“A severely disabled grad student tries to save his science from extinction.”
BASED ON A TRUE STORY.
(Originally called CRASHDOWN.)
Synopsis
A licensed Professional Engineer is fired from a major consulting engineering firm in Austin, Texas after they discover he’s schizophrenic. A decorated, disabled veteran and alumnus of the US Naval Academy, Truck fights the dismissal but to no avail. He enrolls in grad school at the University of Texas in the Aerospace Engineering Department, studying celestial mechanics. The year is 1997.
Truck’s Ph.D. research project is a computer optimization of the Earth-to-Mars trajectory. A dozen Mars missions had recently failed to land on Mars, so it was a critical challenge for the space community at the time. His computer algorithm finds a faster, safer, more efficient trajectory to Mars. Then they find out he’s schizophrenic. He’s expelled within a matter of weeks, a semester short of a Ph.D.
This time he fights like hell. In addition to the chronic schizophrenia, he develops extreme dry eye that limits his quality visual time to only a few hours each day. This dismissal stands, and he’s banned from campus for life.
T.K. LeForge was the last graduate student at the last university in the world to offer celestial mechanics as a graduate degree. With me, it ends. And the fight goes on.
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Bill H. Clark