It wasn’t long after his arrival at MIT in the fall of 1980 that Peter got a new nickname: “Pete in Space.” His fraternity brothers at Theta Delta Chi called him “PIS” for short, and had fun with “space cadet” and “spaced out” jokes. Peter took the friendly ribbing in stride and started signing his name as PIS; he was happy to be at MIT.
With each passing day he grew more impressed with the university’s diversity of programs in molecular biology, physics, computer science, electrical engineering, astrophysics, aeronautics, and astronautics. His new school was dazzling. But as he walked the halls of the Infinite Corridor, scanning announcements and posters, he discovered one thing missing: MIT did not have a student space group.
How could there not be a student space group at MIT, of all places? Peter went to the campus activities administrators to ask about space-related clubs for students. There were computer clubs and astronomy clubs, but no space club. He was told that if he wanted to start a club, he needed four signatures and a name.
Peter got the signatures from his fraternity brothers and a friend and drew up a list of potential names: Student Space Society; Children of Icarus; Students for the Preservation of the Future; Students for the Exploration and Development of Space; Space Cadets of America; and Space Cadets at MIT. He nixed the space cadet options after hearing how the potheads in his house loved the name. He eventually settled on the name Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), because it best explained the group’s mission. He made a couple hundred flyers, blanketed the campus, and took special care in finding a prime spot in the Infinite Corridor. He used a transfer letter kit for the block lettering of SEDS, and wrote in thick pen, “If you care about your future in space, join me in the student center.”
The nineteen-year-old Peter was already juggling a heavy class load and two undergraduate research projects, one space related, and the other for his premed track. Many nights, his lab work kept him so busy that he wouldn’t get back to his fraternity house until three A.M. On the premed side, in the genetics lab of Graham Walker, he worked on plasmid instability of PKM-101 in E. coli. To feed his space-related passion, Peter had scored a UROP project in the Man Vehicle Laboratory (MVL) in AeroAstro, building 37. Peter worked in the windowless ground floor, where the design, cabinets, floors, and even some of the equipment felt like it hadn’t changed in a half century. It all transported Peter to the days of Apollo.
Peter’s work in the MVL was far from glamorous, but he loved it. MVL research focused on the physiological and cognitive limitations of humans in aircraft and spacecraft. Founded in 1962, the lab worked closely with NASA to study space sickness for astronauts in the early Apollo program. It now had another NASA contract to work with a new breed of astronaut, the payload specialist, scientists trained to conduct experiments in space aboard the shuttle. Peter helped design and build an electrogastrograph to record the electrical activity of the stomach during motion sickness. Later in the school year, he would begin to research and construct an experiment tracking involuntary eye movements called nystagmus, a part of motion sickness that astronauts faced. Peter was told he would get to work one-on-one with astronauts. He was also aware of the buzz that NASA needed more astronaut physicians for future shuttle flights and had plans for an eventual space station. Peter was officially premed, but passionately pre-astronaut.
—
On the scheduled Wednesday night of the first meeting of SEDS, Peter waited nervously in his reserved second-floor room in the Stratton Student Center. Only five people had signed up, and he feared that no one would come. He watched anxiously as students passed by. A few paused, as if they were about to come in, and then continued walking. He bit his nails, a habit he had been trying to give up. Within a few minutes, several people ventured in, then a few more. To his great relief, about thirty people gathered in the room—not a bad turnout.
Peter welcomed the group and talked about his background, saying he “drank all the Tang”—Star Trek, Star Wars, Apollo. He talked about why the time was right to start a student space organization: “This is our future we’re talking about. We can’t have myopic politicians say where it goes. We need to stand up for the future of space.”
