Rings

A personal essay about black holes, Earth-sized telescopes, transcendentalism, career growth, and the quest to see the unseeable. Originally written in April 2021.

A teal arrow sits in the center of a shaded circle, indicating direction. The circle is a spotlight, meant to call my attention to my place, show me where I fit in this grand scheme of things. It expands as I zoom out, shifting perspective from local to regional. If I zoom out as far as I’m capable, my circle becomes gargantuan, swallowing Boston, making me feel both mighty and weak. If I twist my phone, the arrow shifts along with it, pointing in whatever direction is my will.

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The Phase Between Gemini's Legs

I’m lying on my back in the grass—cold, but not too cold. Just enough to cause fingers to numb slightly in fifteen minutes’ time. I hear a couple laughing as they walk somewhere behind me. A tall guy with a beard passes by, looks at me funny. A girl power walks across the courtyard, holding a plastic bag at the end of each arm. I see a jogger with a headband, unicolor in navy blue. I hear cars, trucks, buses, horns, and nineteen seconds of crosswalk beeping roughly every minute and a half.

Above, the bright light of Venus blurs behind a thin cloud layer, off to the right of my view. An almost perfect half moon—a first-quarter moon actually—is pretty much directly overhead, a bit right of center. Off to my left, the illuminated, curving spire of the MIT Chapel shines skyward, pointing to the pale red dot of Mars.

The first-quarter moon phase began today at exactly 3:41pm, EDT, Friday, March 30, 2012. It shines in front of the constellation Gemini, between the legs of the twins, Castor and Pollux of Greek mythology, high above the faint, sinking sparkle of Betelgeuse.

Summer just started in the northern hemisphere of the red planet, causing the Martian North Polar Cap to slim to a sliver—a tiny white hat on top of a round, horribly sunburned fat man.

It takes sunlight about six minutes to reach Venus.

These things about the universe I know because I’m watching it through the tiny 3.5” glass display of my black iPhone 4.

The software application—or app—on my phone that enables this knowledge is called SkyView. Point the phone’s camera at any part of the sky, day or night, and this program will tell you exactly which object you’re looking at, along with a few fun facts about that object.

I direct the camera above and to the left of Gemini and the image of a giant crab appears on the screen. This is Cancer, which fittingly means crab in Latin, depicted by only two stars I can see: Tarf and T-0314. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but that’s all that SkyView gives me.

Below Cancer I see a new image on the screen. It’s a satellite with a designation “Cosmos 1400.” I learn from my 4.9 ounce friend that many old Soviet and now Russian satellites are given generic Cosmos designations in a meaningless nomenclature that covers many military and scientific instruments. Hmm, so much for specificity. I have to open up a web browser and Google “Cosmos 1400” to learn that it’s a Soviet ELINT (Electronics and Signals Intelligence) satellite, launched on August 5, 1982, from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Archangelsk Region of the former USSR, about 800 kilometers north of Moscow.

My first reaction to the fact that I had to actually close one program, open another, type in a few words on a screen without buttons, and tap on the first result that came out of a web search to learn the launch location of the Cosmos 1400 satellite—annoyance. Why didn’t my app already know I’d want more information about the Cosmos 1400 satellite and nicely arrange those details for me, saving me such a hassle?

Of course, this reaction was immediately succeeded by a second, thankfully more powerful one: my, what expectations we have these days.

What would Galileo have thought of the power to point an instrument at any location in the sky and have its information displayed on a tiny screen at his fingertips? It’s taken over three thousand years of painstaking observation, data collection, debate, theory, and seemingly outlandish (sometimes heretical) claims from some of the finest minds in history to reach our current understanding of the universe. Now anyone can buy an app that catalogues everything you can see in the sky—all for only $1.99.

Presumably, we’ve been looking up for a long time. Considered the oldest of the sciences, astronomy was first practiced by priests and holy men who studied the movements of celestial bodies to determine celebrations and planting cycles. The earliest star catalogues archaeologists have found date back to around 1600 B.C. and belonged to the Babylonians, though even earlier drawings of eclipses, comets and supernovae by the Sumerians at least confirm that our earliest ancestors found occasion to glance skyward and ask, “what’s that?”

The Greeks were the first to construct a cosmological framework based on astronomical records they inherited from the Babylonians. Thales, who Aristotle deemed the first philosopher of the Greek tradition, predicted solar eclipses around 480 B.C. Aristarchus developed the first heliocentric theory in 270 B.C. Hipparchus first recorded the names of the constellations in 100 B.C., and Ptolemy developed the first mathematical framework for predicting the apparent motions of the planets in 200 A.D.

