The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  “On the outside we seemed so different,” says Tiffany. “My friends said, ‘You’re such a health nut and you’re going with the Coke man?’ But we were a lot alike too. There was just a knowing that we were supposed to be together. And we both wanted to have kids. But that’s where we had absolutely no idea what we were getting ourselves into.”

  It’s hard to believe now, but Taylor was at first an intensely self-conscious child, fearful of new situations and nearly paralyzed by shyness. “When he was about to start kindergarten, Kenneth wanted to hold him back,” Tiffany says. “He was small and emotionally immature compared to the other kids his age.” But Taylor did begin kindergarten that year, with his contemporaries, at St. James Day School.

  The Episcopalian elementary school was headed at the time by Dee Miller, who remembers Taylor as timid and unusually empathetic. “That first day of kindergarten, he held a little girl’s hand. He stayed with her all day and got her through it, even though he hardly said a word.” All through that year and the next year too, Taylor rarely interacted with his classmates except when he was helping them with their work.

  It took a national tragedy to pull Taylor out of his shell. In the grieving aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Wilsons traveled to Nashville, Kenneth’s hometown, to attend a memorial service. “I think 9/11 really affected him,” Kenneth says. “The way the TV kept showing the planes going into the buildings. For a second-grader, it was like it kept happening again and again.”

  At one point during the event, Taylor, who had up until then sung only at Sunday Methodist church services, suddenly stood up and began singing “God Bless America” in an ethereal soprano. His spontaneous performance transfixed the crowd of several hundred, moving many to tears. Afterward, Arkansas’s lieutenant governor, Winthrop “Win” Rockefeller, approached Taylor, removed his own American-flag lapel pin, and silently pinned it to the boy’s shirt. Word of the performance spread quickly, and soon people throughout the region were recruiting Taylor to sing at weddings, fundraisers, and other events. He had perfect pitch and enough volume that he rarely needed a microphone.

  “He’d put on a little blue tuxedo, and people paid him really well,” Tiffany says. “But he would’ve done it for free. He loved it, and he was so animated, with his hands and his facial expressions.”

  After September 11, Taylor became intensely patriotic. For Halloween, he dressed as a “rescue hero,” carrying a grappling hook as he made his trick-or-treat rounds. He wrote letters of appreciation to workers clearing rubble at Ground Zero, and for his eighth birthday, he requested a cake decorated with a flag and the words God Bless America. Taylor joined the Cub Scouts and later the Boy Scouts, happily wearing the uniform, saluting the American flag, and going through the Scouts’ quasi-military drills.

  Just before his ninth birthday, Taylor dropped his construction tools and announced that he was going to be an astronaut. Tiffany baked him a rocket-shaped organic cake and Taylor started reading everything he could get his hands on about space exploration. He also began sending letters to astronauts, requesting pictures and autographs. At bedtime now, he would cast aside any book that ventured into the realm of fantasy. He no longer wanted to know about heroes and magic; he wanted to know how manmade things traveled through air and space.

  Tiffany and Kenneth did their best to keep up with their son’s rat-a-tat-tat questions but quickly reached the point where they lacked answers to his increasingly complex queries. They brought him to the Texarkana Public Library, where Taylor asked the reference librarian what she had on rockets and space. “If she’d been honest she would’ve told me not to waste my time there,” Taylor says. “It was a pretty disappointing place if you wanted to find out anything about anything. Even for a third-grader.”

  The local hobby shop proved more enlightening. Kenneth and Taylor began building small rockets and launching them on weekends, when the sprawling parking lots at Four States Fairgrounds were usually empty. “We’d bring Joey along,” Taylor remembers, “and he just loved it. When the parachute came out, me and him would run and try to catch the rocket when it floated down.”

  That summer, Taylor spent his weekdays building and repairing his rockets. By midweek, he’d grow restless; his weekend launch window would seem a hundred years away. Taylor began pestering his maternal grandmother, who had moved into the house next door, to take him out on weekdays to launch rockets.

