The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  * * *

  ●

  In March 2015, we issued our final report for the Starshade. It is 192 pages of charts and spreadsheets and illustrations that can be boiled down to a single line: We know how to build it. Together, we had solved or had a plan to solve each of its developmental hurdles, and it’s become an official NASA technology project because of our team’s work. That means it’s a real investment with real dollars. It could be a real thing. The answer is a flower with a huge center and as many as twenty-eight pointed petals: less a sunflower than a child’s drawing of the sun. I’m certain that it’s the best way for us to take direct images of exoplanets. Not just any exoplanet, orbiting some angry red dwarf—another Earth, orbiting another sun. I think it’s the most beautiful spacecraft in the universe.

  The Starshade would help a space telescope see differently than Hubble, differently than Kepler. Think of what they’ve allowed us to see. Today, right now if we want, we can do more. What is maybe my favorite illustration comes late in the report, a dramatic before-and-after comparison, demonstrating the difference that the Starshade would make to a space telescope’s field of view. In the before, the telescope is blinded by the light of a single powerful star. In the after, there’s a near-perfect darkness. It’s as though the star is an all-consuming fire, and we’ve learned how to blow it out like a candle.

  We also came in, for the time being at least, at $630 million, well under our billion-dollar budget. That’s if we rendezvous the Starshade with a space telescope already on the books—perhaps the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), scheduled for launch in the mid-2020s. We know that we’re still asking for a lot of money. A lot of other things can be bought with $630 million. The Air Force has plans to replace its current fleet of Stealth bombers with a hundred new B-21s. In 2017, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the program to be $97 billion. In other words, we could build one fewer B-21 and build the Starshade instead, with a few hundred million dollars left over. We just need to decide as a country, and as a species, what sort of future we want. What matters to us and what doesn’t? What do we want to accomplish? How do we want to be remembered?

  Our report had to be temperate and academic in its language. “The Exo-S mission study serves as a proof-of-concept that a low-risk, cost-driven, $1B ‘Probe-class’ mission leveraging proven technologies is capable of ground-breaking exoplanet science,” we wrote. “Exo-S would be a major step toward directly revealing the planetary systems of nearby stars, with luck finding a planet as small as Earth…It is our sincere hope that the results of this study will prove useful to the design of a future imaging mission for the study of habitable exoplanets.”

  I am less temperate in real life, one of the lasting virtues of my grieving years. By the end of the Starshade study I’d returned to the team working on TESS, the wide-scanning space telescope being developed at MIT. What had seemed too much to bear after Mike had died now seemed relatively easy, at least in comparison to the Starshade’s many challenges. The difference between the two was that TESS was a physical reality; it would launch in April 2018. (I was its Deputy Science Director from 2016 to 2020.) Seeing it take physical shape in the lab only made my desire to build the Starshade more intense. Why was one possible and the other not? Why couldn’t it be made real, too?

  I borrowed a small-scale version of our Starshade, used for testing in the desert, and a full-size model of one of its petals. They fit into a pair of black travel cases. Those cases are now as battered as the doors I have beaten down trying to get the Starshade made. I have taken those models into classrooms and airports and lecture halls. I have tried to show people how we can explore our universe more completely than we might ever have imagined. We could prove that we’re not alone. Children almost always understand what I’m trying to say. It’s the adults who sometimes don’t. Adults have been given too many reasons not to believe; that’s why they so often say no. Children have greater faith in us. That’s why they always say yes.

  * * *

  ●

  I married Charles a few weeks after we published our final report. When we went to get our marriage license, we asked the town clerk whether she could marry us. She could, but the ceremony would have to take place outside the office, after hours. She told us about a park across the street, and we headed out to take a look. It was perfect. There is a little bridge that crosses the brook that meanders through Concord. That’s where Charles and I would cross to our new lives together.

  Of course, Melissa helped me pick out my wedding dress. She also helped me hire her friend to take photographs: Gigi, the same photographer who had shot Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and our online dating photos. I wanted evidence of our love that I could hold in my hands. The day of our wedding was cold but bright and clear. It was the right kind of spring day, one of those on which the world seems about to burst with life. I had my makeup done, put on my dress, and headed to the park. The only people there were the clerk, Gigi, Charles, and me. That’s what we wanted. We said simple vows to each other, honest expressions of our love and commitment, sometimes pausing to laugh, sometimes to cry. I like to think that Charles and I each rescued the other. During the ceremony, my brain kept asking itself the same questions. What were the odds? How did I find Charles? How did he find me? I felt like the luckiest person on Earth. I still do. After feeling cursed for so long, it is blessing enough to feel blessed.

  After the ceremony, Melissa met us at a restaurant a few blocks away in town, and Max and Alex joined us. Veronica came along, too. Melissa had organized a champagne toast. She told us that true love is nearly impossible to find. Another Earth should be easier. I knew how lucky I was to find her, too, that long-ago day on the hill.

