Alex Thatcher

Alex Thatcher has led a most absurd life, down many disparate paths, which he blends into all of his stories. Literally, the absurdity begins from the day he was born. On the front page of the paper with his birth announcement is the story of a UFO sighting. It’s about a man chasing a UFO all across Indiana in a truck. Sound familiar? It might, because the real-life story was later used in the beginning of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It continues to this day, such as having dinner under the space shuttle Endeavor while chatting with space industry leaders.

His first years of life were spent surrounded by a family of autodidactic polymath farmers who also worked day jobs in the Electronics industry. In addition to that there was a Grandpa on his Mom’s side who had been a chemist with no degree while simultaneously a racecar track owner, who would go on to sell tractors and cars from his own dealerships. On his Dad’s was a Grandma who was an artist, a painter, and had worked on an assembly line as an electronics assembler since World War Two. She once soldered together a Heathkit television set in the living room while Grandpa, a superb Navy chef, made Thanksgiving dinner from scratch - a man who had started from nothing as an orphan. Already being in this environment, and then put in a very unique pre-school at age three, Alex learned Spanish as a second language, music, art, ABCs, math and numbers before even setting foot in a real school kindergarten. At age three he also learned to ski, and at age four, he was in the paper for being the youngest runner in a local six-mile race. It was no wonder, as improbable as it might seem, that by second grade, he was attending college, in summer school, learning computer programming, basic logic and reasoning and that was just the first nine years....

Aside from his first sci-fi book, Meat Market. He created the now decades old comic “Infinity Club”, which led to Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica comic proposals. He also wrote award winning stories such as "Stump", "Skunk Creek", and "Under", and non-fiction magazine articles such as “How not to Canoe” and “Snow Foot”. This created an opportunity to work for a DARPA RFP looking for writers and creatives, whose primary details were published the next year by astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison in the book 100 Year Starship 2012 Symposium Conference Proceedings.

Able to conceive of infeasibly improbable ideas, explain the way to actually make them work, the need for them, such as bamboo for starships and organic carbon fibers substitutes, Alex worked his way into a space development paper and presentation at AIAA’s SpaceOps 2014 to establish IP. It including a radical idea humorously labeled Foameroid. The topic of many presentations at the event was asteroid capture and proposals around doing such. The Foameroid wasn’t just capture, but living in it and examining it from the inside out after hitting it with a penetrating warhead that filled the asteroid with expanding foam.

He would go on to work with NASA and their ISAS program (Idaho Science and Aerospace Scholars) teaching one of their classes for students in the program. A program, which allowed select High School Juniors to take additional online NASA-developed courses on Space Exploration, culminating with a trip to NASA Ames upon completion, for a tour and several days experiencing what people in the Space Industry work on.

He would even work with Space India to provide several articles such as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. In it, he detailed step by step, how to build a 1/18 model space module from cardboard and spare parts, for kids based on the AIAA SpaceOps presentation. The same model could be seen when he was interviewed by ABC news about his proposal at SpaceOps.

While most of his focus has been on research papers, he's focusing, once again, on fiction. Beginning with the re-release of Meat Market as a 13th anniversary edition, which includes an all-new bonus chapter, he'll also be releasing a compilation of his previous short stories with some new material. His next new fiction work, a serial, will be coming soon and will incorporate all that he's learned since 2005 about the Space Industry and all kinds of made up fun too.