In this week’s episode of Working, Slate’s Jacob Brogan talks to NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan about her work overseeing research projects at NASA. Stofan shares some of NASA’s newer initiatives—from teaching scientists to relay science-loaded information to general audiences to working with the private sector, as well as what it’s like to add diversity to NASA. Brogan and Stofan also talk about life on Mars and the ever-existential question, “Are we really alone?”
And in this episode’s Slate Plus bonus segment, Stofan tells Working about what other planet she would visit and why.
Jacob Brogan: Welcome to Working, Slate’s podcast about what people do all day. I’m Jacob Brogan, and I write about technology and culture for Slate. This week we spoke to Ellen Stofan, the chief scientist of NASA. By training, Dr. Stofan is a planetary geologist who has studied volcanoes both here on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. In her current role she helps coordinate scientific projects of all kinds, which means she has to keep up with a dizzying array of recent research topics. She also discussed how she helps communicate NASA’s work to students, and to the public at large, before addressing the question on all of our minds: Are we really alone?
And in a Slate Plus Extra, Ellen Stofan tells us about why she loves Titan, a moon of Saturn that is much like Earth in certain ways and profoundly alien in other.
Who are you, and what do you do?
Ellen Stofan: My name is Ellen Stofan, and I’m the chief scientist of NASA.
Brogan: So, what does that mean? What does the chief scientist at NASA do?
Stofan: Well, if you look at my official job description, I provide science advice to the NASA administrator about all of the science that we do at NASA—from studying the sun, studying the solar system, the universe, our favorite planet, the Earth, and trying to get humans ready to move out beyond low Earth orbit, out into the solar system.
Brogan: How did you come to hold the position?
Stofan: I’m a planetary geologist, so I studied volcanoes across the solar system. And my whole career has been working on different NASA missions, from missions that study the Earth, Venus, Mars. In my spare time, I still study volcanoes here on the Earth. I try to get out in the field and do some volcano work. I just published a paper on some volcanoes on Venus. And I’m still doing a little bit of work on Titan.
Brogan: Can you, to the extent that there is such a thing, walk us through a typical day?
Stofan: You know, my days are wonderfully varied, which is why I love my job so much. So, I might start out my day like I did today, having a meeting about how do we get humans beyond low Earth orbit, beyond the space station, out to the vicinity of the moon and to Mars in the 2030s, which is a goal of the president.
So we take that problem apart piece by piece, because obviously this is a huge challenge on how we do this. I might have a meeting that’s one of my least favorite meetings, which is a budget meeting, where we say, OK, what’s our budget for this year, what is the planning budget for next year? How can we put a budget together that allows us to accomplish our strategic goals? From that, I might go to a briefing on some latest research we’re doing on human health, on the International Space Station, whether it’s talking about the twin study, where we just had Scott Kelly up on the space station for a year. And in the meantime we had his brother, Mark Kelly, here on the ground. And we were actually looking at a number of different areas of how long duration space flight affects humans down to that genetic level.
Then I might go to a briefing on a subject I’m very passionate about, which is diversity and inclusion, not just at NASA, but also the workforce in general. If we’re not tapping into all of our population—girls, African Americans, Hispanic Americans—we’re not getting the full force of the power of people to solve the tough problems we have, whether it’s getting humans to Mars or climate change.
And then I might end up my day going to a meeting, for example, on the oceans or the Arctic where I meet with my counterparts from all the different federal agencies who, for example, might be involved in Arctic research to say how are we across the federal government really using the federal taxpayer dollars the best way we can to get the research done to benefit the people who live in the Arctic, to better understand the rapid pace of climate change that we see in the Arctic.
Brogan: So, you advise NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. How much time do you spend working with him directly?
Stofan: I usually meet with him three or four times a week in meetings where he might be being briefed on a scientific subject, where I might sit down with him and go over some of the issues that I’m dealing with. You know, what’s some great science that I think he’d be excited to learn about, as well as some of the challenges that we’re encountering on trying to get the mission of the agency accomplished.
Brogan: So your responsibility then is at least partially about kind of focusing attention and helping the agency think about priorities and directions that it might push further research?
Stofan: Right. We have a directorate where we are managing our science mission, so they’re worried about the day-to-day. Are our science missions on schedule and on budget, and are we going to launch them on time? And are they operating? And are we getting the data out to the investigators? My job is to really pull up to the 30,000-foot level and say, “Where are we going? What are we doing? Are there roadblocks to us getting the science done? How can we better look across the federal government to work with other agencies to get our work done? How can we reach out to our international partners?” to really move this whole science and exploration enterprise forward.