  “Taylor and my mom were extremely close,” Tiffany says. “She kept an eye on him and she knew him like a book; maybe better than anyone else.”

  To demonstrate that he knew what he was doing, Taylor set up his launch apparatus in the driveway and took his grandmother through all the prelaunch steps and safety checks. Finally convinced, Nell drove her grandson and his rockets out to the empty fairgrounds on a windless Wednesday afternoon in August.

  The first rocket up for launching was one Taylor had repaired after a hard landing. With its broken fin glued back on, it looked as good as new, and Taylor inserted the igniter into the bottom of the engine and slid the fuselage down the launch rod and onto the pad. Then he backed away to the controller, where his grandmother was waiting.

  Taylor armed the firing switch and counted down dramatically—“Five, four, three, two, one”—then pushed the launch button. “Blastoff!” he yelled as the rocket hissed off the pad—leaving its no-longer-glued-on fin behind. Once the rocket cleared the rod, it veered sideways and whizzed horizontally toward Taylor and his grandmother.

  “It was like it was aiming at us!” Taylor remembers.

  There was no time to hit the ground, no time to move. The rocket whooshed between Taylor and his grandmother, standing just five feet apart. It skittered across the field and tunneled into the grass, then jettisoned its nose cone and parachute with a final pop.

  “At that point,” Taylor remembers, “we decided to pack up the rockets and call it a day. On our way home, Grandma and I agreed that it was probably best to keep the whole thing quiet.”

  3

  * * *

  Propulsion!

  “THERE ARE FIVE THINGS involved in a space shuttle launch,” Taylor begins, spinning around to face his third-grade classmates, his left hand behind his back, his right index finger raised emphatically. Taylor, wearing a blue astronaut jumpsuit with NASA patches, paces in front of a triptych tabletop poster titled “Aeronautical Engineer/Astronaut” and then comes to an abrupt halt. He picks up a plastic model of the space shuttle.

  “First, sparks are sprayed to make sure there’s no hydrogen in the air. When everything’s lighted, it sways back and forth and then it takes off.” Taylor sweeps the model through the air. “Then Kennedy Space Center turns it over to Johnson, and Johnson calls for the roll maneuver.”

  “Johnson?” a girl’s voice asks. The video camera pans left to a curly-haired girl with her hand raised.

  “Houston,” Taylor says.

  “Like as in ‘Houston, we have a problem’?” the girl asks.

  “Yes,” Taylor says tersely. “A couple seconds after it breaks through the sound barrier, the boosters fall off.” He tries to snap apart the model but it doesn’t separate, so he just points to the components. “After it breaks through the ozone [layer], the external fuel tank falls off. Then, if you’re gonna orbit the Earth, okay, you gotta turn,” he says, acting it out. “But if you’re going to the ISS, you gotta make a much larger turn.”

  “What’s the ISS?” two kids ask.

  Taylor jumps up into the air. “The International Space Station!” he shouts. He replants both feet on the floor—briefly—and adds, “For some reason, NASA uses everything in abbreviations. Speaking of abbreviations, who knows what NASA stands for?” Hands shoot up, and Taylor points to one acronym-guessing kid after another, clearly enjoying shooting down their answers. Finally, he blurts out, “It’s the National Air and Space Administration!”

  Though the budding astronaut has botched the second word (it’s A
eronautics), he’s already moving on, pointing to pictures taped to the board. “This is me at Kennedy Space Center. This is me and my dad in the assembly building. This is me with an astronaut. Here are all the Columbia astronauts who died. And here,” he says, solemnly picking up an object wrapped in clear plastic, “is a ceramic tile made for Columbia, which I got at Cape Canaveral. It’s highly toxic, so don’t open it.”

  “Highly toxic?” one kid says. “Open it!”

  “Would you die?” another kid asks.

  “No,” Taylor says. “You’d just burn.”

  His classmates rapid-fire questions at him.

  “Have you ever gone up into space?”

  “Have you ever tasted astronaut ice cream?”

  “What about the astronauts who died?”

  “Do you know that your dad is taping all this on video?”

