Scientists say that when we gaze up at the stars we are actually looking at the past. But when Frank O’Brien of West Windsor looks at the sky he sees the future. O’Brien, a NASA Solar System Ambassador, will give a lecture at the Roebling Museum on Saturday, February 23, discussing, among many topics, the possibility of life on Mars.
Though that may seem like a far-fetched vision, O’Brien notes that when he was a toddler the idea of landing a man on the moon seemed like a dream. “I am a child of the Space Age,” O’Brien says. “I grew up with it, and it permeated all the media. I watched John Glenn fly when I was in second grade. It was a magical time — there was nothing we couldn’t do.”
He grew up in the early 1960s and by then traveling to the moon was one step away. O’Brien recalls that the space age was an incredible and bold epoch when the Apollo lunar missions were a national goal and technology converged to accomplish something that had previously only been a vision.
Three passions circled O’Brien’s education and formative years: space exploration, aviation, and computers. And all three came together when O’Brien began sifting through the Apollo Lunar Mission flight journals. How did young O’Brien get his hands on such data?
“A dear friend of the family and flying buddy of my father, John O’Neill, left the Air Force to join NASA. Hearing his stories about what he and NASA were doing was simply utterly amazing to me,” O’Brien says. When he was 13, he received a huge box for Christmas, full of all the technical manuals for Apollo. “When all the other kids were sneaking Playboys, I was reading about guidance systems. What a geek I had already become and it’s been downhill ever since,” he says.
O’Brien’s father was a career fighter pilot with the Air Force for more than 20 years. “I think Dad said we moved 19 times in 22 years. We moved all over the country and Canada, from the desert of Southern California to the Arctic Circle,” he says. The oldest of seven kids, O’Brien describes his mother in heroic terms: “Military wives are the strongest breed there is and my mom was a classic.”
He studied engineering at Rutgers and eventually found a love and calling for computer science. O’Brien says he worked at the Hill Center on Busch Campus during school. “Mostly to earn beer money,” he says, but at the time there were only three large computers in the basement of the buildings. As a student, he sat around for hours in the basement waiting for processing to be completed — as a result it was a very communal environment for students. “We spent time swapping experiences and learning together. These were the days when ‘hacker’ didn’t have the evil connotations that it does today. It was a huge badge of honor. Competition was fierce, if only for who could come up with the cleverest hack. Between school and work, I don’t think I saw the sun for my last two years at school,” he says.
While O’Brien was at Rutgers from 1974 to 1979, manned spaceflight was in a hiatus, similar to today. “There was a terrible recession in the aerospace industry, and the idea of working for NASA didn’t have the appeal it had in the 1960s,” he says. “As a result, that wasn’t my focus. Designing computers was on a huge upswing, and I wanted to grab that one by its tail. A computer? On your desk? What a concept! So, spaceflight moved to the background of my plans.”
In 1981 he started his 32-year career with Colgate Palmolive, where he currently works as a database administrator. He and his wife, Stacey, and stepson, Jeremy, have lived in the Windsor Ponds community for 11 years. West Windsor, he notes, is a fertile area for education, as well as family values and culture. “I’ve lived in other areas where the exact opposite is true, and it’s quite sad,” he says.
O’Brien’s formal involvement with the space history society began with joining the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal community in 1995 as a contributing editor. From this background, he wrote a highly regarded book on the Apollo Guidance Computer and is writing a second book on the Apollo spacecraft. So in his “spare time” he writes an engineering review of the space craft itself.
O’Brien’s talk at the Roebling Museum, “Roving on Mars: The Journey of Curiosity,” will describe the mission background, science objectives, and the challenges of landing a car-sized rover on Mars.
“Mars, very possibly was as full of life as the Earth was billions of years ago — very primitive, but life nonetheless,” O’Brien explains. “Mars had an atmosphere, lots of water, and many of the ingredients needed to make the ‘pre-biotic soup.’ The rovers were designed to follow the water, as this is the basis for life as we know it. And they found ancient traces of water in abundance. So conditions on Mars were far more favorable for life as we know it years ago, but the climate and environment changed.”
Could life still exist? “It’s hard to imagine life getting a foothold now, given the low temperatures, almost no organics in the soil, a thin atmosphere, and lots of radiation. But, perhaps life could have evolved there to survive it? That’s really tough to say and honestly, we need to go there to find out.”
To O’Brien NASA plays an important role. He explains that an abundance of products and processes in various industries were forced to be created to meet the challenges of many space projects. And many are now “the way the world does business.” He explains that “NASA didn’t invent the microchip, but they forced manufacturers to learn how to do it and make them incredibly reliable. And everyone has benefitted from those experiences.”
“Roving on Mars: The Journey of Curiosity,” the Roebling Museum, Florence. Saturday, February 23, 1 p.m. JPL Solar System Ambassador Frank O’Brien. Seating is limited, reserve space by calling 609-499-7200. www.roeblingmuseum.org
The Roebling Museum celebrates National Engineers Week (February 17-23) with an open house on February 23 in honor of the engineering genius and technological advances of the Roebling Company. The Museum is open for the day from 11-4 p.m. Engineers may tour the galleries, listen to the lecture and enjoy light refreshments. The lecture will be held at the museum in the Roma Bank Media Room. The day is free of charge for all engineers who bring a business card or for student engineers with a student I.D.
