Telling people about herself wasn’t her strong suit. “I’ve never been a self-revealing person,” she said. She went ahead and told them about herself anyway. How by the age of thirteen she’d learned from her father, an aerospace engineer, to fly a plane. How, as a girl growing up in the fifties and sixties, she assumed that her ticket to adventure was not a pilot’s license but her gift for languages. Before she graduated from high school, without setting foot in France or Germany, she became fluent in both French and German. She planned to learn a bunch more languages. “My simple theory was: learn lots of languages and use them to see the world,” she recalled, in an oral history for the Johnson Space Center. She entered UC Santa Cruz in 1969 as a language major. But there was a science requirement, and to fulfill it she took two classes in ocean science. There she learned that human beings were now descending fourteen thousand feet in tiny submarines and mapping the ocean floor. “It was endlessly fascinating. This mix of things I’d always seen on the pages of National Geographic.”
The travel she’d imagined until then had been horizontal: east or west, north or south. She now began to imagine it as vertical, too: up and down. She wanted to study the plates beneath the bottom of the sea.
She was accepted into graduate geology programs everywhere she applied, including Princeton, with full research fellowships. She accepted the free ride at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, because what interested her was the mountain range at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean known as the mid-ocean ridge, and for several reasons Nova Scotia seemed to her the best place to study it. From just about the moment she arrived, she started looking for access to a submarine that could take her down, so that she might inspect the mid-ocean ridge up close. “I’m pursuing an academic career and asking,” How do I get into one of those submarines?’ I wanted to go see the stuff myself.”
It was her brother who had first told her about NASA’s new need for astronauts. He’d seen an ad in the newspaper announcing that the space agency was opening its rocket ships to all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty, under six feet tall, weighing less than 180 pounds, and in possession of just about any sort of college science degree. He’d already applied and thought she also should. Women were specifically encouraged for the first time. Minorities, too. All that was required were some character traits: “a willingness to accept hazards comparable to those encountered in modern research airplane flights, a capacity to tolerate rigorous and severe environmental conditions, and an ability to react adequately under conditions of stress or emergency.” Up to that moment NASA had been looking mainly for test pilots who could at least feign indifference to their mortality. Now they were looking for scientists—or at any rate scientifically minded people—but with a twist: they needed the temperament of fighter jocks. Kathy hadn’t taken her brother seriously. You really think they’re going to hire an oceanographer? A girl????
A few weeks later she ran across the call for astronauts again, this time in a science journal. They really did seem to want women scientists. And she sensed that she might be the sort of woman they were looking for. “I never brought normal girl books home from the library,” she recalled. “I was fascinated by maps and the stories they told.” She was handy, too, and quick to figure out how things worked. “I kind of always flunked the dolls test,” she told an interviewer for the Johnson Space Center’s oral history project. “I never found the dolls interesting. The dollhouse stuff I found interesting, but from an architectural point of view: building them. And I’d want to lay them out differently. I didn’t want to just move the furniture around, and I sure didn’t want to just sit there and imagine conversations [between dolls] that never happened. Let me go build another house; that was more interesting.”
The head of NASA’s astronaut program had asked her to tell the group about herself—but she sensed that they were after something else, too. They listened without saying a word, until she got to a point in her story where she was on a ship in the ocean, in a storm, conducting research. It was the aspect of research oceanography she loved best: “Figuring out how to adapt to everything that happens while you’re at sea and still come back with the data that you needed, and the accuracy that you needed. I loved that challenge,” she said. “Then you’ve got to work up the data and write the papers as sort of penance to be able to go out to sea again the next year.”
George Abbey interrupted her just as she was describing how, in the middle of the storm, in the middle of the night, a critical piece of research equipment had busted. She’d had to haul it into the boat in the darkness and inspect each segment. The oceanographer in charge of the expedition had watched her labor for the first few hours but finally turned grumpy. “Just fix the damn thing,” he had said, and gone to bed.
“So what did you do?” Abbey asked her.
“What do you mean what did I do?” she said. “We fixed it.”
“And then you went to bed?” he asked.
“I felt like saying, No, you idiot, I did not go to bed.” Instead she explained that she had stayed up for two more hours, to make sure her fix held in the storm. Later NASA had her take a Myers-Briggs–type personality test. Like virtually all the astronauts—but unlike roughly 85 percent of the American population—she profiled as a “mission-driven” person. “The mission-driven type was overrepresented in the astronaut population,” she said. “Whereas more dreamer- or salesman-type folks are very underrepresented.”
From the original eight thousand or so applicants, NASA selected thirty-five to become astronauts. Six were women, all scientists. A lot of the men were indeed former fighter pilots. They tended to see themselves as the main event and, at least at first, looked upon the women scientists assigned to accompany them as a sideshow. Kathy wasn’t shy about expressing her thoughts on this subject. You know you’re just my taxi driver, she told one of the pilots. My job is the interesting part of this mission. He didn’t like it, but the space program was changing. “By the time I got to it,” she said, “it had gone from just proving you could get there and come home alive to: what are we doing here?”