Brogan: What are those larger conversations look like? How do you interact with other space agencies, for example?
Stofan: You know, we work with our partners every day on the International Space Station. Some people have suggested it should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because it’s an amazing thing that you’ve had these nations cooperating in space who don’t always necessarily totally get along on the ground, and accomplishing so much scientifically, really moving human space flight forward in this international collaborative way. And we want that to continue at the ISS, and then as we move humans beyond.
Almost every science mission that we do now has some aspect of international partnership. We have instruments on their missions, whether it’s the Japanese space agency, you know, the German space agency, the European Space Agency. We collaborate very closely with Russia on the International Space Station. That’s the way the world works now. It’s an international global space community, and it’s a benefit to everybody.
Brogan: What about private industry? Do you have any interactions with private groups that are looking to do space travel or space flight?
Stofan: NASA has a very strong commitment to saying if there is something that NASA does that the private sector can do better, let’s have them do it so we can focus on our resources where we get the most benefit.
So, a couple years ago we started launching cargo to the International Space Station through two companies: Orbital ATK and SpaceX. We’ve now added another company, Sierra Nevada, to that. In about a year and a half, two years, we will start launching crew to the International Space Station by Boeing and SpaceX.
We just signed a cooperative agreement with SpaceX for a mission they want to send to Mars, where they want to land one of their dragon capsules—they’re calling it Red Dragon—on the surface of Mars. So, we want to partner with the commercial sector wherever we can to really leverage getting done what we want to get done. We want to see humans accomplish a lot in low Earth orbit until the mid-2020s. Then we want to go beyond. Where can we partner best with the commercial sector to benefit the economy, to benefit science, to benefit humanity?
Brogan: Is there any internal resistance to this work with private organizations and groups?
Stofan: You know, I think when we started out down this path, for NASA, it was a culture change, because when you think about things like our astronauts like letting our astronauts be launched by somebody else, letting our cargo, but I think we’ve seen a real sea change at the agency where everybody is like, “Yeah, let’s partner with these commercial guys because together, we’ll actually move this exploration enterprise forward.” It’s a very different scenario than in the ’60s, when we were trying to get humans to the moon. In that case, basically 100 percent U.S. government funded. Only the U.S. going to the moon. Getting humans to Mars, we need everybody. We need the private sector. We need our international partners. We need anybody who wants to help. This is hard. It’s really hard. NASA can’t do it by itself, so we’re ready and willing to partner.
Brogan: I think I’ve read that dozens if not hundreds of experiments are performed on the ISS every year. How do you coordinate all of the data that comes back from that?
Stofan: You know, on a day to day basis, we have a whole team down at the Johnson Space Center who really coordinates—you’ve got investigators from everything by people collecting samples, for example, from humans, whether it’s blood or doing measurements on their eyes, to understand the effects of microgravity. We’ve got experiments on combustion, on materials, growing protein crystals, doing research for pharmaceuticals on new technologies, like a 3D printer. So, it’s a logistics issue of how do you get all that research done, how do you best use the International Space Station crew? So, we have a great team down in Houston that really works on what are the priorities, how do we get this done. You know, you’ve got the crew. They’ve only got so much time. How do we work that out? So, it’s an elaborate process that they’ve really honed and works really well.
Brogan: You’ve got researchers working on a huge variety of highly specific issues in highly specific fields. You have your own background, and presumably a massive knowledge base that goes beyond that. But how do you personally negotiate the different disciplinary boundaries that inform the kinds of science that NASA conducts?
Stofan: When we look at, you know, what are we going to do for the next five years, what are we going to do for the next ten years, we turn to the National Academy of Sciences. And they do what are called decadal surveys. So, about every eight years they bring the science community together and say, you know, what are the next goals in astrophysics? What are the next goals in microgravity science, all that work we do on the International Space Station? Earth science? Planetary science? Studying the sun?
And the science communities are the ones who set the vision for where/what are the measurements that need to be made? What kind of missions could NASA be doing? We take the results of those decadal surveys and say, “OK, we’ve got now this much money in our budget, and how do we fit those two together?” So we really leave it to the community, because they’re really the ones who know best where’s the science going, where’s the cutting edge, what’s that next measurement you could make that would take the science to a new level?
We have a phrase—we say always a decadal quality science. Not just necessarily an incremental measurement that will help you know a little more, but is it going to move the science to a new level? And that’s where we get the idea for things like our James Webb Space Telescope that’s going to launch in two years. That’s an infrared telescope. It’s going to be able to look deeper in space, which is basically deeper in time to really close to the time of the Big Bang and say what did the universe look like at that point. How can we learn more about the processes that occurred in the very early universe that led all the way to us? So, that kind of science really comes from the National Academy.
