what are you going to do with your life?

Titanum Electron Gun is key to space simulator. Engineer, James Stephens, checks new Caltech gadget.

How did my dad know what he wanted to do with his life? How did he know that he wanted to be a mechanical engineer and build rockets? That question is an oversimplification. He didn’t really build whole rockets but he worked on bits and pieces of rockets and on the robots and astronomy satellites that rode up into the sky on those big tin cans. Still, he always made it sound like he knew exactly what he wanted to do in life and he went right down the mechanical engineer path through school, to work at Rocketdyne, and on to The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Caltech. I suppose that the glamour of things that are new, bold, and uncharted helped make it an easy decision to pursue rockets and space stuff.

I am in my forties now and I still don’t know what I want to do. I bought into in the whole do-what-you-love thing but it has never really gotten me anywhere that would look like success to most of the people walking around on this rock. I am happiest making things with my hands (the engineer homunculus in me throwing its weight around) but what things I get a kick out of making is always changing. So how does one get the $$ out of that? I’ve never really found the way to make my talents into cash. I suppose I should have gone to art school but I just didn’t want to jump the hoops. I suppose I should have followed the engineer path, but it seems to me that engineers don’t have the fun they did in the age before CAD/CAM and all the computer screens. Sitting in front of a glowing screen all day makes me cranky. It just doesn’t hold up to the tales of early rocket engineers tinkering with hydrazine and living on the edge.

This beats the heck out of an exploding rocket, no?

Digression Warning: skip this bit if you don’t get a thrill from tales of chemical stinks and medicinal serendipity. According to anecdote, use’ta be, in the early days of rocketry and super volatile liquid fuels there was no sophisticated way to check for leaks in the completed and fueled up rocket standing out on the launch rig. A tiny little leak would be a baaaaaad thing resulting in certain disaster. You want all the rumbling flame to shoot out of the nozzle on the tail of the rocket, you see. If anything is squirting out in the wrong place it tends to screw up the works and make everything into a big flame ball that goes nowhere fast. Fortunately the hydrazine in the liquid fuel smells like ammonia. (Don’t quote me on this. I’m running on anecdote and my cluttered and fogged memory here, not on any sort of expertise.) It’s toxic as all get out in larger doses but someone had to be the canary in the coalmine. One person with a good nose and the short straw would have to go out to the launch rig, climb a ladder, open a little door on the side of the rocket, and sniff. No ammonia stink? Thumbs up, it’s launch time! So tonight, let it be Löwenbraü. “Where’s the medicinal serendipity?” you ask. Guess what? Hydrazine is a chemical precursor to thorazine a.k.a. chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic drug sometimes used to reduce effects of a bad LSD trip. Better living through chemistry and the canary feels aaaall riiiight.

Dad was a thoroughly practical space engineer, a loud-mouthed critic of manned space flight, and the fly-in-the-ointment of every hair brained NASA pork barrel project. I don’t know for sure if his boosterism for robotic spacecraft and his practicality was something that grew in time or if he came right out of school swinging the fists of practical testing and fanatical belief in building spacecraft the way Ford cranked out Model Ts. It is telling, however, that one of his early big projects at The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was building a testament to practicality, the Molesink, also known as The Molecular Sink Space Simulation Laboratory. That’s a mouthful. He kept the black sign that labeled one of the steel doors opening into the big room filled with huge vacuum pumps, tanks of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium, and pipes running every which way patched here and there with ape shit* (that one I’ll have to explain later). Long after it went out of use and was scrapped, dad was proud of the big space-making machine that gave him his hernia. We still have the sign. It makes the shop in the garage seem more important.