What they were doing in space was what she sensed she’d been put on earth to do: explore, gather data, and make sense of it. “The science was three big things,” she said. “Bullet point one: using space as a platform to look back at Earth and out into the cosmos. Getting a different point of view. There is a kind of understanding of this planet that space alone makes possible. Bullet point two: What do we need to know that we don’t know about living in space? Bullet point three: How does the human body respond to being sprung from the force of gravity? How do fluids flow? How does the body behave?”
What had grabbed her attention from the start was the earth science. The snapshot that might be taken of Earth from above, of the current conditions on Earth that were going to be crucial to mankind’s understanding of its environment. “I was all about bullet point one,” said Kathy.
She couldn’t just skip the other bullet points, however. She might see her job as gathering data about the planet; but a lot of other people saw their jobs as gathering data about her. They now had another kind of human body to study, though it was reluctant. (“I was moderately disinterested in being a lab rat.”) It didn’t help that the engineers at the heart of the space program had some strange notions about women—for instance, that they were more vulnerable to rapid decreases in pressure. “The air force worked with this aerospace medical unit,” she said. “They’d concluded that the women were more likely to experience the bends when the pressure went from high to low. They think they’ve detected a higher instance of damage to the central nervous system. They tell them I’m going to die.” She thought: You guys don’t have enough data, and the data you have you’ve handled badly. She pointed out that female deep-sea divers didn’t experience any special problems at lower depths.
It was an open question as to which was more mysterious to a male NASA engineer: outer space or the American fema
le. They appeared to have better data on outer space. They had prepared makeup kits for their space shuttles, for instance, even though Kathy and a couple of the other women didn’t wear makeup. They set out to design flame-retardant one-size-fits-all bras and underpants, until the women explained that the one-size-fits-all approach used for men’s underwear wasn’t going to work with women’s underwear. In the end, the women won the right to buy their own flame-retardant underwear. And how would a woman urinate in space? The engineers worried about that one for a while. The male astronauts had been fitted with condom catheters, but these were always threatening to leak or even burst and obviously wouldn’t work for women. To everyone’s relief, a NASA engineer created an extra-absorbent polymer and worked it into a diaper that could be worn by all. (In the bargain he’d anticipated the baby diapers of the future.)
And of course, the male engineers were seriously worried about what might ensue if a woman had her period in space. “The idea that women might menstruate in orbit drove the whole place up a wall,” said Kathy. “The male world’s response was, Oh, that’s ok. We’ll just suppress their periods. We all looked at each other and said,‘You and what other army, buddy?’” The engineers finally agreed to pack tampons in the supply kits. The first time Kathy opened her kit she saw that each tampon had been removed from its paper wrapper and sealed in a plastic fireproof case. Heat-sealed tampons. Each plastic case was connected to another. She pulled on the top one and out pops this great long chain of little red plastic cases, like a string of firecrackers. Hundreds of tampons, for one woman to survive for a few days in space. “It was like a bad stage act,” she said. “There just seemed this endless unfurling of Lord only knows how many tampons.”
The engineers eventually sat down with the female astronauts to discuss the matter.
“Would one hundred be the right number?” they asked.
Kathy Sullivan worried that NASA might use the differences between their bodies as an excuse “to write different rules for males and females.” The male astronauts, on the other hand, adapted pretty quickly to the presence of women. The guy she’d been assigned to walk with in space was named Dave Leestma. They’d had a moment together that captured the spirit of their interaction. They had started training in their space suits. Step 1 was to remove their clothes and put on the first layer of the 225-pound suit—the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment. The test chamber was full of male engineers. “I have this fleeting sense that everyone has just realized that we’re about to go boldly where no man has gone before—there’s a woman in this mix,” said Kathy, in the NASA oral history. “So I looked over at Dave and said,” Dave, let me tell you my philosophy about modesty in circumstances like this.’ He shifts a bit and says,‘Okay.’ I said,‘I have none.’ He said,‘Fine.’ We start peeling off clothes.”
Kathy couldn’t have been less interested in the gender drama. She just wanted to go to space and “see it for myself, not in a magazine picture.” She wanted to get on with the mission. Which was why she never complained about her space suit. “It was a small, medium, large kind of thing—not a custom fit kind of thing,” she said. “My knee was never in the knee of the suit. The suits were stiff and took real muscle to move. Whenever I had to bend my legs I had to overcome this extra leverage.” By the time she realized that her suit was never going to fit, NASA had asked her to wear it. “I was not going to turn this into‘See, we told you she’d be all this extra trouble.’ I decided,‘We’re just sucking this up.’” But really, her space suit should have come with a warning label. In a test chamber, a NASA engineer had flipped the switch that enabled the space suit’s emergency oxygen tank, and the suit had exploded in a giant fireball. “If you’re doing some weird test that’s unlike anything that you normally do, it would still get your full attention,” Kathy said later, “but this was like saying that when you step on the gas of your car, it’s going to explode. Highly discomfiting.”