Then the Library of Alexandria burned, Roman culture collapsed, and a thousand years of Dark Ages swept western civilization before the Renaissance breathed new life into the science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Copernicus reinvented heliocentric theory (which had originally garnered few serious followers when Aristarchus pitched it 1,800 years earlier). Brahe used the first-quarter moon to show just how much farther the sun is from our moon with trigonometry we now learn in high school. Kepler formulated laws of planetary motion based on elliptical instead of circular orbits. Galileo looked through a tiny 3-inch refracting telescope to find spots on the sun, mountains and “seas” on the moon, the phases of Venus, and the four largest moons of Jupiter. And then Newton established his theory of gravity, giving us a framework for understanding all motion in the universe except for the extremely fast and extraordinarily small.

Today, I can learn three thousand years of astronomical history while lying on my back in the grass.

Starting to feel the numb tingle in my fingers, I’m overwhelmed at the magnitude of this power that I take for granted on a daily basis. Brahe stared through instruments he designed himself to track the same objects for twenty years, cataloging a thousand stars, and now I can call up a program that tells me the distance, history, and location of a thousand stars in a few seconds. I think of the couple, the tall guy, the power-walking girl, the jogger. Do they know and use this power, too? Maybe they do. Maybe they take it for granted. For now they’re consumed by universes of their own making.

We’ve got the universe in our pockets but nobody’s looking up.

I can’t blame ‘em. I only decided to lay in the grass because I just downloaded this app and wanted to check it out.

SkyView even works if you point it through the Earth. I can see the sun, just an hour or two since dipping below the horizon. I point this device through my stomach and notice the International Space Station is on nearly the exact opposite side of Earth from me, orbiting above the South Pacific Ocean. Huh. Looks like Uranus and Neptune are down there, too. Some couple billion miles straight below me.

Technology can be distracting. It can lead us down rabbit holes and pollute our minds with an endless, senseless stream of junk and inconsequence. But it can also induce wonder.

This pointing through the Earth thing is what gets me, even more than being able to target a pindrop in the black sky and identify it as the double star Acamar, 120 light-years away. In a world of almost endless distraction, I can point my phone at my backpack and see Saturn, aim it at my toe and catch the dip of Mercury just below the horizon, direct it at a garbage can and there’s the Hubble Space Telescope.

I suppose this has its drawbacks. I can imagine a world where starstruck citizens wander dumbly about, absorbed in their augmented realities on tiny handheld screens, occasionally bumping into each other and inanimate objects, pointing cameras at unsuspecting children while following the projected orbit of Jupiter across the southern hemisphere. I don’t think our legal system is quite ready for the “I plead wonderstruck” defense against restraining order requests.

It’s almost completely cloudy now. Mars has disappeared, as well as the entirety of Gemini. Only the half moon and a faint glimmer of Venus maintain observable evidence of the vast universe all around me. But no matter—I’ve got that universe right here.

Ring ring. With a flash of the screen, my black Delphi vibrates in my hand and Gemini is gone.

My ride’s here.

Midnight on the Causeway

(originally posted on www.opennasa.com in April 2011)

Couple minutes after midnight. Clear sky of stars above, three-quarter moon just over the horizon, launch tower lights dancing across the river.

I’m the lone person on the causeway, standing on the narrow stretch of rock and road crossing the Banana River between the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It’s really just me here. Not another soul in sight. Not even headlights. White folding chairs are lined up in neat little rows in the grass and tents have been erected over empty tables awaiting crowds who will amass here in two days to view a display of fire and thunder and grandeur—the launch of Space Shuttle mission STS-131.

The Falcon 9 rocket, awaiting its maiden voyage and white like an alabaster statue, stares me down from afar.

I was on my way to work but I had to stop. They’ve got this rocket lit up with these massive spotlights for all the world to see. It’s impressive. Farther up the coast, the Space Shuttle Discovery sits on Launch Pad 39A, lit up by no spotlights. I don’t think the RSS has rolled back yet. That must be why there are no lights turned toward Discovery.

I try to take a picture of the white rocket with my phone, but it doesn’t come out. I get back in my car. Time for work.

Advanced Crew Escape Suits (ACES), ready to fly for the crew of STS-133.

I work in the Shuttle Crew Escape team. We’re responsible for Shuttle astronaut survival equipment and various other hardware, headlined mainly by the orange pressure (“pumpkin”) suits you’ve probably seen once or twice before adorned on spacefarers as they make their way over to and strap into the Space Shuttle orbiter. They’re called Advanced Crew Escape Suits, or ACES, for short.

