Peter sat alone in his dorm room at Hamilton, a New England–style liberal arts college of 1,800 students in Clinton, New York, almost five hours north of his home in Great Neck. The school had a beautiful campus, but after only a few weeks there, Peter was feeling like he had made a big mistake.
His love of space, chemistry, and rocketry was stronger than ever, yet he was on a premed track at Hamilton, not on a path to becoming an astronaut. Making matters worse, it didn’t look like the school would permit him to double major in biology and physics, a compromise he hoped would allow him to continue his dual desires of space and medicine. This was not a place for a science-based double major, let alone a serious student of space.
Peter was at Hamilton because he hadn’t felt smart enough to apply to Ivy League schools, though most of his friends had ended up there. The premed track was for his parents. The boy who couldn’t be contained was now contained.
Not long after his arrival at college, the eighteen-year-old wrote in his journal: “I must admit I’ve been having second thoughts about Hamilton. I wanted a larger selection in courses. I’m trying to get a major in biochemistry set up. Don’t know if I can do it.”
A page later: “I’m extremely bothered by this paradox I’ve encountered about Hamilton (though I strongly hope it’s false). First I hear it to be extremely hard scholastically, harder than many of the larger ‘better’ well-known schools. Yet I don’t know if it will be considered when it counts, on entrance to graduate work.”
When Peter returned home to Great Neck for Thanksgiving break, he ran into Michael November, a former high school classmate who was now a college freshman at MIT. They set up a tennis match at the Shelter Bay tennis court adjacent to his home to get some exercise and catch up with each other. As they rallied on the cold but dry late-fall day, Peter admitted to Michael, who had been in his advanced-placement chemistry class, that he was already starved for science and technology. Whenever Hamilton hosted a science-related talk from a visiting professor, Peter was front and center taking notes. “I eat it up,” Peter told his friend. “Philosophy is great and literature is fine, but I want more.”
Michael, who had played football at Great Neck High and loved math the way Peter loved space, was having the opposite experience. Between tennis shots, Michael told Peter about a program at MIT called UROP, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, giving undergraduate students the chance to work on research in fields as varied as nuclear science, urban planning, and solar-photovoltaic systems for houses.
Michael told Peter that he was working on fusion experiments involving the building of a scaled-down version of a tokamak, a vacuum inside a circular steel tube that used magnetic fields to confine fusion. His project leader was Professor Louis Smullin, who had helped create the school’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and was head of the radiation laboratory in the early 1940s when the lab developed airborne radar used during World War II.
Peter stopped playing. He couldn’t believe a freshman was getting to work on fusion. “Ohmygod, that’s incredible,” he said.
Michael was also taking a class on relativity from Professor Jerome Friedman, director of the school’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science. His freshman physics class was taught by Professor Henry Kendall, who was working with Friedman on breakthrough research into subnuclear particles called quarks.* By the time the tennis match had ended, Peter couldn’t get MIT out of his head. He spent the rest of Thanksgiving break working on his car, a Pontiac Trans Am with a V8 engine and a golden firebird on the hood. He had modified the carburetor intake manifold to take in more oxygen, and he toyed with the idea of putting in a nitrous injection system.
—
When Peter returned to Hamilton after Thanksgiving, he called MIT to learn about its transfer policies. Buoyed by what he learned, he scheduled a tour and interview in early January; the admissions application for transfer students would be mailed to him. He wondered whether he even had a chance; MIT was one of the most competitive universities in the world, and it was even harder to be accepted when transferring. In the meantime, though, Peter would try to make the most of Hamilton, while also reaching outside the campus for science and space. He started a biology study group to meet two to three times a week. He sought out professors and local authors with connections to space. He wrote letters to NASA, including:
Dear sirs:
I am writing to you in regards to my education. I’m presently a college student, and eventually I hope to enter the space program. First, however, I wish to enter graduate school to obtain an MD, hopefully in conjunction with a Ph.D. (probably in biochemical engineering). My question is, does NASA offer any educational programs which would be of interest to me? . . . Also if possible, please send me any information you can about entering the space program, astronaut training, etc., and an application if possible?