Brogan: Do you ever find yourself struggling to keep up with science that’s conducted at NASA?
Stofan: You know, I stay in pretty close contact trying to follow all of the science that we’re doing. But I tell you, it really does blow me away, the quality of science, how we’re moving science forward in so many different areas, whether it’s understanding how does the sun work, how do these explosions that take place on the surface of the sun and send particles streaming towards the earth that could disrupt communications. Kepler, our spacecraft that’s discovered almost 5,000 candidate planets over the last four years.
You know, the advantage of my job is I can actually pick up the phone, or more likely send an email, or go visit these people and say, “Tell me what you’re doing.” It’s fascinating. It’s energizing. It’s just truly cutting-edge science. And I get to hear about it every day.
Brogan: When there’s a new discovery, what’s your first step then for making sure that you understand it fully and grasp its importance?
Stofan: You know, a lot of the times I try to go right to the person who is doing the work. For example, when we were getting the data back from the New Horizons mission at Pluto, you know, I could just email Alan, who is the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, and say, “What do you got Alan?” And he’d send us some images slightly before they got released, and so we got to see exactly what was happening. And, of course, for me as a planetary scientist, it’s really hard not to start doing science on the images. And I’m like, well, what about this. And I’m like, OK, I need to leave that to the team who is much better equipped to figure that out. But I was sort of doing instant analysis on the images because they’re so beautiful and so interesting. Usually, again, I try to go right to the person who is doing the research and say, you know, what are you doing? Or I go and I pull out the journal article and read it.
Brogan: So how much time do you spend reading papers and journal articles and such?
Stofan: Oh gosh. It really varies, because I usually get into work around 7. And I’m here till about 5. And some days I’m literally in half-hour meetings all day, without a break. And so those days, which was kind of a little bit of yesterday, I don’t have much time. On a day like today, I actually have a couple blocks. And so I have a pile of articles and journals and stuff I’m supposed to read. And that’s sitting there. And I try to whittle that down. And the more I try to whittle it down with these timeslots I get, the more then it grows back up again. So, trying to stay on top of that is probably the hardest thing. And lately when I get on an airplane, I’m just like a zombie. And so I have this idea I’m going to get all this work done on airplanes, and then I don’t.
Brogan: You’ve been listening to Dr. Ellen Stofan, Chief Scientist at NASA. In a minute, Dr. Stofan tells us how she makes jargon-heavy, complex scientific discourse accessible to the public at large.
How much time do you spend interacting with the public?
Stofan: You know, it’s a big goal of mine to try to interact with the public as much as possible, because the American taxpayers are the ones who let us do what we do. And I want them to participate in the wonder of exploration, the joy of exploration, why we’re exploring. So, I try to get into a classroom at least once a month, and I try to get out to a community group about once a month, at least. And then I end up, especially if I’m doing foreign travel, I’m giving maybe eight, nine talks in a week.
I really try to reach out to nontraditional audiences. About two weeks ago, I did an event celebrating the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, talking about, first of all, the planet Uranus. All of its moons are named after Shakespearean characters. But what I love about Shakespeare is the timelessness of Shakespeare, and also the fact that great storytelling is something we need to do better in science, because science has drama. It has characters. It has plots. You know, galaxies are born, they evolve, they die, they get ripped apart when they collide with other galaxies. You know, these are stories. And as a scientific community, we need to learn how to tell them better, to bring the public along with us into the wonder and fun of what we do. I always tell kids the best-kept secrets scientists always have is that science is actually really fun.
Brogan: So much of the research that’s done at NASA seems like is very granular, though. It’s about the effects of microgravity on someone’s pupils, or something like this. How do you tell a story about that?
Stofan: You know, I love to tell that story by the fact that whoever thought that our bodies, given the fact that we evolved on the surface of this very specific planet, around this star, in this solar system that sits on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, all of that has caused our bodies to function exactly the way they do. We are optimized to live on the surface of this planet—from the way our hearts pump, to the way our immune system works, to the way fluids sort themselves out in our body. You take us out of that environment, and your body goes, “Wait a minute, what the heck?” The fluid starts migrating toward your head and it puts pressure on your eyeballs. And your heart is trying to pump, but now there’s no gravity. And as I always like to convince myself, every time we move here on the Earth, we’re actually exercising. So maybe I don’t have to go to the gym today, you know, because every time we stand up, we’re fighting the force of gravity. You get us in space and our body is like, “Cool. Now I get to float. I don’t have to do anything.” But then your bones start losing density. Your muscles start wasting.
