Dan’s Pick: A Review of Astro Turf

by Dan Plumeau

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that M. G. Lord’s memoir/history lesson, Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science (Walker & Company, 2005), is a breezy, well-researched and enjoyable summer read.  This insightful collection of stories illuminate the evolution of gender roles in the exclusive world of what would become Pasadena, California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), while describing parallel events in the author’s family life.

Ms. Lord, acclaimed social critic and author of the well-received Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, opens this work with a humorous slice-of-life view of a somewhat uncomfortable relaxation therapy session at JPL, attended by reluctant staff members.  This event occurs in 1997, at the time of JPL’s triumphant success with the Mars Pathfinder rover mission.   Lord then jumps back in time, to the 1930s, revealing the genesis of her father’s personal belief systems and his involvement with early experimentations in rocket-propelled flight.  As the book hop-scotches from pre-Cold War, low-tech fumbling to present-day miracles of space fight, we are exposed to numerous fascinating and often idiosyncratic individuals. For instance, there is Frank Malina, the largely uncredited pioneer, who would define the scope of the JPL and whose dalliance with Communism would force his exile to France, where he would become a respected artist. 

We are simultaneously given an intimate portrait of Ms. Lord as a young woman in a family where her mother is stricken with cancer and her father, ever distant and career-oriented, "remained a silent, archetypal, mid-century male."  The author’s struggle to reconcile her love for her father and her simultaneous resentment of his behaviors provide an effective and often moving counterpoint to the descriptions of the JPL’s evolution from a male-dominated monolith to a more integrated organization. 

Ms. Lord’s modesty is apparent in that she glosses over the fact she was among the first female undergraduate students at Yale University.  She graciously allows the story of Donna Shirley, the skilled engineering manager who led the successful Pathfinder Mars Rover mission in 1997, to champion the feminist subtext of this work. 

As Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science concludes, the reader is left with a sense of accomplishment in the realm of technology and peace in Ms. Lord’s personal journey.