Sincerely,
Peter H. Diamandis
—
When January finally arrived, Peter and his mom drove to Boston and headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, across the Charles River. Peter and Tula walked along Massachusetts Avenue, past the Harvard Bridge,* continued up a well-worn staircase, past a row of grand columns, and into the entrance of 77 Mass Ave., the marbled and domed rotunda at the heart of campus. Peter took in every detail, from the inscription in Greek under the dome to the long hallway stretched out ahead.
The winter sun streamed through the tall windows behind them, filling the travertine lobby with a muted buttery light. Students were bundled up in puffy jackets and carried books and backpacks, their chatter echoing in the cavernous space. The lobby led to a hallway running 825 feet in length, connecting to other parts of campus. Tula, who loved architecture, thought the building was as breathtaking as the Pantheon in Rome. Peter had a feeling he couldn’t describe. Maybe it was how his mom felt when she spotted their Great Neck house, or how his dad felt when he saw his mom for the first time, wearing her Friday night dress, and just knew.
Peter and Tula walked slowly down the long hall, and Peter studied the posters and flyers on bulletin boards and in display cases. There was a sign for UROP, the undergraduate research opportunities program that Michael November had touted. A student told Peter and Tula about “MIT Henge,” where for a few days every year in late January, the setting sun lined up with the string of buildings on the north edge of Killian Court and shined all the way through building 7 and reached building 8, with the best viewing from the third floor.
The hall, known on campus as the Infinite Corridor, ran through parts of buildings 3, 4, 7, 8, and 10. MIT was number-centric—students, classes, and buildings were all assigned numbers. Classroom doors had opaque creamy glass with black, hand-painted department and professor names, reminding Peter of doors he’d seen in old detective shows. Peter wanted to open every door and explore every subject. He was uncharacteristically silent, soaking in all of the details. He and his mom passed buildings 10 and 11 and stopped at building 8, the physics department. Created in the nineteenth century by MIT founder William Barton Rogers, the department had among its faculty and graduates a dazzling array of Nobel Prize winners and some of the field’s greatest minds, from Richard Feynman (quantum electrodynamics), Murray Gell-Mann (elementary particles), Samuel Ting and Burton Richter (subatomic particles), to Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel), Bill Shockley (field-effect transistors), George Smoot (cosmic microwave background radiation), and Philip Morrison (Manhattan Project, science educator). Physics classes at MIT had been flooded with students in the years following the launch of Sputnik and the success of Apollo.
Peter and his mom made their way to the biology department. He had an understanding with his parents that if he was accepted at MIT, he would stay on his premed track. The biology department here had much more to offer. Peter and Tula doubled back through the corridor, studying more of the photos, posters, and signs for events and clubs, from salsa dancing to stargazing. Peter had two departments he had to see before leaving. The first was in building 37, devoted to astrophysics. It was a field both ethereal and real, where words and equations tried to interpret vibrant colors, patterns, and formations of the cosmos.
The very last stop on their tour was building 33, AeroAstro, which had produced more astronauts than any other place outside U.S. military academies. Military officers had received aviation training for World Wars I and II here. Breakthroughs in hypersonic flight testing were achieved. Buzz Aldrin got his PhD here in 1963. Other astronauts—Jim Lovell, Apollo 13; Ed Mitchell, Apollo 14—took MIT’s astronautical guidance class.
There was a picture of a half dozen NASA astronauts visiting the Instrumentation Lab: three men were the Apollo 1 astronauts—Virgil Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White—who died during a prelaunch test. Next to them were MIT students and astronauts Dave Scott, Rusty Schweickart, and Jim McDivitt.
Peter studied the department time line: Charles Stark “Doc” Draper started at MIT in the 1920s and founded the Instrumentation Laboratory in the 1930s. Peter kept reading, stunned by what he was learning. The inertial guidance system for Apollo—the computer that got man to the Moon—was developed here in the Instrumentation Lab. Right here! The guidance system came to life at a time when computers took up entire rooms, when typewriters with carbon paper were the norm, and when television was black and white. A small team from MIT had figured out how to use a new technology, the integrated circuit, to send man and machine to the Moon and back. Baseball fans had Wrigley Field. Golfers, St. Andrews. Surfers, Mavericks. Climbers, K2. This was Peter’s hallowed ground.
