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Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science

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In many respects this is a remarkable book. M.G. Lord seeks to unpack the history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a contract facility of NASA, from its origins in the 1930s as a rocket development installation under contract to the U.S. Army to its current status as planetary science center par excellence. In attempting this analysis Lord presents a scintillating narrative of JPL's evolution that is part memoir/part history and always challenging and thoughtful. She uses the experience of her father, who worked as an engineer on the Mars Mariner 69 mission, as an entree point into the engineering culture of JPL. From there she delves deeply into the origins and evolution of the center from its creation by Frank Malina and his self-styled "suicide squad" who fired rocket engines in the Arroyo Secco near the present-day Rose Bowl during the latter 1930s. Using the tools of post-modern analysis and deconstruction, but without reliance on the jargon that makes so much of that work inaccessible, Lord successfully furthers understanding of two major themes in the history of spaceflight that have been largely misunderstood to the present. This first is the place of JPL in the history of rocketry and why it is less well-known than the accomplishments of other actors, especially Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team, in the public consciousness. Second, Lord explores the gendered aspects of rocketry and spaceflight and observes the very gradual entrance of women into the profession.

The first theme that Lord illuminates is the systematic and selective writing of the history of spaceflight. For some fifty years Wernher von Braun and his German rocketeers who built the V-2 and then came to America at the end of World War II have been popularly interpreted as far-sighted visionaries with an integrated space exploration plan that would foster a future of great discovery in the "final frontier." The historiography of spaceflight has lionized these individuals and maximized the team's role in the development of American rocketry and space exploration even as it minimized the wartime cooperation of von Braun and his "rocket team" with the Nazi regime in Germany. Both were conscious distortions of the historical record. Even today, few Americans realize that von Braun had been a member of the Nazi party and an officer in the SS and that the V-2 was constructed using forced labor from concentration camps. The result has been both a whitewashing of the less savory aspects of the careers of the German rocketeers and an overemphasis on their influence in American rocketry. Lord juxtaposes that master narrative of spaceflight history with a more accurate portrayal that shows that the United States developed a very capable rocket technology in such places as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere. Led by Frank Malina, JPL developed jet-assisted take-off (JATO) rockets during the war and the WAC Corporal immediately thereafter. They even spun off a major corporation, Aerojet, that remains an important rocket engine company to the present.

Lord asks, appropriately, why have Malina and the JPL rocketeers been largely forgotten while von Braun and the Germans received overwhelmingly positive publicity? "With accomplishments like these," she writes, "you'd expect to find him [Malina] enshrined in history, alongside Goddard, the quirky collector of rocketry patents who did not work well with others, or von Braun, the oily ex-Nazi who very much did" (p. 66). The reason, Lord finds, is because Malina had ties to leftist organizations in the 1930s, although he always denied being a communist. Accordingly, his pedigree was not one of unabashed anti-communism and in the Red Scare era during the 1940s and 1950s it would not do for the keepers of this new and remarkably powerful technology of rocketry to have any propensity in favor of Marxism. Always conscious of the horror of rockets in war, Malina believed that his work in World War II was appropriate only to rid the world of a great evil. After World War II it did not take much hounding for him to leave JPL and accept employment with the United Nations. The U.S. government then ran Malina out of the U.N. as well, and he eventually became an artist in Paris where he died in 1981.

For the first time, Lord draws starkly the systematic process whereby for political reasons the U.S. publicized a foreign rocket team, that of Wernher von Braun, while deemphasizing an American one under Malina's direction. As Lord concludes: "To a country that viewed international politics as a clash between teams--us and them, right and wrong, good and evil--Communists were them, wrong and evil. What is more, people who had expressed curiosity about communism in the 1930s were not allowed to reconsider. Regardless of the way their sympathies may have evolved, they were inexorably tainted" (p. 95). Because of this Malina and the accomplishments of his "suicide squad" were largely omitted from the history of spaceflight until the 1980s when they began to reemerge.

The second theme that Lord investigates is the fascinating subject of gender in rocketry and spaceflight. Of course, aerospace engineering in the United States has been the province of a largely white male population. She describes how she found a pamphlet published at JPL in 1959 entitled "About Missiles and Men." The title says much about the perspective of the NASA center in the era, but "The book's cover says a lot about sex and rocketry...It shows two missiles darting across the page--one placed so that it appears to rise from a ground technician's groin" (pp. 37-38). Lord explores gender throughout this book, using the career of Donna Shirley, who gained fame during the Mars Pathfinder mission of 1997, and who had been battling for greater acceptance of women at JPL since the early 1970s. It has been a slow process and Lord believes that there is much yet to accomplish on that score at both JPL and NASA.

