Rocket Man, Rocket Girl

I n the early 1960s, all was well with the Lord family. Charles and Mary and their only child were living in La Jolla. He worked as an engineer, and his wife--who had a chemistry degree--stayed at home with their daughter. But when Mary Lord became ill, the family was set adrift.

“What we needed was a full-time husband and father,” writes M.G. Lord in her memoir, “Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science.” “What we had was a Cold War-era rocket engineer who embraced the values of his profession: work over family, masculine over feminine, repression over emotion. Whatever grief he may have carried, he remained a silent, archetypal mid-century male.”

In her book, to be published this week by Walker & Co., Lord tries to reconcile her feelings about her absent father by turning her focus on the ethos of rocket science itself. She mixes childhood recollections with an in-depth look at the history and culture of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where her father helped build the space probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission.

“The probes he worked on were scouts, sending home thrilling glimpses of unexplored worlds,” Lord writes. “All were about hope, expansion, the future, none of which ... would otherwise have crossed my mind. They had an almost mystical significance. The few moments of intimacy I shared with him were when he explained them to me.”

If school books such as “About Missiles and Men” had made being a woman seem undesirable, events at home made it appear worse. When I was in third grade, my mother received a diagnosis of breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy. I was not sure exactly what these things were, but I knew that they were bad and linked to being female. My mother and father discussed them behind the locked door of his study. She sobbed. I was afraid.

When she came back from the hospital, I felt as if I had two mothers, or maybe three. Around my father, she was almost maniacally cheery, and after several martinis, he too would brighten up.

When she thought she was alone, she was not bubbly. The surgery, I discovered, had sundered not just breast but underarm tissue; excruciating exercises were required to regain normal movement. I know this because I spied on her. The rupture to our perfect life ended my career as a hall monitor. I became a sneaky kid. What was the point of being good or adhering to rules if such behavior didn’t stop bad things from happening?

As I questioned the beliefs I had been taught, my mother became more devout. Each morning she went to 6 o’clock Mass, often taking me. “Ask God to protect Daddy’s job,” she told me, but God had other plans. To engineering families, layoffs were like nuclear accidents; we knew they could happen, but we hoped and prayed and secretly believed that they wouldn’t. When the ax fell at Convair, we were not prepared. At 57, my father was not the ideal job candidate. Mother exhausted herself cheerleading. Eventually, he secured “job-shop,” or contract work in Los Angeles, a three hours drive north. For two years we saw him only on weekends.

From my perspective, this was not entirely bad. My father was a classic mid-century dad, permissive good cop to my mother’s disciplinarian bad cop. She banned weeknight television; he was transfixed by Saturday morning cartoons. She forbade me to build model airplanes because the glue was toxic; he arrived one Friday with a squadron of balsa-and-tissue kits. (We spent the next 24 weekends building Supermarine Spitfires, Grumman F6F Hellcats, Messerschmitt 109s, Mitsubishi Zeros.) Then there were chores. Helping my mother prepare liver and onions was loathsome. Helping him whip up frozen margaritas was fun. At age 8 I could mix a mai tai, a gimlet, a Singapore sling.

What I loved most, however, was when he talked about what he did--critical work on some critical project (e.g., the country could not function without the mission and the mission could not function without him). In the spring of 1965, he began work at Northrop Aircraft Inc. on flight controls for the HL-10 and M2-F2, designs that had originated at NASA’s Langley Research Center. They were wingless “lifting bodies,” or wedges that could fly. The HL-10 had a flat stomach; the M2-F2 appeared pregnant, and both looked as if they would plummet like a brick when dropped from a larger plane, which is how they were intended to fly. Yet such wingless craft, he told me, were the future of space flight. You could launch them on a rocket and they would glide back to earth. They could shuttle astronauts to a space station. They would live in history.

