San Dimas man dreams of recycled space station

SAN DIMAS - The only movie Gene Meyers ever bought was "Field of Dreams." In it, actor Kevin Costner's character mortgages his house to build a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.

Meyers, 47, of San Dimas, has a dream, too. But his goes beyond corn, peanuts and Cracker Jack. He want to build a space station from used shuttle parts, specifically, from the spent fuel tanks.

If successful, it would be the most ambitious aluminum can recycling project ever undertaken.

Meyers wrote his book, "ET-Solutions: Detroit's Competitive Secret," that every time the shuttle ejects the huge, external tank, or ET, it simply plummets into the Indian Ocean.

In fact, the ocean floor is littered with aluminum chunks from these 747-sized hollow obelisks.

Picking up an idea developed by NASA in the late 1970's, Meyers wants those tanks left in space, then joined end-to-end in a ring-shaped space station that could support 500 people

But Meyers doesn't stop there. In fact, the industrial engineer with the boyhood dream of space travel, says the station idea "sizzles" with American opportunism that could re-ignite a burned-out U.S. economy by creating thousands of new aerospace jobs.

During a recent lecture at Cal Poly Pomona, Meyers listed an almost unending string of benefits a permanent station would bring. These included development of a lunar tourism trade made possible by slinging the station orbit around the Earth and the Moon.

"It would develop a tourist trade on the Moon. The entire station would literally fly to the moon and drop people off on a base there," he said.

Meyers also proposed a way to solve the drought. By hoisting gigantic mirrors up from the station, they could reflect sunlight onto Earth's oceans, creating clouds and more rain.

This out-of-this-world scheme could be controlled so that it would rain in the West on Wednesday but be sunny for the weekends. Likewise, winter temperatures in New England could be raised to a temperate 55 degrees, thereby lessening the demand for heating oil and reducing acid rain, he said.

"The environmental benefits would be spectacular," he said.

But Meyers' bright-eyed optimism was not entirely shared by engineering students half his age, who doubted the wide-ranging benefits of the ET station.

On the other hand, the students said the recycled space station itself was a sound idea that should be pursued.

Meyers, who spent $50,000 to publish the book and bankroll his marketing tour, is quite serious. The soft-spoken, gentle man said the ideas have been considered by experts and are workable with the cooperation of industry and Congress.

"The mid-level managers at NASA are very enthusiastic about this. They've got plans you wouldn't believe stuck in drawers," Meyers said.

James Hartsfield, a spokesman for the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said: "ETs as space stations - there have been a lot of studies done on that."

But NASA dropped the idea when budgets got tight. Now, it is asking Congress to approve what Meyers calls "a Winnebago-sized" Freedom Space station at a cost of $30 billion. Meyers says by using the existing ETs, the larger ring-shaped station would cost only $5 billion.

Today, on the day the space shuttle was scheduled to be launched, it appears Congress is against funding the Freedom Station. "If Congress kills the Freedom Station, it would open the doors for NASA to say, all right, what about this one?" Meyers said.

In the meantime, Meyers follows a quixotic trail - on radio talk shows and college campuses - not leaving a single windmill in his path. He is driven by a childlike desire to see space and fulfull a dream of his father, Walter Meyers, who worked at Aerojet in Azusa.

When his father died last year, he told Gene to do whatever he wanted with his inheritance. Gene went for the dream: "I could've bought a new car for myself or I could've done this. If I find this idea does not catch on, I want to be able to say I went down every single avenue and knocked on every single door."

"They say one man can't change anything. I'll tell you in six months."