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Rocket-pointing control was Western Hemisphere’s first major home-grown space technology; author talks about how that CU innovation spawned an aerospace titan

How did a company best known for its glass jars hit a comet 83 million miles away? The answer involves technical expertise, heroic dedication, an industrial giant’s push to modernize, Hitler’s V-2 rocket, speakers destined for a Hall & Oates summer concert tour, and the search for life’s origins.

That’s how the publisher describes the book, “From Jars to the Stars: How Ball Came to Build a Comet-Hunting Machine,” by award-winning science journalist Todd Neff, who presents an inside look at the backgrounds and motivations of the men and women who actually create the spacecraft on which the American space program rides.

A timeless story of science, engineering, politics and business strategy intertwining to bring success in the brutal business of space, “From Jars to the Stars” is a lively account of one of humankind’s great modern achievements. It is a story about people, foremost those on the Deep Impact mission, which smashed a spacecraft into the comet Tempel 1.

“From Jars to the Stars” explores the improbable beginnings of Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., which built the comet hunter, and the evolution of the American space agency that funded it.

The book begins with the story of a group of University of Colorado students in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s who built a “sun seeker” for the noses of sounding rockets studying the home star. The pathbreaking device sparked the creation and development of both Ball Aerospace and the University of Colorado’s formidable Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Recently, Neff answered Clint Talbott’s questions about the connections between CU and Ball, academe and private enterprise, the scientific spirit and the inspirational value of space research:

Question: The genesis of Ball Aerospace, your book makes plain, was in no small part due to the perseverance and scientific acumen of CU physicists and engineers whose “Rocket Project” literally set its sights on the sun. To what extent does this emphasize the complementary roles of academic research and private enterprise?

Their roles are wonderfully complementary. Academia drives economic innovation. Marvin Caruthers’ pioneering DNA-synthesis work in his CU lab led to his co-founding of biotech giant Amgen, among other companies. Google emerged from Stanford. Countless technologies born in academic labs are brought to market every year through corporate licensing agreements facilitated by organizations like CU’s Technology Transfer Office. Corporate laboratories at places such as IBM still do remarkable work. Government researchers at the likes of NIST in ��«����Ƶ invent amazing technologies, too. But I think we can thank university labs—so many modern versions of the Rocket Project—for our standard of living.

Q: Your book opens with a memorable scene involving a one-armed man sitting in a concrete house, waiting for repurposed German military hardware to “blast his work into the great beyond.” That man was Russell Nidey, then a CU graduate student and, later, a Ball Brothers Research employee. He is one of several memorable pioneering characters here. Their research ventures were by no means guaranteed to end up as they did. What do you think propelled them to keep working on sun-seeking devices?

I never used to think of space scientists and engineers as high-stakes gamblers, but that’s really what they are. They wager their careers, or at least years of work, on machines that a failed launch or a misbehaving sensor can wipe out. Space is just a very, very tough place to do business. Nidey and his colleagues watched four pointing controls crunch into the desert as utter failures before finally succeeding more than four years after they started. So what drives them?

I think some on the Rocket Project truly did see a beauty in the idea of spaceflight and discovery. But on the whole, they were motivated most by two fundamental forces. The first was a stubborn desire to solve problems, no matter how impossibly difficult, no matter who had failed to solve them before. The second was a commitment not to let their colleagues down. If someone was responsible for something, he just got it done, whatever it took. The fact that these were driven, achievement-oriented people as a group didn’t hurt, either. I think you’ll find the same dynamics at play in modern space missions.

Q: When the CU team’s biaxial pointing control achieved its first success, you write that a device “designed by students in a University of Colorado basement had become the first device ever to find its footing in the great vacuum above. Americans—not Russians, not Germans—had made a machine that could focus on a particular point in space from space, a basic requirement of nearly all spacecraft that would follow. The pointing control was the Western Hemisphere’s first major home-grown space technology.” That seems like a significant milestone, but was it recognized as such then?

Not in the least. The biaxial pointing control remained unknown beyond a tight community of solar researchers—the first space scientists—who recognized the genius of the Rocket Project’s creation. Maybe it was the name—I mean, “biaxial pointing control” wasn’t something Crispin Porter + Bogusky would have come up with. The name was, technically speaking, accurate, of course: The device did control pointing on horizontal and vertical axes.

But if Deep Impact had been called the “Dual-Module Comet Penetrator-Observer Mission,” I’m not sure how much press it would have gotten, either. Unlike, say, Burger King, for whom Crispin Porter devises ad campaigns, public “brand awareness” mattered little to the CU team. Their pointing controls won ardent supporters in Air Force and Navy research labs, whose scientists bought pointing controls as fast as the Rocket Project could make them. And look at what the Rocket Project’s clinically named, obscure technology created: Ball Aerospace and LASP, which anchor a ��«����Ƶ aerospace cluster employing thousands and worth probably a billion dollars a year.

Q: You note an interesting episode in which former CU President Ward Darley excoriates the Ball company for pirating CU scientific talent; Darley argued that actions like Ball’s would weaken academic departments, thereby depriving industry of needed training grounds. Based on your knowledge of Ball’s history and high-tech history generally, how would valid would you say Darley’s concerns were?

Ward Darley had every right to be peeved. He saw Ed Ball, the Ball Brothers president, swooping in from Muncie, Ind., to poach two of the top guys of a project bringing CU tens of thousands of dollars a year. But Darley failed to see that that such “poaching” would be good for everybody. Students do eventually graduate, and not a few from CU have gone on to work at Ball. The Rocket Project continued to flourish, becoming LASP as well as CASA, which emerged from LASP in 1985. Both now count among the world’s top academic space science and technology organizations.

When Russ Nidey and others left for the corporate world, bright, motivated successors quickly filled their shoes at CU. Ball grew. LASP and CASA grew. And now you have projects like Kepler, the exoplanet-hunting spacecraft launched in 2009, which Ball built and LASP operates. The divided corporate and academic teams that evolved from the Rocket Project are working together for everybody’s benefit.

Q: The subtitle of your book is “How Ball Came to Build a Comet-Hunting Machine.” You suggest that the story is relevant because of NASA’s $19 billion budget and because the Deep Impact story offers insight into where that money goes. You also suggest that space science drives interest in so-called STEM disciplines. That inspiration effect was certainly evident in the 60s and 70s; do you think it is as compelling for students now?

It’s hard to stoke the public imagination with tales of DNA sequencers, say, or new approaches to developing algal biofuels. We’re more than 35 years removed from the last Apollo moon landing, and it will be a decade or longer before humans fly beyond Earth orbit again. But space still has an allure that will, I think, always elude other sciences—even those that are unquestionably more pressing to the needs of humanity and the planet our profligacy increasingly stresses. Go outside on a clear night and look at the stars. The incomprehensible immensity of it all! Space is where science began, and it’s where the answers to our most profound questions—Where did we come from? Why are we here? Are we alone?—still lie.