Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Astro Turf: M.G. Lord's New Book About the Private Life of Rocket Science

Episode Date: March 7, 2005

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M.G. Lord's AstroTurf, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome back to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Author M.G. Lord joins us. Her new book, AstroTurf, is an intensely personal reflection on the history and culture of rocket science in America, most specifically at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Later today on What's Up,

Bruce Betts will unveil yet another space trivia quiz and hand a Planetary Radio t-shirt to our latest winner. Here's a handful of headlines from around the galaxy. Though its sister ship Mars Express has been a glorious success in orbit around the red planet, the little British Beagle 2 lander was never heard from.

A just-unsealed report says the project was so cash-strapped it should have been cancelled years ago. There's a detailed write-up at planetary.org, where you can also get the latest on the Mars Exploration rovers. At the moment, Spirit is enjoying the vista from atop the Cumberland Ridge. Meanwhile, Opportunity has been putting the pedal to the metal. It set a new Martian land speed record a few days ago,

when it covered nearly 200 meters or 600 feet in just one day. Eat red dust, Sojourner. Maybe it wasn't a prehistoric deep impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, but a big cloud of dust, interstellar dust. That's the subject of two just-published research papers. One hypothesizes a cloud so thick it blocked the sun, ushering in an ice age. The other looks at the possibility of a less dense cloud that was still able to strip away Earth's protective layer of ozone.

So now you have your pick of Armageddon scenarios. There's nothing quite like choice, is there? I'll be back with M.G. Lord right after Emily joins the Flat Earth Society. Kind of. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, In Cassini pictures, Mimas looks squashed. Why? Mimas, which is one of Saturn's medium-sized icy moons, is definitely not a sphere.

It is clearly squashed-looking, being almost 10% wider across its waist than it is from pole to pole. Usually, the solar system's larger bodies pull themselves into a spherical shape under their own gravity. Then, there are two main forces that act to distort the spherical shapes. The first is centrifugal force caused by the body's spin, which tends to make it fatter around the middle than it is top to bottom. The second force is tidal, where a large body distorts the shape of a smaller one orbiting it, raising a pair of tidal bulges, one on the side facing the large body and one on the opposite side. Mimas is relatively small and close to Saturn,

so the combination of its spin, low gravity, and the strong tidal bulges raised by Saturn's large gravity make it noticeably non-spherical. What other bodies in the solar system are squashed looking? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. M.G. Lord's new book, AstroTurf, is subtitled The Private Life of Rocket Science. She could have easily substituted rocket scientists. Her father was one of them, an engineer assigned to projects at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He is a key player in this fascinating tale

that is part personal journey, part history, and part compassionate consideration of the evolving culture of space exploration. I found it to be full of personal surprises, some of which I couldn't wait to share with the author when she visited the Planetary Society on a recent afternoon. I've got the first of my little surprises for you, things that we have in common. And I don't know if you ever owned that lunch pail

that adorns the dust jacket for your book, but I did. I had that lunch pail in elementary school. I mean, what was so uncanny to me about choosing that image for the cover, because, you know, we struggled with the cover. And then Christina at the last, at the 11th hour, Christina Stalsky, who designed the jacket, at the 11th hour she found that in a junk shop on the Lower East Side and took a picture of it for the reading copy at Book

Expo. And my jaw dropped because I, too, had, you know, that was my lunchbox. Not mine with, you know, Mary Grace scratched down in the bottom of it, but mine. This was, I remember it so well. When I picked up the book, I thought, oh, my God, I haven't seen that in 35 years. It is, of course, a scene on, it's either Mars or the moon, and a couple of people in spacesuits and all these fanciful Willie Lee-type rocket ships and donut space stations.

