To be accurate, the Jehad never had been put in orbit in one piece. Each part, and all of the equipment needed to put those parts together, had been rocketed into orbit from the ground. A team of highly skilled scientists and construction workers had pieced it together, an amazing job considering they had done this in a state of weightlessness. Eight men had lost their lives as a result of punctured spacesuits. The strange thing about the Jehad was that it could never have lifted off the earth under its own power. Although the twelve generators which would drive the Jehad to Mars produced fantastic voltage, their force would not have knocked down a child--in fact, the push from a single motor was about equal to the power exerted by a pigeon in flight. However, it was the most efficient and most economical motor man could use to travel ninety million miles to Mars--which is not the shortest route, but the most practical since it makes use of the earth's motion and the sun's gravitational power. The plasma motor, more correctly the traveling-wave plasma motor, was developed after several years of research at the NASA laboratories near Cleveland, expressly for space propulsion. The first big breakthroughs, which led to the eventual perfection of the machine, were made in 1961. Because the machine was so complicated, involving principles laymen found hard to understand, it had received very little publicity. In the simplest terms, the plasma engine, like the rocket, makes use of Newton's law on the conservation of energy--for every action there is a corresponding and opposite reaction. But here the similarity with rockets ends. In effect, it means that if you throw a ball, as much pressure and force is backward thrust on the hand as forward thrust on the ball. Since the ball has smaller mass, it sails through the air while your hand and body stay put because you are anchored by your weight and gravity. But in space you would go back in proportion to your mass, just as the ball goes forward. And if you continued to throw balls you would accelerate with each toss. The plasma motor is an electric generator, "spread out." That is, the rotor--the part that revolves--is removed, the motor opened up and flattened. Then it is coiled into a tube so that the field travels at right angles to its normal direction. This makes the electrical field run down the tube in waves, instead of in a circular motion.