As it happened the M2-F2 did live in history, but not for those reasons. In May 1967, during a test flight at Edwards Air Force Base, it went down in a spectacular crash--maiming but not killing its pilot, Bruce Peterson, the model for Steve Austin in the 1970s TV show “The Six-Million Dollar Man.” Footage of the actual smash-up was shown each week during the show’s opening credits.

Fortunately, the M2-F2 stayed aloft long enough for Northrop to offer my father a permanent job. We could finally move to live with him, a prospect that thrilled me until I saw our new home in Long Beach, which, in contrast to La Jolla, seemed a dreary community with a dreary oceanfront flecked with dreary oil rigs camouflaged as high-rise hotels.

My father didn’t spend much time there, which may explain why he liked it. He was commuting to Pasadena for Mariner Mars 69. He worked long days, sometimes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, often ferried there from Northrop by helicopter. To a sheltered 10-year-old, this seemed glamorous, worthy of James Bond.

Northrop delivered the two Mars-bound spacecraft to JPL on schedule. They were then shipped to Cape Canaveral for launches on Feb. 25, 1969 (Mariner 6), and on March 27, 1969 (Mariner 7).

Although my father was no longer involved with them, he followed their progress. His new project was a differential maneuvering simulator for NASA Langley. A piece of ground-based hardware, it didn’t have the same urgency as a spacecraft. But he kept long hours, as if it did.

I wish I could say that while he was gone I stood by my mother. But I was no better than he. I became editor of the junior high yearbook because its staff met after school. Anything to avoid going home.

Worse, years of absorbing “Why Study Science” and “About Missiles and Men” had brainwashed me. At puberty, I had begun to transform myself into an alien, coquettish creature. I made good grades quietly on tests, but stopped sticking up my hand every time my teachers asked a question. I became that bundle of insecurity, cliquishness and cosmetics obsession known as an eighth-grade girl. For older teenagers, 1969 was a time of defiance, of nonconformity, of taking a stand against the Vietnam War. But all I wanted was to be like everyone else.

Our family, however, was not like everyone else. My mother was very, very sick. By 1969, she had had a second operation and two brutal rounds of chemotherapy. I tried to maintain a facade of normality at school, just as my father, for the same desperate, wrongheaded reasons, tried to maintain one at work. My relationship with him grew increasingly rocky. When it came to the avoidance of my mother’s condition, we each saw in the other what we despised in ourselves.

As spring became summer, the Mariners reached Mars. The eyes of the world, however, were on the moon, where, on July 20, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked. Long Beach is an aerospace town, a bedroom community for McDonnell Douglas. The applause there was deafening.

We clapped and cheered in my honors summer science class, to which I had been invited because of my science grades. I had enrolled in it, however, for a typical teenage reason. The boys in the course greatly outnumbered the girls. That July, my short-term objective was to persuade a geeky boy from a different school, whom I had met at a districtwide math contest, to kiss me. This potential occurrence seemed as implausible and miraculous as a trip to the moon. I had no long-term objectives. Because of my mother’s illness, I could not imagine the future, much less plan for it.

On July 30, while the Apollo astronauts were still in post-lunar quarantine, two things happened. My mother underwent a third operation--a hasty emergency procedure in response to an infection. And Mariner 7, the second of the two Mars ships, malfunctioned. Both these events upset my father, but he would discuss only Mariner 7. He transformed his fear for her into fear for the spacecraft.

In fairness, the spacecraft’s crisis was dramatic. He learned details from friends at JPL. Yet because he was not a member of the flight team, there was nothing he could do. He was as powerless to help it as he was to help her.

JPL engineer Charles Kohlhase was in a different position. At the time of the problem, Mariner 6 had successfully swept across Mars’ equatorial region and sent back 75 images. Mariner 7 was supposed to swing by the southern polar ice cap. But “in the last few days before the pass,” Kohlhase recalled, “Mariner 7 had an onboard anomaly.” Its signal disappeared. Navigators feared it had been struck by a meteoroid.

