Venus

I am in the very unusual position of loving my job. I try to never take that for granted. When I think of the many ways that I could be earning a living and how many of them are boring, grueling or simply meaningless, I am filled with gratitude for my job. I believe work is meaningful because it is work and I spent a few years working some jobs that were only significant because they helped me fulfill my call to care for my family - and that was enough. I always maintained that a content man can be content doing anything and I had to prove that for a few years in a job that I started out hating, learned to make the best of, and eventually was very successful in. Then I was able to get a position at NASA working with some of the most creative and brilliant engineers and scientists in the country. It is the amazing gift of a job that provides for my family and is a blast at the same time.

I have spent the last three weeks immersed in Venus - working on a lander concept. It has been one of the most intense and exhilarating three weeks of work that I can remember. I had worked on one or two Venus missions many years ago, but nothing like this one. Part of the joy is how crazy the ideas are, how impossible it seemed when we started and how feasible it looks now. Venus is very close to what people picture when they think about Hell. It is about 870 degrees on the surface with a thick soupy atmosphere of sulfuric acid and other extremely nasty things. When our satellite enters the atmosphere it experiences over 160 g's during the deceleration. That means that a little 10 pound box weighs 1600 pounds. I have to design the structure to hold all this stuff under those conditions. Then our lander slams into the ground at about 10 meters per second (a world class sprinter running into a wall is about that speed). Then it frantically grabs data (for less than 10 minutes) while it being fried in the scalding heat, drowns in acid and is crushed by the heavy atmosphere. Then we want to take off again and move about 5 miles and land again. It is insanity, but insanely fun to design.

I never set out to do what I do. I just bumbled along, got a degree because I needed a career and wanted the discipline of a really hard major, seemingly stumbled into the job at NASA, all the while never sure what I was doing. I never had a master plan, never thought more than a few weeks ahead, never took tests to determine what I should do with my life, never really did any of the things that successful people do to land their dream jobs. I had a shepherd who was nudging a clueless sheep into a very green pasture. And I'm designing a satellite to land in Hell. There is some strange analogy in that, but I can't quite make it out.