Nexus - 0217 - New Times Magazine-pages

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also? JS: Well, all the other 40. Only two of them ran into trouble and produced strychnine and thus only did two years of time. But what the others did was shown. We took many photographs. We were taking photographs here, there and everywhere! We brought the craft back and had the film developed and we had cine films. JT: Did you have them right in orbit or... JS: Yes, from the orbit. I knew more about Australia than any book ever told me! When I wrote to a chap in Australia who thought he knew a lot and started telling him some facts and fig- ures that I knew, he was surprised! JT: Was there a lot of publicity for your work? JS: We do know that the BBC has a lot of film, because they came out every month to continue the story on the work, Now, do you know any other individual that had a regular programme on all channels in the UK? That's four channels. Monday in the first week of the month, the BBC 1 carried on with the story where they left off. They would show you just a little bit of the story from where they left off. They'd show you just a little bit of the story in a flashback and then carried on the story as to how much progress had been made over the month. The following week ITV, an independent TV programme, came along and did theirs. They'd take you back to what they last showed you, bits of it to bring your mind back to what you've seen, and then they would continue the story as to how the progress had gone. And we had been doing this for a whole year! In there, there were some flight shots showing the craft going up through the trees into airborne, and they played the music to the movie 2001 to it. They played me against the Americans’ effort. All the American failures were kind of chipped and worked in to make it a good comical game, but that was perhaps the bad part about it. It might make people laugh at American failures and we're racing away with a complete new technology. They were playing on this and, of course when they eventually went to the Moon, we were only three months away from proceeding with a manned flight. JT: I was just looking at your lecture again and you said you were in an explosion. Was that when you were building one of these? something like forty-five degrees away from it. JT: Oh, that's a nice feature! JS: Yes, it turns away and takes an entirely different route. Just one thing has to be brought to mind, if you're racing in a space- ship into space and a great chunk of rock is coming towards you, the craft has to sum up whichever object has higher kinetic energy, whether the oncoming object has higher kinetic energy than the craft has. If it has, then the craft has to move out of the way. But if its energy is greater than the energy of the rock, then the rock will move out of the way. It will be deflected. JT: Well either way you don't hit it. That's good! JS: We used to rush models towards my home to show that it can't hit the building. As soon as it gets close to the building, the field pushes it away. JT: Were there ever any manned flights of your craft? JS: No. None was manned. Because of the vacuum created by the machine, it would make life-support systems necessary and the cost was too much. There were six craft lost before the radio-con- trolled P-11 was flown. JT: You had two units, 21 and 22, Were they both in orbit for two years? JS: Oh yes! Most of the craft were really up there 10 years before we got rid of them. JT: You had some up there for 10 years? JS: Yes. Of course once they had done what we wanted to know, we can't really do anything else with them unless we were going to expose them, And we couldn't do that until we had enough information that would allow us to man one. You see media are, shall we say, ignorant people, technologically. When they see something going on, they can't see why you can't man them. And if you can't man them, they start giving you bad pub- licity, and cause governments to stamp down on you. JT: I thought the longest ones in space were 2 years. JS: Ohno! Most of the craft you can say were credited with a good ten years of flight time. The two we talk about for 2 years were testing basically the new nylon body material which went into strychnine. And we had to discontinue this fibreglass materi- al of those days. JT: That was 21 and 22, but all the others stayed up a long time NEXUS*47 DECEMBER 1993 - JANUARY 1994