It looks like something out of a Heinlein novel. Doesn't it? Yeah, certainly from one of the covers of his early books. And that name, Robert Heinlein, is one that I hope we'll be able to get to during this conversation, which I'm sure hope we'll be able to get to during this conversation, which I'm sure is going to be all too brief, as we talk about AstroTurf and the subtitle of the book, The Private Life of Rocket Science. Let me read a quote from another friend of the Planetary Society, I should say on the back here, a blurb from the jacket. Exploring America's collective memory of glory rides to the moon and Mars, M.G. Lord

chases the contrail of her absent father. This book blends its own rocket fuel, one part daughter's love to two parts popular culture, and the launch makes a gorgeous explosion. And that's from Davis O'Bell, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, someone who's been heard on this radio program. That's quite a quote. Do you think it's a fair description of the book? I hope so. I think so. Having just finished it this morning and enjoyed it and learned quite a bit from the book, and I thought I knew a lot about the culture at JPL, which is what we focus on. But this choice that you made to interweave your personal experience because of your father's experience at JPL, I think works extremely well as you talk about the history of this history-making lab.

Well, thank you, Matt. I mean, the challenge for me was to make it not just my personal insignificant story, but to place him in a really important, larger story of space exploration in the mid-20th century. Not to in any way denigrate his role and what he brought to the story and to your life as an individual, but he does seem to symbolize or represent a different era at JPL and one that you talk about at length in the book. And it was an era in which there was a beauty contest at JPL where the so-called computers, the women who sat in one room in front of their calculators, I guess periodically one of them would be named the queen of outer space.

This was the highlight of the JPL social season. Many people think that there weren't women at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1950s and 60s. Well, in the 50s and 60s, indeed, they were, but they operated these massive Fryden calculators. And in the 1950s, the competition was actually the misguided missile pageant. Which is even better. But in 1958, when NASA was formed

and JPL assumed responsibility for planetary exploration, the computresses competed for the title of the Queen of Outer Space. And I have a most astonishing picture of the queen and her court in front of a missile in the book. Part of the fun of reporting this wasn't just the interviewing people and going through popular culture from the period. It was going through the photo library at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I was amazed at some of the things I found. In fact, sometimes I went looking for images and found things that were so bizarre and so much better that we ended up putting those in the book. Like the 1962 Harper's Bazaar photo shoot.

Oh, yes. With the model, with Pickering, who was then, he was the longtime director of the lab. The Ranger spacecraft and this bored, affected, pelvis-out model wearing a hat that was the exact replica of the Ranger spacecraft. a hat that was the exact replica of the ranger spacecraft. If anything could embody the dissonance of so-called feminine culture and so-called masculine culture in that period, it is that image. This is the middle history of JPL because you begin with the earliest beginnings of the lab and this great photo, I guess, since immortalized periodically by mannequins that are

posed to represent these guys who started the lab and were firing rockets a long time ago. You bring it from there, right through this period of the 50s and 60s, up to Steve Squires, getting back word from Mars, from the Mars Exploration Rovers. There is an underlying concept. My book looks at an archetype of masculinity, the Cold War era rocket scientist who was, of course, an engineer. And I start with the early rocketry pioneers because they were very exotic fellows who probably would not have been terribly welcome at a mid-century NASA center. One, John Parsons, was some say a Satanist, but in any event, a priest in the Ordo Templi Orientis, the sex cult founded by Diary of a Drug Fiend author Alistair Crowley. And the other, the one whom I find much more compelling and very historically underappreciated,

The other, the one whom I find much more compelling and very historically underappreciated, is Frank J. Molina, one of the first directors of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who I don't believe received his historic due because, like many intellectuals during the Depression, he briefly in the 30s flirted with communism. And was hounded ever after by J. Edgar and the FBI? And was hounded ever after by J. Edgar and the FBI. Certainly during the McCarthy period, the achievements of the Pasadena group, in the public mind at least, have been eclipsed by the Pinamunda group, the group to which von Braun belonged. Let's put it out there, the Nazis. That's the word. in the book because, of course, it's now well documented that that crowd that was brought over in Operation Paperclip, which you described, they weren't quite the nice fellows that they were painted to be by themselves and by the American government. But not only that, that the amazing accomplishments by these fellows at JPL were sort of submerged in favor of boosting the Wern Vaughan-Brown crowd.

Exactly. And Frank Molina died, unfortunately, in 1981, very young, at age 69, of a sudden heart attack. By 1984, he might have felt somewhat vindicated in that Arthur Rudolph, who was the head of our Saturn V program, sort of took the fall for the Nazi scientists. Von Braun himself had died of cancer in 1977, but by 1984, the secrets in many dossiers leaked, including the fact that Rudolf had honed his management skills as the chief of slave labor at the Middle Baudour concentration camp where the V2s were built and where near the end of the war, a thousand people died every month from starvation, beatings, and filth-borne diseases.

