GETTING THERE -- En Route to Japan

Having travelled halfway around the globe, an advanced satellite makes it's way to a special port, ready for shipment to the Japanese launch facility at Tanegashima.

Getting up before the sun on a November morning in Alaska may not be an honest way to represent a person's effort. The sun doesn't make much of an appearance at this latitude. The GPM team traveling to Japan takes that as a charge: we're not planning to hang around too long, either. 

Back on the icy tarmac, we leave our steamy bus for the gelid confines of our twilight passenger cabin, up, up, up the precarious metal ladder to the top of the C5. Then we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Turns out that the plane is fine. It's the runway that's too slick with ice.

Engines idling, bellies rumble. Breakfast never happens. The catering we'd expected in the second half of the trip didn't survive the days of our unexpected Alaskan idyll. People crack a few jokes--how could the overnight quartet of engineers assigned to babysit the satellite have eaten everyone's pancakes!-- but nobody complains. As soon as the Air Force clears us for take off, we're heading west at full throttle.

Nine hours above the Pacific, the team settles into zenlike repose. Conversations are minimal due to the ferocious airplane noise and requisite earplugs. Movement slows. Time expands.

Then, after an eternity, we're on approach. Human dynamos spin up. People run through mental checklists and stretch for action.

Minutes after the wheels stop beneath the gray airplane, people move like springs released. The advance team meets us on the ground with no greater ceremony than high fives and back slaps. In minutes the Japanese and NASA ground teams are rolling at full speed. The C5 nose and tail pops open, and it isn't long before our truck trailer gets pulled out the plane. Not far behind, the great white box holding the satellite rolls out smoothly, only to be bolted down to the waiting truck bed.

From a distance the scene looks like the epitome of an ant colony. Dozens of people with well- coordinated roles clamber and labor over objects many times their individual size, yet collectively manage to make short work of huge jobs. The American team coordinates care and feeding of their spacecraft; the Japanese ground team coordinates movement of heavy objects and extensive runway logistics. A handful of US Air Force crew provide essential assistance working in and around the airplane.

In a little less than three hours, the plane is unloaded, sealed up, and gone. With the satellite now loaded onto the truck, a motley foot parade walks alongside, heading a mile distant for a freshly paved section of sea port, retrofitted specially for this enterprise.

The Japanese ground crew performs like Cirque du Soleil; onlookers can only marvel at the display of technical acumen. They make it look easy. The truck pulls up like a demonstration of precision driving. A massive crane, already waiting, hoists a special I-beam into place. Working side by side, NASA mechanics and Japanese ground teams unbolt the satellite, hook lifting chains to the sides, and prepare. As the shades of night stretch shadows long, crews wheel in small, powerful outdoor lamps, turning the scene into an outtake from Close Encounters.

Then: it rises. The great white box containing the largest Earth science research satellite ever floats above the scene. Gracefully it swings over the edge of a great cargo ship, waiting at port. Then slowly it descends into the hold, disappearing beneath the railing. Another quartet of NASA engineers boards the ship, where together with a Japanese crew they'll sail for Tanegashima Island. First by air, now by sea, the satellite inches it's way to space.

ALASKAN LAYOVER -- En Route to Japan

An overheated bus on a frigid Alaskan runway isn't usually regarded as a great way to spend the morning, but adventures have their own logic.

As we descended into Alaskan airspace, we learned we were going to refuel on the tarmac at Elmendorf AFB. We were going to push hard to get back in the air, maybe two hours, maybe three. We touched down, rolled up, shut down, sat up. Then we got instructions: no walking around in the cabin. Why? Static electricity could build up, ignite the fuel. They weren't joking. But that's so yesterday. This morning we awoke when our body clocks kicked us out of bed, no alarm clock necessary. A snow-dusted muster in the Air Force's North Star Inn lobby soon became a bus ride back to the runway. With an ice storm pressing in with several inches of snow forecast to follow, the Air Force determined that we either had to get gone or stay another day in Alaska. Ah, the best laid plans... We stayed. Ice covered wings on a C5 doesn't augur well, and the de-icing plan simply couldn't counteract meteorology. It was a good try, but soon our overheated bus has us heading back to billeting. They say armies travel on their stomachs. Add teams of NASA engineers to the list. With nothing but time on our hands (save for our exasperated logistics experts) thoughts turned to the singular subject of food. Unloading the precious satellite? Transporting it across Japan? International permits, weather issues, electronic safety tolerances, humidity inside the shipping container, landing permits outside of our originally scheduled plans? Nope. Breakfast, please. Someone figured out where to find the base cafeteria, and a droopy trail of cheechako--that is, folks from the lower 48 states--gingerly made their way across the icy sidewalks to find grub. But not everyone. Back at the airplane, the GPM satellite sat like a spoiled pasha in a temperature and humidity controlled box. That meant rotating shifts of our engineering wizards needed to stay at the plane, babysit, troubleshoot, monitor vital statistics. After all, the contents of that box is why we're all here. It's just that being here isn't helping us do anything useful with the contents of that box.

