Daring Mighty Things with Charles Elachi

What’s the key to greatness? To dare mighty things.

That’s what Charles Elachi, the former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told a rapt audience at The Huntington last month while in conversation with Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence. The filled-to-capacity event was the fall installment of “Why It Matters,” a series of discussions between Lawrence and distinguished guests about the enduring relevance of the arts and humanities.

“For this particular program in our series,” Lawrence said, “the ‘It’ … is the exploration of space—why it matters and how it fuels both our knowledge and our imaginations.”

Lawrence and Elachi’s conversation, marked by moments of wonder and humor, spanned a range of topics, from the importance of taking risks to environmental stewardship and the mutually enriching interactions among the arts, humanities, and sciences. The program evoked the themes of The Huntington’s two exhibitions for the 2024 Getty initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Like Elachi and Lawrence’s dialogue, the exhibitions demonstrate the beneficial intersections of scientific and artistic perspectives.

Elachi—a Caltech professor emeritus of electrical engineering and planetary science and a member of The Huntington’s Board of Governors—led JPL from 2001 to 2016, ushering in what has been recognized as a golden age of robotic space exploration. During Elachi’s tenure as director, JPL launched 24 missions, including three famous rovers to Mars: in 2004, the twins Spirit and Opportunity, which were expected to survive for 90 days but remained operational for six and 14 years, respectively; and, in 2012, Curiosity, which continues to explore the red planet to this day.

When answering Lawrence’s questions about how JPL ensures quality control in long-term and complex projects, Elachi emphasized the importance of fostering a culture that encourages employees to push boundaries and learn from mistakes, which is essential to their success.

Referencing a favorite quote by President Theodore Roosevelt, Elachi said, “It’s far better to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure,” than to live in the “twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” He added: “You do the same thing in music. You do the same thing in any exploration. Otherwise, you don’t advance.”

But Elachi also emphasized the need to do “a lot of design, a lot of testing” to mitigate risks.

Elachi screened a 2021 NASA video of a jetpack lowering the SUV-sized Perseverance rover with a sky crane to the dusty surface of Mars and narrated the extraordinary challenges involved in such an intricate maneuver. The aeroshell containing the rover, he explained, enters the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour. “That’s like going from here to San Francisco in less than two minutes. We have five to seven minutes to slow down and land softly on the surface. We call it the ‘seven minutes of terror.’ Hundreds of events have to happen … correctly to land safely.”

Lawrence drew a connection between that recent Mars mission and the renowned Pasadena author Octavia E. Butler, whose bold imagination redefined science fiction. “Where [Perseverance] landed is now called the Octavia E. Butler Landing,” Lawrence noted, describing the late author as “an amazing gender- and genre-bending writer.” Over the past eight years, Butler’s literary archive has been the most frequently requested collection at The Huntington.

Two weeks after the landing, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of science, said that there was “no better person” to mark the landing site than Butler. “Her guiding principle, ‘When using science, do so accurately,’ is what the science team at NASA is all about. Her work continues to inspire today’s scientists and engineers across the globe—all in the name of a bolder, more equitable future for all,” Zurbuchen said.

On the same Mars mission, the helicopter Ingenuity, a tiny stowaway under the Perseverance rover, became the first aircraft to achieve “powered, controlled flight on another planet,” according to NASA. Elachi described this feat as a “Wright brothers’ moment.” Footage of Ingenuity, zipping like a hummingbird across the screen, elicited audible delight from the audience. That prompted Elachi to talk about Leonardo.

“Not Leonardo DiCaprio,” Elachi quipped. “I like to include Leonardo [da Vinci] because he was a perfect example of somebody who crossed between science and technology and art.”

Juxtaposed on the screen were a photo of Ingenuity and a similar-looking device, known as an aerial screw, drawn by da Vinci more than five centuries ago. On Elachi’s next two slides, da Vinci’s drawings of a tank-like vehicle for attacking fortresses eerily resembled Perseverance in its aeroshell. Perseverance looks “like it was copied from him,” Elachi said. But “it wasn’t,” Lawrence marveled.

Elachi recalled a memorable invitation to the Royal Library of Turin in Italy, where he had the rare opportunity to leaf through da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds. The library later digitized the codex, and JPL attached a microchip with the digital files to the Curiosity rover, where it will remain on Mars for thousands of years, he explained.

“We ought to scan some of the documents at The Huntington,” Elachi suggested to Lawrence, “and put that chip on the [next] lander … so we can say The Huntington has a branch on another planet.”

Bridging the past and future, Lawrence asked what lessons NASA’s discoveries on Mars and other planets might offer about environmental stewardship of our own planet.

“We believe that Mars and Earth formed roughly at the same time,” Elachi said. “At the beginning, their environments were very similar. But then, over billions of years … somehow Mars got colder faster than Earth, and the water either froze or the molecules were dissociated and the hydrogen evaporated. If Mars started like Earth, could life have evolved on it? That’s our key focus. Now, in addition to that, we have learned a lot about the environment on Mars, how the climate has changed over billions of years. Equally interesting is Venus, which is … really hot because it has a lot of carbon dioxide. So, if we don’t watch how much carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere, we might become like Venus, where life is not sustainable.” Lawrence added, “It’s a cautionary tale.”

Lawrence also asked Elachi to discuss the relationship of art to space exploration and the JPL program he created to recruit artists, known today as The Studio at JPL.

Elachi recalled a meeting more than 15 years ago with Dan Goods, a graduate from the ArtCenter in Pasadena, to discuss how art could play a role in helping to communicate JPL’s missions to the public. Today, Dan Goods leads The Studio, a group of roughly a dozen people producing such engaging works as retro-style travel posters to planets both inside and outside our solar system.

The Studio’s work also includes Orbit Pavilion, an aluminum sculpture shaped like a nautilus shell, that was exhibited on The Huntington’s Celebration Lawn in 2016–21. Visitors could enter the installation and listen to sounds representing the movements of the International Space Station and 19 Earth science satellites as they orbited overhead, providing critical information about global climate and other “vital signs” of the planet.

Underscoring the timeliness of this “Why It Matters” event was the imminent launch of JPL’s Europa Clipper, the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission. Europa, the fourth largest moon of Jupiter, is roughly the size of the Earth’s moon. The spacecraft, launched on Oct. 14, will travel 1.8 billion miles and arrive at Jupiter in April 2030.

“In the future,” Elachi said, “we can [send] a lander, drill our way through the ice, and put a submarine” in the ocean underneath to search for signs of life.

Europa Clipper’s vault plate is engraved with an original poem by Ada Limón, the 24th poet laureate of the United States. Titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” the work addresses humankind’s yearning to find life elsewhere while also acknowledging the importance of our interior lives here on our home planet.

Lawrence delivered a moving reading of the poem, which concludes with the following lines:

                                … we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

Harnessing the power of the imagination, scientists and artists strive to understand the universe in their own ways but with a similar motivation—a deeply human desire to make new connections and discoveries.

Watch a video of the “Why It Matters” event in its entirety.

Kevin Durkin is the managing editor in the Office of Communications and Marketing and the editor of Verso.