We are talking with M.G. Lord. She has written AstroTurf, The Private Life of Rocket Science. She's also the author of Forever Barbie, which was a big success before this one. It is not and is not meant to be an exhaustive history of the Jet Propulsion Lab. It is a very personal story, and we'll get back into that after we take a quick break. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space

interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments

at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. M.G. Lord is our special guest this week on Planetary Radio. She has written AstroTurf, The Private Life of Rocket Science, which you told me before we got started today is now being featured in the JPL bookstore, which I guess is a good indication that, as you said, it's certainly not an indictment of JPL or the times that you write about. Far from an indictment. No. It's sort of an account of a conversion experience.

I think it's almost a love story in some ways. Well, I certainly came to understand my father better when I myself immersed myself into the world from which I had been excluded as a child, the world of planetary exploration at JPL. Now, you were excluded from that world of reality-based planetary exploration, but you were a big science fiction fan. You talk a lot about Robert Heinlein in this book, and one of the stories you talk about is Have Space Suit, Will Travel, first science fiction story I ever read. Oh, really? I love that book, and I think it was especially meaningful for me as an eight-year-old girl. Robert Heinlein is often tarred probably because of his later novels as something of a misogynist, but I argue in the book that his early novels were really almost feminist classics, like Have Space Suit, Will Travel, which featured an 11-year-old girl who

was smarter than the 18-year-old male central character, and a really amazing creature called The Mother Thing, capital M, capital T, a fuzzy, portable creature that was neither male nor female that advanced what to me seemed like a really radical notion, which was that biology wasn't destiny and that men, too, could nurture. This was not something that we were taught in the early 1960s. And we're talking about a juvenile novel from that series of books that Heinlein wrote. series of books that Heinlein wrote. But so many of them, I mean, his stories, things like Let There Be Light and Delilah and the Space Rigger also had very strong female characters who used their initials. And it was as a consequence of those stories that Mary Grace Lord in the summer before fourth grade suddenly insisted on being called MG, and I've been MG ever since. It was a time, though, when your father, maybe he was representative of the time that he worked at JPL, but those times did change. And you talk about some of the pioneering women who earned

the opportunity to get a lot more responsibility, other friends that we've talked to on this program, Donna Shirley among them. Absolutely. Well, I mean, and also Marcia Neugebauer, the first woman project scientist on the first two Ranger missions to the moon in 1962. She and Donna Shirley, I guess, are the people most often cited as having really broken the so-called glass ceiling really early on. They were different philosophically. Neugebauer was interested in doing her work and advancing her career. But Shirley said to me that, you know, once she knew all the passwords and could play in the clubhouse with the guys, she wanted to change the passwords, sort of, well, where Neugebauer, a physicist,

studied waves, Shirley made them. Yes, that's a great quote. As you get into this period, when you have folks like Donna Shirley, who ran the Mars program for a number of years, I wonder how much JPL represented the changes that were taking place in broader society. Was it lagging behind them? Bruce Murray, who was the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1970s, said that when he arrived at JPL, his mission was to make JPL and its culture sort of current with what was going on in the larger culture. I mean, he said that the 60s had passed JPL by, or JPL and the entire aerospace industry.

And this, in a very concrete way, meant working to establish a child education center, which is one of the real milestones that made it much easier for women engineers and two career couples to work at JPL. And JPL is a place that is, for those who've never seen it, never been there, I certainly encourage you, if you can wangle a tour sometime when you're in Southern California, it's worth it. Because it's a city. It is almost a community unto itself. And it does have a fascinating history. Your book, I think, brings out elements that, as far as I know, no one else has covered. Yeah, I think that there are definitely things in the book that haven't been looked at. Take us up to the current day and this period that has sort of reconciled you with the Jet Propulsion Lab. Well, I mean, the short version

is in the late 1960s, my mother was dying of cancer and my father, as I myself might have wanted to do, threw himself into his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission. He, in fact, worked for Northrop Corporation, which built the bus or the body of the spacecraft. And I think I have loved, hated, and watched JPL for 30 years as a consequence of his absence. You know, what we needed was a full-time husband and father. What we had was a Cold War era rocket engineer who embraced the values of his profession, masculine over feminine, work over family, repression over emotion. Yet, even as I resented his absence, I was beguiled