As mysteriously as the signal had vanished, however, it suddenly reappeared. The spacecraft’s battery had sprung a leak, engineers determined. This resulted in a minor explosion that had pushed the spacecraft off course and, worse, had confused the “orbit estimate,” a prediction of where the spacecraft would be. Although engineers had pinpointed the problem, the ship was not yet out of trouble. The navigators had to figure out its location, then reprogram its science instruments so that when it flew by Mars on its new course, they would be pointing toward the planet.

Kohlhase was at the center of this fix. After the navigators had located the spacecraft, they fed its coordinates into a computer program that translated the changes in the spacecraft’s orbit into changes in the pointing angles for its TV camera and other instruments.

“When the person who ran the program showed me the numbers, I didn’t feel they were right,” Kohlhase told me. “I didn’t feel they matched the new orbit estimate. So I changed them in my head.” Then he did something, he said, that “would never happen today.” He sent his version of the commands--not the version from the computer--up to the spacecraft.

It was a hard decision. “Although the changes were small, I aged a year in an hour,” he recalled. “I remember sitting in front of a computer monitor, waiting to see the first pictures of Mars--knowing that if I never saw any, or if they veered too far from the desired scientific swath, my career was over.”

But the pictures arrived. One hundred twenty-six of them. Thirty-three taken during the spacecraft’s closest approach. And they showed what the scientists had wanted to see: the planet’s south polar cap.

There was hope in the world, there had to be. The summer had been full of evidence. Two men had landed on the moon. The boy had kissed me. My father’s spacecraft had made it to Mars. Miracles happened. Technology was unflappable. I permitted myself a guarded euphoria. Surely, science could lick a medical problem.

By September, however, my euphoria had faded, as had the apparent euphoria of the Mariner science team. As feats of engineering, Mariners 6 and 7 were indeed triumphant. But the data they sent back were grim. The pictures looked as dead and deadly as those returned by Mariner 4. At a news conference in August, immediately after the second flyby, George Pimentel, a UC Berkeley scientist and principal investigator on the infrared spectrometer, announced that his instrument had detected methane and ammonia, two gases linked to the possibility of life. By September, Pimentel had to admit that he had made a mistake.

To ensure money for subsequent Mars missions, however, these depressing facts had to be presented with a cheerful spin. The September news conference on Mariner was a study in euphemism. Robert Leighton, a Caltech scientist and head of the team that interpreted the photographs, finessed the cratered bleakness. Mars, he said, does not resemble the moon or even a rock-strewn desert on Earth. Rather, Mars looks “like Mars.”

There was, however, no way to put a bright spin on my mother’s cancer. That fall we learned it had metastasized. In March 1970, she entered Long Beach Memorial Medical Center for what her doctors predicted would be no more than a month. She survived six months, until the following September.

Recently, I found a snapshot of our family from March. We sit on a tired brown sofa. My mother is skeletal. She raises a glass of wine with her thin hand, the back of which is bruised from an intravenous drip. She smiles weakly. I am smaller than I remember. Eyes shut, I grasp her tightly around her waist, like a sort of human limpet, as if by hanging on I could hold her longer in this world.

My father, however, looks most shellshocked. There are pencil smudges on the front of his pale blue stay-pressed shirt. He sits apart from us, gazing at nothing, his eyes as black and vacant as outer space.

To discover what exactly my father had done on Mariner 69, I needed to talk to someone who had worked with him. I made dozens of false starts trying to track down team members through the Northrop-Grumman newsletter, the company’s retiree organization, the phone book and the Internet. In 2002, I finally connected with Des Arthurs, who had been in his 20s when he worked on the project.

Arthurs is a structural engineer, and his job on Mariner 69 was to make its parts light and strong. Strength mattered particularly during launch, when they were subject to violent shaking and the forces of acceleration. He showed me photos of tests at JPL that involved shaking a solar panel at different frequencies. This wasn’t so much to check the panel itself, but to check the accuracy of computer programs devised to model the panel’s vibrations.

