They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Dreamer Builds the First Civilian Spaceship [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Weil (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

This is a classic American tale of dreams and obsession--the suspenseful, brilliantly written account of one eccentric man’s hunger to open space travel to us all: to let us rocket into orbit, return to earth, and soar yet again--thus transforming space travel forever.

They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus

Gary Hudson was seven years old when Sputnik flew, nineteen when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and all he ever wanted to do was to travel into space. Between 1970 and 1996 he founded and disbanded five separate rocket-building companies, none meeting with much success. Then, in 1997, at the age of forty-seven, he launched Rotary Rocket. His goal was to develop and build the Roton, the world’s first manned, single-stage-to-orbit, fully reusable spaceship, capable of shuttling ordinary people into orbit and back in a single day. Elizabeth Weil followed Gary for two years, and in this book she brings to vivid life a seductively--perhaps delusionally--optimistic world where science and science fiction meld and fuse, and where imagination and invention collide.

In California’s bleak and windswept Mojave Desert, Gary assembled a fanatical, mismatched crew of engineers and technicians, and Weil bears witness to their Roton endeavor, from first conception to final test flight. The cast includes a pyromaniacal engineer, a world expert on composite airframes, two former Navy test pilots, Gary’s infinitely patient wife, a third-generation Mojave motel owner, and an enigmatic and resourceful financier. At their center shines Gary himself, a man eternally reflecting the glow of a better, lighter, higher world--a world that, despite his flaws and failures, he perpetually convinces us we’re all about to reach.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Weil, a magazine writer, chronicles the efforts of one baby boomer determined to create a working space ship. Gary Hudson was fascinated with space exploration from his childhood, and by the time he approached his 50th birthday, he had nearly 30 years in the rocket-ship business. An eccentric fellow, Hudson attracted a small group of employees and investors equally as fanatic. Weil shadows Hudson for nearly two years as he attempts to raise money to build and complete the Roton, a single state¤to¤orbit reusable rocket. She attends conventions, speeches, employee barbecues, befriends Hudson's sickly wife and listens endlessly to Hudson's dreams. The book's anecdotes are somewhat reminiscent of stories about the development of computer companies or Internet startups the camaraderie, the hard work and a certain naOvetE about the business world. Weil's writing is simple and occasionally elegant, but the book would have been stronger had she revealed more passion for the subject: she remains an interested but impartial observer. The notion of traveling into space is wildly appealing, but this book never fully engages the reader: unfortunately, Hudson isn't a terribly likable guy and his chances of succeeding seem so slim.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

A community of rocketeers flourishes, and they hope to achieve what NASA has not: cheap access to low-earth orbit. Of the companies founded to pursue that goal, the one chronicled here, the now-liquidated Rotary Rocket, generated scads of publicity in the aerospace press during its short existence; its founder, Gary Hudson, assented to a Boswellian presence to dramatize its fortunes. Weil's bio-narrative of Hudson's exertions faithfully expresses the junction where visionary futurism and practicality meet--usually to the detriment of the vision. An entrepreneur, not an engineer, Hudson had several failed rocket ventures behind him when the rotary-rocket idea possessed him. Weil describes the rocket itself--a hybrid of helicopter blades and spinning rockets--and the financial backing Hudson garnered from telecom mogul Walt Anderson and techno-author Tom Clancy. Becoming more skeptical of Hudson by the page, Weil comes to regard his enterprise as faintly fictive yet emblematic of the unreined enthusiasms of "spacers." They (though perhaps not Hudson himself) will revel in Weil's inside account. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; First Edition edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553108867
• ISBN-13: 978-0553108866
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #901,714 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #50 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( C ) > Columbus, Christopher

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well researched, but disappointing in outlook, October 6, 2002

By 

Tom Brosz "Tom A. Brosz" (California, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Dreamer Builds the First Civilian Spaceship (Hardcover)

First, it should be known that I have worked with Gary Hudson for about thirty years now. I have worked with him and for him in every one of his endeavors. I am working with him now on space projects. I have also and known many of the other people described in this book, and sometimes I think that Weil spent most of her time talking to and being with an entirely different set of people.

Her research on the subject of space is intensive, and it is obvious she has done her best to do her homework. Her background information on the space field is detailed, and as far as I can tell, correct. I know from observation that she spent huge amounts of time at Rotary Rocket interviewing people and hanging around the operation, and that either through extensive note taking or a steel-trap memory, no detail or comment, technical or otherwise, escaped her notice. This is no half-assed writing job. There is a lot of work here. One cannot say this book was written by someone who blew in for a week to take a look around and then left. Which makes the end result more disappointing. More on that later.

The book is almost painful to read, but that might just be me. It seems unsympathetic at best, patronizing at worst. There is a generous supply of unflattering physical descriptions, applied to almost every person in the book, and repeated continuously. Hudson's shaking hands are endlessly commented on. When Zubrin is expounding on his innovative methods and philosophy of space exploration, Weil makes a point of commenting on "projectiles of spit flying from his mouth." Why this is relevant or what function this could have other than to express dislike or even contempt for the subjects is unclear. One can imagine a description of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg address, and describing in detail the way his wart quivered as he talked.