by what he did. The probes he worked on were scouts sending home thrilling glimpses of new worlds. They were about hope, expansion, the future, things that at my mother's deathbed would not otherwise have crossed my mind. And the few moments of real intimacy that I shared with him was when he explained these missions to me. And he was an explorer. And really, all of the major characters in this book are, I think, fairly described as explorers. Right up to the end, and we've saved a minute or

two here, not very long, I'm going to hand the book back to you. And if you would, read to us a little bit from the close here, which is during your coverage. I mean, you had a press pass and you were dealing with the Mars Exploration Rovers. Yeah, I was able to attend the launch of Opportunity and the end of the book takes place at the landing. Soon after the landing, the VIPs poured out of JPL. The lab felt like a lab again. I had pierced the world from which I had been excluded as a child. My hard-won press badge announced that I belonged, and I understood the powerful grip that this world had upon my father because it had an equally powerful grip on me. Wonderful. Thank you.

Where do you go from here? You told me that you're working on an article for the LA Times Magazine. On the alternative space industry in Southern California, sort of what happens after the XPRIZE. I'm interested in smaller companies like XCOR and SpaceX and Pioneer Rocket Plane, although it's now based in Oklahoma. Is there a business model to be found here or just a very expensive prototype financed by an Internet gazillionaire?

Paul Allen, the Internet gazillionaire, was inspired to finance Spaceship One by Heinlein's rocket ship Galileo, so it all comes full circle. Well, we will watch for the appearance of that article, which of course will be, I'm sure, online as well at latimes.com. The Los Angeles magazine. Oh, I'm sorry. You know what? I think I earlier said LA Times magazine. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, so I'm glad you corrected that, Los Angeles magazine. We will also let people know

that AstroTurf, The Private Life of Rocket Science by M.G. Lord, our guest today, is available from Walker, Walker Publishing, and I believe... Or Amazon. Or Amazon, like every other good book that's out there. Thank you very much for taking a few minutes to make your way up here to the Planetary Society today, not very far from JPL, and we wish you luck with the book. Thank you, Matt. not very far from JPL, and we wish you luck with the book.

Thank you, Matt. And we will return with more of Planetary Radio, specifically what's up with Bruce Betts right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Aside from the squashed-looking Mimas, what other bodies in the solar system are not quite perfect spheres? The answer? All of them. Every single body in the solar system, from the Sun to Pluto, spins, and as a result of that spin, they are fatter around the middle than they are pole to pole.

Even the Earth is a few tenths of a percent thicker at its waist. But the most obese of all the Earth is a few tenths of a percent thicker at its waist. But the most obese of all the planets is Saturn. Because it is not very dense and it spins quite fast, Saturn is 10% thicker across the middle than it is top to bottom, a difference that is easy to spot in any photograph of Saturn's full globe. But the oddest shaped planet in the solar system could be the most distant one. Pluto and its big moon Charon are relatively small bodies with relatively low density that orbit unusually close to each other. The combination of spinning and tidal effects could make both planet and moon distinctly egg-shaped,

with the pointy ends of both eggs permanently pointing at each other. We won't know for sure if these predictions are right, though, until we can send a spacecraft to fly by Pluto and Charon to take a close look. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time again for What's Up on Planetary Radio with the Director of Projects, Dr. Bruce Betts, from the Planetary Society.

Welcome back. I'm so excited. I'm so exuberant. Well, share that with us. And plus, it looked like your brain had frozen for a moment there. Hey, fun things to look for in the night sky. We've got that periodic planet poking up there. I suppose they're all periodic. Everyone, go see Mercury in the next two weeks, please.