Peter talked about the momentum of the Apollo program in the sixties carrying through to a lesser degree in the seventies, with Apollo 17; the Voyager probes reaching the space between stars; and Skylab, the U.S. space station launched by a modified Saturn V, providing the first glimpse of space station technology. But progress had slowed, the space shuttle was delayed and over budget—it was being called the “$9 billion spaceship that refuses to fly”—and NASA had no new plans to send people to the Moon or beyond. Public interest in space had dropped. Peter enthused about all of the spinoff technologies that came from the space program, including cordless appliances, compact integrated circuits for navigation, implantable pacemakers, and freeze-dried food.
“Our goal,” Peter said, surprised by his own fervor, “is to enlighten our government, private industry, and the general populace regarding the benefits of a strong space program.”
Peter was asked whether he would consider making SEDS/MIT part of a national space group called L5, formed around the ideas of Princeton University physicist Gerry O’Neill. As author of The High Frontier and founder of the Space Studies Institute, O’Neill called for establishing a colony of about ten thousand people at L5, a gravitational sweet spot between the Earth and the Moon where a spacecraft could remain stationary, always more than 350,000 kilometers from Earth.
Peter shook his head. “I want an organization created for students run by students,” he said.
A man at the back of the room raised his hand and introduced himself as Eric Drexler. “I think Peter made a case for a student-led organization,” Drexler said. “I don’t think this group should be part of L5.” Drexler had worked for O’Neill at Princeton for two summers making a mass driver, an electromagnetic cannonlike device to shoot payloads of lunar material from the Moon. His master’s degree was in aeronautical engineering from MIT, and his thesis was on a high-performance solar sail system for space. He was a PhD candidate studying the ground-breaking field of molecular nanotechnology.
The meeting closed as Peter gathered names and addresses. He stayed late answering questions and brainstorming the future of SEDS. When he finally walked outside, the air was still warm. The sky was clear with stars. The moment felt perfect. He’d had this feeling before, when he walked through the hallway of the Infinite Corridor and was sure he was entering something big, something real. Walking through campus, posters under his arm, Peter felt as though he could reach out and touch the future.
Chapters of SEDS were soon announced at Princeton and Yale. Scott Scharfman, a friend of Peter’s from Great Neck High, started the Princeton chapter while another former Great Neck classmate, Richard Sorkin, initiated the Yale chapter. Peter, Scott, and Richard drafted a four-page constitution; started a national petition drive directed at President-elect Ronald Reagan and the U.S. Congress, urging funding for solar power satellite research; created a club logo that included the space shuttle; and sent off a carefully worded letter to Omni, known for its mix of hard science and pseudoscience, stating, “The steady deterioration of the U.S. space program’s goals and budget endangers our future and demands an organized response from our nation’s campuses. . . . We invite you and the other students at your college to begin a chapter and join us in our cause.” The international headquarters of SEDS was 372 Memorial Drive—Peter’s fraternity.
Omni published the letter in April 1981. That month, space shuttle Columbia, STS-1, was finally launched, generating international attention and a resurgence in national pride. The mission was the first of four planned orbital tests of the shuttle, which took off like a rocket, cruised in orbit like a spacecraft, and returned to Earth as a glider. It was the world’s first reusable manned spacecraft and marked the first launching of American astronauts in nearly six years.
Thousands of spectators had poured onto the beaches across the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center. As the countdown reached its final seconds, crowds chanted “Go, go, go!” As Columbia was pushed straight up, crowds roared, yelled, and prayed.
Returning to his fraternity after class one day, Peter slowed to a stop inside the front door. There in the foyer of his fraternity house, in the midst of the dozens of wooden slots, was his mailbox. It was overflowing with letters, packed in like a thick deck of cards, with a few jutting out at odd angles. Was this a prank? Peter carefully pulled the letters out and examined the envelopes, with all different handwriting, stamps, and postmarks. He sat down in the foyer and began to read. A student in Bombay wanted to form a SEDS chapter. A woman at Arizona State University was interested in meeting like-minded students to form a chapter in Phoenix. A man in Lubbock, Texas, said he was studying “colony ecosystems, mass drivers, etc.” to reach space if “Uncle Sam defaults.” An engineering student from Toronto wrote, “It is hard to express my reaction to your idea; ecstatic is probably close. An organized student voice in support of the space program is long overdue, and your initiative has sparked a welcome feeling of optimism inside me.” He suggested that the goal of SEDS become not just national, but international, and he offered his services as Canadian coordinator.
