How Evel Knievel Helped to Spur a Revolution in Commercial Spaceflight
Chapter 3: Red Moon Rising Serialization
Over the next few months, I will be sharing insights from my new book, with Peter Navarro, Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier on this Substack. Today, I’m offering you a few sneak peeks into the chapter on the surprising history of Commercial Space. You can find the full book on Amazon or if you subscribe I’ll release full chapters here. Enjoy!
A Stuntman and a Fruitcake
Robert Craig Knievel was as crazy as they come. The self-promoting stuntman, known to the public as “Evel Knievel,” was famous for trying to jump Harley-Davidson motorcycles over cars, buses, fountains, and even tanks filled with live sharks.
In the process, he suffered an extensive list of broken bones. Knievel’s biggest dream had always been to jump over the Grand Canyon. Unsurprisingly, the US Department of the Interior had jurisdiction over most of the canyon and did not share the stuntman’s enthusiasm with killing himself on federal land. Alluding to another passion of his, Evel used a 1968 interview in Sports Illustrated to respond to his detractors:
I don’t care if they say, ‘Look, kid, you’re going to drive that thing off the edge of the Canyon and die,’ I’m going to do it. I want to be the first. If they’d let me go to the moon, I’d crawl all the way to Cape Kennedy just to do it. I’d like to go to the Moon, but I don’t want to be the second man to go there.
Knievel moved his sights to Idaho’s Snake River Canyon. He selected a 1,600-foot gap downstream from Hell’s Canyon and leased land on which to conduct the stunt. Now all he needed was a motorcycle that could make the leap. His previous longest attempt, a failure at Caesar’s Palace, was just 141 feet. It would take a rocket to cross that canyon. Robert “Bob” Truax was a young naval officer inspired by the work of Robert Goddard. In the 1930s, he began building his own rockets and liquid-fueled rocket engines. During his career in the military, Truax led the teams that developed the first hypergolic (self-igniting) propellants, the JATO (rocket-assisted take-off packs for planes), and worked on the Polaris missile. Moving to the private sector, Truax headed design of Aerojet’s Sea Dragon, a huge orbital rocket that would have launched from a silo afloat at sea. In 1996, he founded his own firm, Truax Engineering, with the crazy idea of pursing commercial rocket development outside the military-industrial complex.
Working on a project started by Doug Malewicki, Truax built the Skycycle X-2 for Evel Knievel’s canyon jump. While the Skycycle did have two wheels, the vehicle was far more rocket than motorcycle. On the morning of September 8, 1974, Evel sat semi-recumbent inside a sleek aeroshell with large tail fins pointed skyward on a steeply inclined launch rail. A huge crowd had been gathering on the east side of the canyon for days. There was a party-like atmosphere filled with an eclectic mix of RV campers, motorcycle gangs, and hippies. Evel’s steam-powered rocket vaulted into the air, leaving a white trail of steam against the blue Idaho sky. As the Skycycle climbed, its trajectory looked perfect, but partway across the canyon, the recovery parachute prematurely deployed. Evel and the Skycycle crashed into the canyon. Despite the failure, Truax’s design was solid. In 2016, stuntman Eddie Braun flew a replica Skycycle X-2 named Evel Spirit across Snake River Canyon at 400 mph. The new Skycycle was built by Bob Truax’s son, Scott.
When Evel emerged from the canyon, bruised and battered but not seriously injured, he sauntered up to Truax and said, “Well Bob, that’s going to be one hell of a hard act to follow. What else you got up your sleeve?” Bob had a rocket up his sleeve.
Truax’s real passion was his Project Private Enterprise, which would develop commercial space launch vehicles and fly paying “space tourists” on suborbital spaceflights above the fifty-mile limit on a vehicle called the “Volksrocket.” Knievel agreed to give Truax a million bucks if the stuntman could become the first civilian in space. Unfortunately, Knievel’s motorcycle jumping career was waning, and he failed to deliver more than a few thousand dollars for the rocket project. Truax, however, continued to pursue funding for his Volksrocket. Always having a sense of humor, he ran one ad titled, “Wanted: risky capital for risky project.” The government had no interest in commercial spaceflight, and Truax remarked, “NASA doesn’t talk to me. They think I’m nutty as a fruitcake.”