SPECIAL CARGO -- A Report from Japan

The tough mathematics of orbital mechanics describes how satellites fly around a planet. But the alpha-dog engineers who get satellites into orbit are tough orbital mechanics of a different sort. 

Two days out of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, I'm traveling with a no-nonsense team of engineers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center on a mission to deliver a billion dollar research satellite to the spaceport that will send it up. If you're thinking that Andrews is an out-of-the-ordinary departure zone you'd be right, but then again this is no ordinary trip. When you're shipping a one-of-a-kind, school-bus sized satellite halfway around the world, you don't simply check it at the counter. That's why the team booked a ride on one of the nation's biggest beasts of the air, the legendary C5-M Galaxy Cargo plane. Way atop the cargo hold, the team tries to settle in to the windowless passenger compartment. Down below, in the airplane's cavernous belly, a massive white box surrounds our spacecraft, clearing the ceiling only by centimeters. A large flat bed truck trailer rides a'foredeck as well, just to make sure the satellite has a comfy ride from the airport to it's next destination.

The mostly middle aged team mixes easily with the young Air Force crew shepherding us. A crewman offers us blankets and pillows at the start. We understand the flight is going to a be cold one, and those who accept the offer are intensely grateful. We also receive earplugs, something that turns out to be more than just a good idea. The C5 rumbles like the inside of a locomotive; it's relentless and exhausting. The cabin temperature has most of us in hats and gloves beneath our blankets, but it's our feet that scream for attention most. Just like road signs that say, "bridge freezes before road surface", the floor loses heat to the vast open cargo space below. No one complains, or at least not much. The galley is stocked with fare far better than any commercial flight, and hungry, frozen team members fill plates with chicken wings, crab cakes, sandwiches, and cheesecake. 

The plan is to partially circumnavigate the globe in about sixteen hours, but nine hours into the trip, we're wheels down in at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, near Anchorage. It was not supposed to go like this, but things change on one-of-a-kind itineraries. An initial plan to refuel in mid-air got scotched because of intense headwinds that threw off range calculations. Now overnight in Alaska, a cascade of logistical complexity has the team grumbling…but not for long. After all, this is a NASA mission through and through, and the "can-do" spirit that made the Space Agency the country's shining star has the team considering options with laser beam focus. Contingency plans are in the works, and the plan is to press on tomorrow for Japan. Traversing a frigid Alaskan parking lot,we find ourselves at the Elmendorf AFB bowling alley, scrounging for supper. 

This morning it's back to the sky.  A team waits for us in Japan; there's an H2-A rocket there waiting for it's payload. After all, scientists can't think about science, let alone orbital mechanics, without orbital mechanics getting their machine up into orbit.

THANKSGIVING 2013

WE LIVE

We are artists. We live in the world. The world is made of stories, not atoms. We are artists. We tell stories. Stories always include people and ideas. We are artists. Stories demand our engagement with the world. Stories give shape to the intangible essence of relationships and ideas.

INFORMATION

Information is not the same as story. Context makes information live. Stories shaped by people automatically invest context. Information is not the same as story. People contextualize information. Contextualization qualifies relevance. Information is not the same as story. Relevance makes opportunities for decisions. Decisions determine invention.

INVENTION

Invention creates meaning from the intangible. Relationships are always intangible. Meaning is a function of intangibility converted into invention. Invention creates meaning from the intangible. Inspiration in service to invention requires effort to make things real. Things that are real have the potential to prove themselves upon our pulses. Invention creates meaning from the intangible. Intangible meaning is much more relevant than physical matter. Reality therefore is a function of making choices.

PRESTO

Nobody creates in a vacuum.

WE LIVE TO LIVE

We are artists. We live in the world, and the soul of our days is the endless transmutation of intangibility into meaning. It's therefore appropriate for the week of Thanksgiving to say "thank you" to the closest people in our lives who empower and inspire us to create, to tell stories, to live.

