WHO IS GOVERNMENT?
A SERIES FROM POST OPINIONS
The Searchers
Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab
In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we’ll find evidence of life on another planet. I’m willing to say this because I’m not a scientist and I don’t work in media relations for NASA. But all evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don’t find conditions for life on the moons near us, we’ll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we’ll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things.
And thus, the conditions for life. In a few years, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will have a panoramic field of vision a hundred times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. And on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — we’ll call it Roman from here on out — there will be a coronagraph, a device designed to perform something called, beautifully, starlight suppression. Starlight suppression is the blocking of the rays of a faraway star so that we can see behind it and around it. Once we can master starlight suppression, with Roman and NASA’s next astrophysics flagship, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, we’ll find the planets where life might exist.
To recap: For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether life is possible elsewhere in the universe, and now we’re within striking distance of being able to say not only yes, but here.
About the author
And yet this is not front-page news. I didn’t really know how close we were to this milestone until I visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on a hot and dry day in June. The lab, a division of NASA that specializes in building unmanned satellites, explorers and land-based rovers such as the Opportunity vehicle on Mars, is known as Disneyland for nerds. It’s where a good swath of the world’s best minds in astronomy and astrophysics and engineering work in extremely boring buildings in extreme heat surrounded by jagged mountains and only 23 minutes from downtown Los Angeles. The campus is very clean and very sunny, the architecture is just short of gulag, the offices just short of stultifying, but the work being done at JPL is the most inspiring research and exploration currently being done by any humans on our planet.
And it’s paid for by you. No billionaires will fund work like this, because there’s no money in it. This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was founded in 1936 by engineers from the California Institute of Technology — known as Caltech. Originally funded by the U.S. Army to research rocket propulsion before and after World War II, JPL’s mission evolved to work closely with NASA, with a concentration on unmanned space exploration. They built the first American satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958. The next year, they built Pioneer, the first U.S. probe to leave Earth’s orbit. They built Ranger 7, the first American spacecraft to successfully send back images of the moon, in 1964. They built the Mars Opportunity rover. They helped build the Cassini Saturn orbiter, which in 2017 dove between the planet and its rings. (Did you miss that? I missed that. How did we miss that?) They built key parts of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble. They’ve built spacecraft that have taken samples from passing comets, and Voyager 1 in 2012 became the first human creation to leave our solar system entirely. It’s currently 15 billion miles from Earth — and is still sending back data.
In the cafeteria, I was surrounded by the scientists from France, from Ukraine, from China, even from Queens, and while they ate burritos and Cobb salads, they talked about dark matter, and sub-Neptunes, and something called the “demographics of planets.” At the table was Jason Rhodes, who studies dark energy, and Marie Ygouf, who specializes in high-contrast imaging from telescopes and satellites. Next to me was Feng Zhao, who had a meeting after lunch related to the deformable mirrors — they are not a way to see yourself more favorably — that will be aboard the Roman. At the far end of the table was Tiffany Kataria, whose specialty is studying the atmospheres of exoplanets, looking for, say, reflections caused by water droplets — an indicator of the possibility of life. I sat across from a scientist from Australia, Alina Kiessling, who works on stratospheric airships, and whose profile on the JPL website simply says, under her name, “Structure of the Universe.” Actually, go to the JPL website and you’ll find job descriptions that make most job titles — and most jobs — seem a bit trivial and myopic. Katarina Markovic’s title, on the site at least, is simply “Origin of the Universe.”
But at the moment, much of the work at JPL is devoted to finding and examining exoplanets, and there is an urgency to the work that is palpable. In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when. And if there’s going to be one scientist to bet on being part of the team that does it, it will be Vanessa Bailey. To date, only 82 exoplanets have been directly imaged, and Bailey found one of them.
Bailey grew up in South Dakota, in a rural area outside Brookings. Her parents were both scientists; her father taught biology at South Dakota State. The skies were dark where they lived, the stars everywhere. Bailey watched “Nova” on PBS — the town didn’t have cable — so that’s where she got most of her early fascination with the universe. Her parents bought her a small telescope that she used from time to time, but usually she observed the night sky with the naked eye, from the fields outside her house. “Astronomy has a long tradition of thousands of years of naked-eye observing,” she says. “That led to the discovery of planets, and it’s in some sense one of the first sciences. And yet, as technology has improved, I think we’ve been able to make phenomenal leaps.” One such leap was Hubble, the space telescope that was launched in 1990, took blurry photos for a few years, then was fixed by astronaut-mechanics in space, at which point it gave the world the most astounding pictures in the history of humankind.
