The Vulcan really drove the point home

Posted Thursday, March 4, 2021.

The Pappalardo below is Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist who is the central figure in “The Mission”, David W. Brown’s account of the twenty-year quest to send a space probe to explore Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa:

When Pappalardo was a child, astronauts worked and played on the moon. It was just normal, a thing people did, like work in a factory, bank, or bakery. They set up seismometers. They collected rocks. They explored this strange new world and encountered mystifying phenomena: spots of orange dirt on its plaster landscape, jarring flashes of light when they closed their eyes. Scientists on Earth solved these puzzles: the former formed by fire mountains in Luna’s primordial past; the latter, cosmic rays colliding with rentinas. Astronauts drove cars up there. They played golf. They brought mice with them. Pets! In space!

Bob was never going to be an astronaut---that just wasn’t in the cards---but he was a child of Star Trek, and across five-year missions, Spock pointed the way in first run, and then in syndication, and then in animation (the Vulcan really drove the point home): science…

---from “The Mission: or, how a disciple of Carl Sagan, an ex-motocross racer, a Texas Tea Party congressman, the world's worst typewriter saleswoman, California mountain people, and an anonymous NASA functionary went to war with Mars, survived an insurgency at Saturn, traded blows with Washington, and stole a ride on an Alabama moon rocket to send a space robot to Jupiter in search of the second Garden of Eden at the bottom of an alien ocean inside of an ice world called Europa (a true story)” by David W. Brown.