My father, Harold Kaufman, is in the NASA Hall of Fame for his work on ion rocket engines. Ion propulsion uses vaporized, ionized mercury fired through charged grids. The actual mass of ionized particles is small, so the engine can’t lift a rocket out of the earth’s gravitational pull. But in space, the accelerated particles could theoretically propel a craft at speeds approaching twenty miles per second.

The Kaufman Engine has additional applications, from satellite orbit maintenance to various industrial uses. When I was young, my father brought home versions of his engine. I took them to show-and-tell.

We studied the skies, too. Dad saved lunch money to buy a telescope. Together, we built a wheel-within-a-wheel contraption that, with the help of star charts, could pinpoint locations for the telescope. Saturn. Jupiter. The Pleiades. The Andromeda Galaxy. All a part of my childhood.

In second grade, I designed a rocket, meant to carry me to the moon. Though I’d barely begun construction, I believed it was time to solve the problem of fuel, so I headed to the corner gas station with a five gallon can. Dad quickly put an end to that project, but in its place, we began building model rockets. We discovered Estes, a Colorado company that sold kits and solid fuel. I launched a hundred of these models—some with cameras and payload compartments. (My apologies to the earthworm.)

As an adult, I continued to design rockets, each one sillier than the last. One issue with real rockets involves drag (less drag means better acceleration). But model rockets leap off the launch rod, too fast to follow. I began designing drag into my rockets to make the launches seem more “realistic.”

Dad’s gone now, but my obsession with rockets remains. Like my other obsessions (baseball, the Alamo, blues guitar), I am best at expressing fixation through writing. In September, Black Rose Writing will release my novel Dread Tribunal of Last Resort. Set during the Civil War, the novel follows Decker Brown, a would-be fireworks manufacturer who finds himself part of key moments in Civil War history having to do with rocketry.

The Civil War was an interesting time for technology. Submarine warfare, rocketry, trench warfare and aircraft carriers are things normally associated with other wars. But they were part of the Civil War story.

Civil War rockets were notoriously inaccurate. Great attention was paid to the design of the rocket, and almost none to the fuel. Odd, since black powder propellant had pockets that doled out thrust in fits and starts—a major contributor to that inaccuracy. Decker Brown is interested in what he calls chemisms. This interest is a natural result of his knowledge of illuminations (fireworks), which use various chemical substances to create colored light effects.

A novice rocketeer with unusual ideas was easy to imagine.

Dad was encouraging of all my obsessions. (Though he disliked sports, we played catch most every summer evening.) But the obsession that was closest to his heart involved rockets. When I think back, I think of nights bent over a telescope and rockets hurtling through space. I hope that readers can glean a hint of those wonderful memories through the story of Decker Brown.