  “Shush!” Taylor yells. “I can’t take all these questions!” He turns around, grabbing at his head, then spins toward the class. “I’m not answering any more till everyone gets quiet!” He sits on the table, smiling and shaking his head as the kids laugh away. In half a minute, they’re quiet. Taylor stands up and points to Ellen Orr, the curly-haired girl in the front row, who has been frantically waving her hand.

  “Taylor, why do you want to do this?” she asks.

  “You can help people,” Taylor says, “and make breakthroughs in outer space. And if you’re the engineer, you can build safer planes and shuttles. And if you die in a tragedy, you’ll still be a hero.”

  “The thing about Taylor that no one’s ever seen with any other student,” says Dee Miller, who would lead St. James Day School for many years, “is his passion. He was obsessed with science and he poured himself into everything he did. Everyone loved watching him, and when he was in the room, he just took control.”

  “This will sound strange,” says sixth-grade teacher Angela Melde, “but I’d say Taylor was the only true Renaissance man I’ve ever met—and he was a grade-schooler.”

  The carbon composite tile Taylor passed around wasn’t actually toxic. “That was complete BS,” the teenage Taylor would confide. “I just didn’t want kids opening it up and touching my tile.” But it was one of thousands of tiles made for Columbia, the shuttle whose tile-coated wing was breached by a falling chunk of foam insulation, compromising its ability to hold up to the heat of reentry.

  Just two months before Taylor’s presentation, Columbia had disintegrated as it returned to Earth, scattering debris across Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. For the next few weeks, Taylor had one parent or the other drive him out after school to search for pieces of the wreckage. Authorities had warned the public not to touch anything because the parts could be radioactive, so Taylor brought along a toy robot grabber-arm from the NASA gift shop, which he figured he’d use if he found something. “So I wouldn’t actually touch it, but I would pick it up.”

  Taylor had studied aerospace accidents from a scientific angle, but Columbia was, he says, “an emotional thing; it had a big impact on me. Space was my thing; I actually felt like I was part of the NASA family. I wasn’t scared or deterred by the accident, but it made me think about the responsibility that people who build things like the shuttle have. More than anything, I felt like I needed to be involved to make sure it didn’t happen again.”

  As the end of Taylor’s third-grade year approached, astronaut was still the first word that came out when anyone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. But it was becoming increasingly clear that Taylor didn’t want to just ride in space chariots; he wanted to build them too. Now he was tweaking his kit rockets, playing with different engines and wrappings, fine-tuning fins, experimenting with ways to minimize drag, maximize thrust, boost altitude. Before long he’d moved beyond kits and was building rockets from scratch. With his grandmother’s blessing, he took over a corner of her garage and set up a table that was soon strewn with tubes, parachutes, and engines. Each afternoon after school, he’d jump out of his mom’s car and sprint toward his rocket laboratory, Tiffany’s shouted reminders to have a snack fading behind him.

  Taylor had been learning mostly by trial and error, but the pace of his progress was frustrating. If his rockets were going to fly higher, he’d need to more precisely tune the aerodynamics and weight dynamics. Among the trickier challenges was keeping the center of gravity ahead of the center of pressure (the center point of the aerodynamic forces), which can be complicated, since both centers change constantly throughout a flight. To inform his technique, he sent away for advanced books and consulted rocketry sites on the Internet. He learned how to calculate center of pressure and find the velocity a given rocket needs to be aerodynamically stable as it comes off the launch rod. Once he knew how much acceleration was necessary, he could figure out the required thrust and then pair the rocket with the right motor.

  At the time, Taylor says, he didn’t think of what he was doing as applied physics. “I just wanted my rockets to go higher.”

  But as his hand-built rockets got bigger, Taylor started running up against the cost and thrust limitations of hobby-shop engines. “What I really wanted to do,” he says, “was build me those big rockets they shoot off in the Black Rock Desert, where they need to get FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] clearance to launch.” Hoping to stretch his allowance and singing money, Taylor began to reverse-engineer his store-bought engines, taking them apart and analyzing their nozzles, propellants, and ignition systems. “At that point,” he says, “I realized I could probably make my own engines, even my own fuels.”

