Richard French gets the call to work for NASA, fulfilling a dream that started with his professor Carl Sagan.

Richard French is former Chair of the Astronomy Department at Wellesley College and is a founding science team member of NASA's Cassini Mission to Saturn. He uses the Hubble Space Telescope and telescopes around the world to observe the rings and atmospheres of planets, and particularly enjoys introducing self-proclaimed “non-scientists” to the wonders of the Universe. He chose the life of an astronomer over that of an opera singer, but still loves music and the allied arts. Dick enjoys mountaineering, paddling, bicycling, photographing his travels around the world, and encouraging others to read “Moby Dick.”

This story originally aired on December 27, 2019 in an episode titled “Shoot for the Stars.”

Story Transcript

Thirty years ago, I’m in my office at Wellesley College and the phone rings. “This is NASA headquarters. Congratulations, Dr. French. You've just been selected to be a member of the Cassini Science Team, the great mission to Saturn.” I hung up the phone and I was thrilled.

This was going to be a decades-long adventure, an international opportunity to study Saturn and its moons and rings. What could I do? What would we learn?

And then I immediately had a feeling of panic and fear. What could I do? Was I smart enough? How could I contribute?

And immediately after hanging up the phone, I had a sudden memory of a boring, dreary undergraduate physics lab at Cornell. I was a Physics major somehow by accident in between taking opera lessons and we were doing an exciting lab. I think it was rolling balls down inclined planes, demonstrating something that Galileo had shown to be true in the 1600s. I was perfectly willing to take his word for it.

But as I was trying to complete the lab, I looked over on the bench and I saw that my lab partner had two books with him. One of them was called the Book of Mars and the other had the wonderful title Intelligent Life in the Universe, by a Russian astrophysicist by the name of Shklovsky and an American scientist by the name of Sagan.

My lab partner said, “It’s not Sagan, it’s Carl Sagan. He didn’t get tenure at Harvard so he came to Cornell. He's teaching the course.”

I said I got to get into this course, so I made an appointment to meet Dr. Sagan. And I said, “Professor Sagan, I'd love to get into your seminar”.

And he said, “Well, Dick, I see that you've had Astronomy.”

I said, “Yes, I have.”

He said, “Well, I don't want students in this class who already know astronomy.”

I said, “I didn’t say I know astronomy, I said I took Astronomy. Ask me any question I won’t know the answer.”

It wasn’t until later he knew how true my statement was. But he was charmed. He let me into his class. And even though physics was challenging for me, he inspired me to apply to graduate school at Cornell and I was accepted and he became my first PhD thesis advisor.

I remember taking a Planetary Astronomy class from him and he looked us all in the eye and he said, “There's only one generation of scientists for whom those distant points of light in the sky that we call planets will become individual worlds. We’ll visit them with interplanetary spacecraft, go beneath the clouds of Venus, land on the surface of Mars, plunge between the rings in Saturn and find out what those worlds are like. Who among you wants to join this adventure?”

And I said, “I do. I do. I do.” I had found my passion.

But graduate school had a way of chipping away at my self confidence. And on one of those dark, wintery Ithaca days when I didn’t want to work on my electrodynamics problem set, I was writing in my diary and I thought it might be an instructive calculation to estimate the fraction of the mass of the universe I represented. It was an astonishingly small number. And then I looked and I was aghast and I realized I had made a mistake. I couldn’t even quantify my own insignificance. And I took out a big red pen and I wrote in my diary, “This is why I will never make it as an astronomer.”

But I persevered and I began to work on my PhD thesis which, I was reminded, was intended to be a superlative piece of independent scholarly work with the emphasis on the word ‘independent’. A PhD is not given to a group. I PhD is given to an individual so the individual has to suffer through the fiction that they have done all the work themselves when mine was indeed a collaborative effort.

And then on the day that was supposed to be celebratory when I was so-called defending my thesis, Carl Sagan posed a question. “Dick, did you write every word of your thesis?”

Well, he bloody well knew I hadn’t because I had co-authored part of that thesis with another member of my thesis committee. And I felt the blood draining from my head and feeling a sense of shame and guilt, of exposure and inadequacy as though six years of graduate school are going down the drain. But I had the other members of my committee who had, after all, co-authored my thesis to defend me and I got my PhD.

I made my way east to MIT as a member of the research staff and then, by happenstance, to the faculty at Wellesley College in the Astronomy Department, I had finally entered the world of publish or perish.

And that phone call from NASA was not a guarantee of academic success because it would take seven years to design and build the Cassini spacecraft and another seven long years to get to Saturn. That’s 14 years for the dean to wait for me to publish my first science paper about Saturn, and that was asking for a lot of patience.

But I was on the Cassini Radio Science team, one of 12 teams, one for each of the instruments on the space craft. And we began our seven long years of work of planning every single minute of observations for all those many times we would orbit Saturn, plunge past the moon Titan, look at the rings, look at the ionosphere, look at all of Saturn’s many moons.

