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Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science
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Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science

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A daughter's journey to rediscover her father and understand the culture of space engineers

During the late 1960s, while M. G. Lord was becoming a teenager in Southern California and her mother was dying of cancer, Lord's father-an archetypal, remote, rocket engineer- disappeared into his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, building the space probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission. Thirty years later, Lord found herself reporting on the JPL, triggering childhood memories and a desire to revisit her past as a way of understanding the ethos of rocket science. Astro Turf is the brilliant result of her journey of discovery.

Remembering her pain at her father's absence, yet intrigued by what he did, Lord captures him on the page as she recalls her own youthful, eccentric fascination with science and space exploration. Into her family's saga she weaves the story of the legendary JPL- examining the complexities of its cultural history, from its start in 1936 to the triumphant Mars landings in 2004. She illuminates its founder, Frank Malina, whose brilliance in rocketry was shadowed by a flirtation with communism, driving him from the country even as we welcomed Wernher von Braun and his Nazi colleagues. Lord's own love of science fiction becomes a lens through which she views a profound cultural shift in the male-dominated world of space. And in pursuing the cause of her father's absence she stumbles on a hidden guilt, understanding "the anguish his proud silence caused both him and me, and how rooted that silence was in the culture of engineering."
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 26, 2009
ISBN9780802719379
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science
Author

M. G. Lord

M.G. Lord is a celebrated cultural critic and investigative journalist, and the author of Forever Barbie and Astro Turf. Since 1995 she has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the Times's Arts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, and ArtForum. Before becoming a freelance writer, Lord was a syndicated political cartoonist and a columnist for Newsday. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

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Rating: 3.4038461538461537 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book had some interesting information in it but I found it to be a bit disjointed. It didn't seem to have a real focus. Was it about the author's father, the history of the JPL, a tale of Nazis and communists, a discussion of equality? It touched on all of these things but didn't seem to focus on any of them. In particular, if it was about equality, it did a poor job - it discussed gender and gay progress but did not mention race at all. Overall, I think it could have been a much better book, but it was not uninformative.

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Astro Turf - M. G. Lord

Praise for Astro Turf

This book blends its own rocket fuel — one part daughter's love to two parts popular culture — and the launch makes a gorgeous explosion. — Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter

Engaging . . . part memoir, part cultural history, part paean to unmanned space exploration. — Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle

"Astro Turf is worlds apart from Lord s splendid debut book, Forever Barbie, but the writing is as powerful and the intellectual scope as daring. Where Barbie was a wry study of a totemic troll, Astro Turf is a personal trek through a murky era. Decades later, looking back at the Space Age through the eyes of an adult journalist, Lord sees sexism and dysfunction, and her observations are mordantly funny." — San Diego Union Tribune

"Veteran investigative reporter Lord delves with great detail into the history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the boys' club mentality that shaped her father's views of women and science. Interviews with former colleagues, current employees, and the women who finally broke the lab's glass ceiling deftly reveal an industry focused on the future but too long mired in the past. Astro Turf starts slowly but ultimately lifts off."—Entertainment Weekly

In many respects this is a remarkable book.. .it is an enormously valuable addition to the literature [on the history of spaceflight].— Roger D. Launius, Chair, Division of Space History, National Air and Space Museum

"Astro Turf is a lively, insightful look at the giddy world of aerospace engineering, informed by M. G. Lord's personal experience of growing up in rocket's red glare of an engineering family. I was fascinated." — Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"A blend of memoir, science writing, history and reportage that tells the story of JPL from the inside out . . . the book stands as a bookend to Forever Barbie, since the image of the hyper-masculine rocket scientist is as much a cultural archetype as Barbie is emblematic of a feminine ideal.''—Newsday

Lord sets an affecting portrait of her father within an eye-opening history of rocket science. . . . Creative and discerning, Lord writes with both deep feeling and marvelously sardonic wit as she recovers buried truths about science, prejudice, and politics, and marvels over all that the space program has achieved.Booklist, starred review

"A marvelous ramble linked to the life and times of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where [Lord's] father worked as an engineer. . . . Astro Turf is never less than interesting and can be exciting, even when you already know the outcome of a particular event."—New Scientist

