ASTRO TURF

Reviewed 10/10/2005

Hardback cover Paperback cover
HC — 0-8027-1427-7 PB — 0-8027-7739-2
ASTRO TURF: The Private Life of Rocket Science
M. G. Lord
New York: Walker & Company, 2005

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN 0-8027-1427-7 259p. HC/BWI $24.00

This book's reproduction on its hardback front cover of a "spacey" 1960s lunchbox, painted with delta-winged rocket, wheeled space station, and space-suited astronauts striding over the surface of a busy Mars base, brilliantly evokes the "go-fever" spirit of the 1960s when its author came of age. In her Introduction, M. G. Lord describes a 1997 "touchy-feelie" seminar at JPL, in strong contrast to the cultures of engineering and of America that held sway half a century before: the "beat the Russians" hysteria of the Cold War, the push for science and technology fostered by Sputnik, the stereotypical nuclear family of the 1950s, with its rigid sex roles of taciturn Dad the Breadwinner and nurturing Mom the Homebody. Her father, Charles Carroll Lord, was a typical engineer, putting work ahead of family. From page 6:

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, archetypical midcentury male.

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.

Lord skillfully interweaves her personal recollections and feelings with the larger events of the times: the development of the Atlas missile, on which her father worked; the deployment of the hydrogen bomb which made Atlas and other ICBMs useful as delivery systems; the surrogate war of the Space Race; specific items like the M2-F2 lifting body, which careened its way into popular culture by crashing1 behind the opening credits of The Six Million Dollar Man which ran for 108 episodes during the 1970s, standing in for the accident that led to the "bionic" enhancements of its astronaut hero Steve Austin.2

But this is much more than just a personal reminiscence of how home life was distorted by the distorted sexist culture in America of the middle twentieth century. Chapter 2 gives a detailed, absorbing account of the origin of JPL and the careers of its principals, notably Frank Malina and Jack Parsons. Malina was a student of von Karman and the theoretical brains of the "Suicide Squad"; Parsons, self-taught, was its fuels chemist. Other original members were Edward Forman, Apollo M. O. Smith, and Rudolph Schott.3 This chapter also explores what Lord calls Operation Overcast. Better known as Project Paperclip, it was the Army program which brought hundreds of Nazi rocketeers into the American missile program. Lord notes the irony of expelling suspected Communists while welcoming actual Nazis. And in fact the U.S. space program might have done as well without von Braun and his compatriots. The "Suicide Squad", working at White Sands, fired a WAC Corporal on 11 August 1945 to 235,000 feet. It was the first man-made object to leave Earth's atmosphere. The Germans, 35 miles away at Fort Bliss, did not match that accomplishment for six more months. But fear of godless communism, and the political mileage to be gained from denouncing it, led American authorities to many absurd crusades. Not the least absurd was the one to which Frank Malina was subjected.4 Even after he had left rocketry and moved to Paris as a UNESCO environmental scientist, Lord relates, the FBI hounded him and sought his extradition in 1952 — apparently in order to embarrass the United Nations, which refused to purge itself of "pinkos".

Chapter 3 continues the saga of Frank Malina.5 In it we learn that the indictment (obtained just under the wire on the statute of limitations for his alleged offense) was dismissed by the judge per a petition from the prosecutor who had brought it under pressure from the FBI. Despite this, the Bureau did not drop its surveillance of Malina in Paris. He attained some renown for his kinetic artworks and enjoyed a vibrant social life. The agents were baffled by his guest list; it included William Pickering (Director of JPL) and Leonid Sedov (an architect of the Russian space program) as well as Jacob Bronoski, Mary McCarthy and husband James West, Joan Baez and former husband David Harris. But the FBI's zeal never flagged. It regarded Malina's 1964 proposal for an international scientific base on the Moon as "subversive" and suspected that the International Academy of Astronautics which he co-founded in 1960 had a "seditious" agenda.

Meanwhile, Wernher von Braun was riding high. With the help of Walt Disney, a staunch anti-communist, and the U.S. print media, he promoted the German vision of space exploration to the exclusion of all others. Von Braun died in 1977, Malina in 1981. By then, Lord notes on page 120, the pattern had been set, even as foretold in a screenplay treatment by Malina and Parsons in 1937:

Rather than hand their research to the Nazis, Hamilton and his team [in the screenplay] burn their papers. In real life, Malina and his team didn't have to destroy their own work; anti-Communists did it for them. And the Nazis, through their links to the American space program, were triumphant.

