Dr. Charles Elachi was appointed the Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2001, and in the intervening decade he has overseen a flurry of highly successful missions to Mars and beyond. Prior to that, he served as the director of NASA’s Space and Earth Sciences program for 18 years while teaching the physics of remote sensing at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Elachi was born in Lebanon in 1947, and he pursued his education in France before coming to CalTech in 1971 to gain his doctorate in Electrical Engineering. He started working at JPL while still studying at CalTech and has served there ever since. He has published more than 230 papers on electromagnetic theory and remote sensing.

America’s love affair with exploration is deeply ingrained in whatever confluence of history and ambitions makes up our cultural identity. The idea of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and experience has appealed to our collective imagination since our nation’s inception as a few scattered outposts in the New World. We saw it in our nation’s settlement, in our Westward expansion, and in the can-do spirit that sent men to the moon within a decade of President Kennedy’s famous directive.

Earlier this summer, America’s love for exploration took center stage when the Mars Curiosity Rover touched down to a live audience of 50 million people on August 6. To put that in perspective, the 2012 Olympics had an average of 30 million viewers on any given night. The rover landing, which took place at 1:32 a.m. EST, was played on the iconic digital billboards in Times Square; and NASA recorded 1.8 billion hits on its website in the subsequent 24-hour period.

Far from simply being a successful science experiment, the landing was a media sensation.

The public’s nearly unconditional love for space exploration and the dramatic triumphs of the past decade make it easy to forget how uncertain the future of the Mars program was at the beginning of the millennium. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) lost two expensive spacecraft in 1999, one to a gaffe confusing metric and imperial units.

“The two failures happened during a period where everyone was advocating, you know, we need to do things faster, better, cheaper, which different people interpreted in different ways … Some people interpreted it as, ‘Well, we’ll take shortcuts,’ and I think that’s what got us in trouble,” said Dr. Charles Elachi, Director of the JPL since 2001. “In this business, once you launch a spacecraft you cannot bring it back to fix it.”

Instead of gutting the program, the lab instituted new checks and balances, and the following decade has witnessed twenty successful missions sending robotic emissaries across the Solar System, which has resulted in “literally thousands of scientists getting data from these different satellites and conducting research, I’m sure many of who are at Yale,” added Dr. Elachi.

Dr. Elachi’s story embodies the American spirit of discovery and cooperation so perfectly that it almost seems trite — until you remember that in August this spirit propelled the JPL to achieve one of engineering’s most devilishly tricky feats ever.

Born in Lebanon in 1947, Dr. Elachi immigrated to the United States in 1969 to get his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology. “I came to Caltech because I knew some of the faculty there, and then when I found out that JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA, I thought, ‘How lucky I am!’ So after the first year at Caltech, I started working part time at JPL as a student to earn my living, and here I am 40 years later.”

Dr. Elachi’s specialty is remote sensing and electromagnetic theory, topics on which he has published more than 230 papers. When asked what aspect of the Curiosity mission he was most proud of, he highlighted neither the unprecedented skycrane landing maneuver, nor the extensive mobile laboratory they loaded onto the rover, but rather “the capability of bringing a team of literally hundreds and hundreds of people to focus on an objective, and really work hard to achieve that common objective that seemed really impossible … And that’s what I’m particularly proud about, more than any specific technological accomplishment.”

The team he referred to has been working almost continuously for the past eight years to send the rover on its 55 million kilometer journey. Their job is indeed just beginning as the rover makes its way to a crater rife with sedimentary rocks conducive to the search for organic materials. The short road trip is expected to last a couple of months; as Dr. Elachi explains, “You know how scientists are, every time we drive and see something interesting we say, ‘Let’s spend a day examining this, and let’s spend a day examining that.’”

This week’s “something interesting” is the discovery of what’s almost certainly an ancient streambed, where smoothed pebbles suggest an antediluvian Mars where life could have flourished.

The federal government’s commitment to space exploration came under close scrutiny this year in light of devastating budget cuts in the proposed fiscal plan for 2013, along with NASA’s decision to retire the Space Shuttle and rely on the Russian Soyuz rockets to transport astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Yet we may have a chance to reaffirm our investment in the space program. As Dr. Elachi says, “Congress has come back and said that it’s not going to allow that cut to happen. As a matter of fact, they added back some money to the Mars program. And after the landing, we’ve created a much more positive environment back in Washington relative to the Mars program.”

The end of the Shuttle program comes as the technology for entering Earth’s orbit has matured to the point that the private sector can now begin “to make [space travel] affordable like what happened with airplanes,” according to Dr. Elachi.

This process has already begun, starting with NASA’s contracts with SpaceX and the Orbital Sciences Corporation to resupply the ISS. “The government, specifically NASA, will focus on sending a human beyond Earth’s orbit, going back to the moon, to asteroids — to assemble a telescope at the Lagrangian point — and ultimately going to Mars,” he elaborates. “It’s similar to almost any endeavor of exploration: the first steps are usually done by the government, because they are expensive, and then once that technology’s in place, the private sector can capitalize on it.”

As we step back to reexamine our relationship with outer space from afar, the question inevitably turns to what we can gain, and at what costs. According to Dr. Elachi, the Curiosity rover has cost each American seven dollars over the past eight years. In other words, seeing Curiosity land on Mars cost the average American less than seeing Transformers 3. Moreover, aside from the gains in scientific knowledge and the countless technological innovations spurred by space exploration, our love affair with the cosmos has value for, in Dr. Elachi’s words, “The inspiration it gives young people [and] the pride it gives people about what great things their country and humankind can do.”

America has always sought to redraw the boundaries of what is possible and to push the limits of human imagination. And if Dr. Elachi is right, we will not be able to help but follow that drive across the Solar System, from one giant leap to the next.

Ben Weiner is a freshman in Branford College.

 

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