To a public weaned on tales of American technological prowess, the rocket scientist was a nerd with a swagger, the intellectual counterpart of the astronaut and the test pilot. With razor-cut hair, boxy glasses and a grasp of celestial mechanics that bordered on the magical, he represented the highest evolution of Establishment Man. Cultural historian M. G. Lord knows that the truth is more complicated. Those buzz cuts disguised some important misfits. And some of those engineers had unhappy daughters at home. . . . [A] revealing look inside JPL.San Francisco Chronicle

This compact and beautifully designed memoir explores how a father's conventionality was visited on his daughter.The Seattle Times

Absorbing...an unusually effective hybrid of corporate history and personal memoir. —Michael Upchurch, American Scholar.

While on a mission to understand her dad, a Cold War—era NASA engineer, Lord unearths a good-ol'-boy, anticommunist culture inside the Jet Propulsion Lab. Her witty criticisms of rocket men who could imagine living on Mars but couldn't dream of women becoming astronauts, are tempered by heartfelt observations about her father. Although he wasn't the space cowboy Lord envisioned, his dedication to designing ship actuators was no less heroic.WIRED Magazine

"While it is a look back to the rough, and sometimes painful, opening of our movement into space, Astro Turf is also a hopeful ode to the future." —Homer Hickam, author, Rocket Boys/October Sky

Lord has invented a whole other kind of memoir, one that travels through time and the history of technological development, while reminding us that despite our best efforts to be supermen we all in the end suffer the flaws that make us so deeply human.—A. M. Homes, author of The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know

Also by M. G. Lord

FOREVER BARBIE:

THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF A REAL DOLL

ASTRO

TRUF

The Private Life

of

Rocket Science

M. G. LORD

To Robin, Nick, Zoe, and Maya

Never send a man to do a robot's job.

Gentry Lee

Don't marry an engineer, Dolores, marry an artist.

They have more home life.

Robert A. Heinlein

CONTENTS

Introduction

or The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

Mariner Mars 69

or A Foot Soldier's Story

The Rockets' Red Glare, Part 1

or The Unlikely Beginnings of the

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Rockets' Red Glare, Part 2

or Portrait of the Artist

Gender Parity, Part 1

From Science Fiction to Science Fact

No Lost Opportunity

or The Launch of MER-B

Gender Parity, Part 2

From Science Fact to Science Fiction

Bouncing Toward Meridiani

or Postcards from the New World

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Introduction

or

THE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY

This was not what I had expected.

On a hot afternoon in March 1997, I rolled into the parking lot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the speed limit, in step with scientific convention, was posted in kilometers per hour. Thick brown air hung over the San Gabriel Mountains, veiling the lab—a 177-acre patch of sixties-style buildings scattered in the foothills — in eye-stinging murk. I walked though the guard gate and headed east on Mariner Road, named for a series of robotic spacecraft that flew by Mars and Venus in the 1960s. Then I turned north up a steep hill on Surveyor Road, named for a succession of robots that preceded Neil Armstrong to the moon.

Since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formed in 1958, JPL, as the lab is abbreviated, has been a regional NASA center, of which there are fourteen. It is managed, however, by the nearby California Institute of Technology. This may seem a slight consideration, but in terms of culture, it is critical.

Opposite: The Sergeant and Corporal missiles rise from a display stand near concrete cooling towers at JPL.

Beginning with Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, launched in 1958, JPL has had a hand in the design or flight of nearly every major U.S. planetary mission. Although it puts on a snazzy show when its robots land on or travel close to other planets, it doesn't throw open its doors to outsiders. You can't get on lab, as the natives say, without a photo identification badge. Even if you could, you'd be hard-pressed to find your way around. Buildings don't have names, but rather numbers, and addresses reflect the sequence in which the structures were built, not what is next door. Building 264, for example, is located between Buildings 167 and 198.

