What better time than the Fourth of July weekend to remind you that Twin Falls can brag about its own rocket man?

He’s Gary Bennett, a 71-year-old, Twin Falls-born, Boise-bred aeronautical scientist and engineer now retired to Emmett. He worked for NASA and the Department of Energy on advanced space propulsion systems, including the Voyager (exploring Jupiter and Saturn), Galileo (Jupiter) and Ulysses (the sun) missions.

For a spacefaring-minded fellow, Bennett had the good fortune to be 17 years old in 1957.

That was the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human-made object to orbit the Earth. Bennett was transfixed.

“I have to credit my grandmother and the Flash Gordon comics I read as a kid for my interest in space,” Bennett told the Idaho Statesman’s Tim Woodward in 2007. “When my grandmother told me that stars were suns, my universe expanded. And Flash Gordon was able to travel to the stars. We needed better propulsion to do that, and I figured that would be the (Boise Rocket Research Society’s) contribution. As if a bunch of teenagers from a town of 35,000 would be the ones to invent it.”

He and three other members of the society got together on the night of Sputnik’s launch and listened to the satellite beeping on a console radio.

When they weren’t tracking satellites, they were launching rockets, and cooking up fuel to propel them in Bennett’s parents’ basement.

That didn’t always go as planned.

“We were trying potassium chloride and charcoal powder for rocket fuel,” he said. “We didn’t have any charcoal, so my mother suggested grinding up charcoal briquettes in the meat grinder ... It was a classic dust explosion. If you get enough fine, flammable material in the air and get a spark, it will burn. We’d brought in a battery with a wire attached, and when somebody touched the wire the basement just went red.”

Bennett got off relatively easy.

“The backs of my ears were singed,” he told the Statesman.

Bennett would get better at such things. After getting a two-year degree from what was then Boise Junior College in 1960, Bennett earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Idaho in 1962, a master’s in nuclear science from Washington State University in 1966 and a doctorate in physics from WSU in 1970.

Over the next 40 years, he worked at various times for NASA, DOE, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the Idaho National Laboratory and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At NASA, Bennett was a physicist at the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications program at the John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Then he joined NASA headquarters as manager of advanced space power systems in the transportation division of the Office of Advanced Concepts and Technology. There, he managed programs including hybrid propulsion, electric propulsion, low-thrust chemical propulsion, and other advanced propulsion concepts including fusion and antimatter.

You read that correctly, Star Trek fans: fusion and antimatter.

He’s also a science fiction author (The Star Sailors), a passionate advocate of science education and the teaching of evolution, and an outspoken defender of the separation of church and state.

“My hope is that someday we’ll get around Mr. Einstein’s theories and be able to travel to the stars by going faster than light,” he told Woodward. “It doesn’t make sense that there’s so much out there and we’re stuck here.”

Steve Crump is the Times-News Opinion editor.