Really easy to see this time. Right after sunset, look in the west and low in the west shortly after sunset. It right now is almost as bright as the brightest star in the sky. Unfortunately, you have to look low on the horizon, but it is there. It will fade, however, pretty quickly over the next couple weeks. It'll still look like a bright star,

but not like the brightest star in the sky. So go see it, because Mercury comes and goes, because it's going around the sun so fast, and because it is inside of the Earth's orbit, we see it go up and down in the sky and never gets high overhead. Look for Saturn shortly after sunset. It's bright, it's yellowish, it's groovy. Oh, one cool thing about Saturn, though, to encourage you small telescope people again, Saturn's rings are tipped almost 24 degrees from edgewise. This is the best it's going to be for many years. We see Saturn going from the rings tipped way off of edgewise, that's a technical term,

all the way to being edge on, and right now they're really opened up. You can also see Jupiter rising about three hours after sunset, looking like the brightest object in the sky, and Mars low in the southeast before dawn, looking reddish. Preview, once again, make sure you know, April 8th, solar eclipse coming up. You said a strange, a goofy solar eclipse, but you didn't explain. No, it's weird, Matt. It's called a hybrid eclipse.

I asked for that. Yeah, we'll be getting back to those Disney characters when we get to the trivia contest. Yes, it is a hybrid eclipse. That means that it is a total eclipse when it is in the center of its path across the Earth. It will be an annular eclipse off towards the sides. across the Earth. It will be an annular eclipse off towards the sides. The moon is just at that magic distance where it covers the entire disk of the sun when it's seen from the center of its path, but it does not cover the entire disk out towards the outsides. We'll talk about it more. It'll be beautiful. Gosh.

That'd be great. So anyway, on to this week in space history. March 8, 1979, Voyager 1 took images that showed us our first images of volcanoes on Io, which turns out to be the most volcanically active body in the solar system. On to Red Room Space Fact! Dig-a-dig-a-dig-a-dig. Spring tides. Spring tides are the highest tides, higher than average, that occur when the moon and the sun are lined up.

So at new moon or at full moon, their gravity conspires to raise higher tides than when you're off near the quarter moons where they don't line up. And then you get the so-called neap tides. Neap. I've always loved that word. Yeah. And do spring tides only happen in the spring? No. That doesn't make sense

that is a fallacy they're called spring tides because they were first documented by a spring manufacturer okay you're lying now how about the trivia contest okay in the trivia contest we asked you a couple weeks ago about pluto pluto the dog the Disney dog. I asked you about... What did we ask him, Matt? You asked when he first appeared. He didn't even have the name Pluto yet, you said. When did he first appear? And we'll tell you how that related

to the discovery of the planet Pluto, which was named in 1930. How'd we do, Matt? Lots of correct answers this time around. And our winner, we're going to mention a couple of others too, but Jamie Cox of Melbourne, Florida, because that's where he hears Planetary Radio on WFHALP in Melbourne, Florida, very near, well, I guess on the Space Coast. And Jamie said Pluto the dog first appeared in 1930.

Now, that was enough to win this for Jamie, but he didn't mention what the cartoon was. The cartoon was, do you remember the name? Dogs on Parade. No, The Chain Gang. Yes, of course, The Chain Gang. In 1930. Where Pluto, I believe, played a guard dog and Mickey was on The Chain Gang. Yeah, that's right.

That's what we were told anyway. Like, for example, Joseph Wandus had it right off of the Disney website that later that year he appeared as Minnie Mouse's dog Rover in The Picnic. And the following year became Mickey's dog Pluto in The Moose Hunt. The Moose Hunt. And favorite sayings, grr, snort, sniff, sniff, sniff, and bark, bark. That's good. So we did get to those cartoon characters. Yes, and folklore at least has it that Pluto the dog was named after Pluto the planet, which was interestingly, ironically named after the god of the underworld in Roman mythology.

Thanks, everyone out there. For this next time around, not quite as wacky and goofy. Everyone knows, everyone on the street knows that carbon dioxide is the most abundant gas in the Venus atmosphere, the Venusian atmosphere.

What is the second most abundant gas in the Venusian atmosphere? To answer this and win a fabulous prize, go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to email us your answer. And we need that in by?

The 14th of March, March 14, Monday at noon Pacific time so that you can be eligible for the next Planetary Radio T-shirt that we give away. Thank you, everyone. Hey, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what it would be like to be a wheel on a Mars rover. Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who doesn't

just join us on What's Up each week, he is What's Up. Rolling, rolling, rolling, keep those rovers rolling. Join us next time for another little jaunt around the solar system. Have a great week, everyone.