  To do that, he’d need to delve deeper into the raw materials of propulsion. He’d need to break down propellants into their components and understand, on a molecular level, how they combined and interacted. In other words, he’d need to master chemistry. Taylor pinned up two posters of the periodic table of the elements, one in his bedroom and one in his garage rocket factory. Within a week he’d memorized all the elements’ atomic numbers, masses, and melting points. That summer, Kenneth’s company was consolidating production with another distributor and moving the bottling line offsite. Whenever Taylor visited the Coke plant, he’d notice a piece of surplus equipment he could use for his lab and would pester his dad to let him bring it home.

  Taylor brought a second table into the garage and topped it with his newly acquired burners, flasks, incubators, and petri dishes. When his parents upgraded their kitchen, Taylor claimed the old stove. What he couldn’t find at the Coke plant, his grandmother would usually buy him, especially safety gear and books. By the time school started again, Taylor’s lab had taken over the entire garage, and his grandmother’s car was relegated to the driveway. Nell told Tiffany and Kenneth that she didn’t mind; she was happy to encourage her grandson’s hobby. That Christmas, she bought Taylor a white chemist’s lab coat with his name embroidered over the pocket.

  One of the few discoveries Taylor made at the Texarkana Public Library was a reference to an article in Scientific American describing a way to image an ant’s brain using a microscope and household chemicals. Taylor learned that the article was part of the magazine’s classic Amateur Scientist columns. For more than seventy years, the series had shown do-it-yourselfers how to create sophisticated science projects on an amateur’s budget. Credited (along with the space race and various governmental and philanthropic initiatives) with fueling the mid-twentieth-century citizen-science movement, C. L. Stong’s and Jearl Walker’s DIY articles on how to build lasers, electron microscopes, and even a cyclotron kick-started many a science-fair project and inspired countless young people to pursue scientific careers.

  “When I got ahold of a secondhand CD-ROM collection of those columns, my life changed,” Taylor says. “I realized there were these world-class experiments that cost millions in top laboratories that you could replicate at home.” Taylor’s lab work shifted into high gear. One week, he was culturing cell lines; the next, he was sorting molecules with electricity or producing glow-in-the-dark b
acteria by isolating the gene that made jellyfish bioluminescent and inserting it into E. coli cells. When he needed a chemical he couldn’t buy—such as crystalline iodine, a powerful reducing agent useful in many chemistry applications, including illegal methamphetamine production—he figured out how to synthesize his own by combining and processing other chemicals.

  Following the magazine column’s recipe, Taylor started his own biodiesel-production facility. He tried to convince Kenneth to let him run the Coca-Cola fleet off his homebrewed fuel, “but my dad made a cost justification that if I ruined a vehicle, it would be thousands of dollars.”

  Mostly, though, Taylor was experimenting with propellants for his rockets, one of which was his biggest yet, a four-foot-long monster nearly as tall as the nine-year-old himself. “It was sort of like Rocket Boys, but a one-man show,” Taylor says, referring to Homer Hickam’s memoir (adapted into the movie October Sky) about teenage rocketeers in a 1950s Tennessee mining town.

  Like Hickam and his buddies, Taylor tried dozens of combinations of fuels and oxidizers: various black powder mixes; ammonium perchlorate composites such as those used on the space shuttle; even “rocket candy,” a blend of powdered sugar and an oxidizer such as potassium nitrate. “It’s basically edible rocket fuel,” Taylor explains, “and it’s actually quite energetic—and a whole lot cheaper than anything you can buy off the shelf.”

  For rocket candy to achieve the proper, putty-like consistency, its ingredients must be heated, dissolved, and mixed correctly. Taylor experimented with various fuel/oxidizer ratios, trying to pinpoint the perfectly peppy mix, but his rocket-candy propulsion program sputtered when a boil-over ruined his lab’s stove. A few weeks later, he wrecked a secondhand replacement stove his grandmother had bought him.