One day, Bailey’s father took her to the South Dakota State campus, and they downloaded some of the telescope’s first images. “My dad printed some of them off on his color printer and I took them home and I just stared at them. It was just a complete change in perspective — the clarity with which Hubble was exposing the universe really blew my little kid mind.”
The Hubble made possible the finding and studying of exoplanets, a field that exploded in popularity while Bailey was making her way through college and graduate school.
“Exoplanet” is a foreboding word for a happy thing, which is a planet outside our own solar system. We have eight planets in our solar system, but it’s now a given that most stars are orbited by their own sets of planets. So, if there are billions of stars in our galaxy alone — our galaxy being the Milky Way; I knew that and you knew that — that means there are billions of planets orbiting these billions of stars. And chances are that one, or many, of these billions of planets has life on it. That doesn’t mean it’s intelligent life, or even semi-intelligent life. It could be bacteria, or some kind of interstellar sea cucumber. But whatever form it takes, we are close to finding it.
Bailey left South Dakota to get a master’s degree in astronomy at the University of Minnesota, then completed her doctorate at the University of Arizona, where Phil Hinz, a legendary professor of astronomy, had retrofitted the university’s telescope to better find exoplanets. Bailey spent more than a hundred nights at the telescope and then, one night, found an exoplanet of her own. She actually saw it. This is exceedingly rare.
At that point, scientists had identified a few thousand exoplanets, but most of these had been found through inference, not direct observation. Inference can mean various things. Astronomers can monitor the brightness of a given star and if there are periodic drops in their brightness, they can infer this means an orbiting planet has passed by. There are other ways, involving gravitational microlensing and radial velocity and spectrometry — I can’t and won’t try to explain these here — but at that point, in 2014, only 14 exoplanets had been directly imaged. That is, actually seen.
And then Vanessa Bailey saw one.
“I was incredulous that it was real,” she says. “I saw the smudge in my data, but there are false positives. It could be just a chance alignment with a background star, for example. You have to do follow-up imaging over time to convince yourself that it’s a planet that’s there orbiting with the stars as opposed to something else. I was skeptical that it was real.”
She did months of research, confirming the data, until she was sure she had actually found a new planet. And, soon, it had a name: HD 106906 b. “It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,” she says. But it was her find. Still, she shrugs off talk that it was anything approaching an individual accomplishment. There was no particular celebration at the university. “I got an article in the student newspaper, but yeah, there wasn’t a paper in Science [magazine] or anything.”
This is a good moment to emphasize that no one at JPL — no one I met, at least — was willing to take credit for anything. Starting with Bailey, there was such a relentless emphasis on teams and groups and predecessors, and such a deep unwillingness from anyone to put themselves forward, or to talk too much, or above all take credit for anything. Bailey was insistent that I talk to the head of the coronagraph team, Bertrand Mennesson — and I did; he is French; we’ll get to him soon — and was so embarrassed to be interviewed at all, and the JPL media team was so insistent that I talk to this person and that person, that it made writing this essay very difficult, and probably very unfair. Bailey is one of about 75 people on the core coronagraph team, and the coronagraph is only one part of the Roman telescope, which is also looking for dark matter and the beginnings of the universe — a worthy topic but not for us, not today.
If anything, the humility on display at JPL might be even more pronounced at NASA. I watched the last launch of the space shuttle, back in 2011, and was part of a strange semi-exclusive-access tour group made up of artists, writers and musicians. Our group included Alan Parsons — of the Project — and the very young and very Finnish inventors of the video game “Angry Birds.” We were able to see just about everything at the Kennedy Space Center, and every engineer and astronaut we met, both active and retired, conformed to the same general personality guidelines: thoughtful, understated and preternaturally unwilling to put themselves even a micron ahead of anyone else.
I was thinking of this while Bailey talked about imaging one of only 14 exoplanets, and then she surprised me with a rare moment of self-assessment.
