This week we share two stories of people who were inspired by heroes of space.
Part 1: After watching a documentary about the moon landing, Kate Downey comes away with a love of all things Buzz Aldrin.
Kate makes you fall in love with things you thought were boring. As the co-founder and Creative Director of Caveat, she heads up a team creating live shows that make you a little bit smarter and a little bit drunker. Previously, she directed Shakespeare and opera with the Public Theater and New York City Opera, and helped build Museum Hack, a renegade tour company at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you've seen any scientifically inaccurate whale illustrations from the 17th century, please alert her @wrongwhale on IG and TW.
Part 2: Richard French gets the call to work for NASA, fulfilling a dream that started with his professor Carl Sagan.
Richard French is former Chair of the Astronomy Department at Wellesley College and is a founding science team member of NASA's Cassini Mission to Saturn. He uses the Hubble Space Telescope and telescopes around the world to observe the rings and atmospheres of planets, and particularly enjoys introducing self-proclaimed “non-scientists” to the wonders of the Universe. He chose the life of an astronomer over that of an opera singer, but still loves music and the allied arts. Dick enjoys mountaineering, paddling, bicycling, photographing his travels around the world, and encouraging others to read “Moby Dick.”
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Kate Downey
It’s 2015. I’m in my Brooklyn apartment and my kitchen is very dirty. I am looking for something on Hulu that I can watch while I clean, something kind of mindless. Normally, I would watch 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation but, honestly, I had watched them all. So Hulu suggests something for me to watch. It’s a documentary. It’s called For All Mankind and it has something to do with the moon landing.
Now, I am a theater person. I went to school for theater. I was a theater major, I do not recommend. I make my living directing Shakespeare and opera. I give renegade tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Basically, I am your go-to girl if you want to know who was sleeping with who in the Renaissance. But science, not so much.
My dad got me a subscription to Scientific American and he said, “You are going to find this so useful.” And I did, because it was the perfect width to hold my door open when I went outside to walk the dog.
So I didn’t know much about the moon landing but I was pretty sure I knew all the important parts. There is blast off. There is ‘One small step for man,’ one whatever for whoever, right? There is when they stick the flag in the moon and that’s it. That’s pretty much all the parts of the moon landing.
Kate Downey shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in February 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So I turn on this documentary and it turns out to be all of this previously unreleased NASA footage from the whole mission. Stuff that they didn’t broadcast at the time because it was too boring or too undignified, or maybe it was a security risk. I don't know.
At first, it’s just shots of the astronauts training or getting suited up or saying goodbye to their families and I’m like, “Great. I am going to scrub the stove to this.” And then blast off happens and that’s great because that’s always really exciting, and I watch that. And then I think, “Great, next stop, one small step for man, etcetera.”
I didn’t know it takes three days to get to the moon. They're basically on a road trip for three days from the earth to the moon, and I have been on a road trip. I took a road trip once from California to Philadelphia right after college with two guy friends of mine and it was very similar. There's really crappy food, there's no personal space, nobody sleeps.
And these astronauts were taking video diaries of their time in the space shuttle or the space craft. And I was watching them do what any of us would do on a three-day road trip in zero gravity. They were flicking food at each other and catching it and doing flips. They were getting on the radio and pranking Mission Control and calling them nerds. They were listening to music on a cassette player. Sinatra and Merle Haggard were the two big favorites of that trip, apparently. On my road trip, we mostly listened to Basement Jaxx, so same.
So I’m watching this and I’m thinking, “Man, I thought the moon landing was very technical and very mechanical and sterile, but this is really human.”
So they get to the moon and they do all of the historical stuff, all the stuff you know, you know, one small step, putting the flag in the moon, etcetera, and then it happens. The astronauts on the moon, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, they start going down this checklist that NASA has given them.
NASA is big on checklists. NASA needs them to test out different ways of moving around on the moon because they'd done the math and they're pretty sure that they know the best ways to move around on the moon. The moon is 17% of earth’s gravity and these astronauts are wearing these very chunky space suits. They're not sure what the best way to move is going to be so they needed the astronauts to test out these methods of mobility, which we call walking, or hopping, or skipping. They're not sure which one is going to work out best.
So while staying in view of the camera that is mounted on the lunar lander, these astronauts start walking and hopping and skipping. It turns out skipping on the moon is really fun. And you just see these astronauts bouncing around in front of this camera like they're in a bouncy castle. And you can hear them over the radio to each other and they're going, “Yahoo!”
