his hands on so we jumped to how ELSE things could work, dreaming up all kinds of propulsion systems and the like. But by far, my favorite topic was space travel and dreaming of how we get to another star.

My life didn’t go in that direction, by day at least. Business school and computers didn’t require as much math knowledge. My dad died in 1991, when I was still young, so I probably should have been talked into a more realistic interest. But whenever I close my eyes, guess where my brain goes? Right back to the latest interstellar propulsion idea.

There have been thousands of those ideas over the years, all iteratively deriving from one another. Only two have made it past a week of inspection. A three month idea finally died out and shortly thereafter I found myself on a red eye flight from San Jose to Boston, staring at that high altitude neon blue glow of the atmosphere at 3am. The idea that hit me that night has taken many jumps since that night, but I’m still working on it. May 18th, 2007. 7 years and counting.