Analogous Inspiration

 When I was a young kid (4-10), I wanted to be an astronaut. Then, suddenly, my ‘dream’ changed – I started telling people that I wanted to be a lawyer. I always thought that the reason for this change was that my dad always said that being a lawyer was a good career, but going through old papers while I was at home made me realize maybe this wasn’t the whole story.

I found a “newspaper” that I had written in fourth grade. Our class had a variety of student-run “businesses”: some people made crafts out of paper and traded them for rocks others collected on the playground. To be a part of this economy, I wrote a sporadic “newspaper,” proudly typed up in Microsoft Publisher and printed on long paper (to be more authentic), which I traded to get my share of rocks and paper bracelets. The teacher tried to stop us, as we used a lot of classroom supplies, but, I digress…

One of these “newspaper” “issues” contained a story about the space shuttle Challenger and its 1986 explosion. Reading it now, I am brought back memories of how shocked I was when I discovered that this had happened, that seven people had died. Even though I was reading about it fourteen years after the fact, I felt as if those people had just died. With my father away in Afghanistan, I was profoundly struck by the mortality of these people I saw as heroes (no doubt there was a fearful analogy in my fourth-grade mind to my father, who I also saw as my hero).

I am reminded of this shred of my past by the resoundingly successful landing of Curiosity on Mars, an emotional event I watched while observing at Palomar Observatory. Early in the evening on the day of the scheduled landing I excitedly texted my uncle, whose ten-year-old son has repeatedly told me that he wants to go to Caltech someday, to let him know about the landing.

After the message was sent, however, I worried, perhaps irrationally, about what would happen if Curiosity were to crash to the surface in a fiery mess instead of land as it was supposed to. Would my cousin lose faith in Caltech? NASA? Science? I remembered all too clearly my own first impression of science’s imperfections, and I was worried that were Curiosity to fail, it would have some momentous effect on my cousin’s life plans.

My fears were unfounded. Curiosity landed on the surface of Mars safely, and as I watched the jubilant celebration of the involved scientists and engineers on a laptop, in the data room of the Hale 200-inch, I imagined my cousin watching this celebration and how much this success would inspire him. I imagined him tracking the progress of the MSL over the next weeks, months, or even years as I voraciously consumed everything I could about Voyager when I learned about it as a child. I was fascinated with the ideal that somewhere, something we humans had made was doing science we couldn’t do ourselves. As I traced my fingers along the a map of our solar system with Voyager’s trajectory overlaid, so I hope will my cousin will someday have a map of Mars along which to trace a similar path.

Curiosity is inspirational. Now, I don’t need an inspiration to spur me towards science, having found my own way, but the awe Curiosity inspires might lead many children to follow it into a field of science.

There is also something else that I have realized in the ten years since I wrote that sad article about Challenger. There can be no progress without risk. Those imperfections that manifest as disaster are not failure, but merely poorly aimed steps forward.