As “cognizant hardware engineer for mechanical devices,” my father essentially was in charge of gadgets--things such as actuators, joints and dampers that secured the solar panels during launch. He designed them and supervised their fabrication. This revelation, I will admit, disappointed me; it did not jibe with what I had believed. Yet when I suggested that this work seemed slight, Arthurs reproved me. In space, he said, nothing is slight. If a tiny part fails, the mission can fail.

On the drive back from the interview, I realized how right he was. For example, although the Galileo spacecraft successfully orbited Jupiter and photographed its moons from 1996 to 2003, it did so with a handicap. Its high-gain antenna, which was folded like an umbrella during launch, never unfurled. A speck of lubricant, engineers believed, rubbed off the antenna’s joints on a trip from JPL to Cape Canaveral. The lack of a high-gain antenna crippled the spacecraft’s ability to return science data at a high rate. During flybys of the moons, engineers had to record data on the spacecraft’s tape recorder, then dribble it back through the ship’s much smaller low-gain antenna.

Because of a teeny glitch in a teeny joint, data that should have gushed through a floodgate trickled instead through a straw.

My father soldiered on for another 24 years. Northrop forced him to retire in 1971 at age 65, but he returned to do contract work on the FA/18 fighter jet. He remained employed until his late 70s. Work nourished him; it provided a goal, drinking buddies, the borrowed invincibility of bold men.

I escaped to college at Yale, and later to New York City, where I had a job on a newspaper as a political cartoonist. Childhood prepared me for an aspect of this craft. You can mine nearly any grim event for humor.

My father and I stayed in touch, but at a remove. Prolonged contact revived memories that we preferred to forget. We were not close again until 1993, when I spent time on the West Coast to report my book on the Barbie doll. Three NASA spacecraft had gone to Mars since Mariner 69. In 1971, Mariner 9 orbited the planet, and in 1976, two Viking Landers touched down. (The rocket carrying Mariner 8 had failed at launch.) Perhaps appropriately, during my first extended visit in 20 years, my father was agitated over a missing Mars probe. In August, the Mars Observer, a JPL orbiter, had vanished on its way to the planet. Brandishing a newspaper account of the disappearance, he was armchair-quarterbacking the failure investigation. Did anyone remember what happened to Mariner 7? he wanted to know. Had the solar panels been properly secured at launch?

He had retired in Fullerton, near my cousin, as well as near the Richard M. Nixon Library & Birthplace. We made a pilgrimage to see the tape recorder on which Rosemary Woods had done her erasing. We barbecued hamburgers. Before he died, also of cancer, I felt we had made peace.

Near the end of his life, he took morphine for pain. Where Scotch had made him mute, morphine made him garrulous. It unlocked stifled emotions. He talked about the shame he had felt as a child, shame that he had never dared to confess. Shame, needless to say, for which a tough, silent, mid-century engineer would never have sought therapy.

He talked about my grandfather’s accident. While in boarding school outside Baltimore, my father had been summoned to Boston, but not told why. He changed trains in New York City, where, as a 13-year-old boy, he figured he had time to take in a magic show. The show, however, ran late. He missed his train. Which caused him to miss his father’s funeral, a mistake so disgraceful to him that he had never revealed it to anyone, not even his siblings.

This event took place 75 years earlier. But, he said, he had thought about it every day of his life after that. He demanded to be buried next to his father.

What we know about Mars has evolved considerably since Mariner 69 swept by the planet 35 years ago. Not only have five U.S. spacecraft successfully landed there, but orbiters such as the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey continue to chart the planet. Mysteries, to be sure, remain, but many have been solved.

I feel this way about my father. When I arrived at JPL in 1997 to begin researching this book, I harbored an old grudge against him. His coldness, I felt, had devastated my mother and me. I believed what he had wanted us to believe: that he had an important role on Mariner 69, and that his remoteness, as well as his relentless assertions of masculinity, had to do with his significance in the outside world.