Throughout the book are several sustained analyses of gender in spaceflight. One of my favorites is Lord's deconstruction of a rocket launch: "One can easily interpret a launch as a symbol of masculine power. It involves a potent object penetrating the heavens. But what, I suspect, gives the experience its psychic resonance is that the imagery is also feminine. During preparations for a launch, the spacecraft is `mated' to the launch vehicle. The harsh, male abstractions of physics are described in the vocabulary of pregnancy and birth, the ultimate female acts of creation. A launch is more than just a knock-your-socks-off explosion. It is a kind of labor, a wrenching struggle to escape one world and move into another. On a deep, archetypal level it is profound--a uniting of the masculine and feminine in the sort of balance that Jungian psychologists believe the psyche seeks" (pp. 159, 161). Such insights are gems scattered throughout the book.

There is much to recommend in this book, and I commend it to all. This is not a work of scholarship, per se. It is written for a broad market and refrains from references to Michel Foucault and the school of analysis he embodied. It does have, however, page sources at the conclusion to lead those interested to more extensive discussions. While Lord refrains from offering an overarching thesis, as would a work of deep scholarship, "Astro Turf" is an important discussion of the history of spaceflight from the standpoint of one NASA facility, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As such it is an enormously valuable addition to the literature.

"Never forget, Son, that your father sold office supplies to the company that made the box that carried the rocks back from the moon."

The New Yorker cartoon quoted in "Astro Turf" so aptly describes how it felt to have a father working in the Southern California-based space program in the Mercury-through-Apollo era. Our dads, whatever it was that they did at North American Aviation or Rockwell or Hughes or wherever, was probably akin to having a dad (or a mom) working behind the scenes in Hollywood. They were not stars or astronauts, but they were working on something famous. And it was much more fun having your dad working on a moon mission than on missiles. At least they could talk to you about the moon.

M.G. Lord's book is the first I've read dealing with the "mid-century" experience of the Space Age kid and our sometimes emotionally challenged, distant engineer dads. Her personal search for what her dad was all about, where did he go and what was he doing when he disappeared into consulting at JPL, is a very touching piece of detective work.

Her observations about JPL and rocket science history and culture are keen and funny. She presents an excellent history of the McCarthy era's impact on some of the luminaries of early space exploration. In particular, she delves into the experiences of women engineers and scientists then and now; these are both painful and heartening stories.

This is a beautifully personal view of the space engineering world, and the men and women who attempt, and sometimes succeed, at accomplishing great missions of exploration.

For most people Rocket Science is a concept, a far removed study for the super intelligent, but for the daughter of a rocket scientist, it is both villian and reality. MG Lord effectively hides her rocket science in an intricate and complex relationship between a distant father, who always chooses work over family, and his daughter. Clearly, Lord has a solid grasp on rocket science; the effortlessness with which she includes an impossible equation in an ordinary sentence brings rocket science into every day life. Above all else, this is the memoir of a daughter whose father was first and foremost a scientist and her struggle between pride and neglect. You read this book how you want to, scientists reading the science, daughters reading the heart. I can think of plenty of subjects that would lose a lot of their sting if teacher's took a page out of this book and grounded complicated technique and theory in more basic human formulas.

I'm not an engineer and I enjoyed Astro Turf enormously. Please note the subtitle: The Private Life of Rocket Science. The private life is there along with the technology and fascinating in terms of JPL's history and completely accessible for the lay person. The references to Sci-Fi movies and Ms Lord's father (himself a rocket scientist) give the reader a rich picture of the birth of space exploration right up to the Mars Landing.

What M.G. Lord accomplished with this wonderful, moving memoir and history is the telling of the human stories behind the often dry history of space flight, including her own personal story of growing up with her father who worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab.

In the vein of Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," this book captivates the reader with fascinating looks at JPL pioneers, like the persecuted Frank Malina and "Satanist" John Parsons, expositions of the dark side of rocket science, such as the Army's "Project Paperclip" that permitted Nazi scientists in the U.S., and explorations of the suppression of women in the industry. Lord accomplishes the telling of these obscure and sometimes stunning stories with her typical wry sense of humor that one finds in her other cultural history book, "Barbie Forever."

Pulling together the various threads of her story about the origins of rocket science, Lord weaves her own personal history that culminates with tough truths about her father who spent so much work time as a JPL engineer. Reading her last chapter that includes the triumph of the Mars rovers was worth the price of admission. The impact of her journey to tell the story of the societal and personal impact of the space program on us, and her, was well stated in this paragraph:

"Neither in my family's past nor at JPL did I find what I had expected. But as any experimental scientist will tell you, investigations take on a life of their own. And sometimes lead to startling destinations."

Growing up myself in the age of Sputnik and the Apollo program, I was always fascinated by rockets and missiles. M.G. Lord's "Astro Turf" shines a light on this whole crazy, wonderful, dark and inspiring era. It left me wanting more.

