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Sci-fi novel is retired airline exec’s intellectual playground
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Thursday, 19 November 2009
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Page 1 of 2 by John Gessner
Thisweek Newspapers
It’s only fiction. Why not tempt the laws of physics?
In Burnsville resident Ben Lightfoot’s new science-fiction novel, six NASA astronauts from the year 2025 get lost in space after setting out at light speed toward the planet Nyvar. Instead, they travel an elliptical path back to Earth – Earth in the 34th century.
“I see no technical reason why you can’t build a machine that would travel at near light speed, and how near that is, I don’t know,” said Lightfoot, 75. “They’re moving atoms and molecules at near the speed of light already. But they’re doing it in a controlled environment. They’re not doing it with a vehicle out in space.”
Lightfoot’s long career in aviation – including 11 years as Northwest Airlines’ vice president for maintenance and engineering – gives him some license to play with the numbers.
But his real purpose behind the self-published “ReGenesis – An Alternative Future” is reimagining a world in which pesky problems like war, crime, poverty and global warming have been all but banished by human ingenuity.
Yet the six astronauts’ mixed views on the new world suggest that utopia can never be anywhere on Earth.
“In the new world, freedom has been redefined,” Lightfoot said.
The author earned his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at MIT and a master’s of business administration at Pepperdine University.
In the 1950s, while working for Lockheed Corp., he had a hand in designing the tail of the C-130 military transport plane. From 1987 to 1991 he served on NASA’s Aeronautical Advisory Committee, which advocated development of a “supersonic” transport capable of traveling at six times the speed of sound.
The uncompleted project got little attention outside aviation circles, Lightfoot said.
“(President) Reagan called it the ‘Orient Express,’ ” Lightfoot said. “It was a high-speed, supersonic aircraft that would fly up to Mach 6 and it would burn methane.”
Retired since 1991, Lightfoot was a Northwest executive for 11 years after 10 years as a vice president of Continental Airlines in Los Angeles.
“A lot of it helped me write the book – all of my experience with aviation and flying,” said Lightfoot, who included within its 465 pages the mathematical formula showing how the spaceship is able to traverse 13 centuries in a year by flying at light speed.
“It’s a maddening calculation,” Lightfoot said.
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