And, I kid you not, one of them is hopping around and goes, “Boopty-boopty-boopty-boopty-boop,” over the radio.
So over this part of the documentary, Buzz Aldrin has a voice over. And he's watching this and he says, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s so easy to forget the danger that you're in. At any point, we could have tripped and ripped our space suit and died in the vacuum of space, but we were having so much fun.”
These guys were the first people to set foot on a planet other than earth. And even with all of their technical training, even with all of their checklists they couldn’t help themselves. The first thing they had to do when they got on a foreign planet was dance and sing and joke around.
So I am weeping, fully weeping in my apartment and I will not finish cleaning the kitchen today. And in that moment I fall in love. If I was a deeper person, or a smarter person, I guess this would have been the moment that I fell in love with science or like the spirit of adventure. But I am not that deep so I straight up fell in love with Buzz Aldrin.
This documentary made me want to learn more about Buzz Aldrin, which was weird for me because normally documentaries did not make me want to learn more. After I saw March of the Penguins, I did not obsessively Google penguins. I Googled penguins the normal amount. But I had to know more. I had to know more about the second man on the moon.
Kate Downey shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in February 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
And I want to be really clear here. Just so we’re clear, I was not in love with 1969 hot astronaut Buzz. I was in love with present-day, 85-year-old Buzz Aldrin. So here are some things I know about Buzz Aldrin and I would like for you to know them.
Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was ‘Moon’. That’s real. So he clearly loves his mom.
Buzz Aldrin goes to middle school science fairs. An 85-year-old man goes to middle school science fairs and tests out the hover crafts. He loves kids.
One time, a man came up to Buzz Aldrin and accused him of faking the moon landing, and Buzz Aldrin punched him in the face. He's so passionate.
Buzz Aldrin demanded that we go to Mars before Elon Musk was born. He's not Elon Musk, which is a quality I really look for in a man.
After Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin became a car salesman and never sold a single car. I love an underdog. What can I say?
Buzz Aldrin got his PhD in Manned Orbital Rendezvous, which was not a thing that anyone had ever done at that point. He got the nickname ‘Dr. Rendezvous’, which is objectively a hot nickname.
So Buzz Aldrin took over my life. I started talking about Buzz Aldrin everywhere, including on my tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You'd be surprised how many paintings at the MET feature the moon and how few people want to hear about Buzz Aldrin on an art tour. Instead of reading fiction, I read his autobiography. Now, the only episode that I wanted to watch of 30 Rock was the one where Buzz Aldrin and Tina Fey yell at the moon together.
When you fall in love with someone, you start to love the things that they love. Their fights become your fights. I couldn’t believe we had stopped exploring space. How dare we! How dare we not try to dance on more planets! I started researching the history of NASA, the history of space exploration to try to figure out where it went wrong, why we stopped. The answer is budgets, politics and not being afraid of Russia anymore.
I started researching the history of astronomy and physics and how gravitational waves might work and how stars are formed. And I started talking to anybody who would listen about all this stuff and telling them how important it was that we go to space, that we keep dancing on planets.
My tour guide company started sending me to more science museums and less art museums. I started Googling jobs in science communication. I started really considering trying to get a job where I could talk about space all day. But I felt like a fraud. I wasn’t a scientist. I hadn’t gone to school for this. I was just a twenty-something who had a big, weird crush on an elderly man and it had led me down a weird path.
And then I thought about my life as a theater person. That had also started with a big, fat crush when I 12 years old on an age-appropriate person that I actually knew. His mom ran the community theater in my neighborhood and I signed up for every act in class and did every play, because that is what the man that I loved loved. And as the years went by and my crush faded and I kept doing theater, I felt like a fraud. And when I applied to college as a theater major - I do not recommend - I thought to myself, this is stupid. You just got a big fat crush when you were 12 and now you think you're a theater person? Later, I realized it doesn’t matter.
When I was working for the public, when I was helping to direct professional opera in New York City, no one gave a shit that I was only here because I had gotten a big, fat crush 15 years ago. So I quit my job as a tour guide and I joined my business partner Ben to launch a theater on the Lower East Side where people can nerd out about the science that they love no matter how they fell in love with it. And that theater is Caveat where we are all standing today. Thank you.
Part 2: Richard French
Thirty years ago, I’m in my office at Wellesley College and the phone rings. “This is NASA headquarters. Congratulations, Dr. French. You've just been selected to be a member of the Cassini Science Team, the great mission to Saturn.” I hung up the phone and I was thrilled.