But the evidence did not bear this out. The only thing worse than having your darkest beliefs confirmed, I learned, is having them disproved. I was afraid to dig deeper--fearing he would turn out to be another Duke of Deception, the name that memoirist Geoffrey Wolff gave to his father, a con-artist who impersonated various professionals, including an aerospace engineer. The dread intensified when I discovered that Wolff’s dad and my father had both worked for Northrop. “Northrop,” I scribbled on a 3-by-5 card, “hires lying fathers.”

Yet my father had not lied. Inflated, yes, but not made things up. And with the perspective of 35 years, his inflation seems poignant. Of course he had exaggerated his importance at home, and oppressed us with his masculinity. In the outside world, because his role was not significant, it was he who had been feminized.

Nor can one entirely blame the culture of engineering for his horror of appearing feminine. Such horror churned through popular culture. Who, for example, can forget Jim Backus as the apron-wearing dad whose uxoriousness crippled James Dean’s character in “Rebel Without a Cause”? Or the torture visited on an effeminate schoolboy in “Tea and Sympathy”?

About six years ago, I stumbled upon an object that I had forgotten. It was a rich wool, mint-green muffler that my father had knitted. In the late 1970s, Roosevelt Grier, a physically immense, irreproachably manly football player, had published a book on knitting, which someone had given to my father as a joke. To continue the joke--and tweak his feminist daughter--he made me a scarf. The scarf, however, wasn’t rough or lumpy or error-ridden. It was soft and faultless and beautiful--an emblem of a feminine element in him that only this once had found expression.

What had made my father a good knitter also made him a good engineer--attention to detail. This attention is why I can’t entirely write off his contribution to Mariner 69. As someone once reminded me, the most advanced spacecraft, run by the fanciest software, is only as reliable as its simplest mechanical components. If they fail, it fails.

The challenge was to place my father in the context of a larger story--the story of space exploration at mid-century. His life belied the American faith in boundless expansion. It did not have the forward and upward trajectory of a space mission; it went backward and downward. A golden child, he was the son of a vice president of International Harvester. But the freak accident that killed his father also killed much of his will to prevail. And the Great Depression sapped a good deal of the rest.

Yet in first few decades of the 20th century, engineering had been a democratic career--one in which men from poor families, or men who were the first in their families to go to college, could, through pluck and merit, succeed. It was not nepotistic then; nor is it now. “At JPL, it doesn’t matter what your father could do,” Robert Gounley, a JPL engineer, told me. “It matters what you can do.”

More than by circumstances, I think, my father was held back by memory--a childhood memory, painted in false colors by shame and guilt. The memory was so powerful that it isolated him from his fellow engineers, and from the upward thrust of their success. He convicted himself of a crime: missing his father’s funeral. And too proud to seek absolution through therapy, he stubbornly refused parole.

In the last year of his life, I communicated with him daily by postcard. He wrote back in an unsteady hand. We signed our letters, “Love.” The phone was used sparingly, because our conversations often went awry. “You’ll never finish that doll book,” he snapped into the receiver, as I struggled with a manuscript. “You don’t have the concentration.” And rather than defend myself, I hung up--reduced by his sentence to a terrified 12-year-old.

Because I had not gone into a technical field, I thought he dismissed what I did. He never said, “Good job.” He said, “I would have done this differently.” Yet after his death, I found a sad thing among his possessions, a thing that stood as an emblem of all our misunderstandings. It was a fat, dog-eared scrapbook of my articles, which, a stranger told me at his funeral, he had proudly and regularly inflicted on his friends.

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.

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Los Angeles-based writer M.G. Lord is a journalist and the author of “Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll” (Walker & Co., 2004), which demystified an icon of feminine culture. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the New Yorker and many other publications.