Future historians will undoubtedly identify the development of space travel as one of the most pivotal and defining aspects of the Twentieth Century. In the United States, the Apollo landings of men on the moon, the routine operation of the Space Shuttle missions, and the construction and permanent habitation of the International Space Station were crowning technological achievements. Likewise, the robotic exploration of Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, the Galilean Satellites, Saturn and its many satellites and rings, Uranus, and Neptune (and their satellite systems) opened up, for the first time, close vistas of our neighbor worlds. And now in the Twenty First Century astronomers have discovered hundreds of extra-solar planets. We can conceive that our great-grandchildren or their robots might someday actually visit them.

Space exploration presents a staggering panorama. Thus, only a simpleton would characterize as "...boring..." a sharply focused memoir which takes us on an odyssey amongst the colorful and zany scientific and engineering architects of mankind's most exciting adventure. Only an insensitive fool would see as "...indulgent..." the heartfelt remembrances of the childhood journey of a bright young girl effectively orphaned both by cancer and by the U.S. Mars exploration program. M.G. Lord has written an astonishingly penetrating, and even shocking, very personal well-researched analysis of the early years of the American space program, and describes the landscape and the players in great detail. She writes of spectacularly politically-incorrect Caltech grad students like amateur Marxist Frank Malina and Satanist John Parsons launching first-generation methyl alcohol rockets in Pasadena's Arroyo Seco, and of politically well-connected ex-Nazi's like Wernher Von Braun. She describes how jingoistic Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover nearly deep-sixed the U.S. space program by harassing and threatening politically progressive U.S. space scientists. She traces the at first subservient, then ascendant, role of women in American space exploration, culminating several decades later in the assumption of major management duties at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory by women like Donna Shirley and Marcia Neugebauer. And she successfully posits The Rocketeer as a quintessential masculine paradigm for American boys and men in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Through it all M.G. Lord recalls with uncommon grace and humor how her personal life with her parents reflected, and was buffeted by, the larger societal and technical issues of those times, issues that perhaps in some ways defined her-and the rest of us who survived that era. Astro-Turf-The Private Life of Rocket Science is a sometimes hysterically funny, sometimes melancholy, but always compelling narrative of her and our youth. And a darned good read.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading MG Lord's Astro Turf, but I left it rather puzzled as to what she was trying to accomplish. The book is not exactly a history of JPL, although in some spots it strives to be just that. I suppose one might describe it as a "cultural history of JPL," but even that wouldn't fit, as her focus goes well beyond JPL. Lord spends time looking at project Paperclip and the influence that Nazis had on rocketry. This is very interesting and well written, but it's not clear why we spend so much time on this. To some extent it seems only to explain the sad life of Molina, one of JPL's founders who was drummed out of the U.S by McCarthyism. But why do we spend so much time discussing the biography of Molina, when his latter life had so little effect on the cultural history of JPL?

To some extent it seems to be a history of Lord's own attempts to understand her father's work. I'm really puzzled why she still believes in the last chapter that her father's work on Mariner 69 was somehow "slight" or unimportant. As an engineer who has worked on scientific spacecraft for NASA, I can say with confidence that to have a contractor with the title of "cognizant engineer for mechanical devices" indicates that this contractor, her father, was very well respected and had a very important position. Lord does not seem to appreciate how incredibly difficult it is to get any mechanical apparatus to operate reliably in the cold vacuum of space. Her petulant insistance that her father's role was less important than he made it out to be indicates that she really hasn't understood the culture of JPL yet.

In several sections Lord seems to be attempting to write a history of gender descrimination within engineering. The "Men and Missiles" pamphlet is hilarious, and Ms. Norris's "recommendation letter" from a chemical plant in New Orleans is heartbreaking: "We had to let Ms. Norris go because of her outstanding performance..." the letter begins. It continues to explain that she had earned her way to be assigned to a position "obviously inappropriate for a woman," and therefore they needed to fire her. Incredible that such things were written down!

However, the book is not thorough enough or structured well enough to provide an actual history of gender roles in engineering, so the reader is left just asking for more.

This book is a collection of very interesting pieces. While I enjoyed reading it, I cannot say that I strongly recommend the whole, as the pieces don't seem to hold together.

I just finished reading this and found it excellent. It is a rare combination of personal confidences and understanding of a professional culture.

I would recommend this to anyone who grew up in the 2nd half of the 20th century.

This slender book is beautifully written, offering both a portrait of a girl and her father as well as background history about the space movement. It is very retro in terms of the place of women and girls not all that long ago.

I have lived in Houston since 1978 and untill I read M.G. Lord's historical memoir, had forgoten the dreams I had in my childhood that I would someday go to outer space. My imagination was stirred by the images in Comic books and the low budget movies about space travel and life in this new terrain. Space travel filled me with longings for adventure and gave me hope that were new territories if man distroyed Earth with Atomic bombs and other horrors. I loved the history in this book about the people who developed the first missles and made exploration into space possible. Astro Turf examines the ways that manned space travel has made earth larger and the universe smaller. I recaptured the sense of those earlier dreams.