“I think I had the benefit of coming in as a student without firmly entrenched preconceptions of what I expected to see,” she said, and looked to the ceiling over my head. “Sometimes, that can be helpful, because this planet was much farther from its star than other planets we’d seen at the time. It was one of the most distantly orbiting ones. So if I had come in with conventional wisdom firmly entrenched, I would’ve just said, ‘Eh, don’t even bother. That can’t be a planet.’ So I think coming in with fresh eyes helped me out in that particular case. So I still try to still balance conventional wisdom and the expertise of years with being willing to look for new things.”
That is the closest you will hear Bailey, or any astrophysicist at JPL or NASA, come to bragging.
The catch is, though Bailey had found an exoplanet, it was not the right kind of exoplanet to support life. The one she found through that telescope at the University of Arizona was about the size of Jupiter, and, in general, the exoplanets that are easiest to find are both very large, and very far from their stars. Why? Well, for starters, it’s easier to see larger things. So the planets farther from stars are the first to be detected. But the farther away any planet is from a star, the less likely it is to support life. Just like our own Jupiter and Neptune and Uranus, it gets too cold. So in the search for planets that might support life, scientists are looking for those closer to a given star, in what’s often called the Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold. But — and this is the key thing — the closer a planet is to a star, the harder it is to see. The light of the star is so bright that seeing anything nearby is almost impossible.
And this is where the coronagraph comes in. Coronagraph technology has been around since 1930, when a French scientist named Bernard Lyot first figured out how to block the light from distant stars — somewhat, at least — to see the planets near them. Scientists have been using, and improving, coronagraphs ever since. There’s a coronagraph on the Kepler Space Telescope, and there’s one on Hubble and one on Webb. The one on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be far more adjustable and sensitive and capable, with more than 3,000 tiny pistons moving the deformable mirrors I mentioned earlier. And though it’s one of the more delicate and expensive science instruments ever to come out of JPL, the principles behind it are fairly basic.
To demonstrate how starlight suppression works, sit at any desk with a desk lamp on it. Turn the lamp off and point the bulb at yourself. Now, draw a planet on a Post-it note and stick the Post-it on the wall next to lamp. Go back to your original position on your chair. With the lamp off, you can see the Post-it planet easily, right there beyond the lamp. Now, turn the lamp on. Can you still see the planet? Not a chance. The light from the lamp obliterates your view of everything near it and behind it.
But there is a solution. Use your hand to block out the light of the lamp. Suddenly, you can see the Post-it planet again. Not so complicated, not so hard. And not so different from the starlight suppression being worked on at JPL.
To take the experiment further, alter the shape of your hand and you’ll see that different configurations of your hand block more light. In blocking the light of a distant star, the more your mask resembles the flowerlike shape of a twinkling star, petals of light and all, the better you’ll be able to see anything — like a planet, for example — close to it.
When I visited JPL, the Roman coronagraph team had just delivered its equipment to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where it will undergo tests and fine-tuning until the telescope is launched, no later than 2027. To you and me, this would seem to be a good long three years of waiting, but to Bailey and Mennesson and everyone else I met on the Roman team, it felt imminent. They had been momentarily relieved to have delivered their coronagraph, but now were stressed about the launch.
“It might as well be tomorrow,” Bailey says.
I look around Bailey’s office. There are about four objects in it. There’s a decorative textile her mom sent her. There’s a calendar. There’s a sticker bearing the coronagraph logo. Otherwise, it looked as though she’d just moved in — or was about to move out. JPL scientists sometimes rotate offices, given their attachment to certain projects, so Bailey has been in this office only for six months. Still, though, its utter emptiness seemed monastic in its detachment from material things. And given that Bailey has worked almost seven years on one project, I ask her about patience and metaphysics and, while we were in the spiritual realm, what finding signs of life on another planet might mean for our lives here.
“Yeah, it’s funny,” she says. “I mean, on a day-to-day basis, I think our work is so in the fine details and not in the big picture that we don’t usually ask ourselves this. But personally, I would find that incredibly inspiring, finding life on another planet. I like feeling small. I like going into Yosemite with the mountains and feeling part of an inconsequential piece, but part of this bigger whole. So, to me, I think finding life elsewhere would only expand that sense, but in a very positive and I think a hopeful way. It also lessens the pressure on you to get everything right because you’re not so special.”