--MS

@michaelstarobin

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SENSUAL

Sensual beach

Some kisses you remember for a lifetime.

What is sensual? It's more than physicality. It's tied to memory, to emotion, to dreams. It has to be. The sensual immediacy you have recalling that summer when you were nine years old playing at your friend's house, near that gnarled oak tree in the backyard, is just as resonant now as it was those many years ago. You easily recall the roughness of the bark when you climbed the trunk, projected into imagination as if you were climbing the side of a thousand foot cliff. There was the pleasing exertion in your legs as you levered yourself onto the rickety plywood platform perched high in the main crook of the tree. There was the smell of mud and leaves, July's great passion urging the powerful tree to unfurl. You experienced those sensations then, but you remember them all to this day.

That's memory. Memory sends us into the past. But some expressions of sensuality project solidly into the future.

The press of desire you feel when lost in thought about days not yet lived are always sensual. Are you dreaming of a vacation? Most certainly those thoughts are not just abstractions. You can smell the beach, the mountains, the city, your girlfriend, the cafe where you imagine ordering fruit and cheese, even if you've never visited the location of those dreams. It's a conjuring of future moments not yet lived. It's sensual even just to imagine the brush fine Phuket sand beneath your toes. You're sent through time and space, you hear the sea. The aroma of fresh baked bread drifting over the cobblestones on Rome's Via del Moro, the morning sun sparkling on the medieval facades of the 7th Arrondissement in Paris--you always live where your mind sends you.

Sensuality is not always kind. You'll never forget the stuffy, overheated 5th grade math classroom you endured. You'll never be free of the rotting smell from the back of that twin turboprop bound for Grand Rapids you suffered for hours on the tarmac. You'll never forget the angry hunger you felt growing up when your parents lost their jobs and times got tight. Our senses imprint themselves like water etches paths through stone.

These days we all seem to push sensual experience essentially into two camps. Sensual experiences are either extreme or ignored. That's too bad. I hate to miss a minute of my day, but I also know that I cannot easily live in a purely sensual space. I often wish I could, but I know that's not realistic.

But memory or anticipations for the future can distract us from life, right now. Don't miss the sensuality of life lived today. Feel your feet beneath you. Feel the ways your heels contact the ground first, how you roll through your foot, hip joints making endless pendulum swings in their sockets high above.

Perhaps your hip joints are past their prime, bind a little when they shouldn't, cause you to wince. Perhaps you're young and spry, an athlete, a nymph. Either way, the great pleasure of being aware of your own physicality in the world is yours to experience. It's true: aching joints traditionally do not provoke pleasurable thoughts, but you're thinking about this all wrong if immediate pleasure is the only reward. Even in the distress of our days--and some of us face longer lists of distress than others--there are the roots of our future history. Each feeling is a story, and each story we allow ourselves to feel is a moment when we're each more present in our day. I'm not suggesting that you embrace what ails you, that your pains are equivalent to what makes you feel good, but I am suggesting that you reconsider the feelings, that you recognize them for what it can offer. They remind you that you're alive, and the alternative is hard to imagine at all.

The sensual aspects of our days are the essential balance to the intellectual pressure of modernity. We enjoy seeing an attractive person because of the narrative force that inevitably will accrue to that sensual experience, even if that force is pure fantasy. It's okay: you're human. The next time you smell something in the oven that makes you wonder when supper will be ready, you're doing the same thing.

When you think about this all later today, checking your email, waiting for a red light, replacing the ink cartridge in the printer, remember to connect even those most mundane experiences to your own sensual experience. It's not the smell of the ink that makes us thoughtful. It's the fact that we can stop to notice it in the first place that makes us human. The moment we try to ignore, or worse, suppress the sensual aspects of our lives is the moment that we miss the best parts of the short time we have to be alive.

--MS   (Hey, you can follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin if you're so motivated.)

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CLOUD WATCHING

Is that an elephant on the left? A tea kettle? Or is it an accumulation of frozen moisture surrounding fine-grained particulates, suspended in the lower troposphere?

What you see in the shape of a cloud is what you see in your mind as an idea just begins to take shape. You can't touch it; you can't easily describe it to someone else. It risks changing suddenly-- even disappearing-- if you don't capture it's essence right now.

Does anyone even have the inclination, to say nothing of the time, for lying back on a grassy hill and watch clouds? There's seems to be so much that supersedes cloud watching these days: so many tasks, tests, and tweets, so many distractions, discussions, departures, and disinclinations.