This was going to be a decades-long adventure, an international opportunity to study Saturn and its moons and rings. What could I do? What would we learn?
And then I immediately had a feeling of panic and fear. What could I do? Was I smart enough? How could I contribute?
And immediately after hanging up the phone, I had a sudden memory of a boring, dreary undergraduate physics lab at Cornell. I was a Physics major somehow by accident in between taking opera lessons and we were doing an exciting lab. I think it was rolling balls down inclined planes, demonstrating something that Galileo had shown to be true in the 1600s. I was perfectly willing to take his word for it.
But as I was trying to complete the lab, I looked over on the bench and I saw that my lab partner had two books with him. One of them was called the Book of Mars and the other had the wonderful title Intelligent Life in the Universe, by a Russian astrophysicist by the name of Shklovsky and an American scientist by the name of Sagan.
My lab partner said, “It’s not Sagan, it’s Carl Sagan. He didn’t get tenure at Harvard so he came to Cornell. He's teaching the course.”
I said I got to get into this course, so I made an appointment to meet Dr. Sagan. And I said, “Professor Sagan, I'd love to get into your seminar”.
Richard French shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in October 2018. Photo by Kate Flock.
And he said, “Well, Dick, I see that you've had Astronomy.”
I said, “Yes, I have.”
He said, “Well, I don't want students in this class who already know astronomy.”
I said, “I didn’t say I know astronomy, I said I took Astronomy. Ask me any question I won’t know the answer.”
It wasn’t until later he knew how true my statement was. But he was charmed. He let me into his class. And even though physics was challenging for me, he inspired me to apply to graduate school at Cornell and I was accepted and he became my first PhD thesis advisor.
I remember taking a Planetary Astronomy class from him and he looked us all in the eye and he said, “There's only one generation of scientists for whom those distant points of light in the sky that we call planets will become individual worlds. We’ll visit them with interplanetary spacecraft, go beneath the clouds of Venus, land on the surface of Mars, plunge between the rings in Saturn and find out what those worlds are like. Who among you wants to join this adventure?”
And I said, “I do. I do. I do.” I had found my passion.
But graduate school had a way of chipping away at my self confidence. And on one of those dark, wintery Ithaca days when I didn’t want to work on my electrodynamics problem set, I was writing in my diary and I thought it might be an instructive calculation to estimate the fraction of the mass of the universe I represented. It was an astonishingly small number. And then I looked and I was aghast and I realized I had made a mistake. I couldn’t even quantify my own insignificance. And I took out a big red pen and I wrote in my diary, “This is why I will never make it as an astronomer.”
But I persevered and I began to work on my PhD thesis which, I was reminded, was intended to be a superlative piece of independent scholarly work with the emphasis on the word ‘independent’. A PhD is not given to a group. I PhD is given to an individual so the individual has to suffer through the fiction that they have done all the work themselves when mine was indeed a collaborative effort.
And then on the day that was supposed to be celebratory when I was so-called defending my thesis, Carl Sagan posed a question. “Dick, did you write every word of your thesis?”
Well, he bloody well knew I hadn’t because I had co-authored part of that thesis with another member of my thesis committee. And I felt the blood draining from my head and feeling a sense of shame and guilt, of exposure and inadequacy as though six years of graduate school are going down the drain. But I had the other members of my committee who had, after all, co-authored my thesis to defend me and I got my PhD.
I made my way east to MIT as a member of the research staff and then, by happenstance, to the faculty at Wellesley College in the Astronomy Department, I had finally entered the world of publish or perish.
And that phone call from NASA was not a guarantee of academic success because it would take seven years to design and build the Cassini spacecraft and another seven long years to get to Saturn. That’s 14 years for the dean to wait for me to publish my first science paper about Saturn, and that was asking for a lot of patience.
But I was on the Cassini Radio Science team, one of 12 teams, one for each of the instruments on the space craft. And we began our seven long years of work of planning every single minute of observations for all those many times we would orbit Saturn, plunge past the moon Titan, look at the rings, look at the ionosphere, look at all of Saturn’s many moons.
What we found was that not everybody can use their instrument to look at what they want to when they can because somebody else is choosing that time to look at what they want to look for, which meant that we were competing with each other. And we found ourselves very quickly using militaristic metaphors: ‘winning’, ‘losing’, ‘battles’, ‘strategy’, ‘victory’, ‘celebration’, ‘exaltation’, 'defeat’, ‘mourning’.