Galileo's broken umbrella

The nuts and bolts of basic mechanics are tweaked by the very low pressure, intense cold, and ionizing radiation of space. The simplest assumptions made about mechanical parts or electronic devices down here on the ground are often poor designs for spacecraft. Lubricants for moving parts turn into horrible glue or worse they disperse, coating everything with a nasty muck. Materials cold-weld together in unpredictable ways, and plastic polymers just plain freak out. Armed with the Molesink and its threatening almost-like-space torture chamber dad would tear gaping holes in the blueprints of impractical and poorly designed spacecraft long before they could get into space and fail where no one was watching or taking notes. What was so practical about that? The big idea was to make a little bit of space here on earth to find out what was going wrong and to learn how to do things right on the cheap. It costs a whole lot less to wreck your electronics in the Molesink than to send them into space and then sit and wonder what went wrong. This may seem obvious but lots of obvious things get buried in the clumsy machine of NASA. Pork projects get arbitrarily farmed out to companies with no practical experience in a particular field and the same old mistakes are made anew. When the Galileo spacecraft’s main antenna failed to unfold my dad lamented the loss of the Molesink shaking his head. Stuffing a prototype antenna in the Molsink and opening a can of space whup ass would have prevented the whole embarrassing mess by proving the design sucked rocks. Lots of dopey mistakes plagued NASA in the 80s and 90s. The Hubble Space Telescope went up with out anyone trying out the optics. There was a terrible lack of attention paid to proponents of practicality like Dr. Fly-In-The-Ointment Stephens.

Dad worked on lots and lots of projects in his time at JPL, but he was slowly moved out of the nuts and bolts stuff. Eventually he was part of the Technology Affiliates program. It was intended to take new technology and inventions produced by NASA folks and make them available to private companies in need of innovation. Dad criticized the Technology Affiliates program for trying to find a problem for a given solution when he should have been finding solutions for problems. In his own time dad had a little business doing just that. He called himself the technology pimp, hooking up hard-up companies with willing, able, and well-endowed engineers, chemists, and biologists. I think dad had more satisfaction in his pimping work outside of JPL where he could fit solutions and people to a particular problem rather than doing it all backwards at JPL.

I need to dig in the dad box and find the documents so I can get the details right but I think there is evidence that he wasn’t totally happy with his position at JPL in the later part of his career. I think he really liked being the technopimp but the Technology Affiliates program didn’t bear much of fruit. There are a few letters regarding dad being turned down for a promotion/raise in the last few years of his time at JPL. Maybe he was just trying to get a higher salary locked in for a better pension, but I wonder if he was just burned out by the bureaucracy and silliness. I wish I had had the mind to ask. There are lots of things I never thought to ask… like, “How in heaven’s name did you know what you wanted to do?!” Was it all just a ruse? Maybe he was just faking the whole time and he never was that confident of where he was going.

not the right shade of grey

*So, what the hell is ape shit? Nope, didn’t forget. It’s a really tenacious thick grey clay-like stuff used to patch up insulation on cryogenic plumbing. At least that is what my fogged brain remembers. It comes in a big rounded log like an ape pooped it out. We had one of those logs in a drawer in the garage up to just a few years ago. Maybe that was what made dad so sure about what he wanted to do… engineering was just an excuse to say things like, “Hey Joe, toss me another log of ape shit. There’s ice on this bitch kitty.” Don’t know what a bitch kitty is? That too will have to wait.

need a pocket in the shower? you're free to be you

Pop didn't look anything like the model here but the guy's sporting the bath skirt thing! As I've mentioned before, dad had that nutty engineer thing in his brain and he tended to do things his own way regardless of convention, social norm, or personal safety. Freedom was precious to him and this was often applied in novel ways like... a terry cloth bath skirt as casual wear. Bein' free, as it were, was typically the first order of business at the end of a busy day. Get home, hot shower, careen out of the bathroom naked as a jay bird, and at last get into something more comfortable... bath wrap (that's what the trade calls 'em as copious research on the subject determined) and a V-neck T-shirt. (I get a real kick out of having two in a row capital letters hyphenated to short words.) Then it was time to watch Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser and let out all the day's pressure. Dad was a champion fog horn when it came to farts. The cat's pupils would dilate and she'd slink out of the room real slow-like and close to the ground.

