At Urban Treasure Map, the adventure usually starts in a dusty yard sale, an abandoned storage unit, or a cluttered flea market. It’s not every day you walk away with a piece of Cold War space history—and it’s definitely not every day you get contacted by NASA. But that’s exactly what happened. A few weeks ago, I was sifting through boxes at a local flea market—nothing too unusual—just part of the usual thrill of the hunt. Tucked beneath a stack of mundane paperwork was something that immediately caught my attention. It wasn’t gold, but it might as well have been: a trove of original documents, diagrams, and nearly 300 pages of handwritten formulas that appear to belong to Thomas Szekely, a brilliant engineer who worked with General Electric on the NERVA Project—a NASA initiative exploring nuclear propulsion for manned missions to Mars.
The The Urban Treasure Map Ethos At Urban Treasure Map, our mission is to explore, uncover, and preserve the incredible artifacts that history leaves behind. Whether it’s a rare book from a forgotten library or a set of nuclear propulsion blueprints lost in a flea market shuffle, every item has a story. And sometimes, that story has the power to shape the future.
When the Treasure Hunts You: The Nuclear Rocket Papers of Thomas Szekely