If the physical descriptions are unflattering, so are the descriptions of their views and attitudes. To read this book, one would think that every person involved in trying to get private space off the ground is just one signature short of commitment to an asylum. While I would be the first to admit that the field garners its share of eccentrics, in my work the people I dealt with were mostly professional, reasoned, experienced, and above all, highly intelligent. That they don't fit easily into a mold goes without saying. That's why they were there. In the book, Tom Clancy offers a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "[t]he reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." I understand the original title of this book was to be "Unreasonable Men," and it would have been a better title.

After a while the feet of clay she keeps slapping onto the ends of everyone's legs gets tiring.

What makes the book disappointing, is that it is not a bad book. It is that Weil seems to have completely missed the whole point. Her detached, somewhat patronizing viewpoint of these efforts is not limited to Hudson and his people, but extends to everyone who dreams of going into space. For that matter, it seems to extend to all entrepreneurs and explorers anywhere who push forward despite obstacles and the scorn of less enthusiastic people. This attitude is even less comprehensible considering Weil has a background of writing articles on the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley. What doesn't she get?

Is there nothing of the dreamer in Weil's soul? I don't want to be that ungenerous. I don't know her that well. But one get the impression that she would have been one of those people wondering why we spent so much money on Moon rocks.

The most telling part of the book to me were the following paragraphs:

"Gary, like almost everybody else who worked at Rotary, had grown up in the science fiction world among the fen. His favorite books were Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 'The Mote in God's Eye' and Poul Anderson's 'The Earth Book of Stormgate,' and he believed that science fiction taught its readers that 'there is no end to accomplishments' and that 'the future is yours to create.'

"...Jaws dropped in Mojave when I first admitted that I hadn't read Heinlein or Bradbury. Or Asimov either. On came an avalanche of well-thumbed paperbacks, people explaining, with generous hearts, that I could not understand them unless I read this one or that. Embarrassingly, I tried to return the favor, extending copies of my own dog-eared favorites--James Salter's 'Light Years,' Joan Didion's 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem'--which people politely accepted and completely ignored.

"Why? As Alexei and Cory Panshin explain in their fannish manifesto, 'SF in Dimension,' 'mimetic fiction'--that is, realistic fiction--is 'a negative drag on literature' Moreover, 'SF which rejects its freedom to be positive is as big a bummer as mimetic fiction.'"

I largely agree with this view on mimetic fiction, or Naturalism, which Ayn Rand effectively skewers in The Romantic Manifesto.

I have run across a lot of non-science people who have never read Heinlein, and are turned off by "scientific fiction." But to have never at least read Bradbury indicates a major lack of the fantastic in one's life. It would be interesting to see if Weil has ever read Tolkein.

I don't think she was the right person to write this book. You might get a similar result from having a highly creative and intelligent blind person do an extensive treatise on Vincent Van Gogh. All the details would be there of his life, and the research thoroughly done, but the impact of his work on the author's mind and soul would be missing.

Had Weil been able to understand the motivations of the people who try such things, fail, and try again endlessly until they succeed, and then applied her considerable skills, this could have been a very good book indeed.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for all Space Cadets, May 20, 2004

By 

Jeffrey F. Bell (Honolulu, HI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Dreamer Builds the First Civilian Spaceship (Paperback)

There seem to be two reactions to this book: pro-space activists think it's trash, while the normal people who seemingly read it by accident all love it. Here's a third perspective: I strongly believe that we need cheap, reusable, privately owned launch vehicles like the one Rotary Rocket tried to develop. But I love this book because it reveals exactly why none of the many Mom & Pop rocket companies have ever produced one. The main problem is that the people who are strongly motivated to start such firms are mostly impractical dreamers who lack the technical skills and business sense to make them work. Reading Weil's dispassionate description of the Roton development program is like watching the film "Ed Wood" -- you can't believe that these people actually existed and actually believed they were building a workable rocketship. The sane part of the space community always knew that the Roton would be a miserable technical failure for all the reasons given on p.167, but it is really scary to see just how out of touch with reality the major players like Gary Hudson and Walt Anderson really were. And these guys are still active in the alt.space community! I sure hope Elon Musk's SpaceX project succeeds so we don't have to watch any more of these painful failures.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Cast of Real-Life Book Characters!, January 3, 2007

By 

Jack Kennedy Jr. "Jack Kennedy 276.275.4700" (Wise, Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Dreamer Builds the First Civilian Spaceship (Hardcover)

This book gives some insight to the history on some of the major charcaters at Mojave Spaceport. While I can not judge the book on how it casts the real-life characters of Mojave as the "mecca for emotionally vulnerable fringe technologists," many have walked away from Roton to do some quite interesting, challenging, and, historic space feats. I highly susepct many more historic events will be at the hands of the Roton veterans of Mojave. The evolution of the people from the failure demonstrates the strength of the passion and the determination of the human spirit. The book is an interesting read for those looking for some basic understanding of the connections among the players of Mojave's fledgling commercialization of space. I recommend the book. Gary Hudson, keep going!