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Since the age of five, Andy Fowler has been fascinated by stars. Being simple-minded back then, he liked how they shone in the night sky and had cool names.
It wasn’t until he was ten when he read they were just hot balls of gas. That kind of took away the attractive splendor. Still, the telescope he received for his birthday the subsequent year renewed an interest, at a time where light pollution had not yet affected stargazing and he had the life-altering moment of seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time.
“I’m gonna be an astronaut someday,” he’d confidently told his best friend, Cecilia Leavitt. They were twelve years old and it was school break. Being mid-Autumn, most students dressed in their long overcoats and scarves. Against the drab grey sky and matching brick building, Cecilia’s red hair was the only spot of color, her freckles more pronounced than usual against her brown skin.
He and Cecilia stood close to the doors of the school entrance, pretending to be unfazed like their upperclassmates who thought everything was childish.
What a poseur, Andy would think back fondly. If only he didn’t spend much time caring about what others thought.
“Yeah, right,” Cecilia had sniffed, who didn’t seem quite obsessed with what their classmates thought and sometimes skipped classes to smoke outside. “You wouldn’t last a day in space.”
That assumption was partly true. To become an astronaut, one had to have the physical endurance, specialized training and STEM education. Andy had asthma and hardly considered himself fit, detesting phys ed with a passion. Once he looked into the astronaut program, the idea of his gravity being off and suspended inches away to instant death sounded like a terrible scenario. So he settled on being a researcher instead, who helped send people to space.
The only place to do that? The National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
***
Even though Andy poured over the brochures and watched the orientation video, he was still mind-blown upon visiting the facility in-person. The Glenn Research Center was the stuff of dreams, everything gleaming and spacious, its futuristic displays and contraptions that would make any self-professed nerd faint from excitement. It made up for the treacherously humid weather, where relocating to Ohio was yet another minor nuisance to overcome in order to fulfil his dreams.
He ought to feel he earned his spot, recounting the sleepless nights to a breakdown in his third undergraduate year, believing he’d never attain a point of genius or contribute anything to his field.
His credentials were a pushing factor to getting him into NASA. He double majored with First-Class Standing in physics and math at Cambridge, took a gap year to travel with his supervisor, Dr. Rubin–a well-respected scholar in the astronomy field–to help with research and polish his curriculum vitae, and attended Caltech for graduate studies. His doctoral thesis was on pulsars and their differentiation in its magnetic field from magnetars, seeking to understand its cosmological constant affecting propagation of gravitational waves. The specificity was necessary not only for the growing studies in his field, but most masters and doctoral students focused on flashier topics like black holes, exoplanets and plasma pinch, he didn’t want to broach a similar topic.
“You’re, like, smart,” his friends used to say with a shake of their heads. It wasn’t a compliment, instead a semblance of disappointment, as if a scholar’s life would inevitably lead to isolation and researching tirelessly until he was feeble and babbling nonsense to a caregiver with no sense of satisfaction.
It was true Andy hardly had time for friends, family, or even romance. His education resulted in moving around, and he lost touch with many people. Caffeine was his closest companion, his bed was hardly ever slept in, student debt piling, and his fevered ramblings about celestial bodies put any normal, sane person to sleep.
Frustrated at how no one understood how fascinating the cosmos were other than his like-minded colleagues, who were equally elbow-deep into their theses and graduate projects, he felt more alone than ever.
He didn’t realize he was spiraling into depression until his mum had the sense to pull him out of university one day and take him to the nearest pub. It was a rather tired-looking taphouse with impressive acoustics. Most of the patrons were middle-aged or aging, dressed in casual clothes, a stark contrast to his Oxford shirt and trousers. The atmosphere weeped of normalcy and gave Andy a glimpse of how his life would’ve played out, not even trying but accepting things as they were. It happened to be karaoke night, and after some encouragement from his mum he sang Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” not expecting to feel elated. The crowd loved it, applauding not for his mind but a feeling transmitted through sound. For the first time, it was a real, human connection, and it sparked a wonder if he spent his past years for nought.
But what would it matter, if enjoying the simple pleasures in life still denied him the exploration of all of the world’s mysteries out there? He wanted to be among the names of legendary astronomers and innovators, a man of science dedicated to his craft who paved the way for future researchers. A man who had admirers and perhaps a few enemies, but played off his detachment as what was to be expected of an ambitious mind who didn’t suffer fools or tolerate flimsy, half-hearted debates that couldn’t even draw one’s own passion on the matter. He figured if one didn’t endure hardships or overwork, then they could never achieve greatness. He would trade his entire soul if it meant producing a great body of work that would live on.
He returned to his studies, a heavy cloud weighing over him that made him feel he was losing his own identity. The worst outcome would be one of those scholars who never amounted to anything, bitter about his life and taking it once seeing there was nothing left. To be a sob story about how mentally taxing his studies were, he was too young to die, and people waxing their condolences as his ashes were scattered along the seaside.
In last-minute desperation, he tried five grams of psilocybin mushrooms with his roommate, William Newton, convinced of their ability to give something transcending, an aha moment like for Carl Sagan and John C. Lilly. All the geniuses who touted drugs must have discovered the secret to generating novel thoughts in their fields. Instead, the room split into colors, he had the urge to laugh at everything, tripped over his knapsack, and woke up on the floor.
“You’ve got to be practical, mate,” Will had said when Andy complained for the hundredth time he wasn’t doing anything with his life. Bespeckled and irritatingly good-looking, William was popular among their undergraduate cohort and would always come back to the dorms smelling of smoke and sex. Unlike Andy, Will didn’t see a point in exhausting over research, confiding that his parents could secure him a job at a planetarium or a professorship at an Ivy League school. Andy was both jealous and wistful, he himself born to a mother and a deadbeat father in an industrial English town, where the only networking he had through parentage was with the knitting guild. “Anyhow, we Cambridge men have the whole world in our hands. You just mention it, and you’ll have them all tripping over themselves in no time.”
Andy resisted making any argument. Cambridge used to carry prestige, but it got trickled down by accusations of elitism and being an old boys’ club. One look, and they’d judge him as a trust fund kid who was lazy and entitled rather than on merit. Besides, he heard how universities and public schools were suffering from cutbacks, many didn’t even see a point in furthering their degrees when they could become content creators or self-made entrepreneurs. It was almost a joke how someone with a doctorate could end up working at a fast-food chain, all thanks to consumer culture and corporations who didn’t care about science or the world around them. If he—God forbid—became an introductory physics professor, all of his time would’ve been wasted. NASA was the only goal, and he would make sure it would become a reality if it was the last thing he would do.
Now he begrudgingly admitted the wrongness in mindset. Science could try to understand the universe’s mysteries, but from a stranger it’d look like long, complicated mathematical equations and jargon-heavy proposals without coming up with tangible results. Why wait for something when entertainment could offer instant gratification? Why learn about the cosmos if everyone would eventually fade away like the stars?
His thoughts returned to the present as he saw a woman stride forward. Her bronze skin glowed as light passed through the glass windows at the right time. She almost seemed angelic with her white pantsuit and flowing dark hair.
“Mr. Fowler? I’m Mrs. Khare, one of the research electronic engineers.” She gave a firm handshake. “I’ve heard you worked at the Smithsonian Observatory. What made you decide to come here, if you don't mind me asking?”
“It's NASA,” Andy gave a smile. “It's been my dream since I was a kid.”