A trip to the Kennedy Space Center reminds Wade Roush of what originally inspired him to pursue science journalism.
Wade Roush is the host and producer of Soonish—a tech-and-culture podcast with the motto “The future is shaped by technology, but technology is shaped by us”—and co-founder of the Hub & Spoke audio collective. He’s a longtime science and technology journalist who trained in the history of science and technology at Harvard and MIT and has worked for Science, MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and other publications. In 2014-15 he was acting director MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program. Wade’s puppy Gryphon thinks his master spends too much time speaking into microphones, but he mostly naps through it.
This story originally aired on Nov. 30, 2018, in an episode titled “Moments of Truth”.
Story Transcript
It’s May of 2016 and I’m in Florida at Kennedy Space Center with my whole extended family, including my niece Lucy, who’s seven, and my nephew Karen, who’s ten. We are there to witness the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and I’m pretty darn excited because I've never actually seen a space launch, a rocket launch in person.
But we have some time to kill before the launch, so I don't know if you've ever been to Kennedy Space Center, but it’s not really just a space port. It’s also a theme park. Because this is Florida and everything is a theme park. So we decide we’re going to kill this time by going into a pavilion.
This pavilion is all about the history of the space shuttle program. The beginning of this experience when you go into the pavilion is you walk up this long, circular ramp and then they herd you into this big auditorium. They show you a movie and the movie ends in a pretty spectacular way. So basically, they're showing this computer-generated paper airplane-like toy early model of the space shuttle before it got fully fleshed out.
And it’s soaring over the earth and the music is swelling and the space plane comes to a stop. Suddenly, the lights go down and the screen rises up. Right behind the space plane is the actual space shuttle Atlantis.
The audience walks through the hole where the screen was and you're there nose-to-nose with Atlantis. And I walk through. I’m looking at Atlantis and I realize there are tears running down my cheeks.
I didn’t really want to have to explain to Karen and Lucy why their uncle was crying about the space shuttle because their uncle is a technology journalist and he writes about space and this was a little weird. So I went off into a corner to collect myself and I thought back to a day thirty years before that.
I remembered working on a problem set in the basement of the science center in the computer lab and a friend of mine from the college newspaper came over and said, “Hey, did you hear the news?” The space shuttle blew up.”
And he was the kind of guy who would pull your leg about that kind of thing so I said, “No way. What are you talking about?”
He says, “No, I’m serious.”
So I grab my bags, I ran across the yard, I slammed up the stairs, I flung open my dorm room door, I flipped on the television and there it was, those images of the Challenger exploding 73 seconds after liftoff on January 28, 1986. All you could see was this giant exploding ball of flaming fuel and the solid rocket boosters kind of veering off in crazy directions like fireworks.
And because the networks didn’t have anything else to show, they kept repeating that image all day long and it kind of got seared into my brain. It wound up changing my life because, up to that point, I had been a super NASA fan boy. I had been a real space geek.
When I was in fourth grade, I made this big poster of the Saturn V rocket that was like six-feet tall. I remember the teacher put it up on the classroom wall and that was the proudest day of my life. Now, that I was in college, I was studying physics and astronomy. I even had a job at the observatory working for an astronomer who studied x-ray stars, and he was helping to build a satellite that was going to go into space in the cargo bay of the space shuttle. But now, that was all completely on hold because the space shuttle program was shut down and they were trying to figure out how this happened.
It turned out that the cause of the accident was that some hot gas had escaped in between the joints of one of the solid rocket boosters. These solid rocket boosters were built in segments. The joints were supposed to be kept sealed by these rubber O-rings. On the morning of the launch, it was a super cold January day, the coldest day that NASA had ever tried to launch any rocket. And Morton Thiokol, the company that had made the solid rocket boosters, called up NASA and said, “You know, we’re not completely sure these O-rings are going to work when it’s so cold.” But they got overruled and the shuttle launched anyway with results that we all saw on television.
So seeing this accident investigation unfold, for me, was kind of a scales-falling-from-my-eyes moment. I started to think more critically for the first time about science and about technology, and it occurred to me for the first time that there are all these risks that we never really account for until it’s too late. There are all these chains of human decisions that seem logical and rational in the moment but lead to catastrophe.
So I basically decided to change my life. I quit my job at the observatory, I dropped my major, Physics and Astronomy, and switched into the History of Science. I decided to become a science journalist. I went to graduate school to study more History of Science and History of Technology so that I could be a better journalist. I wrote my whole dissertation about technological accidents, so I got pretty obsessed.
But throughout that time there was one disaster, two actually, that I could never bring myself to write about. One of those was the Challenger, that terrible accident that killed seven astronauts. The other was the Columbia, the other space shuttle that was destroyed. It was destroyed on reentry in 2003 killing another seven astronauts.
I did go on to be a science journalist. My day job basically is to help people think more critically about science and technology.
Basically, back to the present, I’m nose-to-nose with Atlantis and I’m struck by two things, first off. One is that this ship is a lot bigger than I expected. I had never seen a space shuttle up close. This thing, it turns out, it’s like the size of a 737. It’s kind of overwhelming.
The second thing, it’s beautiful. It’s this enormous machine. It’s kind of weather beaten, it’s kind of pockmarked because it’s been in space. It’s travelled more than a hundred million miles in space but still it’s got this grace to it.
There are actually three surviving space shuttles. The other two are parked in hangers and they're just sitting on the ground. But at Kennedy, they've taken the Atlantis and put it up on these pillars and they kind of canted it at an angle. It’s got dramatic lighting and the cargo bay doors are open and the satellites, that robotic arm that they use to repair satellites is extended and it looks like it’s flying in space. So there's a lot of theme-park, showbiz thinking that went into this whole presentation.
But that wasn’t why I was crying. I think the reason I was crying was that seeing this beautiful, graceful, gigantic spaceship in person sort of made the space program tangible for me for the first time. Basically, that brought me back to the place where I had to admit to myself that this technique I had developed for detaching myself from the stories I was covering wasn’t working anymore. I wasn’t able to maintain that critical distance that a journalist is supposed to have towards his subjects.
So we left the pavilion, we went out to the launch viewing site, we waited for the Falcon 9 rocket to launch, and they wound up scrubbing the launch for a technical glitch. But they rescheduled it for the very next day so we decided to pile back in the car and drive back to Kennedy and see if we could catch it the second time.
This time we went to Cocoa Beach, walked out to the end of a long pier and stood there in the wind and the waves and waited for the rocket to launch. Finally, it did and it just arced into space, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. And a few seconds after the launch, the sound hit us. We were like ten miles away but it’s so loud that you can hear the roar, you can even kind of feel the roar in your chest.
I looked down at Karen and Lucy and I saw the amazement on their faces. And, for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was seeing all of this through a child’s eyes as well. Thanks.