  The boys started climbing all over Charles, telling him how handsome he looked in his suit. They didn’t pay any attention to me, in my pretty white dress and makeup. I mean, Charles looked dashing—but hello, blushing bride over here!

  Alex didn’t take long to ask the question that had been on his mind for a year: “Can we call you Dad now?” The grownups in the room felt the answer catch in our throats. Melissa was in tears.

  “Yes,” Charles said finally. “Absolutely.”

  Then Alex asked if he could have some champagne, and Charles poured him a little.

  “My head feels funny,” Alex said.

  “Charles!” I said. “Your first official day as a dad and you got your kid drunk.”

  Alex knew a soft touch when he saw one. After his champagne, and a root beer, he asked if he could have one more thing.

  “Sure,” Charles said.

  “You know that ice cream place—”

  That’s when I stepped in. “I think it’s time to go back home, boys.”

  Charles and I spent our first night together as husband and wife at the inn that’s in the middle of Concord. We woke up the next day and went to the town hall to pick up our marriage certificate. We walked home together with it in our hands, our proof of another life.

  * * *

  ●

  Not long afterward, we filed more paperwork, this time for Charles to adopt Max and Alex. We wanted to make his fatherhood official. Freya, the lawyer I had found when all I wanted was a haircut, prepared our application for us. A widow and a lawyer, twice useful, she never had a chance to make her escape; I was never going to let her go.

  We had to appear in family court in Cambridge. Max and Alex wore their first suits—a little ill-fitting, but they were such handsome young men. Charles was a handsome, slightly older man. Even in the winter he kept his color, and I still loved the way his crisp white collar looked against the strong line of his jaw. A big storm had been forecast for that day, snow up to the windowsills. We didn’t want to risk missing our morning appointment, and we stayed the night in a hotel in the city. We woke up to a pretty dusting of snow that soon cleared, leaving us under the watch of
a bright winter sky. The storm never arrived.

  Freya met us at court, along with her assistant lawyer. The judge and the bailiff were the only other witnesses to our important moment. Family court is normally a hard place. Most families go there because they are falling apart, and falling apart in a way that causes them to need strangers to help settle their differences. There is so much sadness in those halls. The judge had a reputation for being tough, but I think she was almost relieved to see us. We stood before her so that we could come together.

  The judge read our adoption statements, first for Max, then for Alex. She had them each bang her gavel to make the other’s adoption official. Now Charles really was a father, and the boys again had a dad. I couldn’t believe it. There had been so many black days and sleepless nights when I never could have imagined something like this scene, at least not with me in it. I had struggled for years with the most challenging math, and now here it was, solving itself in front of me. We made four.

  We walked down the courthouse steps together. A family. We checked out of our hotel and got into our car. Charles asked the boys if they had buckled themselves in. “Yes, Dad.” He started up the engine and turned the wheel toward home. The sun was still winter-high and shining. The sky was cloudless. There wasn’t a shadow in the world.

  We had asked the boys if they wanted a big party with their friends to celebrate, or a quieter gathering at home, just the four of us, sitting around the table in four chairs, eating some cake.

  They chose cake.

  * * *

  ●

  When Charles moved in, he asserted his presence in quiet ways, in order to feel more at home in a house that didn’t always seem like his. The wires that I had left taped and dangling from the ceiling in the front hall bothered him. They looked bad and possibly dangerous. He asked me why there wasn’t a light there, and I told him the story of the boys and their duels, and how I had worried about discovering a hurt child or a broken light, and how I had taken down the light all by myself, and how I had felt reduced and gigantic at the same time. There’d been a hole in the ceiling ever since. I didn’t know how to fill it.

  Charles was always good at taking my hints. One day when I was at work, he seized his opening: He got out the ladder, carved out the plaster, installed a proper junction box, ran the wires through it, and hooked up a new fixture. Flush-mounted this time, too high for even our growing boys to reach.

  Charles made sure that the light was on when I came home that night, filling our front hall with its orange glow. It spilled out of our windows and onto our front steps, and when I came up our walk, I felt its warmth. I stood outside and looked through our windows for a long time before I walked up the steps and opened the door to the sounds of happy boys and the smell of supper.

  Sometimes you need darkness to see. Sometimes you need light.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Search Continues

  In August 2017, after years of work and hope and effort, SpaceX prepared to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from the coast of Florida into space. The rocket didn’t have a crew, but ASTERIA was on board.