What we found was that not everybody can use their instrument to look at what they want to when they can because somebody else is choosing that time to look at what they want to look for, which meant that we were competing with each other. And we found ourselves very quickly using militaristic metaphors: ‘winning’, ‘losing’, ‘battles’, ‘strategy’, ‘victory’, ‘celebration’, ‘exaltation’, 'defeat’, ‘mourning’.

This attracted the attention of a sociologist who visited us and I felt like a rat in a maze. “You wouldn’t mind if she sits in on your meeting and takes notes, do you?” So it’s where the one-way mirror as we’re having our intense conversations. And we learned that unlike Cassini’s scientists, the Mars Rover scientists would sit around a small table in the morning looking at pictures of Mars taken the previous day, sipping their lattes, looking at a rock, coming up with a whimsical name to call that rock, probably named after a new flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. While we on the Radio Science team were licking our wounds in defeat, the Radar team having swiped away from us our one opportunity to measure the gravitational field of Titan, something I’m still sore about.

Well, scientists aren’t trained to be diplomats. Sometimes politicians aren’t either, but we found that the stale argument that your science is better than somebody else’s or your idea is better, or that you have something more important to do became a bit stale. And those of us who finally became a bit successful at this recognized that in one morning’s meeting, when you have sitting next to you somebody who’s an important ally in trying to secure observing time, during that afternoon meeting we’d be sitting across from you and we’d be your fierce competitor and you'd have to find a way to have dinner with them that night.

Well, we found a way, ultimately, to get along but there's nothing better than a good victory over the Radar team. And I still remember going to Paris, a celebratory dinner off the Champs Elysees with a little too much wine. We were celebrating the fact that we had secured the 21st flyby of Titan away from the Radar team to have a chance to try an audacious experiment. We were going to send our 13 watts of radio power, aim it for a lake on the northern marshes of Titan. And if we aim that radio signal at just the right angle and it was a calm day on Titan then the radio signal would reflect, pass through a billion miles of space, reach the earth and tell us whether the lake was made of methane or ethane.

“Long live T21,” we shouted, and wrote our names in the restaurant book. I still want to go back and find those signatures.

But nothing could beat the opportunity of being at the jet propulsion laboratory when T21 experiment was actually happening. We’re sitting in the operations room. we had the schedule right in front of us and we knew to the second when we predicted that that faint echo off of the glinting lake in the northern seas of Titan - Kraken Mare was the colorful name of that lake - would reach us over an hour long it took the radio signal to reach us. We knew to the second and I had a fistful of dollar bills ready to spray across the room in celebration if we saw the echo.

And I started the countdown, “Five, four...” There it is. It came out early. And I just threw the bills to everybody. I turned around and one of the members of the Radar team happened to be in the room at the time and I just smiled.

We had our share of victories but the mission eventually had to come to an end. Two years ago, the spacecraft was sent on a daring plunge between the rings and Saturn itself. We were going as close to the planet as we could to get a close look at the gravitational field, at the rings, at the atmosphere. And then the spacecraft was running out of fuel.

An engineer said, “It’s time.” We have to send the Cassini spacecraft crashing into Saturn itself.

So we all assembled at the jet propulsion laboratory one final time. I looked around the room at all of the engineers and scientists that we’d worked with for decades and I wasn’t thinking of the victories and the losses, the T21s and the Radar team. I thought of the immense pride of working with an international team of scientists and engineers doing something good, learning something true about the world, working together, facing odds. And we’d come to celebrate, or so it seemed.

We were sitting in the second row. My wife and I, next to me she's a rocket scientist too, we’re there with a phalanx of photographers sitting up in front of us waiting to catch the reactions of scientists and engineers after working for decades on this mission to catch our emotional response to the death of our beloved spacecraft.

We looked at the screen and the screen had a little flicker. It was like a heartbeat in an emergency room. And the spacecraft’s signal was saying, “I’m still alive. I’m still alive.” And then it flickered and disappeared and then came back momentarily again, and then it was gone.

The room was silent. There were no cheers. And then I sobbed and I buried my face in my hands. And the photographers took the picture of my shiny top of my head.

Then next morning at the Los Angeles Airport, Colleen and I are looking at the Los Angeles Times and I said, “There's a picture of some Cassini scientist on the front page. Who’s that bald guy?”

It was my Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame. “Grown scientist cries at loss of piece of machine,” it seemed to say.

But it was more than a machine. It was 30 years of human effort and endeavor. I cried because I would never work with that group again. We had shared so much. I cried because Carl Sagan didn’t live to see that day. I cried in gratitude for his support and inspiration to try to become that rocket scientist. And I cried because I realized I was wrong those old days. I was wrong when I crossed that mark out in my diary. Somehow I had become a rocket scientist, I had become an astronomer. Thank you, Carl.