A space engineer's daughter reads LEAVING ORBIT: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight

Tuesday night as I walked past the door of the room in which the 10 p.m. news was on the television, I heard the meteorologist say that the space station would be visible in our clear western sky starting at 10:22. It was 10:18. If I hadn't just read Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight, by Margaret Lazarus Dean, I may not have heard his words. But I did and so immediately walked outside, calling out to my husband to follow me for a space station view. We walked for a couple blocks, me in my slippers, trying to escape streetlights and trees. And there it was, summersaulting across the sky, left to right, bright as a diamond, until it was gone, over other neighborhoods far away.

Leaving Orbit is about the end of the U.S. space program; it's a personal look as well as a deeply researched history. If Mercury was the beginning of our space program, the last take-off and landing of the space shuttle Atlantis was the end. The space station still orbits, but it will now rendezvous with commercial or non-U.S. spacecraft. Throughout the book Dean asks, why are we stopping?

The book was a fascinating read for me. First, it chronicled a daring and exciting period of our history. Second, it spoke of big dreams and big ideas that real men and women actualized in their work. Third, and more personally, it gave me a view into events that formed the backdrop for much of my life. My father was an aerospace engineer and had his hand in many of the projects Dean discusses, but most particularly the shuttle program, for which he was the lead engineer for the flight control system. Reading Dean's book was at times an emotional experience for me, with shuttle having so much to do with my growing up years, particularly those in Florida. It was also an emotional experience because like so many of you reading this now, I can remember sitting in front of the television watching Neil Armstrong take those first steps on the moon.

In Finding Livelihood I have a couple sentences about my father explaining shuttle to me and my brother and sister at the dinner table one night.

"My father was the engineering manager for the flight control systems. For years, long before “shuttle” was a household name or even a public curiosity, I knew what he was working on with his slide rule. He had first told us about it at the dinner table one night. The idea was wild. He rocked his hands in the air to show us the gyroscope action of the flight guidance instruments and then moved them along an upward then descending arc to show how the shuttle would launch like a rocket and land like a plane. He rested one hand on top of the other to show how it would return to the Center for its next launch by riding piggyback on a 747."

I tried to pick a single excerpt from Leaving Orbit to convince you also to read it, but I'm having trouble selecting just one. So there will be more than one.

This:

"Though I'm under forty-five, too young to have seen Neil and Buzz climb out of their lunar module, too young to have witnessed the prime of NASA, I love the idea of spaceflight. I love the audacity of the handsome young president challenging us to to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard; I love the young scientists and engineers who took his charge as their personal religion and made inestimable sacrifices to meet John Kennedy's challenge after his death. I love the fire and rockets, the thundering wonder of building-sized objects hauling themselves off the launchpads and past the grip of gravity. The badass steeliness and crew cuts of the test-pilot sixties astronauts, the engineers in their short-sleeved dress shirts and dark ties, the technicians in their greasy uniforms. I love the old ladies wearing cat's-eye glasses and drinking tea while they stitch together the seams of the space suits that will be the only barrier between moonwalkers and the sucking black vacuum of space."

And this, where she describes watching, from the vantage point of Cape Canaveral, the last launch of the shuttle Discovery:

"And now the sound comes toward us: bassy, crackly, like a fireworks display that never lets up. The sound goes right through you, and if you have become too emotionally involved in the space program, this sound will make you cry. It's the sound of American exploration, the sound of missiles put to better use than killing or threatening to kill, a sound that means we came in peace for all mankind. The man from Ohio is trying to watch through binoculars and shoot videos of the launch with his phone at the same time; his wife is exclaiming "Oh my God! Oh my God!" over and over. We cry and tip our heads back to trace the bright light up."

(I posted to this blog when Discovery landed after this last flight: see here)

And this, about the people and their work:

"One thing I notice every time I'm at the Cape is how literal all the workers are about their work. I've kept calling the work here some kind of dream, yet what I see over and over is that, to the people who do the work, nothing is a dream, a metaphor, a fairy tale: everything is exactly what it is. If the work here results in something beautiful, it is beautiful by accident, as form follows function. It is the reflected beauty of our inventions I'm seeing, not someone's abstract idea of beauty."

I hope I've convinced you to read it. Leaving Orbit is the winner of this year's Graywolf Press nonfiction prize. (I wrote about last year's winner, The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, here.)

If you receive my newsletter, (click here to subscribe), which is separate from this blog, you'll be hearing from me over the weekend with another perspective on this book and why it inspires the explorer in any of us.