The grounds were silent, except for ominous mechanical sounds — a hiss from a liquid nitrogen tank, the clatter of droplets from a concrete cooling tower. Two immense penile structures stood at the intersection of Sergeant Road: the Corporal and Sergeant missiles. The former, visitors can learn from a helpful sign, was America's first operational surface-to-surface missile, designed by JPL in the 1940s when the lab was run by the U.S. Army. The latter, developed a few years later, was a more evolved weapon; it could deliver a conventional or nuclear warhead seventy-five to eighty miles and featured an inertial guidance system invulnerable to electronic countermeasures.

Up ahead, in the Mars Yard, a model of the plucky Sojourner rover, a brainy shoe box on wheels, scuttled over rust red stones for the benefit of a television crew. In the spring of 1997, Sojourner had not yet become a starlet. Three months hence, she, as the engineers say, would distinguish herself on the Mars Pathfinder mission.

I headed for a trailer at the crest of the hill. There Donna Shirley, director of the Mars Exploration program, and the highest-ranking woman on the lab's technical side, was holding the final class in her four-day seminar Managing Creativity. Like Sojourner, Shirley would go on to be a household figure during the Pathfinder landing, holding forth in a boxy Mars red suit as a commentator on Cable News Network. Leading her class, Shirley wore jeans, Reeboks, and a tailored man's shirt, suited to clambering over fake Mars dust with her mechanical protégée.

A model of the Sojourner Rover, which rolled around on Mars in 1997.

Shirley's coinstructor was Alice Fairhurst, a defiant teenager in the body of a woman born in 1935. Two years earlier, with her daughter-in-law, Fairhurst had published a book on Meyers-Briggs personality types, with which the class had been working. Each of us, at our deepest core, we learned, harbors an animal archetype. Although foxes, as nonreflective, quick-to-act, professional-athlete types are known, were sparse in our group, we had a solid representation of Utopian unicorns, bustling beavers, and, not surprisingly, ultracerebral owls. Fairhurst, you knew, could tell if you were a beaver or an owl from, say, the pressure of your handshake. But she never imposed an identity. She let you discover it for yourself.

The lights were dimmed and the Venetian blinds drawn. We filed in silently and, as instructed, removed our shoes. The intimacy was almost unbearable. My face burned with embarrassment at the sight of a blue-white toe peeking through a tear in the brown sock of a male engineer across from me. I sat with Hector Del Castillo and Christopher Hartsough, owls that I had befriended in the course. Del Castillo is a physicist who specializes in optics; Hartsough, a software engineer. I dug my feet into the hard blue industrial carpet.

Shirley flicked a switch on a portable boom box, liberating pings of New Age music. A swooshing brought to mind the Pacific Ocean, pounding twenty miles away. Let your eyes relax and your lips relax and your cheeks relax, she intoned. Relax your face, your mouth, and the very tip of your tongue. I heard the rustle of breath. Relax your legs, your feet, your knees, your toes. A low whine arose from the speakers, like the cry of a whale.

If we relaxed and released and regressed, we would reach the target of our meditation and the wellspring of our creativity: our inner child.

I tried to imagine my father, an aerospace engineer who had died in 1994, in the room, but I could not. This was not how he had described JPL in the 1960s.

You may need to overcome deep-seated, forgotten fears from childhood experiences, Shirley continued. You may need to do things that scare you to death to prove you are no longer a frightened child.

I was torn between being a reporter or a participant — watching the engineers and physicists squirm or shutting my eyes. But Shirley was persuasive.

I want you to remember an important, positive childhood experience that formed a belief system that you have, Shirley said. Try to remember as far back as you can.

My lids grew heavy. An orange and purple afterimage of the Sergeant and Corporal missiles melted into the silver pen-and-pencil set on my father's desk.

Where was the event? she went on. Who was there?

I was in La Jolla, California, on the floor of my room, from which you could see the desk in my dad's study. I remembered two smells — both beguiling to me, though not necessarily to others. They were melting plastic and skunk. The latter emerged from the decrepit foam rubber lining of a pressure helmet that my father had dug out of the trash at General Dynamics-Convair, where he worked in the early 1960s, and presented to me. However stinky and disgusting, the helmet was authentic. It trailed two hoses, and its visor could be sealed shut. The object elevated my stature among my fellow fourth-graders. I wore it for Halloween, class presentations, entertaining after-school guests. At night I slept with it.

