Spring 2001, amid the manicured lawns of the Princeton University campus, I was recumbent in an office chair with my mind in the universe when the phone rang. It was the White House. They wanted me to join a commission to study the health of the aerospace industry. I agreed, but at first I was indifferent. I don’t know how to fly an airplane. But then I read up on that sector and realized they had lost half a million jobs in recent years. Something bad was going on.
The commission’s first meeting was to be at the end of September. And then came 9/11. I live—then and now—four blocks from Ground Zero. My windows are right there. I was supposed to go to Princeton that morning, but I had some overdue writing to finish, so I stayed home. One plane goes in; another plane goes in. At that point, how indifferent could I be? I had just lost my neighborhood to two airplanes. Duty called. I was a changed person. Not only had the nation been attacked, so had my backyard.
I distinctly remember walking into the first meeting. The 11 other commissioners filled the room with testosterone. There was General this and Secretary of the Navy that and Member of Congress this. It’s not as though I have no testosterone, but it’s Bronx testosterone. The kind where, if you get into a fight on the street, you kick the guy’s butt. This I-build-missile-systems testosterone is a whole other kind. Even the women on the commission had it: A former congresswoman from the South, who had an Air Force base in her district, deployed a vocal tone perfectly tuned to say, “Kiss my ass.” Another one was chief aerospace analyst for Morgan Stanley; having grown up as a Navy brat, she had the industry by the gonads.
On that commission, we traveled the world to see what cultural or economic forces might be influencing the aerospace industry’s stability here in America. We visited China before they put a man in space. I carried with me the common stereotype of everybody’s riding bicycles along broad boulevards, but instead, Audis and Mercedes Benzes and Volkswagens filled the streets. Cars dominated the roads, not bicycles. Then I went home and looked at the labels on all my stuff; half of it had been made in China. Lots of our money was already going there.
On a side tour we visited the Great Wall. A tourist attraction, of course, but in its day, a military project. I looked far and wide but saw no evidence of technology, just the bricks that comprised the wall. As an experiment, I pulled out my cell phone and seamlessly managed to call my mother in New York. “Oh, Neil, you’re home so soon!” was her first remark. No, I was 8,000 miles away, yet that cell phone connection was the best I’ve ever had—ever. Nobody in China is uttering America’s cell phone mantra, “Can you hear me now?”
So when China announced, “We’re going to put somebody in orbit,” sure enough, I knew it was going to happen...
A free public lecture for all with an interest in nuclear fusion is taking place on Wednesday 4 April between 18.00 and 19.00 at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Fusion is particularly relevant to an Oxfordshire audience because of the local Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), host to world-leading research programmes which seek to develop [...]