Losing NASA — and finding it again
We sit transfixed before a wall-sized video of plankton moving in the ocean, each type — diatoms, flagellates, synechococcus, and prochlorococcus — moving on the currents in the world’s oceans, each a different color swirling like one of Van Gogh’s starry nights with the brush strokes in motion. It’s beautiful.
We’d come to NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., for a tour. We were expecting big space stuff — light years, black holes, dark energy — but here we were looking at plankton. There was our Earth, so familiar and yet unknown. “Most of the ocean is a dark target,” said Woody Turner, one of the scientists standing before the video. The newest satellites were seeing the ocean in more detail than ever before.
They pulled up the next video on the “hyperwall” in the Scientific Visualization Studio to show us the “particulate matter” that was spilling into the atmosphere, second by second: There were Canada and Siberia on fire and the dust from the Sahara swirling out into the Atlantic where hurricanes were forming. And on from there to all the carbon dioxide being emitted to heat up the planet. This wasn’t the NASA that I grew up with.
I was born with the Space Age, in 1957, the year the Russians launched Sputnik and sent America into a frenzy. I could name the original seven astronauts; was given a cool astronaut’s helmet in kindergarten; built models of all the rockets and satellites; ordered NASA’s publications from the Government Printing Office in Pueblo, Colo.; watched the launches (once on my back like an astronaut as I ate space food, a birthday present). My high school in Elwood, N.Y., was named for our first space hero, John Glenn, and the globe we had at home showed Glenn’s three orbits in thick dotted lines. I flew model rockets in competitions and was nationally ranked for a while. I talked rockets all the time, and then I grew up, and NASA grew up, and we went our separate ways.
It’s that “Right Stuff,” Cold War Space Race that’s keeping us from seeing today’s space agency. About 9 percent of NASA’s $25.4 billion budget is spent on the Earth Science Division, but that is overshadowed by the 45 percent of the budget spent on putting astronauts in the space station, or in three years, getting them back to the moon. “Most of the public doesn’t realize NASA looks at the Earth,” said Turner, “but the largest of NASA’s science divisions at Goddard is devoted to Earth science, with 1,600 scientists.”
One of those scientists, Leslie Ott, is a research meteorologist working on the global modeling of our climate and all the carbon we’re adding to it. “To really understand it, we need to understand weather, ecosystems, and human influence,” Ott said. She monitors trains of satellites — each passing over the same spot, making 6 million observations every six hours, “a conveyer belt of terabytes of information constantly feeding the model.”
Satellites have always been geeky, odd packages with names like OGO, SDO, OCO-2, and yet they perform astonishing feats. They bust into the news when the Hubble or Webb telescopes see deep into space.
After the dazzling videos, we toured the big building where they assemble and service satellites. We peered down into the world’s largest “clean room,” where the workers in white “bunny suits” were assembling a mock-up of the next space telescope, scheduled to be launched by 2027. It’s named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy and its first female executive, who shepherded the Hubble Space Telescope to congressional funding. (Who knew? While the original seven astronauts were strutting around the pages of Life magazine, she was back in the office, working late.) This space telescope will be seeking exoplanets and measuring dark energy, an unknown force that may be 68 percent of the universe.
We were ushered on to the ROC — Robotics Operations Center — where they’re designing and testing the robotic arms for OSAM-1, a satellite that will refuel other satellites in orbit, starting with Landsat 7, which was not designed to be refueled. A group of engineers were huddled over a computer screen showing rows and rows of numbers.
The robotic arm and “fingers” have to perform a precise, delicate sequence.
The assembly building, which has the unwieldy name of In-Space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing, is a warren of clean rooms and testing facilities to shake, rotate, spin, and otherwise stress satellites and their components. A huge thermal vacuum chamber, looking like some Jules Verne steampunk contraption, simulates the extreme cold and heat of space.
Everyone we met was excited about OSIRIS-REx, which had landed on the asteroid Bennu, scooped some of it up, and is due to land in Utah on Sept. 24. The asteroid, about the size of a few city blocks, was “full of surprises.” The scientists thought it would be like a beach, but it was so full of rocks it was tricky to close the lid before the satellite took off. We’d never heard of OSIRIS-REx, and if you’d asked me about it before our tour, I would have guessed it was one of those new dinosaurs they keep finding in China.
Somewhere in the news, OSIRISREx and OSAM-1 and many others may have been briefly mentioned. We walked through one of NASA’s TV studios where several times a year they make their scientists available to local TV news, trying to break into the doom loop for a four-minute sprint through some new discovery, the results of decades of dedication, sometimes entire careers.
When we came home, we told our friends, who are awash in the news, about what we’d seen. They hadn’t heard about any of it, from the plankton to the new telescope. We might as well have been Marco Polo returned from Asia with strange tales. We’ve lost track of NASA. In the old frontier days, the Space Race got into people’s heads. They named schools for astronauts. Today, at a moment when only 29 percent of adults have “a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests,” we’re missing the big show.
NASA hasn’t found a way to hold our interest since the Cold War ended. It tried selling us on a contradiction: Space travel is bold/space travel is routine. (Even the term “spacewalk” was coined in the 1960s to conceal the danger of stepping out of the capsule.) The shuttle was supposed to be a commuter train, and the International Space Station is supposed to be just another day at the office.
While we were at Goddard, we’d walk past these large screens showing a live feed from the space station. An astronaut was outside the station hooking up some sort of cables with slow, balletic movements. No one paused to look at it.
It reminded me of the Wright Brothers — not the heroic triumph of the first, short flight in 1903, but what happened two years later. The brothers came home to Dayton and out in public perfected the early aeroplane, making long flights, turning in graceful circles as the trolley ran past. Dayton’s commuters looked out, took in this astonishing sight, pitied the brothers, and returned to their routines.
Howard Mansfield is the author of “Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers,” and the forthcoming “I Will Tell No War Stories.”