The melting smell came from my Mattel Vacuform — a toy that heated a piece of plastic, the size of a slice of American cheese, until it softened and could be molded into an object, like a model airplane. That day, I had made a dozen or so generic fighter jets. My father, amused by this, summoned my mother into the hall to watch. I pretended not to notice.

How did the experience make you feel? Shirley continued.

Accomplished. Interested in engineering.

Now write down an event as an adult where your behavior was influenced by this experience.

In response to the question, I stole a look at the room. Engineers scribbling, I wrote. Take orders well. No evident smirks. The experience had left its mark. I had come to JPL to investigate the culture of engineering. My father's death had not shut the door on our relationship; it had exposed doors I dared not open in his lifetime. I wanted to understand who he was and what had made him that way.

Next Shirley asked us to dredge up a darker memory—one that involved pain or a sense of being thwarted.

Again I thought of my father, and the period in the middle 1960s during which he vanished. He was not abducted by aliens or relocated to the other side of the world. What kept him away was Mariner Mars 69, a mission to send two robotic spacecraft to Mars, on which he had been hired as a contractor. My father worked for Northrop Corporation, and JPL, which managed the mission, had subcontracted with this firm to modify the bus, or body, of the spacecraft.

The late 1960s were not a happy time in our family of three. My mother, barely fifty, was dying of cancer, her frightened, five-foot-ten-inch body wasted to about one hundred pounds. I was pretty small and frightened myself, shuttling between the unique hell that was home and the garden-variety hell of junior high. 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: work over family, masculine over feminine, repression over emotion. Whatever grief he may have carried, he remained a silent, archetypal midcentury male.

One of the two Mariner 69 spacecraft that flew by Mars in the summer of 1969.

Oddly, at the same time that I resented his absence, I was fascinated by what he did. The probes he worked on were scouts, sending home thrilling glimpses of unexplored worlds. All were about hope, expansion, the future, none of which, at my mother's deathbed, would otherwise have crossed my mind. They had an almost mystical significance. The few moments of intimacy I shared with him were when he explained them to me.

Tony Spear, the project manager on Pathfinder, once described engineering as the study of failure. You find out why something didn't work so you can make it work the next time. Pathfinder was hard for its creators to deal with because each component actually did its job. Failure, however, was an apt term to describe my relationship with my father.

We fended for ourselves after my mother died — a housekeeper was ruled out by daunting unpaid medical bills — and I am not entirely sure how we got through. Neither he nor I could cook, and he refused to try, viewing the process as an affront to his masculine dignity. At fourteen, a sophomore in high school, I was not exactly Julia Child, and I grew to hate food preparation, baffled that anyone could confuse the excruciating process with love. Laundry was another ordeal. Never mind that my father had designed flight controls for fighter jets and spacecraft. He would not understand the cycles on the washing machine. Such knowledge, it seemed, was precluded by his gender. It was useless to explain. When his heaps of socks and underwear became too revolting, I scooped them off the floor — the hamper, too, was a challenge — and cleaned them.

The quest for dinner took us to grim family restaurants or poorly lit cocktail lounges. Our favorite was a cheesy place on the top floor of the Holiday Inn overlooking the airport in Long Beach, California, where we had moved from La Jolla. The food was awful — limp, breaded halibut, tasteless iceberg lettuce, freakishly emerald peas. But we loved the place. If we pretended to watch the planes, we didn't have to talk to each other.

My father did not push me to follow in his footsteps. He grudgingly helped with science or math homework, shoving aside his second martini to disparage some shortcoming in my mathematical logic. He wanted me to hone my cooking and cleaning skills, perhaps to spare him the chore of finding a new wife. But I was driven by terror. If I did not do well in rock-hard, number-filled courses, for which, heredity notwithstanding, I had no aptitude, I would not get into college. I would be stuck in Long Beach, California, mothering him, for the rest of my life.

Perhaps it was because he was born in 1906, and his only child didn't come along until his fifties. Perhaps it was because he had worked in an environment that, except for a few secretaries, was exclusively male. Perhaps it was because his late wife had chucked teaching high-school chemistry and, later, working for a public utility, to keep his house. But my father had some very weird ideas about women. He couldn't have

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