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[Photo: Top, launch of Atlantis, courtesy of NASA; lower, taken of the book next to of one of my numerous shuttle memorabilia.]

On reading, Wright’s Surprised by Scripture

A friend at church, a philosophy professor at a nearby university, has gathered a group of women to read together through N. T. Wright's new release, Surprised By Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues. It's a book of essays that posits that assumptions about what the Bible does or does not say don't necessarily match the reality of what it actually does or does not say, particularly as related to contemporary issues.

The chapter we talked about last night was about faith and science and the widespread tendency to be unable to hold both in our brains at the same time. Blame it on Epicurus, the third-century BC Greek philosopher who spread the word that the gods, if they even existed, were so far removed from any earthly care or concern that we were essentially on our own. Blame it on the separation of church and state, which has shaped our way of thinking, here in the U.S. more so than in Europe, to such an extent that it seems impossible to imagine we’re part of a reality that includes it all, heaven and earth, in a dynamic, interactive, and mysterious present. Blame it on lots of things, but let’s do something about it.

The women in the room all read the chapter with an eye toward how it informs their lives and their work. Teachers thought about the classroom; parents thought about the raising of their children; those with a political spirit thought about voting decisions and acts of citizenry. I thought about my writing and how Wright’s words encourage me to keep writing in the vein of looking for signs of God's presence in the quotidian, of imagining layers of reality, of exploring the interplay of divine and human.

“Judaism and Christianity classically…celebrate and explore the mysterious interpenetration of heaven and earth," writes Wright. Each of us left with minds and hearts excited to further celebrate and explore that mystery.

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[Photo: taken of Wright's book, conveniently placed next to stacks of a journal that speaks of mystery on a quarterly basis.]

The power of a bedside snail

I just finished reading a beautiful meditation on mollusks. Gastropods in particular. The snail to be exact. An ordinary garden snail sustained the spirit of Elizabeth Tova Bailey for one year among many of a mysterious illness, and she wrote about it in her lovely book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Her friend had lifted the snail from the floor of the woods near her home, laid it under a wild violet uplifted from that same woods and planted in a pot, and gave it to her as a bedside gift. 

By day, Bailey felt comaraderie with the nocturnal snail who also lay motionless while the sun shone and the rest of the world hurried about. By night, sleep was difficult and she felt comfort in listening to the sound of the snail chewing wilted leaves and mushrooms with its 80 rows of 2,640 teeth and in knowing he was roaming about while the rest of the world slept. 

Henri Matisse, The Snail

Of course the book is not only a meditation on snails, but also on the mysterious bond between humans and pets, and on illness and survival.

"Everything about a snail is cryptic, and it was precisely this air of mystery that first captured my interest. My own life, I realized, was becoming just as cryptic. From the severe onset of my illness and through its innumerable relapses, my place in the world has been documented more by my absence than by my presence....Yet it wasn’t that I had truly vanished; I was simply homebound, like a snail pulled into its shell. But being homebound in the human world is a sort of vanishing."

The book’s 208 pages, which includes penciled drawings of snails, gives me new respect for the complex anatomy and physiology of, and surprising historical literary attention to, the common snail. In fact, it made me feel guilty for so intensely disliking the slimy slugs, gastropodal cousin to the snail, that invaded a garden I once had and on which I blamed the garden’s lack of growth. Every night I put out jar lids full of beer to entice them away from my plants, but these efforts of eviction did no good. Still, I remind myself, those slugs didn’t carry the snail's graceful shell with the Fibonacci spiral that speaks of elegance and mystery.

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Reading labels

A commercial has been on television lately advertising the perks program of a certain drug, and it compels me to put on my medical writing hat. With every box of this drug that you buy there’s a perk inside that apparently makes the drug worth buying in case you had any doubt about buying it for its ability to alleviate the troubling condition from which you sought relief in the first place. I know the power of perk programs. I recently succumbed to the pull of one for another type of product, a nonpharmaceutical, and admit its effect is to make me choose that product preferentially rather than others in its genre when I run out and need to restock. 

The problem with the commercial’s advertisement of this specific drug’s perk program is that this drug should never be taken for more than 14 days or more often than every four months. Mr. or Ms Consumer should not be going back and back to the drugstore, this time trying for the steak dinner with a purchase, and two weeks later trying for a free spa appointment. If the condition that this drug addresses doesn’t go away in 14 days, you are supposed to stop taking it and see your clinician. Reading the box will tell you this but it’s not what the commercial or even the existence of a perk program implies.