My team and I flew over from Houston on Wednesday. We have five days of prep work to get ready for this Shuttle launch on Monday morning. We test personal cooling systems to make sure they work. We suit up the crew to make sure their suits fit right and provide survivable pressure in the event of a cabin depressurization. We count all the pencils (yes, literally, like a surgery crew accounting for all sutures and sponges), make sure batteries are charged, clean the boots, attach mission patches, make little bags for light sticks that go in pouches on the astronauts’ arm sleeves to help emergency rescue crews find them in the dark in case all hell breaks loose. We are some of the last people astronauts see before breaking the bounds of Earth’s gravity well to spin around the planet.

And if all hell does break loose, if that day ever comes, we’ll be some of the people responsible for the last line of defense in keeping those astronauts alive.

In this world, emergencies aren’t just unfortunate inevitabilities—they are meticulously planned for and diligently expected. Because we work in a business where strapping seven people astride six million pounds of explosives is not only sane but, dare I say, routine. And I mean that in the very rudimentary aspect of the word. They say there’s nothing routine about spaceflight. Perhaps a better word is accepted. We accept a certain amount of risk during each and every launch and we accept that nothing expected ever happens as expected. In that vein, Crew Survival is our life.

The first four Shuttle crews launched with ejection seats on the flight deck. But ejection seats proved infeasible beyond these flights as crews increased in size and the actual window of survivable situations wasn’t all that large with ejection seats in the first place. Following the Challenger accident, the roots of my job were planted, as NASA began flying astronauts with Launch and Entry Suits (LES) in 1989, replaced by the ACES in 1995. The suit provides a full pressure, self-contained environment around the crewmember that allows for him or her to bailout of the orbiter during controlled, glided descent in the event the vehicle doesn’t have enough energy to make it to a runway.

Our subsystem doesn’t protect the crew in all scenarios, but it was the best that could be done at the time given what was available, constraints to the already-built Shuttle design, and the just plain old dangerous environment encountered in breaking through our Earth’s atmosphere.

The team stretches far beyond technical hardware oversight. We’re concerned with all aspects of crew survival, from emergency egress from the launch pad to in-the-air emergency breathing and bailout. Our efforts are a composite response to each of NASA’s three fatal accidents: Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. In a perfect world, our team’s work is never needed. In a perfect world, Space Shuttles launch and land safely every time. But we can’t plan for that. We plan for the bad days. We plan for the unexpected.

I’m on my way to work after midnight because Monday’s launch happens to be at 6:21am, meaning our work starts just before midnight Easter Sunday. Now we’re sleep shifting to prepare for it. Plus if the crew needs to change something—say they want to swap out a watch or grab an extra pen or they’ve got a problem with their glove—we’re the ones to make it happen. We’re up when the crew’s up. We sleep when they sleep.

I’m heading to the suit room at KSC, which is just down the hall from the astronauts’ personal living quarters. It’s the same room that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins got suited up in before entering the history books over 40 years ago. It’s the same room John Young and Bob Crippen left to fly a beautiful yet awkward, clunky-looking brick with wings strapped to the side of a rocket for the first time. It’s the same room the STS-135 crewmembers will leave from when they become the final crew to fly that same clunky-looking brick nearly 30 years later.

As I drive on down the causeway towards the suit room, still the lone car for miles, it occurs to me that the causeway is a metaphor (this occurrence may or may not have been brought about by a semi-loopy, sleep-shifted mind-state): NASA’s on a causeway, too. We’re in the in-between space where we’re still connected to the mainland, but also well on our way out to an island on the other side.

I imagine many others in the business have felt a similar sensation, staring out at the waters of change like they’re alone at midnight on a causeway, too. Stuck between two worlds, maybe. Stuck between changing paradigms. Wondering why spotlights are shining in one place and not the other. Feeling the insight and stillness of a star-filled sky while the lights keep flickering and the ground keeps spinning at full speed below.

On that causeway, I think of the history of the suit room I’m heading to, the collective legacy of a space agency still very much in its infancy, carrying a rich, proud heritage earned through fifty years of diligent attention to detail and passion to lift humanity beyond our known world, beyond our known selves, to that other side of the river.

Maybe the nature of our business means we’ll always be on a causeway. Maybe being on the causeway is a necessary step—one that we accept as the nature of our dangerous business where the expected never happens as expected, and planning for the unexpected serves as the creed by which we strive.

Maybe traveling down the causeway—the journey between two places amidst a sea of uncertainty—maybe that’s what it’s all about in the first place.

State of the STEM Workforce

(originally posted on www.opennasa.com in October 2009)

State Of The STEM Workforce in the U.S. View more presentations from Garret Fitzpatrick

A few months ago, Amanda Stiles and I were invited to speak to a group of NASA interns, young professionals, and post-docs at the STS-127 Pre-Launch Education Forum at the Kennedy Space Center on the subject of “the State of the STEM Workforce”. We were thrilled but- why us? What did we know about the State of the STEM Workforce?

