The entire complex, as I later learned, had been built from the relegated ashes of an old industrial complex, something that the Navy had used. The land was very flat in all directions, and I could view the beach from a small bluff that was within walking distance from the barracks. For days on end that summer I would meander down the dusty road that connected my set of buildings with the beach, and when I finally reached the coast I would sit down on the white sand in the shade of looming bleached palm trees and stare out at the ocean. It was a large and mysterious body of water that lay off shore, neither Atlantic nor Gulf waters. Many times large thunderstorms would blow in from the southwest, and gigantic gray clouds, darkened with their rainy burden, would appear as if by magic, rising from the horizon like ghosts levitating out of a forlorn cemetery. Camp Daisy was a little less than an hour south of Cape Canaveral, and numerous that summer I got to witness a rocket launch. Both times they were spectacular, and since they both happened at night, the fiery explosions and rocketing combustion of jet fuels illuminated the dense cloudbanks that loitered off-shore. I found the entire experience to be very exciting, and even from my sand-dune throne underneath the albino palm trees, I could feel the air quiver from the energy of the launches.
I don’t want to give you a false impression of the nature of my stay in Florida. I found time to admire the natural, sun bleached, wind-swept beauty of the shoreline only during brief periods of respite. Upon arriving I was almost immediately conscripted into the services of a small engineering team that was working on fuel mechanics. At that point, these people were mostly private-contractors. I found that I had gotten myself involved in the beginning stages of a lengthy contract labeled Project Titan that had the primary aim of designing a satellite that was to be launched into low-orbit surveillance around its namesake, the most intriguing moon of Jupiter. The project had been started in the late 90’s by Nasa, but funding had been cut and the project aborted and moved into the basement of the Department of Defense. Apparently, a sub-committee swept up the project in a wide-scale search and rescue of abandoned ideas. On federal orders, they distributed the project to a variety of private contractors and research institutions with the simple idea of choosing the lowest, most cost-efficient bid for a program re-design. Jill couldn’t speak highly enough of this plan. In tones that reflected her exuberant mood and accompanied by a fierce concert of gestures, she would cry out, “The de-centralization of project oversight is essential in maintaining the intellectual integrity of privatized resources in the space program.” She always had something like that to say, and I began to predict, with uncanny accuracy, the type of inspiring or dramatic adjectives she would choose for her next tirade.
The end result of this bureaucratic musical-chairs was that a small firm from California proposed a bid that was a few million dollars shorter than the next guy, and that the federal government had proceeded to make an offer, whereby the funds and resources outlined in the proposal would be guaranteed by the federal government, and all research would be subjected to the oversight and review of the US Air Force. In addition, all research and testing would occur on US military property and there was an additional stipulation that all automobiles involved in the project must be domestic. I remember being very deeply touched by the irony of the situation; we were developing the newest breed of space technology, and we were being told in no uncertain terms that our automobiles must be domestic brands. It was these sorts of decisions that originally prompted my decreased respect for any sort of institutionalized collaboration between the military and the government and the private sector, and Jillian Weinstein capitalized on that fact very quickly.
I was assigned to a small team working out of an old airplane hanger that lay at the far end of an old cracked airstrip lined by palm trees. It was located about 15 minutes away from the camp, and I would often walk there in the morning carrying nothing but a knapsack and several gallons of insect repellant which I used liberally to ward off the hordes of aggressive mosquitoes. On my first day of work, I came dressed in a suit and tie, but quickly learned to wear a simple short sleeve dress shirt, shorts, and shoes. I also learned to do my laundry twice a week, or else the stains from sweat and the constantly pervasive moisture and dirt would become permanent very quickly.
I was working with 8 other guys; most were from the universities or professional industry, but a few were military-types. I found it funny that you could tell who was from the military not by their haircut or the way they dressed, but in the way they programmed their computers. Their code was simple and terse and tended to use unusual strands and language. Civilian engineers tend to flourish their code with unnecessary aesthetic touches. Military engineers wrote programs that were built like tanks; completely ugly but extremely tough. At that time, the project was still in its nascent stage and my team had been assigned to testing the position-control thrusters that would keep the satellite locked into a steady orbit over the relatively mysterious rocky geography of Titan. Our biggest worry was the electromagnetic poles. Very little data had ever been collected on the strength or location of Titan’s poles, and our biggest concern was flying our satellite straight through a magnetic storm and having everything on board knocked out of commission. So we spent a lot of our time in the hangar playing with giant magnets. Like curious school children we giggled while removing metal belts, cuff-links, and (in the case of one military engineer) knives, before entering the testing room were we would place instrumental pieces of the thruster apertures in the middle of large electromagnets and flip the switch. As a result, a large part of the initial work I performed at Camp Daisy ended up being very mundane; we would flip switches and laugh at explosions of sparks and dying machinery and as we played gods controlling domains of circuitry and computer chips we carefully took notes, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of our various creations and modifications. Like gods, we had little mercy for inferior machines and I cannot tell you how many innocents we would ruthlessly smite everyday in that rusty hanger at the end of the airstrip in Florida.