The letters poured in day after day. Peter’s fraternity brothers took notice. Now when they called him “PIS,” it was with an air of respect.
—
Over the next two years, SEDS grew from a three-campus group to a student association with close to one hundred chapters in the United States and abroad. Peter, who was now serving as chairman of SEDS, traveled to visit nearby chapters and juggled putting out newsletters and passing his finals. He worked on his public speaking, trying to improve his cadence and confidence, and got his first lessons in fund-raising when he set out to secure $5,000 to cover the cost of printing and mailing the SEDS newsletter to all of the chapters. Fund-raising meetings were set up through friends and faculty, but Peter had a hard time actually asking for the money. He feared rejection.
When he landed a meeting with administrators at Draper Lab, started by Doc Draper of Apollo guidance system fame, Peter knew he needed to do his best. He made his pitch with all the passion he could summon. Afterward, the Draper Lab folks said they loved what Peter was doing with SEDS, but the lab was nonprofit and unable to give him the money. Peter nodded with understanding, but as he began to walk out of the lab, he had another idea. He turned back and asked, “Those newsletters I’m trying to get printed, any chance you have the ability to print them here at Draper?” The response was yes. Peter continued, “Any chance you can mail them out to our chapters for us as well?” Again, the answer was yes. Peter learned a lesson that would stay with him: there is always a way.
Peter organized conferences at universities in the area—Tufts, Harvard, Boston University—attracting notables from academia, NASA, and other established space groups. The first annual international SEDS conference was held over four days in July 1982, with NASA deputy administrator Hans Mark speaking primarily on the government’s military motivations to get to space. In another celestial coup, Peter was invited to attend a United Nations conference on space in Vienna. The meeting would focus on the peaceful, nongovernmental use of space.
Peter searched for the cheapest plane ticket he could find. He would fly to Austria with Bob Richards, chairman of SEDS–Canada, and the engineering student from Toronto who had written to him after reading his letter in Omni. Bob had graduated with degrees in industrial engineering and aerospace and had started a SEDS group in Toronto. He studied at Cornell, and was an assistant to space scientist and author Carl Sagan. Peter and Bob had become allies and close friends with another student, Todd Hawley, who started a SEDS chapter at George Washington University, where the 1982 international SEDS conference was held. Todd, who spoke Spanish, French, and Russian, was a double major in economics and Slavic language and literature at GWU. Hawley had introduced them to David Webb, who was chairman of the nongovernmental space conference at the United Nations.
Peter, Bob, and Todd had become so unified in their vision and presence that people often called them by one name, Peterbobtodd. They were even the same height: Peter had feathered brown hair, parted down the middle; Todd had dirty blond hair and round, wire-rimmed glasses; and Bob had strawberry blond curls and a cherubic face. Todd believed that space was where differences could be erased. Bob looked at the cosmos as the next step in humanity’s evolution. Peter was interested in the hardware of space, and the adventure.
Peter and Bob found their cheap tickets on an Austrian airline, Arista Air, while Todd made his own way to Vienna with his girlfriend, MaryAnn. About nine hours into their flight, Peter and Bob were awakened by a terse announcement that they would be landing in Budapest, Hungary, not Vienna. Upon landing in Hungary—still a part of the Communist Eastern bloc—their plane was boarded by military police with guns and dogs. Bob was convinced they were being hijacked. Peter got out his camera and began taking pictures, until an officer told him to put the camera away. The plane baked on the tarmac, and Peter and Bob waited, worried, and sweltered. This was not how Peter envisioned the first international mission of SEDS would unfold. Eventually they were told that all Viennese citizens on board had to get off the plane and take a bus. There was reportedly an issue with someone’s not paying the landing fees in Austria. Peter and Bob remained in their seats, and the plane eventually took off for Vienna. The two wondered whether the rest of their trip would be as strange.
