Fair’s ideas about EML soon drew the attention of military ­researchers in Washington, D.C. In December 1978, the Defense Department invited him to brief a gathering of top U.S. intelligence and military leaders. Renaming his “Nutty Ideas” project the “National Advisory Panel on Electromagnetic Propulsion,” he told the attendees of EML’s enormous promise for artillery, aircraft launchers, missile defense, fusion energy—and, of course, space launch.

Fair’s pitch succeeded—sort of. Over the next two years, he was able to fund EML research with, he says, “peanuts—$100K or two.” He distributed the money among the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory (at MIT), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Westinghouse R&D Center, and his own Picatinny Arsenal.

More significantly, he organized (under the auspices of the IEEE) the first of what would become biennial symposia on electro­magnetic launch. Over the years, papers delivered at the symposia not only helped move the field forward but also sparked interest in far-flung parts of the globe. “This body of research is what the Chinese and all new folks to the field now use as the basic resource,” says Fair.

At least one project Fair funded had a checkered past. In the early 1970s, Princeton University physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill had gotten enthusiastic about EML. NASA’s Apollo missions were still in full swing, and O’Neill dreamed of building entire cities in orbit. In the August 1974 issue of Physics Today, he described floating colonies built of cylinders 6 km wide and 26 km long, and inside of them, picturesque towns with meadows, lakes, sunshine, and even clouds.

Rather than rocketing construction materials into space, he proposed mining lunar rock and then shipping it to an orbiting manufacturing plant. The rock would be moved around by a solar-powered EM launcher—much cheaper than shipping rocket fuel to the moon, he reasoned. Best of all, O’Neill concluded, rather dubiously, these colonies could be created “with existing technology.”

Someone in NASA apparently agreed, because in 1976 the space agency awarded a $50 000 contract to O’Neill and MIT professor Henry Kolm, part of which they used to build a coilgun. Called the Mass Driver I, the 8-meter-long device had its public debut at Princeton, in the lobby of Chadwin Hall, where a conference on space colonies was taking place. A student fished a copper-coil-wrapped bucket—the gun’s projectile—out of a tub of liquid nitrogen, slid it into the barrel, and bang! The crowd erupted in applause as the bucket appeared instantaneously, or so it seemed, at the far end of the gun, colliding with a thud into a padded barrier that kept it from flying the length of the lobby. Kolm estimated the bucket reached a peak speed of 63 m/s. Though the performance was many orders of magnitude below the theoretical upper limit for EML, the experiment was declared a success.

To build Mass Driver II would require more funding, but before NASA could approve it, Wisconsin senator William Proxmire got wind of O’Neill’s space colonies idea. Famed for his “Golden Fleece” awards for government spending he deemed wasteful, Proxmire went on television to proclaim “not another penny for this nutty fantasy.” NASA quickly pulled the plug on all its space colonies projects, including the Mass Driver.

Fair, though, believed the project was worth continuing, and in 1979 he contacted O’Neill and Kolm and said he’d fund their work.

Then Fair came across Richard Marshall. Shortly after his record-setting railgun test in Australia, Marshall, too, had lost his funding. He left the university, moved to the United States, and got a job with Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, where Fair found him in 1979.

Fair, Marshall, Kolm, and their associates now had to confront the enormous technical problems that electromagnetic guns pose. First and foremost is the power supply. Your garden-variety diesel generator won’t work. All railguns and coilguns require a power source that can generate, store, and then emit an enormous burst of current—anywhere from 500 000 to many millions of amperes in a few milliseconds. Marshall had used a homopolar generator, so named because its magnetic field has the same polarity at every point. Just like any generator, it converts rotational mechanical energy into electrical energy. But instead of continuously converting the kinetic energy into electrical energy, the homopolar generator’s rotors store the energy up and then release it in a several-millisecond pulse. Another early railgun experiment called for hooking together thousands of lead-acid car batteries to supply the requisite juice.

Dumping that much current so quickly raises other problems. To begin with, you need a very-large-diameter cable to deliver so much current—anything smaller would melt. The switch, too, has to be specially designed to prevent a massive arc that would otherwise destroy the switch the instant it was thrown. And in the case of a coilgun, where you’re switching the coils on and off in rapid succession, it’s easy to mistime the switching, which in turn can make the projectile wobble. Too much wobble and it won’t leave the barrel at anything close to the target velocity and may also collide with and damage the barrel.

Needless to say, railguns also have a tendency to self-destruct. The high-velocity projectile and armature gouge the rails, and the magnetic fields put a tremendous strain on the rails as they try to force themselves apart. Researchers have considered using superconducting magnets to generate the strong fields needed, but existing superconductors are too brittle and can’t withstand large, rapid changes in their magnetic fields.

Even the projectiles are a subject of intense inquiry. They leave the barrel at such high velocity that when they hit the air, they tend to flatten, burn up, or shatter. That’s why Marshall and others used small, nonconducting pieces of plastic. But for real-world uses, you’d like some way of guiding the projectile to its final destination, tens or hundreds of kilometers away. To send a satellite into space, for instance, you’d equip the payload with some sort of second-stage rocket to insert it into the proper orbit once the payload left the atmosphere. But the conventional electronics of the 1970s couldn’t survive the massive acceleration that an electromagnetic gun produces.