But I digress... the terry cloth skirt, with handy pocket in front and snap or Velcro fasteners at the hip, made the most of a comfortable weekend working in the garage shop. In the garage dad could proudly wear that skirt with slippers and a plaid flannel shirt while cutting threads on a new piece of three quarter inch galvanized iron pipe for the water heater, metal shavings and cutting oil dribbling on his toes, and not give a damn. Still brilliantly etched in my memory are the few perfect weekend days when one last critical piece fell into place and he was submerged in his element. The religious folk would stop by to proselytise. Honestly, I never could understand why they didn't have a map with red marks for the houses to avoid... the places where they would be hounded with outrageous logical conundrums and soul searching ineffable enigmas.

Ah, just picture it... The big garage door is up (by the way, it was nothing like your garage door. No way! This door pivoted on huge pin hinges about a third of the way down and was counter balanced by lead blocks. Uh huh, I told you, it's that da Vinci "I do it-a my wey!" thing.) Anyhow, it's a sunny afternoon, the garage is open, dad's in his comfortable place busy beating the living hell out of some sorry piece of metal that wished it had never seen the light of day, and a couple of well dressed folks walk up the driveway hoping to spread the word and be on their way. Instead, they are confronted by our cur of a rescued stray dog at the end of his steel cable tether and a guy in a terry cloth skirt mashing something with repeated blows from a six pound hammer. Wham! Wham! Wham! crunk... "Shit! Hi folks, how are you?" he says innocently without really looking up from his mashing whatever it was helplessly clamped in the huge bench vice. "Run you poor idiots!" I'd shriek in my head, but the words never left my lips, it was too late. It was too late when they came to our neighborhood. It was too late when they took up whatever faith they had innocently paddled their little leaking boat into.

The dog gave his usual mixed message, growl-whimper-bark-wag, and pulled his dead weight a little closer to the visitors. Another fine invention of dad's... tethering the dog with a stiff steel cable to a big hunk of rusted scrap steel thing-a-ma-bobber. It was heavy enough that the dog couldn't get far but could drag it along instead. His short tether didn't get wrapped around things and he wasn't constantly getting stuck. It had the added benefit that the dog was free to menace visitors with out being able to move fast enough to bite them on the butt. Like I said, dad valued personal freedom, but the dog was not really the thing the poor slobs had to worry about. The barrage could last for hours. As long as dad had work to do in the garage he was happy to coolly slash jagged wounds in the peace and love offered by the proselytisers. Oh, the agony.

"Why don't you folks give it a rest here and move on down the block?" I'd wonder. The chilled venom, piss, and vinegar had a bottomless source and I have gleaned some bits of explanation over the years. It seems that there had been at least two cases in my dad's life of people he cared about doing what he viewed as incredibly dim witted things based on religious belief. In one particular case it amounted to suicide by refusing basic medical treatment. Well, to each their own. I know my dad believed this too, but when anyone walked into his space to tell him what he needed to believe in to be saved he figured they were asking for it. And deliver IT he did, between the continuing loud hammer blows, all while his junk had plenty of room to dangle in that bath skirt!... and you thought I had forgotten about the skirt.

Mind you, I'm not making fun of the skirt. On the contrary, I have had my own weirdo clothing flings and I too am a big proponent of doing your own thing. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree I suppose, but sometimes the apple doesn't wear terry cloth. I have yet to adopt the bath skirt, in spite of my spouse's joking suggestion that she buy one for me.

Inevitably, the religious folks would look at their watches, pat down their hair that had been blown all cocky-whompus by the gusts of diatribe, and walk backwards down the driveway muttering blessings. I hope none of them took it personally. I can't imagine it didn't leave a few scars, and dad never even raised his voice above the din of his hammering. You can believe in whatever you like but a guy should be allowed to proudly wear terry cloth in his own garage and fart loud enough to scare off the banshees.