—
The next day, Peter and Bob rendezvoused with Todd and MaryAnn, and the four made their way to the United Nations conference. At the front of the majestic building—adorned with flags from dozens of countries—horse-drawn carriages were parked next to satellite trucks. Peter took a picture of a satellite truck with the lettering “MOSKVA, USSR.” He attended sessions called “Tomorrow’s Peacemakers,” “Remote Sensing Centers,” and “Land Use Information Through Space.” He shared a table with a man who told him that he had left his job as a scientist working on Reagan’s Star Wars initiative because he believed the program was dangerous. He told Peter that he’d had his passport stolen and had a KGB woman try to befriend him.
On their second morning in Vienna, Peter, Bob, and Todd stood in the lobby and studied the roster of speakers. The three of them were scheduled to speak the following day. Suddenly, Bob whispered excitedly, “That’s Arthur C. Clarke!” Todd couldn’t believe it. Peter, unaware of Clarke’s godlike status, said, “So?” Clarke was the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, an originator of the idea of geostationary satellites, and a futurist known as the “prophet of the space age.”
As Bob and Todd stared at Clarke, Peter said, “Let’s go talk to him.” Before the starstruck Bob and Todd could respond, Peter headed straight for Clarke, who was flanked by an entourage. Peter got close enough to Clarke to extend his hand and gesture back toward Bob and Todd.
“We are from SEDS and . . .”
Clarke walked away. Peter shook his head. He couldn’t leave it at that. Bob was embarrassed by Peter’s brashness. As the crowd slowly made its way into the auditorium to hear Clarke speak, Peter moved quickly and snagged front-row seats. Clarke talked about the future of the telecommunications industry. Decades earlier, Clarke had written a famous paper in Wireless World that defined the geostationary orbit and proposed using space satellites for global communications.
Peter was fascinated by Clarke’s concept of geostationary satellites and was determined to connect with him. He whispered to Bob, “We’re going to have dinner with him.” Bob rolled his eyes.
After the talk, Peter intercepted Clarke—again.
“Mr. Clarke, we’re from Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, and we’d love to take you to dinner tonight,” Peter declared, just as Clarke was being shuffled off to an interview. “Here’s the telephone number of our hotel and our room number. We’d love to tell you what we’re up to.”
Clarke looked at the three young men and said in his deep British accent, “I’ll call you.”
Back in their shared hotel room, Peter and Bob sat on their beds and stared at the phone. Peter and Bob were now making bets on whether Clarke would ever call. Peter was confident. Bob was skeptical. They watched the clock: 5:30. 5:35. 5:50. Rriiiinnngg. Peter grabbed at the phone. Bob held his breath. Peter said, Uh huh, yes, okay, the InterContinental, sure. He put the phone back on the receiver.
“Well?” Bob implored.
“That was Arthur,” Peter said impassively. “He said he can’t allow us to take him to dinner.”
Bob sighed.
“He wants to take us to dinner!”
Bob didn’t know whether to hug Peter or punch him.
That night, Peter, Bob, and Todd met Clarke in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel. They went to dinner and listened, rapt, to Clarke’s stories of growing up in the 1940s, reading pulp fiction, and his early days with the Planetary Society. He talked about how he came up with his ideas around geostationary communication satellites, and spoke passionately about what he saw as the unifying bond that came with a shared interest in space. He had met all of the major rocket scientists from space programs in the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. “They all have a common sense of space,” Clarke said, urging Peter, Bob, and Todd to think of students from all languages, nationalities, governments, and ideologies coming together over a shared love of space. “Focus on young people,” he said.