You might have noticed by now that there are a lot of women who work at JPL. This is true. Thirty-one percent of its current staff is women, and among younger staff members, this percentage is much higher. You might be contrasting this number with images from popular film and TV in which NASA is a male-dominated place, where the Mission Control of the 1960s and 1970s is populated exclusively by men in white, short-sleeved button downs and black pants. This was not untrue back in the day, but there are some surprising and complicating facts, and surprising and complicating people, that run counter to this stereotype. One in particular bears illumination, and that is Nancy Grace Roman, the person for whom the space telescope is named.
Nancy Grace Roman was born in Nashville in 1925. Her mother taught music and her father was a geophysicist who brought the family all over the country, using his expertise to look for gold and other precious metals. They stopped in Reno a few times, where Nancy watched the night sky from the surrounding desert. By age 13 — in 1938, mind you — she knew she wanted to be an astronomer.
She was discouraged by her high school guidance counselor, who suggested she focus on Latin; she pursued astronomy anyway. She went to Swarthmore College, where she was discouraged from getting a degree in astronomy; she did it anyway. She did her doctoral work at the University of Chicago, and stayed there for six years, working at the Yerkes Observatory in southeastern Wisconsin. She wanted and expected to be offered tenure, but the powers that be were not ready for a woman professor of astronomy. She moved on, accepting a position at the Naval Research Laboratory, where she got into a new field: radio astronomy. Using radio astronomy — in which distances are measured by bouncing radio waves against objects in space — Roman mapped the Milky Way and calculated the distance to the moon. She’d just turned 30.
In 1959, a new government agency, the National Aeronautical and Space Agency, was being formed. An acquaintance there asked Roman whether she knew anyone at the Naval Research Laboratory who might be able to create a space-based astronomy program at NASA. Roman nominated herself, and six months later, she was named NASA’s first chief of astronomy. “The idea of coming in with an absolutely clean slate to set up a program that I thought was likely to influence astronomy for 50 years was just a challenge that I couldn’t turn down,” she later said. “That’s all there is to it.”
Until then, all astronomy was done by telescopes on land. These telescopes can be enormously powerful — picture those giant domed behemoths on hills and in deserts — but they are sometimes limited. The Earth’s atmosphere distorts what they see, and they can’t measure the wavelengths of light. To see further into the universe, unencumbered, we needed telescopes in space.
Roman convinced NASA and Congress to fund research into the first space-based telescopes, and after decades of work and lobbying, this led to the Hubble. By the time it launched, Roman was long retired, but was alive to enjoy its findings — many of which she predicted long before. As early as 1959, she proposed that a space-based telescope could detect planets around other stars, and even detailed the idea of using a coronagraph to make it easier.
She worked at NASA until 1979, when she took early retirement; her mother was ill and Roman needed to take care of her. She continued consulting for NASA though, and she taught high school students, advised science teachers and spent a decade recording astronomy textbooks so they would be accessible to blind and dyslexic students.
Roman died in 2018, at age 93, having been an integral part of the growth of NASA in general, and space astronomy in particular, for the better part of 50 years. She was known as “The Mother of Hubble” by many, but like every other person associated with NASA or JPL, she didn’t like being singled out.
Universally revered now, Nancy Grace Roman was not universally loved when she was a NASA executive. Budgets being limited, she had to make tough decisions. She favored some projects and chopped others. At one point during the 1960s, a team was hellbent on building a telescope on the moon, for example. She nixed it, citing the cost and the likelihood of moon dust interfering with the equipment. But hard choices remain part of the culture at JPL, and in all my encounters there, the scientists and managers were ever-mindful of how precarious their budgets could be.
When I visited Kennedy Space Center back in 2011, an old hand at NASA, who was showing us the shuttle launchpad, said, “We’re not just shooting money into space.” He was surprisingly defensive, and I was saddened — we were all saddened, including Alan Parsons — to hear that this agency we loved, this work that had fired our imaginations, ever had to defend itself.
Community corner
Still, some might argue that these periods of doubt have made NASA and JPL stronger — more frugal and careful and vigilant. Could be. When I was at lunch with eight or so scientists and engineers, I asked them how they’d be spending the rest of their day. Most of them had meetings. Meetings to go over progress on a project. Budget meetings. Meetings about schedules. Meetings about meetings. I’m not saying this is bad, or unnecessary. I’m just saying that this is the way it is. The scientists I met were exquisitely aware that they were spending taxpayer money, and they were determined to justify the faith put in them.
