Weighed down by the burden of leadership as she supervises the construction of a telescope, Erika Hamden finds comfort in an unlikely spot.

Erika Hamden is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Arizona. She develops UV detector technology, builds telescopes, and observes galaxies and hydrogen all over the universe. Her last project was a UV telescope that flew on a high altitude balloon. She is currently leading a team working on a proposal for a UV space telescope. When she isn't building or thinking about telescopes, she has a serious yoga practice, is learning to fly a plane, and loves hiking in the desert around Tucson. Before she went to grad school, Erika worked as a chef for a year. She is still really into eating. Erika is interested in sharing stories about how hardware gets built and the very human personalities that are behind scientific discoveries.

This story originally aired on November 15, 2019 in an episode titled “Wild.”

Story Transcript

By mid-afternoon, the falcon wanted to eat me, and it was shaping up to be the best day ever in the worst place I've ever been. Now, the fact that the falcon was six inches tall, a baby and didn't even know how to fly yet meant that the odds of getting eaten were actually pretty low, although I think if you asked the falcon he would definitely disagree.

So why was I in a staring contest with a baby falcon in June 2018? Because, as you just heard, my job is to build telescopes. Technically, my title is ‘professor’ but I spend most of my time either building telescopes, coming up with new telescopes to build, or inventing things to make the telescopes better. It's a great job and it's taken me all over the world but sometimes I end up in places that are best characterized as the ends of the earth.

And that is the reason why I was in the middle of nowhere New Mexico in this tiny town that is really trying its best called, it really is, called Fort Sumner. The telescope that I was there to build is called the Faint Intergalactic Medium Redshifted Emission Balloon, which we call FIREBALL for short, which is a great name for whiskey and a telescope.

FIREBALL is designed to observe huge clouds of hydrogen gas that we think surround most galaxies. And it does those observations from the very top of the stratosphere on these giant balloons that it just hangs from. My job there was to lead the team of about thirty people who built FIREBALL. And NASA does these balloon launches from a few places on earth. Antarctica is one of them, but they're all really remote because the last thing that you want is for one of these telescopes to land on your house.

Fort Sumner is a very remote place in Eastern New Mexico. It's a town of about 800 people. I say it's the worst place ever but it's really my job that's there that's the worst place.

The town itself is strange. The closest reasonable grocery store is about an hour-and-a-half drive. It's two-and-a-half hours to Albuquerque. A couple of years ago, there were four restaurants and now there are only two.

And there's not much to do. There's a bowling alley but it's closed unless you pay to open it, and you have to rent every lane for the entire night. But there are only six lanes and so it costs you 80 bucks but it's giving you a sense of the bar that you have to cross to have a fun time in this town.

The bowling alley is owned by the pharmacist who also owns one of the two planes that are parked at this tiny municipal airport where we do most of the work. The work itself is hard and it takes a lot of my mental capacity. And my job there is mostly doing day-to-day operations, so I figure out all the tests that we need to run, I come up with the schedule for them, I make sure that everybody is doing the things that they're supposed to do, and I try to anticipate all of the problems that they might have and then solve any of their problems.

I also have to deal with the balloon people, which is not people made of balloons but the NASA people whose job it is to actually get these giant balloons off the ground.

The work is stressful and I want to do a great job at it so I spend a lot of time trying to control everything and making sure that any problem that happens, I can solve it. And I'm pretty good at solving problems. Some of the problems are the things that you might expect. A component breaks and we need a new copy to make sure we can do the work the next day. So I call a company and I can talk them into making an exception for us and overnighting something at 5:00 p.m. so we can get it and keep going.

Some of the problems are very silly. We work with a number of French guys and one of them was complaining to me that he was so tired of eating white bread and cheddar cheese. And so I had French cheese overnighted in from New York City so he didn't have that problem anymore.

And some of the problems are with the balloon people. I need to make sure that they prioritize our tests over the other telescopes that are also there waiting for a launch opportunity. My preferred method for getting people to do what I want is bribery with food or with telescope-themed t-shirts, or just generally being amazing and fun to be around. But sometimes that doesn't get you the things that you want and so the alternative is you have to be able to bring the hammer down on people.

So I've had conversations where I tell them that I will burn the building to the ground if they don't do the thing that I need them to do. And when you tell somebody that, you really have to mean it.

It's a funny story to relay now but it's actually not a great experience to go through to be in that state where you tell someone that you are going to burn it all down. That actually, I think, encapsulates my experience in Fort Sumner running this project that I'm under so much stress to get everything right the first time, I'm trying to control so many things and it makes me into a person that I don't really love. And so it's into this environment that the baby falcon arrives.

So one morning at the airport, there was all this commotion around the hangar where we work. I had been in a meeting previously so I didn't see the stuff that happened before, but for days beforehand we had been hearing these little bird noises, like chirp, chirp, chirp up in the rafters of the building. We figured some birds had made a nest maybe above one of the doors but we didn't have the time or really the inclination to go figure it out.

