THE WIZARD BUILDS A STARSHIP PROJECT PHOENIX — BOOK THREE: FROM WAREHOUSE TO STARSHIP Designing, Prototyping, Assembling, and Testing Phoenix in the Real World

By Robert Colee

- The Day the Starship Needed a Tape Measure
The Wizard had spent a great deal of time thinking about impossible distances.
Mars.
Jupiter.
Saturn.
The outer planets.
Perhaps someday the stars.
He had thought about relativity, artificial intelligence, radiation, propulsion, life support, robots, farms, workshops, medicine, civilization, and the strange philosophical question of what it would mean for humanity finally to become a species living on more than one world.
Two books had grown from those thoughts.
Book One asked:
What must a starship contain?
Book Two asked:
How could that starship become self-reliant enough to support human civilization far from Earth?
Then something wonderfully ordinary happened.
The Wizard went looking at warehouses.
Suddenly the stars had to meet the loading dock.

Three Companies and One Very Large Idea
The Wizard had been wandering through his local area looking at commercial properties that might someday provide a common home for three enterprises:
Global Robotics Corporation, where advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, instrumentation, electronics, and experimental engineering could be developed.
Interplanetary Trading Company, where materials, equipment, components, surplus goods, logistics, sourcing, warehousing, and trade could be handled.
And Global Handyman LLC, where practical fabrication, construction, repair, installation, modification, maintenance, and the thousands of ordinary physical jobs behind ambitious projects could take place.
The Wizard liked the combination.
One organization could invent things.
Another could find and move things.
The third could fix things.
That sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a shipyard.
The properties he examined contained wonderful open warehouse spaces.
Concrete floors.
Steel structures.
Loading docks.
Truck access.
Roll-up doors.
Electrical service.
Storage areas.
Offices.
Places where forklifts could wander around carrying things that weighed considerably more than Dizzy.
And that was when Dizzy asked the question.
"Wizard?"
"Yes?"
"How big is Phoenix?"
The Wizard stopped.
Shadow the cat, had she been present, probably would not have considered this mysterious at all.
Cats understood dimensional engineering perfectly.
If the cat fit into the box, the box was large enough.
Humans had somehow complicated the subject.

We Forgot to Measure the Spaceship
The Wizard thought about the question.
For two books they had discussed Phoenix as though everybody somehow knew what Phoenix looked like.
There were crew quarters.
A bridge.
A medical bay.
A workshop.
A farm.
Airlocks.
Storage.
Computers.
Life-support equipment.
Water tanks.
Power systems.
Scientific instruments.
Propulsion.
Robots.
Spacesuits.
Small auxiliary spacecraft.
And enough machinery to keep a small community alive millions of miles from the nearest hardware store.
But how big was the thing?
Thirty feet?
Sixty?
A hundred?
Was Phoenix shaped like an aircraft?
A submarine?
A cylinder?
A collection of cylinders?
A central spine with modules attached?
Could it fit through a warehouse door?
Could it travel down a highway?
Could a tractor-trailer carry a section of it?
Could it be assembled indoors?
Would the completed spacecraft have to be assembled outside?
Or perhaps Phoenix should never be completely assembled on Earth at all.
The Wizard looked at Dizzy.
"You have discovered a rather serious omission."
Dizzy smiled.
He enjoyed discovering omissions considerably more than fixing them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HDWX2GS6
• ISBN13: 9798192194232
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 2.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 1.1" x 8.5"