Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science

by M.G. Lord

Book Overview

Astro Turf is the brilliant result of a daughter's journey to rediscover her father--who built the space probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission--and understand the culture of space engineers."Astro... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802714277
• ISBN13: 9780802714275
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Walker & Company
• Length: 259 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

A perfect melding of memoir and history

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.

Growing up in Spaceville, USA

"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.

Rocket Science with Grace and Humor

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.

Finding Heart in the Science of Machines

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.

Exploring the Development of Space Science

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