The comparison is a bit strained, because in real life there was no industrialist plotting to sell American rocketry know-how to Nazi Germany. Yet there are enough parallels to make it resonant. And, Lord continues, what goes around comes around. New scholarship has deepened our understanding of the Project Paperclip scientists with the Nazi party and the atrocities at Mittelwerk Dora. We also understand some of the "what-ifs" of the space program: the results of choices that might have been made, but were not. And we live in a different era, culturally and politically. The Cold War is long over; and we won. International cooperation in space, while not the norm, is an established fact. Engineers may still be bookworms (nerds), but they now have feelings. And many scientists and engineers are women. It is to that new era that Lord turns her attention in Chapter 4.

That chapter begins with her family embarking on a summer vacation. To inspire and educate his young daughter, Charles Carroll Lord will take her on a cross-country tour: Bryce Canyon, the site of Custer's Last Stand, and similar scenic and historic sights. But the inspiring scenes his daughter remembers best are those that came from the pages of Heinlein juveniles like Have Space Suit — Will Travel that she carries along. As she recalls on page 126,

It centers on an eighteen-year-old regular guy named Kip who wants to visit the moon, which, through a fluke abduction by aliens, he manages to do. Further adventures follow, including saving the human race. His partner for these escapades, however, is not a male sidekick, Robin to his Batman or Bud Barclay to his Tom Swift. It is an eleven-year-old girl, PeeWee, who is smarter, tougher, and braver than Kip.

The book also features "the Mother Thing," an extraterrestrial of indeterminate gender, who provides the love, support and cuddling that children traditionally get from their mothers. This blew me away. Here was a place where girls could outthink grown men and mothering was a job, not a biological destiny.

Other female Heinlein characters also impressed her. She mentions M. L. Martin and G. B. McNye ("Mary Louise" and "Gloria Brooks") as the reason her own Mary Grace became "M. G.".6 It was not only in his fiction that Heinlein promoted female abilities; when providing expert commentary for the Apollo 11 mission with Walter Cronkite, he suggested that women should have been on the flight.7 Lord contrasts this attitude with a 1962 comment by von Braun who, when asked if NASA would ever fly women, quipped that mission planners had reserved 110 pounds of weight allowance for every male astronaut's "recreational equipment". It was a commonplace attitude of the time, in America as well as in Germany, that women were not fit for professional jobs. (Donna Shirley encountered it in college; see my review of Managing Martians.) At the same time, of course, there were plenty of women holding down professional jobs — not just in the novels and stories of Robert Heinlein, but in the real world. Lord writes of Margaret Burbridge, an accomplished optical astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory. Burbridge, who went on to become Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Sussex, England, got telescope time at Mount Wilson only because her husband was also on the staff there and let her use his observing hours.

But, throughout history, exceptional women have been entrusted with professional positions. Hypatia, daughter of Theon, taught mathematics and natural philosophy (science) at Alexandria in ancient Egypt. The prejudice against such women is also of long standing. A mob dragged Hypatia from her school and flayed the flesh from her bones with abalone shells. Her murder seems to have been bound up with the conflict between science and religion, for her attackers were Christians. The twentieth century gave us numerous professional women: astronomers, anthropologists, biologists, engineers, mathematicians. Some are well known: Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Sally Ride. Many are obscure. All had to muster not only skill in their chosen career, but courage to face tough opposition from a male-dominated industry or establishment. Citing historian David F. Noble, Lord proposes that this opposition sprang from the late medieval period when higher learning was monopolized by monastic religious orders — or, as she describes them, "celibate, ascetic, and frequently misogynistic priests." Whatever its origins, it led to some absurd prejudices against allowing women into technical roles. Lord presents a host of examples. Fortunately, before this parade of prejudice becomes too long, she turns to the history of JPL and the women who, with the help of Lab directors and other enlightened males, made it what it is today. Notable are Marcia Nuegebauer, its first female project scientist, Bruce Murray (Director 1976-84), who established a child care center, and Donna Shirley. In addition to heading up the Sojourner project that built the first Mars rover, Shirley authored a pull-no-punches report on what was wrong with NASA management. (The report "ruffled the feathers" of NASA administrator Richard H. Truly and other top brass at the agency. It was released in watered-down form and had little impact.)

