Back at the helm of NASA’s space sciences division is Ed Weiler, a Chicago boy who went to Northwestern to get a degree in astrophysics. He’s a familiar face around the agency, back at a job he held a decade ago. In between, he oversaw NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where all kinds of astronomical machines are created. Before that, Weiler was lead scientist for the Hubble observatory.
It was in that role that Weiler first came into prominence, a blue-eyed, sandy-haired straight-talker explaining to folks how the cornerstone of NASA’s Great Observatories program came to be launched with a misshaped main mirror.
“Now I talk to people from generation Y or X who don’t remember Hubble had a problem,” says Weiler. “We’ve gone far enough now that people forget.”
Once nice thing about leaving some tread on the road is you know where you’ve been and, if you’re lucky, you have a pretty good idea of where you’re going.
We’re sitting outside on an unseasonably cool day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The cold doesn’t bother me,” Weiler offers as I steer him away from the noise and distractions of the JPL newsroom. “I grew up in Chicago.”
It’s almost a brag, how Windy City winters prepare you to stare cold in the face. Even in southern California, where the temperature was 85-plus a few days ago. Now it’s in the 50s, just like NASA, just like Ed and just like I’ll be someday in the not too-distant future. In our culture it’s easy to forget that getting older is what we hope for.
It’s hopping around here today, the day before Phoenix lands on Mars. It’ll be the first time water from another planet is sampled -- if it works. Weiler was in charge when the last lander failed and he’s been talking up the grim Mars stats ever since he’s back in the limelight as NASA’s top space science guy.
Weiler likes a good come-back story, like Hubble’s. For you young-bloods, the telescope was outfitted with corrective optics by a space shuttle crew and went on to deliver paradigm-shifting insights into the nature of the universe, such as the fact that it’s growing even faster now than it was in its youth. I feel like that’s true in life as well.
At 59 and with 30 years of government service on his resume, Weiler could have retired by now. Except for one thing: He feels the best days are yet to come.
“I got excited by the moon program and by the Mercury and Gemini flights because I had this dream as a kid that NASA would be going to Mars and to the stars someday. I still believe that humans will travel in space. It’s our nature to explore and I still think that’s in our future. I think it’s going to be more spread out with other countries involved, but that’s still in front of us.
“I’m also convinced that it will be in this century , the 21st century -- and I’m absolutely convinced of this, maybe not while I’m still alive, or you perhaps, but sometime in this century -- we will have the technology to build and launch a telescope (perhaps humans will have to construct it in space because it’s very large) that has the ability to search the atmospheres of other planets around other stars and to find those telltale traces of life around another planet: methane, carbon dioxide , the oxygen ,the water vapor. We find those elements in an atmosphere and we’ve proven that we are not alone. There’s life out there. That only happens once in human history -- once -- to answer that age-old question. That will have profound philosophical effects on the human race. And we will have that technology in this century.
“So yeah, I there’s a future out there,” he says. And with dramatic flair, drops the clincher: “Will we have the will to grasp it?”
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