![]() I got in touch with Camilla Ledegaard Svendsen, an old friend of his, through Facebook. Madsen’s obsession with submarines and rockets was all-consuming, but not to the exclusion of sex. He often slept at the workshop where he built things. He spent his twenties and thirties organizing his life around the building of submarines and rockets. Carl died when Madsen was 18, and for the next few years, Madsen ricocheted around, starting several degrees and apprenticeships-in welding, refrigeration, and engineering-before dropping out of each.Īs a teenager, Madsen discovered the Danish Amateur Rocket Club but was eventually kicked out because he wanted to use fuels that others in the group felt weren’t safe. It was Carl who stoked his son’s fascination with rockets, telling him, among other things, about a man who would become a hero to Madsen: Wernher von Braun, the Nazi aerospace engineer who later came to the US and helped develop the Apollo missions. Annie moved out with her other sons while Madsen stayed with his aging father.Īccording to Madsen’s biography, written by Thomas Djursing, Carl was a brutal man who beat his stepsons, though not Madsen. Madsen was six when his parents split up. She had three boys from two previous marriages, and the union with Carl did not last long. His mother, Annie, was more than three decades younger than Madsen’s father, Carl-a pub owner. Madsen was born in 1971 and grew up in a small town south of Copenhagen. Refshaleøen had once been the heart of Denmark’s shipping empire. It was only later, after everything that happened, that the details of his private life would become important. Wall was in the early stages of her reporting, and she would not have known much more about Madsen than what had already been published. Fox, the filmmaker, calls him a “modern-day Clumsy Hans,” for the seemingly dimwitted suitor in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale who wins the princess’s favor over his more intelligent brothers. His habitual uniform was coveralls and hiking boots. He had a weathered face with the prominent features of a toy troll. He saw the setting sun and Wall aboard the submarine in the distance, waving toward him.īy most public accounts, Madsen was a charismatic rebel. A while later, Stobbe was tending to a quayside fire when a friend told him to look up. A little later, she sent a photo of windmills in the water, and then another of herself at the steering wheel. Just before boarding the submarine around 7 pm, Wall texted Stobbe a photo of the Nautilus. It was, von Bengtson wrote in 2011 on a WIRED blog he started that year about the rocket building, “the ultimate DIY project.” Madsen and von Bengtson were among them, occupying a hangar, and financing Copenhagen Suborbitals with crowdfunded donations. That industry’s decline had left empty warehouses and factories, which had been reclaimed by artists, engineers, and other creative types. The two set up shop on Refshaleøen, an area of the city that extends into Copenhagen’s harbor and once had been the heart of Denmark’s shipping empire. ![]() Their plan was to launch the first manned built-from-scratch rocket. He and a former NASA contractor named Kristian von Bengtson cofounded a company called Copenhagen Suborbitals. ![]() Shortly after the launch of the Nautilus, Madsen started another venture. Unlike Nemo, Madsen had stayed close to home in Denmark, but he had devoted his life to building audacious vehicles of his own design, ones that might venture high above the atmosphere or down into the depths of the ocean. Jules Verne’s antihero Captain Nemo was a figure who lived outside social laws, sailing the seven seas in search of total freedom. Madsen christened the vessel the UC3 Nautilus, after the fictional submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Peter Madsen, the designer of the vessel and the organizer of the day’s event, climbed into the hatch, smiling in a white skipper’s hat, before the submarine motored into the water. The onlookers cheered as the submarine floated for the first time. Part art project, part engineering feat, the submarine weighed 40 tons and had been built by volunteers at minimal cost from donated iron and other parts. On May 3, 2008, a sunny Saturday in Copenhagen, a crowd gathered along a dock to watch a 58-foot submarine be lowered into the water. ![]()
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