Robert Truax
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Captain Robert C. Truax (USN) (1917 – ?) was a rocket engineer in the U.S. military and later in the private sector with companies such as Aerojet and his own company, Truax Engineering. He developed a number of pioneering rocket systems including the Sea Bee. Truax was a major proponent of low-cost rocket engine and vehicle designs.
Truax conducted his first rocket experiments as early as 1932. As a teenager, he read about Robert Goddard in Popular Mechanics magazine and was inspired to build his own rocket while residing in Alameda, California.
In 1936, Truax began experiments with liquid-fuel rockets while at the United States Naval Academy. In 1938, he showed a thrust chamber that he had constructed to the British Interplanetary Society and wrote technical reports, which were published by the American Rocket Society. In 1939, Truax graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering. During the war he first served on CV-6 Enterprise and a destroyer, before moving to BuAir. There he developed a successful liquid fuel JATO unit that was used for some time before the introduction of solid fuel units.[1]
After the war, Truax's knowledge of rocketry led to him being "loaned" to General Bernard A. Schriever, then in charge of missile development in the US Air Force. Truax led the Thor IRBM project between 1955 and 1958, before returning to the Navy to work on Viking and Polaris. It was during his work on Polaris that be became interested in the idea of launching rockets from the ocean.
He retired from active service in 1959 and joined Aerojet where he led the Advanced Development Division. Here he developed his ideas for a "big dumb booster", a very large rocket that would be cheap to operate for a variety of reasons, including being launched from the water. Experiments running engines under water were entirely successful, but plans to build the massive Sea Dragon design came to nothing when NASA closed their Future Projects office in the late 1960s, a victim of budget cuts as the Vietnam War was winding down.
In 1966 Truax left Aerojet to found his own company, Truax Engineering. Here he continued his work on the sea launch concept, developing a smaller design known as Excalibur. Exalibur was followed by the similar SEALAR and the smaller Excalibur S.
Truax became known to the American public as Evel Knievel's engineer. Working to allow Knievel to jump the Snake River Canyon, he designed the steam-propelled Skycycle X-2. Truax tested his design twice, on April 15, 1972 and again on June 24, 1973, but both attempts failed. Due to the great expense of the rockets, no more tests were conducted. On September 8, 1974 Knievel was launched in Truax's Skycycle, which immediately failed, crashing into the Snake River bank and nearly killing him. It was determined that a design flaw caused the parachute to deploy at launch, putting it in the exhaust path.
After the Snake River failure, Truax turned to a small "Volksrocket" design for sub-orbital space tourism flights. Funding was never available in the amounts needed to develop the project, and although the engine was test fired and a mockup built, the design never flew.
He had four children with his first wife, Rosalind Truax, two children with his second wife, Sally Truax, and is now married to Marisol Truax.
[edit] Trivia
Truax's legendary history as an independent rocketry system developer was such that it was used as the basis for the TV show Salvage 1 starring Andy Griffith as a junk yard owner who built his own orbital craft. While the incidents portrayed were highly implausible for the time period that they show ran, the premise based on Truax's history and the potential for those incidents as future possibilities were, and remain, possible.