He used a line the group loved: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Toward the end of dinner, Peter said, “If you don’t mind, can we call you ‘Uncle Arthur’?”
The answer was yes, and soon Uncle Arthur, the prophet of the space age, had signed on to become an adviser to SEDS.
—
Back in the Man Vehicle Lab at MIT, working with Professor Chuck Oman, Peter affixed adhesive electrode patches to the face of a man he considered royalty—Byron Lichtenberg, test pilot, Vietnam fighter pilot, MIT-trained mechanical engineer and biomedical engineer, and new breed of space traveler.
Selected as a payload specialist in 1978, Lichtenberg was excited by the space shuttle’s promise of about forty-eight flights per year, doing science, satellite deployment, and building of the space station along the way. But it had already taken three times as long as planned to launch the shuttle, and the astronauts were expecting to do only a third as many flights. It was the winter of 1983, and Lichtenberg was scheduled to fly the shuttle’s first Spacelab mission by the end of the year.
One of the key areas of research for the payload specialists was space sickness, something the tough-guy astronauts of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—all former military test pilots—were loath to admit. Russia’s Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first astronaut, reported no sickness in space. Russia’s second cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, who orbited Earth seventeen times, earned the distinction of being the first man to vomit in space. Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart suffered space sickness on his first day in orbit. Buzz Aldrin told his friends in the MVL that he had felt extremely queasy returning to Earth.
With electrodes attached to his head and stomach, Lichtenberg was seated in Peter’s rotating chair. He was spun in one direction, moving his head in another until the symptoms of nausea began. Data were recorded and responses compared. Peter and his professors also spent a great deal of time in the chair.
There were interesting findings—once you feel the onset of nausea, full recovery takes thirty-five minutes—and new questions. Lichtenberg planned to wear a head-mounted accelerometer made by the folks in the MVL on his shuttle flight and keep detailed notes of how he felt. The work in the MVL was about “bringing space sickness out of the closet.” The director of the MVL, MIT professor Larry Young, was selected as principal investigator to perform a series of space experiments on the crew of Spacelab 1—the first pressurized laboratory to be carried into space on the shuttle.
When Peter and Lichtenberg weren’t doing experiments, they talked about the life of an astronaut. Peter wanted to know what was asked during the interview process. He wanted to be ready. Lichtenberg told him that the standard questions focused on the hardware and software of spaceflight, the training, and effects on his family life. But there were some obsure and silly questions, including: “What is the lifetime of an average red blood cell in your bloodstream?,” “Don’t you think we faked the Moon landings?,” and “We hear aliens visit the space shuttle and hop on board with you guys. What do you think?”
Peter peppered Lichtenberg with questions about the odds of becoming an astronaut. Lichtenberg said that NASA received about six thousand applicants for every round of hiring, and usually no more than ten of those applicants became astronauts—1 out of 600, less than .17 percent. Selections could be “random or political,” and the vetting process was brutal, he said.
It suddenly occurred to Peter to mention that he had a small tear in his retina, the result of getting kneed in the eye while playing football.
“Would that get me thrown off?” he asked.
“Yep,” Lichtenberg said. “That would get you tossed out of the selection process.”
Peter was stunned. He didn’t know what to say.
“NASA is risk averse.” Lichtenberg shrugged. “Heck, even if you are selected, it doesn’t mean you’ll actually fly. Most astronauts are called penguins: they have wings but don’t fly.”
Peter had dreamed of being an astronaut for as long as he could remember. What would he do if he couldn’t reach space through NASA? What would he try? What would he risk? Was it even possible to get to space without the government’s help?
Nearly three thousand miles away, in California’s high desert, an airplane designer disenchanted with government-run programs was asking similar questions. For now, he was working on a low-flying plane that he hoped would do laps around the best that the U.S. military had to offer. But like Peter, this dreamer in the desert had high hopes of one day reaching the stars.