Content area
Full Text
When M.G. Lord set out to write about NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., she had no idea that it would turn into the story of her life. It was the late 1990s, and Lord, a former Newsday editorial cartoonist and author of "Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll," wanted to focus on a single mission: to explore rocket science and the culture of JPL. "I started out thinking I could write about one project," she recalls on a dreary winter morning in a restaurant near her Los Angeles home. "I thought I would write about the Galileo Project that was happening in 1996. It had just entered orbit around Jupiter, and I thought I could write about the team, with each member serving as an emblem of something I wanted to talk about."
The more she wrote, however, the more Lord came face-to-face with an unlikely specter - her father, Charles Carroll Lord, a Northrop engineer who in the 1960s had worked at JPL designing mechanical devices for the Mariner 69 mission to Mars. "What I found," Lord says, "was that the memoir component was overpowering." Seven years later, the result is "Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science" (Walker, $24), a blend of memoir, science writing, history and reportage that tells the story of JPL from the inside out.
Seven years might seem...