Peter looked at space relics, including parts from the Instrumentation Lab’s Mars probe. Built in the early 1960s, the probe never launched, but its technology evolved into the guidance computer for Apollo. MIT was awarded the first NASA Apollo contract for the guidance computer in the months following Kennedy’s famous speech. Jim Webb, the administrator of the newly formed NASA, knew Doc Draper, engineer, inventor of inertial systems, and a pilot who tested parts he made by flying the planes himself. According to Draper, Webb had called him and said, “Doc, can you develop the guidance and navigation system for Apollo?”
“Yes, of course,” Draper said.
“When will it be ready?” Webb asked.
“When you need it,” Draper replied.
“And how do I know it will work?”
“I will go along and operate it for you,” Draper said, formally volunteering to be an astronaut at age sixty.
Draper could not have known that he and his team were capable of building a computer to get men to the Moon. It hadn’t been done before. But Draper didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line by saying yes to one of the most difficult technical challenges in history. He believed in himself, and in his team. Walking through the labs, Peter jotted down another note, this one involving one of his idols, Wernher von Braun, who was asked early in the Apollo program: “Wouldn’t we do a lot better if we collaborated with the Russians?” Von Braun replied, “If there were collaboration with the Russians, there wouldn’t be a program in either country.” Peter wrote, Competition got America to the Moon.
As Peter and Tula headed out into the late afternoon cold, Peter’s mind went over the array of classes, subjects, and breakthroughs in this one location. This was a place of limitless possibilities.
—
Back at Hamilton after his tour, Peter was antsy. MIT had been another reminder of the audacity of NASA, of what had been accomplished in less than a decade. He wanted those glory days restored. The 1970s were in many ways the opposite of the 1960s. Money had been redirected to the Vietnam War and to myriad social problems.
During the 1960s, NASA’s budget was around 1 percent of the total federal budget, and the agency had more than 400,000 employees and contractors at its peak in 1965.* By 1979, NASA’s percentage of the federal budget had been cut in half, and the agency counted around 20,000 employees. NASA canceled its mission to send a spacecraft to do a flyby of the famed Halley’s Comet, set to pass close to Earth in 1986 and not return for another seventy-five years. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were canceled even though most of the hardware had been bought and built. The Moon had been reached, and critics said the government was “shooting money into space.” Design and development of the space shuttle were delayed, and plans for a U.S. space station in low-Earth orbit ended. Lovers of space wondered what was next. It was the withering away of a dream.
Desperate to do something space related at Hamilton, Peter created and circulated a pro-space petition to send to every elected leader he could find, from local representatives to President Jimmy Carter’s adviser on space affairs. Peter expressed his concerns about the “slow but sure degeneration of the U.S. space program’s goals and budget.” He collected about two hundred signatures from Hamilton students and faculty—significant for a campus of 1,800. Peter then penned a letter that he hoped would be published in the science magazine Omni:
I am directing this letter to college students. Having learned of the death of both the Galileo and Halley’s Comet/T II missions and the embarrassing delay of the shuttle program—and having seen the space program pushed aside by our government—it is about time that those of us who support our space program, our future, address the issue.
The method for letting the government know how we feel is simple: begin a petition at your college, collect signatures, and submit them to the proper offices of the president and Congress. There are nearly 1,000 colleges and universities in the United States, with an average of 2,000 students per institution. We represent a powerful force and we can change our future.
Peter H. Diamandis
Great Neck, NY
—
In early February 1980, Hamilton hosted a lecture by visiting professor Jim Arnold, founder of UC San Diego’s chemistry department, consultant to NASA, and one of the first to study rocks and soil returned from the Moon. Arnold talked about the rich and useful resources to be mined from the Moon and near-Earth asteroids. Peter had never heard of mining asteroids for metals like nickel, iron, and platinum. When the talk ended, he met two visiting students representing what they called the “international school of the future,” who were intent on establishing a “space micropolis.” Walking back to his dorm, Peter looked at the cards they had given him. This had been a good night, but the lectures were few and far between at Hamilton, and he wouldn’t hear from MIT for at least another six weeks.