Are the greatest cloud watchers of all --romantic, existentially minded teenagers -- even able to consider clouds anymore? Does it even happen at all? Even in summer?

It would be a shame to let it go.

Watching them from the ground, clouds are untouchable and essentially unknowable. By ourselves, we can't even prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they're really there. I say this not so much as a theistic challenge, but rather based on the lack of solid evidence we can gather. Ask the person next to you what he or she sees in the same cloud (assuming you've made a few minutes to lie back on a grassy hill somewhere) and you'll likely get a completely different description than what you have in your own head. Visual cues about of what a cloud looks like to you clearly cannot define universally agreed poetic meanings.

But maybe that's the reason people have stopped looking at clouds lately. With so much of society tied to endlessly measurable data, objects invested with purely subjective meaning become anathema.

That in itself should present a bright caution light. As we're all a product of culture, even a culture largely calloused to poetic, romantic thinking, it's essential at least to be attuned to how we all respond to various fractal inputs from the world around us. We see the same things, and still we come away from those things with wildly different perspectives. Where I see a dragon in a cloud, you may see the house where you grew up, branches of the old maple tree hanging close to the eaves above the front door.

The caution is that we're all starting to see clouds in isolation, if we even bother to see them at all. More to the point, without those shared cloud watching conversations we're no longer rolling over onto one shoulder to look at our similarly reposed friends, and say, "A house? Really? I think that part over there looks like smoke rising from a dragon's nostrils." You point at the spot in the sky; they try to follow your finger. You discuss it, perhaps even debate it, you share the moment cloud spotting on a hillside, with the whole Planet Earth beneath you to offer support.

In the exchange between you and your friend, something intangible yet fundamentally real becomes clearer. Even in a space that's fundamentally untouchable, you begin to appreciate something honest and true, even if you're only pointing to masses of condensed moisture in the sky.

All you have to do…is try.

--MS

WABI-SABI

One red leaf

Perfection isn't real. Perfection only exists in mind. Therefore, for something to be a perfect depiction of anything else -- a feeling, an image, a sound, an idea-- it must be imperfect.

That paradox gets my heart going every time I think about it.

Say it: wabi-sabi. It's balanced in the mouth like an aged cabernet. It's rhythmic to the ear like controlled breathing to a long distance runner. There is no perfect translation from the Japanese, it's source, but the measure of it's aesthetic is deep and profound. It speaks of balance and peacefulness, imperfection and beauty, and above all, life.

Nothing lasts forever, but in the digital age we're often led to believe otherwise. Everyone's heard that every bit of data we enter into our various electronic devices persists, eternally discoverable. There's always a record, we're told, always a copy backed up on a server, somewhere. Everything is searchable.

Wabi-sabi says otherwise. Impermanence defines all things. Wabi-sabi says that perfection is an unattainable goal. What we create––as individuals and as cultures--exists in finite time. In the digital world those lifespans may be artificially extended but ultimately they reach an end. All things are finite, and as such, all things are imperfect.

It's essential to realize that there's always a new creative discovery, a new idea to pursue, even if nothing lasts forever.  But the moment a creative person thinks his or her invention is so important that it can transcend time's infinite reach is the moment creativity fails to understand it's own finite heartbeat.  Nothing lasts forever, and an embrace of that melancholy thought confers vital license for creative people of all stripes to take passionate risks and dare to reach for greatness.

Perfection may be unattainable, but it is an asymptotic goal, and we can eternally approach it. To achieve the sublime, perfecting imperfection becomes one of the most fabulous koans of all.

--MS

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READ A BOOK

Put that tablet computer down.

I mean, don't put it down if you're reading this blog. Send messages to all of your friends about the blog, and THEN put it down.

And don't reach for your TV remote, either!

See those stacks of thinly sliced trees across the room with the colorful cardboard covers? Those are books. You used to read them. They miss you, and more to the point, you probably don't realize just how much you miss them.

I know you do. You're just numb to the surrounding din. If you're reading this blog, you're a reader already. Blogs like this one, about creativity and philosophy and life and all that artsy-airy stuff, tend to attract people already inclined to the slow-motion pleasures books. But there's no prejudice here: books ought to matter to wide populations more than they do these days.

Listen to Public Radio and you'll start to think books grow on trees rather than get manufactured from tree pulp. "So-and-so is the author of a new book on…" seems to be the opening line to interviews all day long. To a lesser, but still significant degree this phenomenon appears on television news programs, too--an ironic reality for a medium that often appeals to viewers who'd never think of picking up a book. The message from mainstream media is that everyone writes books. Therefore it would be easy to be suckered into a false belief that people actually, y'know, still read 'em.