It was now October 11, 1984. The Challenger was in orbit, with her inside it, waiting to walk in space. The air was gone from the airlock. When they simulated this moment back on Earth they put a baking pan with water on the floor, to illustrate what might happen to your body’s fluids if something went wrong with your suit. As the pressure dropped, the water would bubble violently, as if it were boiling. But then a couple of seconds later it would flash-freeze into ice crystals. Poof. “Don’t open your visor!” they said.
On a mission this complicated, it was actually impossible to imagine everything that might kill you. The O-rings of the very spacecraft in whose airlock she now floated would soon become the most famous illustration of the point. Just fifteen months later, the failure of NASA to heed engineers’ warnings about how brittle the rings that sealed the solid rocket boosters could become in the cold would lead the boosters to leak and the Challenger to blow up, killing all the astronauts on board.
Later, when someone asked her why it never seemed to occur to her to be afraid, Kathy had an answer. In college she’d gone bushwhacking with a boyfriend around the Grand Canyon. They’d hacked a trail in a bad place, and they now had to jump onto a narrow ledge or go tumbling down a steep slope. The slightest misstep and she would fall to her death. “I mean, my knees are wobbling and shaking and I remember thinking: not now.” Then she was fine. She’d discovered an emotional talent: she had the ability to decide not to be afraid. All the astronauts had it, she noticed. “If you are scared, I don’t want you to be there,” she said. “Be here. Now. Here. Now. This is the game. Be scared before. Be scared later. Not during.”
Inside her space suit, with the pressure gone from the Challenger’s airlock, she felt no change at all, and that struck her here as strange, just as it had on Earth. “I always thought, Isn’t this room supposed to look different when it has no air in it? But there’s no difference!” She moved along a handrail to open the hatch. She poked her head out into space. Then she reached out and tethered herself to the hook on the outside of the capsule, before untethering herself from the hook inside the airlock. “Mountaineering 101.” With her body traveling at 17,500 miles per hour she set out, hand over hand, to demonstrate that it was indeed possible to refuel a satellite in orbit. With that, she became the first American woman to walk in space.
That first step would shadow her for the rest of her life. President Reagan would invite her to a dinner at the White House and sit her beside him. Corporations would offer her high-paying jobs. Civic organizations across the country would offer her awards and ask her to come and tell her story. Seemingly all of Long Island would soon be in touch, because at some point in space she had looked down—how could she not—and shouted, “Hey, there’s Long Island!” She had a choice of how to play her experience. “You can dine out on this stuff forever,” she said, “but that was feeling shallow to me. I wanted to make the experience matter.”
The same internal process that had led her to decline the role of “girl” made it possible for her to pass on the role of “lady astronaut.” She flew twice more into space, orbited Earth a few hundred more times, and then, in the early 1990s, went looking for something else to do. She now had a measure of celebrity and needed to make a decision about how best to use it. She wanted another mission that felt as important as the one she’d just completed. She wanted to do earth science, and she wanted the stakes of the science to be high: that wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was where she finally found her mission: the United States Department of Commerce.
Around the same time, DJ Patil also wandered into the Commerce Department, though in truth he didn’t know it. Physically, he was sitting at a desk on the campus of the University of Maryland, pursuing his PhD in mathematics. He’d found a security hole in the U.S. government’s computers, and he reached through it to grab what he needed. What he needed was a very specific pile of data. That it, like much of the rest of the government’s data, resided in the Department of Commerce he hadn’t bothered to figure out.
DJ had come to
Maryland from California to study with James Yorke, a professor who had coined the term “chaos theory.” The idea was simple: some small, barely noticed event can cascade into huge consequences down the road. (The day your parents met, for instance: what if that hadn’t happened?) A lot of the drama in his life DJ traced back to a small, little-noticed event in his early childhood: a tendency to reverse the order of numbers. When you see “16” as “61,” you have problems in school. Struggling with his assigned tasks, he diverted himself with unassigned ones. Watching spy movies, he became intrigued withpicking locks.He’d pick his way into other kids’ lockers, move the stuff around inside, then lock them back up—just to freak them out. Then he learned how to pick people’s pockets for fun. He’d take the car keys off some unsuspecting grown-up, move his car, then return the keys to the guy’s jacket pocket. In the eighth grade he hacked the English teacher’s computer and changed the grades—and never got caught. In ninth grade, a prank gone wrong set an entire hillside in a well-to-do Silicon Valley neighborhood on fire. DJ ended up listening to a cop read him his rights. The landowner agreed not to prosecute if DJ agreed to spend the next few months at hard labor, restoring the hillside. While he was doing that he got himself suspended from his English class for exploding a stink bomb, and a few months after that from math class for . . . at that point it hardly mattered. By the time he graduated from high school—after a merciful school administrator changed an F on his transcript to a C—he wasn’t the only one who might look at “DJ” and see “JD.”
At De Anza Community College he stumbled into a calculus class and liked it. More than liked it. He realized he had a gift for it. The calculus class was another small life event that wound up having big effects. By the time he arrived in Maryland to pursue his PhD, he was still interested in math, but not so much as he was in what might be done with it, to study a lot of otherwise inexplicable things that happened in life and nature. “I was always in love with the patterns in nature,” he said, “and what I needed were the tools to understand them. And for me, math was the most sensible.”
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