My Childhood in Science

The story of the author's extremely early career

- By Alan Lightman

In late 1957, around my ninth birthday, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, called Sputnik. I became entranced with the idea of building a rocket of my own. I imagined the lift-off, the graceful arc of the craft as it careened through space. By the age of 13 or 14 I had started mixing my own rocket fuels. A fuel that burned too fast would explode like a bomb; a fuel that burned too slow would smolder like a barbecue grill. I settled on a particular mixture of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate. The body of the rocket, I built out of an aluminum tube. For the ignition system, I used the flashbulb of a Kodak Brownie camera embedded within the fuel chamber. The launching pad, I made out of a Coca-Cola crate filled with concrete, anchoring it with a V-shaped steel girder tilted skyward at 45 degrees.

Somehow I had got it into my head that I needed a passenger. So I built a capsule, to be housed in the upper fuselage of the rocket, and recruited a lizard to ride in it as my astronaut. I constructed a parachute out of silk handkerchiefs and carefully wrapped it around the capsule. A small gunpowder charge-ignited by a mercury switch, a AAA battery and a high-resistance wire-would eject the capsule at the highest point of the trajectory.