After lunch, I visited the Microdevices Lab, where many of the tiny lenses and mirrors and pistons of the coronagraph were made, and where the engineers were careful to tell me about the many spin-off technologies that have come out of their research and development. I would go into this, but I did not understand any of the words that were said to me during my visit to the Microdevices Lab. The men — in this case, they were all men — who spoke to me were deeply sincere and obviously very smart, but I do not have a doctorate in physics or mechanical engineering, so I understood no sentences for a period of about 35 minutes. I nodded and took pictures, and I thanked them and then met Nick Siegler.
If the men at the Microdevices Lab were a bit insular, Siegler, the chief technologist for NASA’s exoplanet program, is their precise opposite. He is loud and gregarious and funny, and he wanted to show me a technology that, like the moon telescope killed by Nancy Grace Roman, might not make it to space but would be damned phenomenal if it did. I present it to you in the hope that we can together create some kind of write-in campaign so this thing happens. It will be the most beautiful space object ever made by humans, involving gold foil and pulleys and origami, and will be bigger than a football field. It must happen. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I waited with Calla Cofield, a media relations specialist for JPL, outside Siegler’s door as he was finishing a phone call. His voice rumbled through the glass wall, where pictures of Siegler with a range of pop-science figures are taped. There was Siegler with Bill Nye, Siegler with Larry King. Suddenly, Siegler burst through the door. “Were you waiting?” he asks. “Am I late?”
And then he was walking down the hall, briskly, and we struggled to catch up. Siegler is 60 years old, with thick black hair and merry eyes. He talks quicker and walks faster than anyone else I met at JPL. He starts in about the coronagraph without preamble.
“With the coronagraph, we hope it does more than just demonstrate the technology. We hope it actually can do some science. It’ll be able to find Jupiters and Saturns and we’ll learn so much from it. But the holy grail …”
He stops. The floor where his office is a warren of nondescript, beige cubicles. “I think we went the wrong way,” he says, and turns to Cofield. “Where were you parked anyway?”
“We’re out back by the power plant,” she says.
“Oh, this is okay,” he says, and we’re off again. “Anyway, so the point is the coronagraph is going to be, it’s going to work fantastically. There’s very little doubt that it’s going to work, but trying to get to planets is a whole new world. So, thank God we have Roman because it’s a step in the right direction, but it only takes us like halfway …”
He wants to show me a technology that is, in its noncompetitive JPL way, the direct competitor to the coronagraph. It’s another way to see beyond the stars.
We get in a golf cart and meander up from the bottom of the canyon. It’s late in the afternoon, and the temperature is in the 90s. JPL’s blocky buildings cast clean diagonal shadows over the immaculate pavement. Cofield is driving, but construction on campus keeps sending us to dead ends.
“And now, we’re going down the wrong way,” Siegler says. We turn around. “And I thought driving would be a better idea!” he adds, laughing.
After a day of soft-spoken scientists, being with Nick Siegler is like walking out of a rural monastery and into a downtown comedy club.
“I love this tour because you just saw the world of high optics in the Microdevices Lab, right?” he says. “Okay, high-end optics, very precise. You can’t touch a damn thing. You breathe on these optics, that could be enough to screw the mission up. Now, we’re going to see something that does completely the same thing — it blocks the starlight, but it does it in a different way. And with this, you can touch everything.”
Siegler grew up in New Jersey, the only child of Marcel and Rosa Siegler, Jewish refugees from Romania. His father was a chemical engineer who worked for decades at the Seton Leather Company in Newark, spending much of his time trying to make leather tanning less reliant on dangerous chemicals. Nick spent summers working at the factory, an experience that motivated him to go to college. “Otherwise, that would have been my fate,” he says.
At home, in his family’s two-bedroom apartment, Nick watched the Viking 1 lander’s pictures from the surface of Mars, the images coming through their TV one column at a time. “I kept hoping that last column would have Martians, but no.”