So, if we want to stay healthy, we have to develop all of these counter measures. Like, for example, the astronauts exercise about an hour and a half every day. And if they do that, they come back with about the same muscle strength and bone density as they leave with. So, instead of being able to wait for another 10 million years of evolution for us to adapt through evolution to microgravity, we’re having to figure out in 10 years how do we keep humans healthy in this environment? How do we counteract the fact that the human body just has not evolved to be anywhere but on this planet?
Brogan: When you’re going to speak about these kind of issues to an audience of nonscientists—to high schoolers or college students—how do you figure out what you want to talk about and what approach you want to take?
Stofan: You know, what I try to do is to think about the fact that all of us have really basic questions. Are we alone? So I don’t talk about astrobiology and how DNA and RNA and cells evolved and the conditions, whether they’re very specific to whether life could evolve.
I go back to that fundamental question: Are we alone? Which humans have wondered about I think ever since there’s been a human looking up at the night sky and saying, “Are we all there is?”
And I think if you take it back to those really basic questions that everybody has, and then you talk about it using words they know, every field—whether it’s baseball, or astrophysics, or politics, or economics—you develop words and ways of talking and phrases. You know, my husband is from the business community and he talks about stuff and I’m like what the heck are you saying. And then people treat scientists the same way because we surround ourselves in words that are not accessible. And so one of the things I really try to do when I talk to nonscientific audiences is leave my science terms at home. And it’s not dumbing it down. It’s saying, you know, instead of talking about tectonics, I’m going to talk about the forces that move the surface of a planet around and make it smash together into mountains, or pull apart and form canyons. So you have to think, What words can I use that will allow them to understand the principle I’m talking about? but not use a term that they’ve never heard before.
Brogan: Does that willingness to leave the jargon behind shape the ways that you communicate things here at NASA as well? Or is that mostly just about dealing with the public?
Stofan: No, I think it’s how we communicate with each other. Because, you know, we love acronyms at NASA. As soon as we can, we’ll slap something into an acronym. And I think it harms us even when we communicate with each other, because you assume everybody is knowing what you’re talking about. And, frankly, so many of us are so diving down to a very minute level that we forget when we’re in a room with 30 people that a lot of them aren’t going to know what we’re talking about.
And so I actually have really promoted a science communication course at NASA for scientists and engineers, and it’s not just to benefit how we talk when we go outside of the agency, but it’s also to think about how am I communicating my message inside the agency. Am I remembering to tell people why this is important? Which is one of the things I think we leave out the most frequently. You want to get right to the what, especially here at NASA. You know, we’re a bunch of engineers. Let’s get to the how. Let’s get to the what. Step back. Remind people of the why.
Brogan: We’ve been talking a lot about your work on a day-to-day level, but when we’re talking about mission to other planets, or even about looking through a telescope back toward the origins of the universe itself, we’re talking about massing time scales, both for the projects and for the kind of things you’re studying. How do you think about the kind of longue durée of interplanetary science?
Stofan: You know, time is something that I’m actually particularly fascinated by because as a geologist I always have a really hard time with time scales. Because in geology, if you say something is really rapid, that means like hundreds of thousands to millions of years. So, geologists have a really warped sense of time. And that’s frankly one of the reasons why climate change is something that’s so alarming to earth scientists, because we’re used to seeing the pace of change take place not over decades, not over thousands of years, but tens, hundreds, thousands of years, millions of years. So, when you see something like the Arctic changing so rapidly over these five, 10-year time scales, it’s extremely alarming.
The other aspect of time is that NASA is basically a 10-, 20-, 30-year agency living in a one-to-two-year town. Because, you know, the way the government works is we’re like, “What’s the budget this year? What’s the budget next year? What is the budget two years from now?” And that’s the framework that we’re working in, trying to make incremental progress year by year, working with our stakeholders, the president, the Congress, and saying, “Where are we going?”
But to me, NASA is really the keeper of the future. Where are we going? What are our technology investments that will move humans to Mars? And so you really have to start thinking about if we’re talking about getting humans to Mars, which is not going to happen till the 2030s, how do you keep your stakeholders engaged—whether they’re the Congress, or whether they’re the American public? And how do you say we’re making real progress so that you feel like you’re part of the journey. You understand where we’re going. You understand why. You know, we think there’s a good chance that life evolved on Mars. We’re going to Mars with humans because we want to find signs of that life. Understand it. Try to figure out how to use that information to help life here on Earth.