A key course required for premed students at Hamilton was intro to biology by Professor Frank Price. The course was tough and had a reputation for winnowing the number of students who continued on the premed track. The study and dissection of a fetal pig made up 50 percent of the student’s grade.
Peter’s class had around eighty students, and consisted of three hours of lectures and three hours of lab work per week. On the first day of class, Professor Price, a biology teacher at Hamilton for five years, gave a stern talk about the importance of treating the fetal pigs with respect and care. He cautioned that “under no circumstances are the pigs to leave the lab.” There was one pig for every two students; the course instruction focused on physiology, organ functions, and the patterns of blood circulation through the heart, lungs, stomach, and liver.
Two weeks before the all-important dissection exam, Peter came down with the chicken pox and had to spend a week in the school infirmary. He missed crucial lab time and test practices. He knew that if he didn’t do well on this test, he wouldn’t have a chance at a top medical school, and he wouldn’t be considered for MIT. Peter could not do poorly on this exam. The thought kept him awake all night. Finally, he hatched a plan: he would “borrow” a fetal pig to study over the weekend. He enlisted help from his lab partner, Philip, who was also a dorm mate. It was decided after class that Philip would casually brush the pig into a book bag, held open by Peter.
The following Monday, Professor Price asked for everyone’s attention. He didn’t look happy. “It has come to my attention,” he said, “that a fetal pig has been stolen. I would like to have whoever has done this to please turn themselves in. And if you know who’s done this, it’s your duty on the school’s honor code to turn him in.”
Peter looked over his shoulder at Philip, terrified. Hamilton’s strict honor code was signed by students at the start of school. Academic dishonesty resulted in expulsion or automatic course failure. The pig, about a foot long, was in a plastic bag with formaldehyde-soaked paper towels hidden at the back of their dorm’s refrigerator. After class and back at the dorm, the worst scenario unfolded: Peter was told that a suite mate was going to turn him in.
My life is over, Peter thought. He asked the suite mate for a day to deal with it on his own. In a state of panic, Peter and Philip met in his room and decided to get rid of the evidence. They walked the campus, eyeing Dumpsters and secluded spots. They were searching for somewhere the pig would never be found. That night, Peter and Philip headed to the woods; Hamilton was in a rural area with hundreds of acres of wooded land. The pig was buried, and the burial spot marked. All Peter could think about was that he would be expelled; his family would be disgraced, and he would never get to MIT. He was physically ill.
Peter called his father. Harry and Tula were at a friend’s house playing cards. Harry excused himself to talk in private, returning more than an hour later. When Tula asked what was wrong, Harry said it was taken care of. Peter told his dad about the mess he had gotten himself into, and said he intended to turn himself in the next day.
Harry Diamandis had listened closely to his son. After a long pause, he presented another idea. Peter was to call the doctor in the infirmary and explain the situation. Harry had visited Peter while he was sick, and found the campus doctor to be kind and smart. The physician should be enlisted as an ally, Harry said. The doctor would talk to Professor Price, and then Peter would return the pig to the lab and have a candid talk with his teacher.
Peter returned to the woods and exhumed the pig. Late in the afternoon, he entered Professor Price’s lab. His hands shook as he took the pig out of his bag. Professor Price could see that Peter was ashen and appeared on the verge of tears. The professor had experienced the theft of his pigs before. He had seen them hanging from nooses in students’ dorms, and pigs had been used for pranks in students’ beds and bathrooms. Professor Price, who had talked with the infirmary doctor, asked Peter, “Did you learn your lesson?” Peter nodded, fighting back tears and stammering, “I’m so sorry.” Peter looked at his professor. Is my life over, or will I be shown mercy? After a pause that seemed to go on forever, Professor Price said, “Good luck on your exam, then.”
A few weeks later, Peter got his letter from MIT. His eyes filled with tears. “Peter, On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to MIT. . . .”
Professor Price had given him a second chance, a lesson of grace and generosity Peter would never forget. There would be no more shortcuts, no more bending of rules. Getting to MIT was a gift. Peter would return to the Infinite Corridor, open some doors, join clubs—and maybe even launch something of his own.