He watched Carl Sagan on “Cosmos” and, enraptured by the astronomer’s sonorous voice and the poetic language he used, Siegler decided he wanted to work at NASA. His parents were skeptical. “They basically said, no, people from where we’re from don’t become astrophysicists. So, I kind of dropped it.”
We drive past a building called the Formation Flight Technology Laboratory. A tour group rushes by, chased by the oppressive sun and into the shade of a nearby awning.
“It’s not even July!” Siegler says.
He earned a degree in chemical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, and then went to work for Unilever. Siegler worked there for 12 years, starting at National Starch and Chemical, and then managing various factories, until one Christmas, home with his parents, he thought about the rest of his life.
“I had accomplished enough in the business world and seen enough of it that I started just asking some basic questions, like, ‘What is it that I really love?’ And, ‘What would I do if money was not an object?’ I think everyone should ask themselves that question. And so I just kind of locked myself in a room and just wrote and wrote and wrote about what I wanted to do, and on that short list of things was astronomy. And the more I thought about it, the more excited I got, until I got the courage enough to tell my employer that that was it. I was going to resign and go back to school and try to make it work. I guess there’s a very fine line between courage and stupidity, and I walked that line for a long time.”
We pass something that looks like an oil derrick. Siegler says: “That metal structure is where they drop certain things on Mars, for example. Where they simulate them, that is.”
Cofield pauses the golf cart again and turns to Siegler. “You’re navigating, not me,” she says.
“Sorry, I can’t multitask,” he says. “Go straight, please.”
Cofield guides the golf cart farther up the hill.
At age 32, Siegler was accepted into Harvard University’s Special Students program, where he had to redo all the math and physics he’d done at Stevens. “I had to work three times as hard as everybody else, because here I am 32, and I’m surrounded by 17- and 18-year-old little geniuses who were just fresh out of high school.” He spent seven semesters at Harvard, and then went on to the University of Arizona, where he completed his master’s and PhD. He was 43 years old when he finished school and started at NASA.
We pass a flat expanse about the size of a few basketball courts; it’s full of red dirt and rocks, with mini-craters and gullies. “That’s the Mars yard, where they tested the Opportunity rover.” We pause briefly. There are a pair of rover replicas sitting idle in the sun. “Everybody’s always surprised that the rover is bigger than they expect. It’s the size of an SUV! Or maybe they just saw ‘WALL-E’ and think it’ll be that size.”
The golf cart climbs the hill, and finally arrives at a nondescript warehouse at the top of the campus. Siegler jumps out of the cart and leads us to the door. “Okay. All right. In here, you can touch everything. Welcome to the world of the Starshade.”
He opens the door to what looks like an airplane hangar. On the wall, next to a vast American flag, there’s something that looks like a giant gold flower petal with a razor-sharp point. Hanging from the ceiling is what seems to be enormous spool of gold foil. There are worktables and pulleys and ropes and wrenches and screwdrivers. In contrast to most of what I’ve seen so far at JPL, much of which is either tiny or on screens, this is a room full of things. Very large things.
I meet a man named Kim Aaron, who has thinning gray hair and wears silver-framed glasses. He is 72 years old, originally from Britain, and on the day that I met him, was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. His official title is comically long and convoluted: chief engineer for architecture and formulation in the Payload and Small Spacecraft Mechanical Engineering Section at JPL. But his demeanor is that of a kindly, good-humored mad scientist who, after 40 years at JPL, has been given free rein to work on pretty much anything he wants.
What Aaron wants to work on is the Starshade, and, for many years now, he and his team have been trying to prove that Starshade is the best way to see beyond the light of stars.
“So for those people who are of mechanical-bent mechanical engineers, this is the ultimate playground, right?” Siegler says. “This is not high-end optics, like what you saw. This is the world of mechanics. Mechanical engineering can simulate the optics that you saw before, but it does it in a completely different way.”
For the time being, though, coronagraph is winning. It’s the coronagraph that will go up on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
“The tea leaves are indicating that the coronagraph is in the pole position,” Siegler says. “We want the coronagraph to work. So, this technology is sort of being put on ice. But, boy, I see a lot of advantages here.” Siegler turns on a large screen, and then he and Aaron walk me through the workings of the Starshade, interrupting one another, with Aaron frequently amending or correcting Siegler.
“Don’t steal my thunder,” Siegler says.
“I’m not letting you have any thunder,” Aaron says.