One morning, the team had opened up the hangar doors to bring some equipment in and, all of a sudden, this baby falcon swoops down and lands on the spectrograph tank. The French guys caught it.

Well, first, they spent a while calling each other and the falcon idiots, in French. They caught the bird before it could scratch any mirrors or pull any wires out or anything and they put it in this white NASA baseball cap that one of the grad students happened to be wearing. They brought it outside and they were arguing over what to do with it and this is when I showed up from my meeting and I am the person who solves every problem so my list of things to do just got one item longer - figure out what to do with this baby falcon.

The falcon was obviously very stressed out. It was occasionally screaming at us and its claws were all clenched and so I figured the first thing we need to do is to make it more comfortable and get it out of this very on-brand NASA hat.

So we get a cardboard box and we fill it up with lab wipes, because that's the closest thing that we have to comfy towels, and we give it a little Petri dish of water and we lay the falcon down in the box.

This is the first time I've ever seen an animal like a falcon up close and it was incredible. The falcon was truly gorgeous. The feathers had this beautiful pattern on it. It was an American kestrel, if you've ever seen one of those. And it was light, so light and it was fluffy and just perfect. It was obviously also very upset so we moved it to a part of the airport away from where we were working so it could be in like quiet.

About once an hour I would go out to check on it and see how it was doing, and for the first few hours it was still on its side, like still really upset. Then in the early afternoon, I go out and it is no longer on its side. It is standing up in the box.

And I'm starting to approach and it is staring at me over the top of the box. And it is so angry. I've never seen a creature that wanted to eat me so badly. And I think if it were bigger and could have flown, it would have definitely given it a try.

The intensity of its stare was unlike anything I've ever seen before. It was like stop-you-in-your-tracks-and-make-you-reconsider-all-of-your-life-choices breathtaking.

I pause here to say that I really like the project and I am not much of a crier but I cry almost every day that I am in Fort Sumner. And I put so much pressure on myself to be perfect and to walk this tightrope of getting everything right the first time, and looking at the falcon and its incredible wildness made me think about why I do that to myself.

The falcon doesn't give a shit about planning. The falcon didn't decide that today was the day he was going to learn to fly and then come up with a multi-pronged strategy to make sure that it did it right the first time. The falcon just jumped out of its nest, it crashed, it got super mad at some humans and then it tried again and eventually figured it out.

Seeing the falcon and its wildness and ferociousness, it made me want to be like that, it made me want to be wild. And so while I stand there and look at it, I thought to myself, “Well, maybe I could take this falcon and keep it with me. And I can tame it and I can become wild while I tame it and take some of its wildness for myself. And people tame falcons and I am good at a lot of things, so I think I could do it. And I could just add one more item to my incredible list of things to do, tame the baby falcon that I've stolen.”

But then I think a little more about that and if I tame the falcon, I'm going to make it more like me and I don't want it to be like me. I love it because it is wild and crazy. And if I make it like me, I am flawed and anxious and I don't even know how to fly. And I love it because it is wild and I want it to stay that way. So even though it makes me sad, I turn around and I go back inside and get on with my day.

The next time I go out to look for it, the box is empty. Later that evening when we're leaving, I see the falcon jumping around and trying to take off. Then the next morning, it's swooping around the parking lot. And then for days afterwards, every time I would go outside, I would look up into the sky to see if I could see my falcon. Months later when we went back again to launch the telescope, some days I would see three falcons soaring above the airport and I would know that one of them was my baby falcon.

We did eventually launch the telescope. After a lot of years of work and a lot of things that I tried to control and things that I did control but, in the end, the balloon had a hole in it and we didn't get the data we wanted and we have to try again. Before the falcon, I think I would have spent a lot of time thinking about everything that I did wrong and what things should I have controlled that I didn't control, and how did I fail. But after the falcon, I know that I did the best that I could. We had to let the telescope fly away and see what happened.

And, to quote Apollo 13, it was a successful failure in that we learned a lot and nobody died but we didn't do the one thing that we were really trying to do. But when I think back on it, I learned a lot. I learned that I can get through anything and I can do it with or without a plan with or without a strategy. And I also learned that I can be fearless if I want to be. I can do things even though they scare me because that's being brave. And I can do things like this right now.

I can actually learn to fly in a plane. I don't have any wings yet. I can come up with an idea for my own space telescope even though it's probably not going to happen, but I can try anyway. I can move to a new place for a new job and try to build a new life there even though doing that scares me. And I can be wild and fearless like the falcon. I can fall from a great height and know that I can come back from it.

Next year when we go back to launch that telescope again, I will be like the falcon and I

know that it will be easier. Thank you very much.