Well, not a whole lot, thought I.

Aside from our involvement in several cross-generational activities at NASA and in the commercial aerospace sector (and our employment as young professionals in the STEM industry), we definitely weren’t experts in STEM education, or its relation to the American technical workforce for that matter.

But we had the invite and we both had been feeling the mounting unease within NASA and the U.S. technical workforce at the declining status of American technological capability. Visions of national greatness slipping away and a general anxious urgency at missed opportunities tugged at my patriotic strings. We wanted to do something about it. Oh, and we’d be getting a trip to Florida out of the deal.

So we did some research, put these slides together and presented at the Education Forum at KSC on June 12, 2009. Its purpose was to describe, on a very high-level, the state of the STEM workforce in the United States and how that relates to NASA, but we also wanted to motivate space people, both young and old, to be a part of strengthening American STEM capabilities by heightening awareness of the issue. It was not intended to describe specific programs, projects, or solutions to NASA or the United States’ education system.

What do you think about the “state of the STEM workforce” in the U.S.? More importantly- what can we do about it?

The Tank

Yesterday was one of the biggest honors of my life.

I woke up, put on a suit and checked out of the Ritz Hotel at Crystal City, Washington DC, with my colleague, Nick Skytland. We had been invited to give our "Generation Y Perspectives" presentation to the wives of our nation's military top brass, as part of the military spouses' effort to understand this newest generation of service men and women to better provide family assistance programs mainly for soldiers serving overseas.

We had to print out the list of DoD senior leadership with their pictures next to their names so we knew who we were addressing if they happened to be there. My McDonald's coffee spilled going through the security checkpoint outside the Pentagon, prompting the guard to announce to the tiny room as if he were addressing an entire army on the battlefield and his megaphone had snapped in half: "Do not send coffee through the metal detector!"

Embarrassing.

Inside, we met up with Master Chief Belinger who would be our escort. He brought us inside where we met a young gentleman with an "honor guard" badge on his chest. I wish I could remember the man's name, but to be honest, I don't. He was about 5'10, brown hair, young face, and had just come back from tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

He told us about the history of the Pentagon and stopped at each exhibit lining the long white hallways to give us more information about the storied past of our nation's military and its headquarters fortress. He then took us to the 9/11 memorial, at the site where the plane hit the building, just over 7 years ago.

Has it really been THAT long?!?

I remember being in my dorm room freshman year, climbing down from my bunk and checking my computer, seeing an image of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. I hadn't even registered that it had been real- I think my first thought was that it was a movie special effects shot... then I read more and thought, "wow, how could that pilot be so stupid to run into a building?" I thought it was probably a tiny cessna at first.

Amazing how naive the world was at that instant. It wasn't until I went to the public bathroom down the hall for a shower and someone said, "Did you just SEE WHAT HAPPENED?!?! ANOTHER PLANE HIT THE SECOND TOWER!!!"

It was then that we all realized we were under attack. Several guys crowded around my tiny dorm room TV as the news stations tried to figure out what was happening. We were watching in horror as the first building collapsed right before our eyes.

I ended up going to class. I can't believe we had class that day, looking back, though I'm pretty sure they'd all been cancelled by the afternoon. I remember hugging my friend Brooke from Philly who had an uncle who worked in the towers. She was crying and I told her that I was sure he probably got out in time.

Turned out that he did.

Now I was giving a briefing in one of the main conference rooms of used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. They called the room "The Tank". The previous presenter before us was the man in charge of the nation's entire military presence in North Africa. Talk about an intimidating act to follow...

The walls were bare, adorned only in dark oak paneling save for a massive oil painting of Abraham Lincoln sitting on a stool in a small room surrounded by three of his generals seemingly looking down upon the conference table. (EDIT: I later found out this painting is called “The Peacemakers” by George P. A. Healy and depicts a historic meeting where Lincoln, Major General William Sherman, General Ulysses S. Grant, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter discussed ending the Civil War on the Union steamer River Queen on March 27, 1865).

I stood behind a podium and watched the expressions of the wives change- in a good way, mostly- as we kicked off an engaging discussion about the factors that have shaped "Generation Y" and the ways we communicate. As I spoke, I couldn't help repeatedly glancing over at Honest Abe, maybe to see if he was still listening or if he'd checked out already, only to ponder more important issues. Like slavery. Or winning a war. Or re-connecting a divided nation.

I was awed and humbled to think of the weight of the decisions that had been made, and will be made, in "The Tank". Abe didn't get up to leave and nobody threw any rotten vegetables at Nick or me. It was one of the most memorable seventy-five minutes of my life.