66 combat missions in the Korean War,” said Cliff (exhibiting a 14-year-old’s precise memory for details, as long as they’re cool details – he can’t remember where his other shoe is on school mornings). “And he shot down two MiGs. I guess people like that don’t have anything to prove.” “You mean by being assholes?” I said. “Yes,” said Cliff. Maybe Cliff will grow up to be a space hero. Or maybe Cliff will grow up to be a space nerd. Or maybe there isn’t any difference between the two. At the Symposium’s opening night ceremony, I watched Cliff listen, rapt, to Lauren Smith explain how space integrates our inner F-86 pilot with our inner geek carrying one of those calculators with more buttons on it than a hotel TV remote. She said, “I have learned that space is full of these delightfully unexpected dualities.” Lauren is manager for the integration and test senior technical staff for the James Webb Space Telescope at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, with dual roles as the team’s mechanical test engineering subproject manager and lead integration and test engineer for all nonexplosive actuators and deployments. What she said had peer-to-peer credibility to Cliff – she, honest to gosh, looks like she’s about the same age. Her job title is longer than her span of years on earth – a planet she has no intention of confining herself to. “This industry,” Lauren said, “is the only place
where you are required to be a super-nerd and an adventurer, a numerically-grounded pragmatist and a starry-eyed, pioneering optimist... These seemingly paradoxical traits make us special. They enable us to not just look at the night sky with insatiable curiosity but to build the satellites and vehicles that take us there. We are 21st- century pioneers – just as our ancestors – who explored uncharted lands in pursuit of untold opportunity.” Cliff has a way to go, getting his nerd factor up to 3rd-Millennium Davy Crockett in Moonskin cap. His eighth-grade science project was “What Happens When You Set Off a Rocket Engine Upside Down?” (That was not its formal title.) The experiment was to see if temperature affects solid-propellant rocket fuel thrust. Cliff, using his own lowly, terrestrial yard- chore money, bought 54 model rocket engines in three sizes. He sorted the engines into three sets, each containing six large, six medium, and six small engines. He stored Set A at minus 20 C (mom’s deep freeze), Set B at 0 C (dad’s ice bucket), and Set C at 20 C (his bedroom). He then built an inverted cradle for the rocket engines out of the aluminum tube that a Romeo y Julieta Churchill comes in. (I smoked the cigar for him.) And he attached the cradle to some gizmo he borrowed from his science teacher that measures thrust in “newtons.” (In case you’re wondering, “What’s a newton?” it is – I quote from the Internet – “the force required to accelerate an object with a mass of 1 kilogram 1 meter per second
94 May 2018
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