I became an engineer to put my talent for innovation to good use, to help people without having to directly interact with them, to satisfy my curiosity about the way things work, to play with fire and electricity and chemicals and really cool machines, to solve problems, to fix things that are broken, to "improve" things that aren't broken, to feel like a total geek and a total badass all at once, to live on the cutting edge.
Those are the basics. The specifics have changed a few dozen times during the last fifteen years and will undoubtedly change a few dozen more times before I retire, but last weekend, I was forcefully reminded of what started it all. I spent a few glorious days in DC with a few old friends, and despite meals, movies, Mythbusters, and many other fun experiences, we still found time to take a seven-mile walk around the city. We didn't stop for too long at any point along our stroll, but we did duck into the National Air and Space Museum for a few moments.
I walked through the doors. The security checkpoint was new, but the Gemini command module still loomed to my left, the moon rock still sat on my right, and The Spirit of St. Louis still hovered overhead. I was nine years old when I first set foot in that room and recognized my destiny in its contents. Biomedical engineering didn't really exist back then, so instead, I wanted to be a rocket scientist.
Specifically, I wanted to be John Aaron. Never heard of him? Not surprising, since he's the most perfect example of a true engineer that I know -- he made a career out of creatively fixing other people's messes from the sidelines. Aaron graduated from college in the early 1960s, and armed with nothing more than his physics degree, he took a job at NASA on a whim. Six months later, he was working for Mission Control handling flight operations for the Gemini missions. While nationally recognized heroes like Gus Grissom, Jim Lovell, and Neil Armstrong were out testing the limits of space, Aaron was one of the many faceless men keeping them alive from behind his computer screen.
I was obsessed with the NASA of the '60s and '70s during my childhood. How thrilling it must have been to explore space when space exploration was still so brand-new, and to actually have the ability to get your hands dirty in it! Troubleshooting efforts in those early days -- astronauts fixing broken lunar rovers with old maps and duct tape, flight controllers trying to make CO2 filters out of tube socks -- always sounded like so much fun to me. John Aaron was the unequivocal master of troubleshooting, and his common-sense cleverness saved the entire space program on more than one occasion. He was the guy who figured out how to bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth using only 12 amps of power. He was also the only person able to teach the crew of Apollo 12 how to reboot their electrical systems after the spacecraft was struck by lightning, saving the mission from certain abortion. How? Years earlier, he had heard of a similar problem during an obscure test mission, researched it to satisfy his own curiosity, and consequently became the world's only expert on the issue.
John Aaron made himself superhuman using only his brain and his ingenuity, which has elevated him to Batman-esque status in my estimation. He was my hero for most of my childhood and adolescence, and he's one of the main reasons why I had my sights set on a career with NASA for so many years. Problem is, there's no place at NASA for Aaron's brand of quick-and-dirty, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants brand of engineering any more. Everything is planned, budgeted, methodical, and triple-checked nowadays. It's neater and probably more efficient, but it's not nearly as fun.
It's not exactly better, either. On my way home from DC, I read an article on Project Constellation, the new NASA missions that plan to return humans to the moon by 2019. I learned that NASA plans to phase out space shuttles during the next few years and begin using Orion spacecraft -- which bear an eerie resemblance to the Apollo command module I wandered past in the museum last weekend. Seems like Aaron and his fellow engineers were more right about things than any of us could have guessed.
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