You already know what the problem is, don't you? The ubiquity of electronic devices and the ease of consumption for the data they serve outweighs the comparative work of focusing on black words on white pages. No pictures! No sounds! No birds knocking bricks out from above thieving pigs! What's more, the stories we consume in books often take days to experience. Pages go by in minutes, not seconds. Action scenes happen only in the mind's eye; characters unspool only if we apply ourselves to the words writers use to bring them to life. I'm not opposed to electronic books, per se. But I sometimes wonder if the ability for them to facilitate quick jaunts to email is like having doughnuts on the kitchen counter when someone else in the house is trying to lose weight. It's a temptation that simply stacks the deck against even the toughest resolve.

The loss of a book culture is incalculable. Electronic methods of communication simply do not function in the same way. In the singular way that sustained reading focuses the mind, books ask us to absorb precisely because we must make room for them. They require our participation to work, where videos and blog posts and photos and tweets barely require our attention at all. Words function differently in different formats, and pictures are not replacements at all. I say this as a guy who not only makes his living making pictures, but genuinely loves good pictures. It's simply that they're not interchangeable. Pictures do not replace books.

The loss of a book culture is the transformative process in a culture that cannot sit still and has trouble thinking complex thoughts. Can the culture do complex things? Sure: cell phone networks are intensely complex enterprises. Next day package delivery systems require astounding algorithms and organizational plans. But there's a difference between complex technical requirements and introspection. Values clarification never comes from technological achievement, and morality--flexible and fuzzy though that term may be to diverse audiences-- can not accrue without introspection andexperience.

This lament does not confine itself to fiction. Non-fiction books matter, too. Countless titles on the miles of non-fiction literature shelves can thrill and inspire in ways just like fiction. But even here, the trend is to wade ankle deep in Wikipedia rather than dive into the deep waters of a full length tome. Science may move faster than the speed of conventional printing presses these days, and not for a second do I suggest that it should slow down. But practical information skimming as a replacement for deep knowledge acquisition are not equatable.

The irony here is that people read now more than ever. Short non-fiction on the web has exploded, with texts of all sorts evolving in real-time. Blogs, new journalism, long form articles, tweets, comment forums, and more constitute an ocean of content that never existed before and competes ferociously for time. But while the level of wordplay may have risen in some sectors as a result of Darwinian pressures in the marketplace, I worry about audiences losing touch with the merits of sustained focus on singular topics.

Modernity has also turned us into consumers of endless instruction manuals, often hyperlinked on electronic platforms, chockablock with detailed information. Are they books? Technically they are. But to claim that instruction manuals for video cameras and networkable toaster ovens and programmable vacuum cleaners have the equivalent heft of novels and histories and other works of sustained thinking is to misunderstand the value proposition. Even pulpy trade paperbacks, showcasing soapy romances or endless spy capers of limited literary legerdemain have are a loss. In the sustained focus of reading the culture learns how to critically assess detail and imagination and opportunities that are not simply simply a click away.

In a thought experiment that will never find it's way into real-world practice, the best way to make non-readers pick up a book may be to lock them in a prison for a few months surrounded by richly stocked bookcases and no hope of escape. Given a paucity of stimulation people are naturally curious.  With nothing else to do but read, I have to believe that most captives would rather open a book and escape. Outside prison walls, the very same action--picking up a book-- is the very opposite of escape. It is an act of quiet engagement. But faced with the beeping, blinking stimulations of the real, non-captive world, natural curiosity often struggles to overcome the ubiquitous distractions all around. Books require a measure of mental isolation, of focus. The modern world does not like to leave us alone.

I don't read nearly as much as I would like, despite my best intentions or druthers. The books that matter to me stay with me everyday. Characters are my friends, my advisors, my foils. Stories become my maps and my inspirations. In a culture that sees the power of this old fashioned technology fading into a quaint antiquity, I lament the implications even as I struggle to find the time to  turn the page.

--MS   (Hey, you can follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin if you're so motivated.)

PS -- Like this? Like what it does for your day? Do you ever mention ideas you encounter in this blog to someone else in your life? If so, share the link! Sure, it sounds like a ploy for free, crowd-sourced advertising, and guess what: it is! If you do spread the word, we'll simply appreciate. We might even bake you a batch of your favorite cookies. (Just ask!)