Astronomy’s Shocking Twist and Orbital Ring Engineering: Origin Story

My Early Years

I remember being glued to the TV on July 16, 1969. I was 6 years old. No one else in my family was interested. I was obsessed with Star Trek and knew I wanted to be a scientist. When I was 12, we moved to the Netherlands. I grew up on a farm. We had horses, cows and chickens. It was beautiful. My mom had 9 brothers and sisters, and my dad had 10. They had lots of kids. Almost all of them lived in the Netherlands. The building was relatively cheap to buy, but it needed a lot of work. Every weekend was a work weekend. The kids would sleep in the hay attics. A typical dinner during the week was for 13; on weekends it was often 50. I have lots of aunts, uncles and cousins. We grew almost all of our own food.

Instead of high school, I went to a trade school. I wanted to study electronics, but was placed in building technology. I know a lot about concrete. My first job was at an architects office in The Netherlands. It was called Architect Buro Theo Teeken. 

My family moved back to California in 1982 when the company my dad worked for relocated him back to their headquarters. My family moved to Fremont, California. I took a room in San Francisco with a group of people who threw events for a living. It was a magical time.

Science and Physics Education Lead to Fun and Technology

I did not go to university until I was 25. I started at Heald Institute of Technology, where I studied electronics. That’s when I remembered my dreams as a child. I became obsessed. From there I went to Ohlone College, where I majored in math, physics and chemistry. I was top of my class in all 3 subjects. From there I went to the University of California, Berkeley.

Chaos theory was a big thing back then. I signed up for every lecture they would let me in. I also joined the Hydrogen Energy Association and went to several conferences. In 1991, I transferred to the University of Amsterdam, where I also studied physics. I spent ‌5 years between the two universities, but never graduated. I was already in my 30s and a divorce threw me for a loop. Life happens.

In 1996 I overheard a conversation about Burning Man at Inn of the Beginning in Cotati, California. The couple were heading out to the desert that evening and asked me if I wanted to go. My car was always packed with camping gear, so less than 24 hours later I was at Burning Man 1996. I met a lot of people that year, but 1997 was when I really got involved with the event. I met many of my long-term friends that year. This year, 2025, was my 27th Burning Man. I look at the event as an annual family reunion.

On October 31, 1996, I was listening to Jerry Brown’s radio show, We The People on KPFA Radio in Berkeley. I thought to myself that I wanted to meet this guy, so I knocked on his door. Jerry Brown opened the door personally and asked me if I knew how to flier. I said yes. He handed me a stack of flyers and said, go flier the Clinton campaign. I did.

Afterwards I returned and he offered me one of the 13 lofts in his live/work space. I worked on his events and his radio show for the next several months. Once he decided to run for mayor of Oakland, he had to unwind his non-profit, so he quit the radio show and everyone had to leave. I stayed in Oakland working with Linda Lowrence, Jerry Brown’s event producer, for the next year and a half. She lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and we see each other on a regular basis here.

My Burning Man theme camp, The Hammock Hangout, also became quite large and grew to 150 people. The structure had room for ‌90 hammocks. Karaoke was my business, but physics was my hobby. I had an oscilloscope and played with electronics and made things like coil guns and Mendocino motors for fun.

The Hammock Hangout theme camp at Burning Man 2005. Photo by Paul G. de Jong.

My Obsession with Space Finally takes Center Stage

In 2015 I became inspired by Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel. I started writing these stories back in 2015 after seeing an Isaac Arthur YouTube video about orbital rings and reading a Wired Magazine article about artificial spider silk machines. To me, it was like peanut butter and chocolate.

I also read Andy Weir‘s The Martian around that time. Isaac Arthur‘s Science and Futurism YouTube channel turned me on to Gerard K. O’Neill‘s seminal work, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. It became yet another catalyst for the science and technology books of the Astronomy’s Shocking Twist series’ technology books, the first being Orbital Ring Engineering. My reading went from economics and politics back to science and science fiction.

The original inspiration for this book is the Orbital Rings & Space Elevators video by Isaac Arthur. I wanted to know what was really possible and understand the real physics behind building such an advanced engineering challenge.

During the covid years, I immersed myself in electromagnetism, nuclear physics, plasma physics, and superconductivity. I designed a high-powered ion accelerator that forms the basis of the Astronomy Shocking Twist series’ second technical volume, Ion Propulsion Engineering. Orbital Ring Engineering is the first technical book in the series, combining decades of entrepreneurial problem-solving with my renewed scientific focus to explore one of humanity’s boldest engineering challenges, a megastructure I believe humanity will build within the next 200 years.

There were many stops and starts. I wrote several papers, and tried turning them into a novel, trying a bunch of different storyline ideas, but none of them stuck. The plot for the Astronomy Shocking Twist series hit me like a sledgehammer in September 2024, and I have been working like mad on it ever since.

Everything I’d done over the years – physics, startups, Burning Man, even karaoke – suddenly tied together in one direction: writing science fiction that actually respects science.

So much of what’s called hard science fiction still takes liberties with physics. I loved The Expanse series, but the Epstein drive always pulled me out of it. The thrust-to-mass ratios just didn’t add up. I wanted to write stories that didn’t need to break the laws of physics or reasonable engineering constraints to be exciting.

During the covid years, I wrote several technical papers on ion accelerators and spacecraft propulsion systems. Those ideas became the backbone of the engineering volumes, starting with Orbital Ring Engineering and continuing into Ion Propulsion Engineering. The five technical books will lay the groundwork – the technologies, the politics, the economics – while the five science fiction novels will explore what happens when humanity actually tries to build them. For me, this isn’t about predicting the far future – it’s about mapping a plausible one.

As the inner cable is forced to curve around Earth, it continually tries to fly straight. The magnetic bearing locks the stationary casing to the cable, exerting an inward force to keep it on course, and the cable pushes back outward with equal intensity. In this sense, the orbital ring is not a static structure but a dynamic equilibrium, a balance between gravity pulling down and momentum pushing out.