This attracted the attention of a sociologist who visited us and I felt like a rat in a maze. “You wouldn’t mind if she sits in on your meeting and takes notes, do you?” So it’s where the one-way mirror as we’re having our intense conversations. And we learned that unlike Cassini’s scientists, the Mars Rover scientists would sit around a small table in the morning looking at pictures of Mars taken the previous day, sipping their lattes, looking at a rock, coming up with a whimsical name to call that rock, probably named after a new flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. While we on the Radio Science team were licking our wounds in defeat, the Radar team having swiped away from us our one opportunity to measure the gravitational field of Titan, something I’m still sore about.
Richard French shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in October 2018. Photo by Kate Flock.
Well, scientists aren’t trained to be diplomats. Sometimes politicians aren’t either, but we found that the stale argument that your science is better than somebody else’s or your idea is better, or that you have something more important to do became a bit stale. And those of us who finally became a bit successful at this recognized that in one morning’s meeting, when you have sitting next to you somebody who’s an important ally in trying to secure observing time, during that afternoon meeting we’d be sitting across from you and we’d be your fierce competitor and you'd have to find a way to have dinner with them that night.
Well, we found a way, ultimately, to get along but there's nothing better than a good victory over the Radar team. And I still remember going to Paris, a celebratory dinner off the Champs Elysees with a little too much wine. We were celebrating the fact that we had secured the 21st flyby of Titan away from the Radar team to have a chance to try an audacious experiment. We were going to send our 13 watts of radio power, aim it for a lake on the northern marshes of Titan. And if we aim that radio signal at just the right angle and it was a calm day on Titan then the radio signal would reflect, pass through a billion miles of space, reach the earth and tell us whether the lake was made of methane or ethane.
“Long live T21,” we shouted, and wrote our names in the restaurant book. I still want to go back and find those signatures.
But nothing could beat the opportunity of being at the jet propulsion laboratory when T21 experiment was actually happening. We’re sitting in the operations room. we had the schedule right in front of us and we knew to the second when we predicted that that faint echo off of the glinting lake in the northern seas of Titan - Kraken Mare was the colorful name of that lake - would reach us over an hour long it took the radio signal to reach us. We knew to the second and I had a fistful of dollar bills ready to spray across the room in celebration if we saw the echo.
And I started the countdown, “Five, four...” There it is. It came out early. And I just threw the bills to everybody. I turned around and one of the members of the Radar team happened to be in the room at the time and I just smiled.
We had our share of victories but the mission eventually had to come to an end. Two years ago, the spacecraft was sent on a daring plunge between the rings and Saturn itself. We were going as close to the planet as we could to get a close look at the gravitational field, at the rings, at the atmosphere. And then the spacecraft was running out of fuel.
An engineer said, “It’s time.” We have to send the Cassini spacecraft crashing into Saturn itself.
So we all assembled at the jet propulsion laboratory one final time. I looked around the room at all of the engineers and scientists that we’d worked with for decades and I wasn’t thinking of the victories and the losses, the T21s and the Radar team. I thought of the immense pride of working with an international team of scientists and engineers doing something good, learning something true about the world, working together, facing odds. And we’d come to celebrate, or so it seemed.
We were sitting in the second row. My wife and I, next to me she's a rocket scientist too, we’re there with a phalanx of photographers sitting up in front of us waiting to catch the reactions of scientists and engineers after working for decades on this mission to catch our emotional response to the death of our beloved spacecraft.
We looked at the screen and the screen had a little flicker. It was like a heartbeat in an emergency room. And the spacecraft’s signal was saying, “I’m still alive. I’m still alive.” And then it flickered and disappeared and then came back momentarily again, and then it was gone.
The room was silent. There were no cheers. And then I sobbed and I buried my face in my hands. And the photographers took the picture of my shiny top of my head.
Then next morning at the Los Angeles Airport, Colleen and I are looking at the Los Angeles Times and I said, “There's a picture of some Cassini scientist on the front page. Who’s that bald guy?”
It was my Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame. “Grown scientist cries at loss of piece of machine,” it seemed to say.
But it was more than a machine. It was 30 years of human effort and endeavor. I cried because I would never work with that group again. We had shared so much. I cried because Carl Sagan didn’t live to see that day. I cried in gratitude for his support and inspiration to try to become that rocket scientist. And I cried because I realized I was wrong those old days. I was wrong when I crossed that mark out in my diary. Somehow I had become a rocket scientist, I had become an astronomer. Thank you, Carl.