  It had been a difficult journey. The camera had made its way from my imagination to our design-and-build class, through drawings and prototypes and an old missile site in New Mexico, to under the seat on the plane with the protective Mary Knapp. Then we’d run out of money at MIT, and Draper Laboratory had liked the technology better for other things. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which had always been interested in the possibilities of CubeSats, ASTERIA especially, picked up where MIT and Draper left off. Three MIT graduates there would play leading roles on the project; they took their work seriously, having seen firsthand how much it mattered. Their passion and expertise made sure that ASTERIA would become everything it could be, that it was built right and lovingly placed, at last, into the hold of a rocket, groaning on the launchpad on a beautiful late-summer day. The rocket would slice into the sky and rendezvous with the International Space Station. The astronauts there would set free our little satellite later in the fall. From a little whisper in my dreams to space: I couldn’t believe that we were nearing the end of such a long reckoning. The last time I’d watched a rocket launch, it was when Kepler went into space. We’d found so many new worlds since.

  Charles and I had planned on going to the ASTERIA launch, but it was delayed by a few days, just long enough for our travel and childcare plans to fall through. On the day of the launch, I took the train into Cambridge instead, walked to the Green Building, and took the elevator to my floor. I walked past the travel posters for distant worlds into my office and shut the door. I sat alone. I opened up my laptop and called up the online video stream. The launch was a big deal to a lot of people for a lot of reasons; all over the world, eyes were trained on that rocket, still waiting on the pad.

  My curtains were opened, and every now and then I looked up from the cloudless Florida footage on my screen and out my windows, at my crystalline view of downtown Boston. There were clear skies everywhere I looked. The launch was scheduled for 12:31 P.M.

  I spent maybe thirty minutes in the quiet, writing thank-you emails to other members of the ASTERIA team. At the last second I decided not to send them. I know that superstition is unscientific. I understand that it doesn’t matter to the universe if a baseball player is wearing his lucky underwear—whether he gets a hit is mostly up to the pitcher and to him. But rockets are delicate, ill-tempered machines. Before the Russians launch their rockets from the steppes of Kazakhstan into orbit, they summon an Orthodox priest to throw holy water at the boosters, his beard and cloak and the holy water carried sideways by the wind. I wasn’t going that far, but I wasn’t going to send a couple of emails until we were safely weightless.

  I was surprised by how nervous I was, watching the countdown clock tick down to launch. Finally it reached zero and I leaned so close to my screen that someone watching might have thought I was trying to crawl through it. In a way, I was.

  The engines ignited with a great big ball of pure fire. The launch tower fell away, and the rocket began to ease its way off the pad. Rockets are almost alarmingly slow in the first few seconds of launch. They seem more like a container ship trying to grunt its way out of port than what they are. But after a few seconds, that Falcon 9 really started moving. It flew straight up. Its ascent began to curve a little, and it pushed its shining shoulders toward its future orbit. The onboard cameras recorded its arching flight. In what seemed like seconds, the sky around it went from blue to purple to black. The rocket had broken through into space. The boosters were jettisoned, and the remainder of the rocket continued its climb into the deepest possible night, the Earth blue and alight behind it, an impossible blackness ahead. It would take a little while for it to catch up with the space station, which was racing its own way through orbit at 17,000 miles an hour, about five miles every second. But the rocket, and our satellite, were well on their way.

  Everything brave has to start somewhere, I thought.

  * * *

  ●

  Not everything brave has to end.

  Late in 2016, after Charles and I were married, before our satellite had launched, The New York Times Magazine published a long profile of me. I was flattered by the attention. I was also a little worried about the story. It can still be hard for me to be open about myself, and people I know talked to me after the story came out and said they were surprised at how much I had shared about my life. “It’s very personal, Sara,” one colleague said. He was right. It was. A good friend was angry: “The writer went too far.” I thought all of my secrets were out.

  But I also learned something about myself in that story. After he’d seen the article, Bob Williams emailed me. His wife, an experienced autism specialist, had read between the story’s lines. She could spot an autistic person from far away. The way they walk, the way they move their hands. The way they’re often alone. Up close
, the signs become unmistakable. Autism is in the eyes, unblinking. In the voice, monotone. In obsessions with machines and how things work. In an attention that can never be shaken.

  She thinks you have autism, Bob wrote. I’ve never met anyone who can focus like you. I told him that his wife was wrong, it couldn’t be. I was too old not to know such a basic fact about myself. No one had ever suggested that I was anything other than quirky as a child, strange as an adult. Back and forth, back and forth. Finally I went to see a doctor who specializes in diagnosing psychiatric disorders, and she confirmed what Bob and his wife already knew. I saw myself clearly for the first time.

  I can’t begin to explain the truth of that revelation. I felt it land, as though I’d been struck by something, a physical impact. So much of my life suddenly made sense. I thought back to my lonely childhood. To my thirst for wide-open spaces and the mysteries they might hold. To my solitary quest for connection, and the way people look at me when I try to talk to them. To my love of logic and the stars. To my refusal to believe that we’re alone, that there is no one else out there like us.