Do you remember? James Webb, then head of NASA, wrote to German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, who headed the Center and who was the chief engineer of the entire manned space program. I found the correspondence in your archives. In fact it took a directive from Vice President Johnson in 1963 to force you to hire black engineers at your prestigious Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Not only that, even though you are a civilian agency, your most celebrated astronauts were military pilots, at a time when war was becoming less and less popular.ĭuring the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement was more real to me than it surely was to you. But I also knew that my skin color was much too dark for you to picture me as part of this epic adventure. I was obviously too young to be an astronaut. But the vicarious thrill of the journey, so prevalent in the hearts and minds of others, was absent from my emotions. Over that time I was excited for you and for America. And I was fourteen when you stopped going to the Moon altogether. I was ten when you landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon. I was seven when you lost astronauts Grissom, Chaffee, and White in that tragic fire of their Apollo 1 capsule on the launch pad. I was three years old when John Glenn first orbited Earth. So the yearlong celebration of our shared sixtieth anniversary provides me a unique occasion to reflect on our past, present and future. In the first week of October 1958, you were born of the National Aeronautics and Space Act as a civilian space agency, while I was born of my mother in the East Bronx. Meanwhile, zealous punctuation, when issued forth from EMOTION, is left largely intact!!!ĭear NASA, Happy birthday! Perhaps you didn’t know, but we’re the same age. Long letters are also edited for clarity and length. * When sensible, letters are lightly edited for spelling and grammar. * When a letter was received via means other than email (e.g., US “snail” mail or social media), that medium is indicated. It’s the world as viewed through the lens of an astrophysicisteducator. One of the earliest dates back to my overlong September 12, 2001, letter to family and colleagues, twenty-four hours after I bore witness, from a distance of four blocks, to the attack and collapse of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.Ībove all else, Letters from an Astrophysicist is a vignette of the wisdom I have mustered to teach, enlighten, and ultimately commiserate with the curious mind. These include letters to the editor, mostly of the New York Times, as well as open letters posted to my Facebook page and other public places on the internet. And in many cases there’s a longing we’ve all experienced at one time or another: the search for meaning in our lives an evergreen urge to understand one’s place in this world and in this universe.Īdded, too, are letters I’ve written, not to anybody but to everybody. Still others are sad, sensitive, and poignant. Some letters are written by people who are angry with the world or with something I have said or done. The letters to me that communicate significant emotion, curiosity, or anxiety are reproduced in full.* Other letters, of the rambling type, I summarize for brevity in a single paragraph. Other letters, mostly of a personal nature, including those with specific reference to a speech I had given, a book I have written, or a video in which I appeared, form the corpus of letters from which my responses are drawn. Those were fielded by expert staff at New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, where I serve as director. But when the world stimulates your curiosity when your state of not knowing leaves you restless when your existential angst overflows sometimes you just have to write a full-up letter to somebody.Ĭontained herein is a sampling of my correspondence, almost all with complete strangers, spanning more than two decades, with most letters selected from a ten-year period when my email address was publicly accessible.* Over that time, most inquiries contained straightforward questions of science. Why else the need for that burgeoning catalog of emoticons to supplement our written correspondence? A smiley face. The greatest casualty may be our growing inability to find words that precisely communicate our feelings and emotions. Now that people communicate with one another primarily by social media, letter-writing has become a lost art.
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