Tag Archives: Nasa

Pencils, Pens and Rocket Science

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Pencils, Pens and

Rocket Science

In an interview discussing her novel “Song of Solomon,” Toni Morrison spent upwards of fifteen minutes discussing the opening paragraph. This was remarkable for it consists of a mere 43 words total:

“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house.”

The two sentences seem simple enough, yet in the hands of the late Pulitzer Prize-winner the writing pen is on the order of rocket science. For example, “North” in the insurance company’s name was a metaphor for the Underground Railroad and slaves fleeing in that direction. The choice of “Mercy” for the town was more evident, but to learn the deeper meanings behind “fly” and “three o’clock” and “little yellow house” was to hear a SpaceX engineer discussing avionics.

I know this because I recently visited with the Lead Build Reliability Engineer for Avionics at SpaceX. Technically, Cullen McAlpine and his team are in charge of making sure the electromechanical assemblies, wire harnesses, batteries, sensors, solar arrays and more all perform as designed.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon astronauts …

In other words, when the Crew Dragon spacecraft lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida (launch time is targeted for 7:49 p.m. ET, Saturday, Nov. 14) to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station, Cullen will be a key author in the sci-fi story that is now almost routine.

Cullen, a 2011 graduate of Ventura High School who earned a degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at UCLA, is a dear family friend of mine. As a kid who grew up during America’s Space Race with Russia in the sixties, I love asking Cullen questions about his work.

I won’t share everything that he told me the other day because you’d have to be a rocket scientist to understand much of it. More truthfully, I mostly have no idea what he was talking about so how can I retell it?

At one point, trying to give the impression I wasn’t a complete doofus, I mentioned how I found it amazing NASA spent a million dollars to develop a pen that could write in the gravity-free vacuum of space whereas Soviet cosmonauts simply used a two-cent pencil.

Cullen smiled at me like a wise professor and then gently educated his ignorant student. With the depth of Toni Morrison discussing writing, he explained that using a pencil in space could be penny-wise and mission-foolish. The tip of graphite breaking off could pose danger to equipment inside a weightless capsule. Even a tiny fleck of graphite could float perilously into an astronaut’s eye.

Cullen told me much more, but most of it sounded like a foreign language. As if in a Paris restaurant, I just nodded a lot.

Doing some homework for the next time I see Cullen, I discovered that early on NASA astronauts did indeed use pencils – mechanical ones costing $128 each. The Fisher Pen Company eventually stepped in and invested $1 million to create a pen that can write upside-down; in blazing temperatures (250 degrees Fahrenheit) and frigid conditions (minus 30 degrees); even underwater.

Featuring a pressurized nitrogen cartridge and gel-like ink, the “Space Pen” was patented in 1966 and first used by Apollo 7 astronauts during their 1968 mission. Soviet cosmonauts followed suit a year later.

Inspired by Cullen, I bought an authentic million-dollar “Space Pen” for 22 bucks. I’m no rocket scientist but believe me, it’s far better – and way cooler – than a pencil.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Apollo 11 Pitched “Perfect Game”

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Apollo 11 Pitched

A “Perfect Game”

A number of years ago, a press-box sage shared with me a story about a New York newspaper hiring a famous novelist to cover the 1956 World Series between the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers.

All went well with the guest columns until Game 5 when the Yankees’ Don Larsen pitched the first – and still only – perfect game in the history of the Fall Classic. An hour after Larsen had jumped into the celebratory embrace of catcher Yogi Berra, the big-time author buried his face in his palms and muttered: “I can’t, I just can’t. It’s too big for me to write about.”

That famous October 8 date in baseball history comes to mind when I think of July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong leapt into history with one small step: “It’s too big for me to write about. I can’t.”

But I must try.

Neil Armstrong’s historic small step/giant leap on lunar surface.

The biggest stories are often best told in the smallest ways, macro being revealed in the micro, and so perhaps recalling NASA’s “perfect game” through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy has merit.

I was, of course, that young boy. Like nearly all American boys – girls, women and men, too – in the 1960s, I watched the Space Race unfold on television with Cape Canaveral launches and space walks and ocean splashdowns. Because of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, growing up to become an astronaut superseded being a fireman, cowboy or Major League baseball player as the No. 1 dream of most schoolboys.

Slumbering in dreamland is where I would have normally been when Neil Armstrong climbed out of the lunar module because on earth it was nearing 11 p.m. in Ohio, too late for 9-year-olds to be up even in summertime. But this was not a normal night. This was the night sci-fi writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne miraculously became authors of nonfiction.

Before camping in front of the television, I remember going outside and staring up at the moon with naked eyes and full imagination. My fantasy thoughts were in many ways more clear than the grainy, ghostly, black-and-white TV images to follow.

Fuzzy as the broadcast was, seeing Neil Armstrong hop down the spider-legged Eagle’s ladder, pause dramatically on the footpad, and then step onto the lunar surface remains as vivid in my mind a half-century later as when it happened “LIVE FROM THE MOON” (as the screen text declared) at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Time while I watched transfixed sitting on the floor six feet from a 25-inch TV screen.

My family had recently gotten its first color television, a Zenith console, and in all honesty “Bonanza” and “Star Trek”, both always popping with vibrant colors, paled to this historic moonwalk episode aired only in black and white.

“That’s one small step for (a) man,” Armstrong famously said, either forgetting the “a” or more likely it being swallowed by space static, “one giant leap for mankind.”

Another quote became nearly as famous, this one employed in myriad situations by the general public: “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we (fill in the blank)?” Fill in the blank could be anything from make a toaster that doesn’t burn toast to forging world peace.

Putting a man on the moon in 1969 seems all the more impossibly magnificent as we look back through the prism of time because it was accomplished with slide rules and early generation computers that filled massive rooms. Similar computing power now fits into the smartphones owned by most 9-year-old kids.

On today’s golden anniversary, Apollo 11’s “perfect game” seems bigger than ever.

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FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …