To him, space travel was a cosmic Rube Goldberg machine.
By the time he got to his first job at Vandenberg, Jones had developed his own ideas about how and when humans would move permanently beyond Earth. He’d been working as an aerospace engineer at Vandenberg Air Force base, helping build out Space Launch Complex 6-the area the Air Force planned to use for launches before everything came to a screeching halt when NASA put the brakes on the shuttle program.įor as long Jones could remember, he had spent his free time pondering the trajectory of space travel five, 30, 50, even 100 years down the cosmic road.
It was a few months after the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, and Jones was suddenly out of a job. In the summer of 1986, Ron Jones was sitting on a beach in Oahu drawing lines in the sand.