It’s immediately clear that the Starshade is in every way the opposite of the coronagraph. Where the coronagraph is tiny, most of its parts microscopic, the Starshade would be enormous, 60 meters in diameter. Where the coronagraph can be tested thoroughly on Earth — and has been — the Starshade would unfurl itself for the first time in space. Where the coronagraph relies on thousands of microscopic parts working exactly right, the Starshade could be adjusted in space.
Here’s the most basic way to describe it: The Starshade would be sent into space with a space telescope about the size of Hubble. Once beyond the moon, the Starshade would separate itself from the telescope, and would then speed ahead for a few weeks, going between 50,000 and 95,000 kilometers away. Its task would be to block the light of a given star so the telescope could see the planets close to it. Once lined up, the Starshade would unfurl itself until it was the shape of a vast flower, petals and all. Siegler shows me an interactive animation of this, and it’s far and away the most beautiful spacecraft ever devised by NASA or JPL.
It’s a work of gorgeous art and a ludicrous feat of ambition. For the Starshade to work properly, after it has traveled that 50,000 to 95,000 kilometers, it would have to be lined up within a meter of the telescope’s line of sight.
“We can do that part,” Siegler says. “It’d work.”
Aaron nods silently. He has no doubt.
“I will always resent the movie ‘Ad Astra’ with Brad Pitt,” Siegler says. “The Starshade was supposed to be in the movie and the producers decided later that it was too complicated to explain it. But what they were going with, and I was selling them, is when Brad Pitt is floating in space, considering whether to take his own life, the Starshade comes into position, blocks the sun, he sees the Earth, and realizes everything he’s ever loved about the world, including his family, was on that blue dot. And the Starshade would’ve saved the day.”
He looks from the screen to me. “Good, right? It would’ve been good.”
Though it’s the coronagraph, not the Starshade, that will go to space on the Roman, there is still a chance this vast gold flower will bloom beyond the moon. If all goes to plan, the Roman will gather data and prove various technologies such that NASA and JPL can send up the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the space telescope to end all space telescopes. It’s scheduled to launch in the 2030s, and Starshade could still be its choice for starlight suppression.
Siegler and Cofield and I step back into the hot canyon amid the falling sunlight, and talk about the dichotomy of the two choices — the little telescope full of tiny parts, and the vast space flower blooming before a distant star. Siegler has to be diplomatic, given he’s helping to manage both projects, and one of them is going to space imminently. But he clearly has a favorite. We get back in the golf cart and head down the hill. We pass the Mars yard as Siegler thinks aloud.
“I mean from a physics perspective, they’re fascinating to see. Talk about the two! Programmatically, basically, it’s always a coronagraph that is in the pole position because it’s just easier to get into space, easier to test on the ground. That’s what people really like about it, you know what I’m saying? NASA tries to mitigate its risk whenever possible. We don’t like carrying a lot of risk because you don’t like the fail. But look at the landing of Apollo onto the surface of the moon! They didn’t test that on the moon! They had to test it on Earth. So some manager at some point said, ‘Okay, we’ll take on the risk.’”
After my JPL visit, I got back in touch with Nick Siegler and Vanessa Bailey to follow up with a few questions. Siegler said he’d recently remembered something.
“I was going through some papers at my parents’ home and I couldn’t believe it, but I found a drawing that I had done when I was 10 years old of an Apollo rocket that I drew in crayon. I had forgotten all that. It was kind of an interesting amnesia that I must have experienced. The goal was always to come to NASA. I mean, let’s face it. Sometimes, I think NASA underplays this, but, yes, we are in the space business and in the knowledge business, but I’ve always believed that we’re really in the inspiration business, the inspiration that we have lent out and inspired generations of engineers and scientists. It cannot be underestimated.
With her typical way, both unassuming and profound, Bailey built on this.
“I’ll say Nick has a way with words, so he’s really excellent at drawing on that inspiration. He’s right, it’s an incredible privilege to work at a place and live in a country that is willing to set aside money to answer these existential questions. I heard a phrase the other week, existential humility, and I really liked that. We’re this complex life form that has evolved over billions of years to the point where we can ask these questions — and yet we’re perhaps not the only ones in the universe. And if we could know that for certain, that would be humbling in the most wonderful possible way.”