Your clinician and pharmacist should tell you the full story of any drug you’re taking or considering taking; in addition or alternatively, as in all areas of life, you can educate yourself to a large degree. Everything about how and why a drug is supposed to be taken is included in the drug’s product “label” (also called prescribing or product information). It’s not really a label, like one that is glued to a box or bottle, but a multi-page document that details everything about the drug, including its chemical makeup, relevant clinical trial data, dosing instructions, known and potential side effects, and more. (For over-the-counter drugs, the label is not as detailed.) Every word in the label is carefully controlled and must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. As an addendum to the label, there is often a patient medication guide that reiterates what consumers most need to know in easy-to-understand terms. 

Anyone can access these drug labels; you don’t have to be a healthcare professional. Go to this advertising-free site operated  by the National Library of Medicine: DailyMed. Enter the generic or trade name of the drug in question in the search box and go from there.

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Science needs wonder – don't we all?

Believe it or not, the junior/senior high school that my sons went to graded on “sense of wonder.” Realistically, no one expects a seventh-grade boy to score too high in this regard, but by ninth grade the expectation is that this sense should be observable and growing, and by senior year, it had better be a palpable driving force. The theory behind taking the temperature of each young man and woman’s growing sense of educated wonder is that it is wonder that will keep him or her learning and discovering when teachers and transcripts no longer require it. Wonder will keep them pushing back the boundaries of what has been done or known by themselves or others, to go further and deeper, to uncover yet more in every realm.

Last month the New Statesman carried an article, “Why science needs wonder,” by Philip Ball, author of the soon-to-be published Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything.I hadn’t realized that "wonder" has historically been a controversial attribute, with a past false dichotomy between the kind of wonder that makes you curious and sends you exploring and the kind that makes you awed and speechless. In elegant fashion, Ball argues that science needs poetry and not just objective inquiry.

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From whence cometh our strength

The astronomers' claim in the documentary Nostalgia for the Light (which I wrote about here), the claim that the elemental calcium in our bones comes from the stars, intriqued me and sent me looking for more information. I found this summary report on a paper published in Nature in 2010 (Perets HB, et al. A faint type of supernova from a white dwarf with a helium-rich companion. Nature. 2010;465:322-325.) Since I don’t have a subscription to Nature and probably wouldn’t understand the paper even if I had access to it, the summary report will suffice.

This is my ever so brief summary of the report by Robert Sanders.

Astronomers have so far, at least at the time of the paper’s writing, found eight calcium-rich supernova, including supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered by a team from Berkeley and described in the paper. They calculate that when 2005E exploded half of its mass was calcium. Further calculations suggest that if this is repeated with other supernova even a couple times every 100 years, enough calcium is produced for life on earth. Two of the study authors interviewed for the report, Filippenko and Li, said that robotic telescopes are “scanning distant galaxies every night in search of new supernovae....”

Tonight I’m going to stand in my backyard, supported by a strong skeleton of calcium-rich bone, look up into the starry sky and give thanks.

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Boomers: roll up your sleeves

Of course it pales in comparison to the holidays that bookend it, Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, but this past weekend held the first ever National Hepatitis Testing Day. How did you celebrate? Did you roll up your sleeve for a needle poke and a one-time hepatitis C test? If you are a baby boomer, specifically if you were born between 1945 through 1965, that is exactly what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will soon recommend that you do.

I often work on projects related to hepatitis in my medical writing day job and have seen this recommendation coming for awhile. Several years ago the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an independent medical think tank, issued a report about the lack of awareness among the public and healthcare professionals concerning hepatitis C, as well as other types of hepatitis, leaving many infected individuals not knowing they are infected and, consequently, untreated. The problem with leaving hepatitis C untreated is that chronic infection can lead to liver disease, liver cancer, and/or death in a significant number of individuals. In response to the IOM’s report, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a report of their own, mandating, among other things, that the CDC expand and strengthen their hepatitis C screening recommendations. 

Epidemiologists have long been studying the large bubble of infection in baby boomers. The CDC says 1 in 30 boomers are infected and most have no idea, despite the fact that recommendations for screening based on risk factors have been in place since 1998. Reasons for the bubble are complex, but it boils down to the fact that hepatitis C was in the blood supply for a long time before researchers figured out a) what it was, and b) a way to test for it. It wasn’t until 1992, yes recent history, that donated blood was widely tested. And of course, there were, and are, other ways to have contact with infected blood other than official transfusions. 

CDC’s recommendation isn’t final yet. A public comment period is open from May 22 to June 8, 2012, after which the final guidelines will be written and published. You can read the CDC’s fact sheet here.

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(photo: hepatitis C, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)