When you spend about a $1 at NASA, you get about $4 return to the U.S. economy. So, we’re an engine for economic good, for scientific good. And so how do you work on these time scales of trying to accomplish a lot over a long time period, and yet keep going on a year-to-year basis? And it’s an interesting process.
Brogan: So, the so-called golden age of human space flight was often described as a space race. Are we still in a race? Has it changed?
Stofan: I think it has fundamentally changed. Obviously at the time of Apollo, you know, we were going to the moon for geopolitical reasons, not for scientific reasons. I see sending humans to Mars as a very different endeavor. It’s about partnerships. It’s about economic development. It’s about setting a tough goal. When you do that, you’re going to invest in technologies. You’re going to see big breakthroughs. And to me, as a scientist, fundamentally it’s about science. You know, again, it goes back to that are we alone question.
Mars is our best place to go to really say, “Are we all there is in this solar system, or did life evolve somewhere else?” Then once we have that information, we can start really thinking about all of these planets we’re now discovering. Just about every star you see in the night sky has a planetary system around it. How many of those are inhabited? We need to understand the probability of life in our own solar system as we start thinking about the probability of life in other solar systems.
Brogan: Do you think we are alone?
Stofan: I think if you look at the scientific evidence, the fact that life evolved so rapidly here on Earth, almost as soon as conditions kind of settled down here on the Earth, life evolved. So, if you think, OK, the conditions on Mars at that point in time weren’t all that different—why wouldn’t life have evolved there? The oceans under the crust of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, liquid water oceans, stable environment, all the same building blocks of life that led to life here on Earth are present in Europa’s oceans. Why shouldn’t we have life there? I think the conditions in which life could evolve, the rapidity with which it happened here on the Earth tell us that it’s extremely unlikely that we are alone. Complex life, like us, that’s harder, because you need stability of environmental conditions over a long period of time. You need enough environment stress to have species evolve. And I think that’s a tougher go to get complex life.
Brogan: Thank you so much for talking to us.
Stofan: Sure.
Brogan: Thanks for listening to this episode of Working. I’m Jacob Brogan. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Our email address is working@slate.com. You can listen to all six seasons at slate.com/working.
This episode was produced by the stellar Mickey Capper. Our executive producer is Steve Lickteig. And the chief content officer of the Panoply Network is Andy Bowers.
* * *
In this Slate Plus extra, Ellen Stofan tell us about why she loves Titan, a moon of Saturn that is much like Earth in certain ways, and profoundly alien in others. If you could visit one planet other than Earth, where would you go?
Stofan: If I could visit one planet other than the Earth, you know, I would have to say Titan, which is this moon of Saturn. You know, its 800 million miles away from the Earth, and yet it’s the only place in the solar system where it rains. There are seas and rivers. But those seas and rivers and that rain is not water. It’s actually liquid methane and ethane, so basically liquid gasoline, because it’s hundreds of degrees below zero centigrade on the surface. So, extremely cold, but yet you have this cycle that’s just like our water cycle here on the Earth. You know, precipitation, evaporation, the whole 9 yards, but different fluid. So, what is that like? What would it be like to stand on the edge of a sea on Titan? Is there anything potentially living in that sea? Very cold temperatures, no water, which we think is critical to life, but maybe everything we understand about life based on the Earth, maybe we need to broaden our horizons. So, to me, Titan would be the place to go. So Earthlike, and yet so alien.
Brogan: I understand you had at one point planned a possible mission to there. Can you tell us a little about that?
Stofan: Yeah. So we—I’m a member of the Cassini radar team. So, Cassini is a spacecraft that’s been around in orbit around Saturn since 2003. The mission will actually end next year. And Cassini has really told us so much about Saturn, about Saturn’s moons, many each of which is fascinating and has its own story. But we were thinking what would be a good follow-on mission to Cassini. And we were really fascinated by these seas on Titan, because if you think here you have this liquid that’s been sitting there for at least tens of thousands of years, maybe longer, it’s, again, an organic liquid. Could reactions have taken place that would even lead towards life? What are the processes? How does that sea interact with its atmosphere? How are waves generated? Processes we can only study here on the Earth, we could go to Titan and study.
So, we proposed sending a small boat basically, almost more like buoy to go and float on the sea, measure what it was made of, take pictures, understand kind of the weather and how that sea was interacting with the atmosphere.
We got pretty far in the NASA process. And then we lost to a mission that’s going to Mars in 2018 that’s going to measure basically Mars-quakes. So, how is Mars shaking? And how can we use that information to understand the inside of Mars, the interior structure of Mars. So, at some point we’re going to get to that Titan sea, but it’s going to take us a little bit longer.
