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Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science

Rocket science is all about perfect physics in frictionless space, about amazing feats of precision in the glare of the public, who ask in awe, "How do they do that?"—not to mention the fantastic fireworks display to get things going. AstroTurf is the perfect engineering solution to having ever-green grass that needs no mowing, sun, or water. But perfection has its downsides, and so the new stadium fields in Houston are real grass. Maybe it was the longing from the fans for dirt on the uniforms and grass stains on the knees.

Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science takes us on an intriguing, well-written walk through the relatively short but spectacular history of the space program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mary Grace Lord, investigative reporter and cultural critic, also offers readers a much more personal look—complete with a little dirt and some grass stains—at those times as experienced by Lord, whose father, Charles Carroll Lord, was of one of those rocket scientists.

Lord recounts the roots of early space exploration and the personalities and politics that drove it. Going over ground that has been covered before by others, she recounts the contradictions of the dark beginnings and the brilliant successes of Wernher von Braun and his team. She traces the tortured paths of some early leaders of JPL in the McCarthy era—especially the path of Frank Molina, the JPL director on whom the FBI kept an exceptionally thick file on alleged anti-American activities. The history lesson is informative to the reader, and, more important, it informs Lord's search into the work world of her often distant father.

Charles's world was one of engineering precision, order, and discipline. Lord observes that at JPL the obsession for clear, logical thought, coupled with singular powers of concentration, was carried to nearly pathological extremes. Nevertheless, those qualities were so valued in scientists and engineers that, if they didn't have them naturally, they just might want to fake the behaviors for the good of their careers. These same behaviors often had an impact on the personal lives of those involved. Into the engineers' heady, technical world, Lord weaves her recollections of life growing up with her father, going places and doing things with him—and she ponders the things left undone and unsaid. The common thread of Lord's story is her discovering new insights about her father—from his making a perfectly knit scarf, just to show that he could, to his dismissive comments about Lord's ability to concentrate, to his struggles with his own low self-esteem as a second- or third-tier rocket scientist.

Rocket science, although precise and disciplined at the bench level, is fragile, ethereal, and political at the leadership level. Lord builds the story with consummate attention to detail and insight into the complex clashes of personalities of such leaders as Molina and von Braun. For example, the selling of rocket science to politicians and the public caught a wave of excitement with the introduction of Walt Disney to rocket science and the commercial and popular success of Disneyland. Disney raised von Braun to iconic status—every story needs a hero. The whole country was glued to the television set to see spaceflight portrayed in short films such as "Man in Space" and "Man and the Moon" created by the artful Disney cartoonists. Lord leaves us wondering just how much those fanciful previews influenced the decision to go to the moon.

Using more recent history, Lord sets about dissecting JPL's personality and its belated acceptance of late-20th-century cultural norms. Women scientists and engineers, and later managers, broke into the intensely male culture at JPL and became role models for the women who followed them. The issues of homosexual lifestyle finally became publicly acknowledged in the 1990s with the debate over health benefits for JPL workers and their partners. Lord uses her knowledge of the lab and insights from her father's professional life to add depth and color to the ongoing evolution at JPL. This part of her story is unfinished and perhaps not completely circumspect. Her discussion of women in the JPL workforce and their successes and failures is largely anecdotal. The anecdotes are valuable, but there must be more to the picture. Likewise, the issues of ethnic diversity at JPL are in transition and continue to evolve. But then JPL is still a work in progress, and only time may allow us to look back at this epoch of change with greater clarity.

Astro Turf is an interesting read and filled with intriguing insights into the inner workings of JPL, the people who work there, and the history that contributes so richly to its unique character. Lord successfully accomplishes her mission in writing this story, which also serves as a memoir about her father. She comes to closure with a more complete understanding of his life, a life so inextricably woven into rocket science that to understand him she had to understand his work.

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