Lord winds up her analysis by covering the launch of MER-B (Opportunity) and associated events, along with the current cultural environments of Kennedy Space Center and JPL. She portrays KSC's as mainly a holdover from the 1960s, despite all the changes that have taken place there. JPL is more up to date, now accepting — though after protracted struggle — of women (and minority groups like gays and lesbians) in professional positions. So, at the end of her journey, Lord finds a history of progress and the hope that it will continue, as B. Gentry Lee, one of the top engineers at JPL, relates how he encourages the female friends of his seven adolescent sons to look into physics or mathematics. A wider perspective also emerges when a woman manager at JPL points out the difference between the misfortunes women meet in Western societies and those they suffer under the Taliban.

In sum, I find this a very worthwhile book. Lord is an indefatigable researcher and makes very few errors. What I thought at one point was going to turn into a feminist diatribe avoided that mistake. Lord retains her sense of balance, weaving personal details of her life together with space program history and sociocultural reporting into a satisfying whole. In the end, she comes to terms with her father's life, finding through his letters and scrapbooks the love and admiration for her that he, bound by personal misfortunes and the stoic culture of engineering, was unable to share when alive. She finds herself enthralled just as strongly by the exploratory quest, realizing that robots like Spirit and Opportunity are fine when they're all we've got, but mere proxies for actually being there.

Fifteen pages of chapter notes, a bibliography of 130 entries, and a thorough index round out the book.

1 The real event, which occurred at Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California on 10 May 1967, maimed pilot Bruce Peterson. He recovered but lost the sight of his right eye.
2 A wag by the name of CP Winter has it that they were going to name him "Steve Houston" but they decided this would be gilding the lily so they picked their surname from another suitable Texas city. (There are few other cities in Texas, well-known or not, that have suitable names. Steve San Angelo is too long, and sounds ethnic. Steve Dallas might cause Larry Hagman to object. Sorry, Sandy Duncan: Steve Tyler just doesn't have that zing, that euphony... Steve Galveston? Steve Amarillo? Nah. Steve Belton might work; he could use his bionic arm to give the bad guys a beltin'. Or -- Yes, here's the one: Steve Winters!)
3 By 1937, the team had expanded to include Martin Summerfield and Hsue-shen Tsien.
4 Like Malina, both Summerfield and Tsien were tainted by accusations of Communist leanings. Summerfield became a professor at Princeton, but lost his clearance. Tsien was deported. Back in his homeland, Tsien's advanced knowledge of rocketry formed the seed crystal for the PRC's guided-missile program.
5 Lord appropriately subtitles both Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 "The Rockets' Red Glare".
6 These women feature in the stories "Let There Be Light" and "Delilah and the Space Rigger" and are, respectively, a biological scientist and a radio engineer. Using the initials gets them past the gender bias in the hiring process. Once hired, they more than pull their weight.
7 Heinlein's choice of Olympic figure skater Peggy Fleming as the ideal woman astronaut strikes Lord as "weird". It doesn't seem that way to me. True, figure skating is decorative rather than productive. True, Peggy Fleming was grace on ice, her performances the epitome of ethereal beauty and delicacy; and Heinlein had an eye for the ladies. Thus it could be argued that this was the motive for his championing the champion skater. But consider how she attained that state: hours of strenuous exercises, day after day for years; training to perform accurately when sick or injured; learning to maintain precise attitude control during triple axles (much like Armstrong or Aldrin in the three-axis simulator) so as to land just right (and to recover smoothly when she didn't land just right); stern discipline to keep her weight constant; and of course the superb physical condition. The one concern is her technical ability: could she have mastered the skills necessary to operate the spacecraft? I know she attended Colorado College while training at Colorado Springs. She's listed as a 1970 alumna, but it's not clear if she graduated, and I can find nothing about what her major was. I conclude that the question of her fitness for astronaut duty remains open.
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