by Chris Jones
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Pettit found his oasis at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a low-slung city that feels in some ways like a Bedouin camp, surrounded by red rocks and stiff-armed cacti. He arrived on campus in the fall of 1978, coming up palm-lined University Boulevard, turning left at the fountain in front of the redbrick building they call Old Main, and disappearing into the sprawl of buildings that makes up the College of Engineering and Mines. They are mostly three- and four-story blocks, clean and efficient, softened by cypress trees, gravel paths, and low stone walls. On Second Street, he found his home in the basement of the more imposing Harshbarger Building, where the chemical and environmental engineers hung out. Outside, it hums like a power plant and off-gasses like a nuclear reactor, a sound and a smell that matches its hard, industrial appearance; inside, it’s a bit like ducking through a submarine, with open metal stairs connecting floors lined with machinery banked against cinder-block walls.
Students here compete in events like the International Micro Aerial Vehicle Meeting, build submarines to track the migration patterns of the giant Pacific octopus, and research how anaerobic bacteria might one day help us rid the world of toxic waste. The egghead faculty, meanwhile, puts out papers with titles like “A new stereo-analytical method for determination of removal blocks in discontinuous rock masses” or “Multimode decomposition of spatially growing perturbations in a two-dimensional boundary layer.” Pettit arrived as the first Ph.D. student for Dr. Tom Peterson, an untenured assistant professor fresh out of graduate school himself. Not knowing exactly how to harness Pettit’s wide-ranging interests and energies—although he seemed on his way to becoming an optics jock more than anything else—Peterson set his new charge loose, as Dr. Levenspiel had in Oregon, letting him roam as far as his imagination might take him.
It didn’t take long for Pettit to distinguish himself from his fellow students, not in the least because, on the door of his cramped office, he pinned up a photograph he’d taken of his own chromosomes. He brewed his own beer and fermented his own wine, and he collected old electronics. There was also the night out at a bar when, asked why he wasn’t eating the chips and salsa that everyone else at the table was demolishing, Pettit borrowed a lighter and lit a chip on fire, holding it up between his fingers and watching the hydrocarbons burn like a candle. “This is why I’m not eating them,” he said before blowing the chip out.
But more defining than his admittedly considerable collection of quirks was the almost artful way of thinking he had developed, one that separated his sizable brain from the purely linear, logical minds sported by most engineers. He still had that hyperanalytical circuitry in him, too, but now he also boasted a more creative, theoretical, open-range spirit. He could find new solutions to old problems that most engineers would never have found, because they were lying in wait on a side road that only Pettit was willing to go down.
His crowning achievement was an instrument he patented (with Dr. Peterson’s encouragement) called COPS, the coherent optical particle spectrometer. By splitting a laser beam in two, recombining each half, and measuring the shift in phase between them, he had learned how to detect submicron particles floating in the air—tiny aerosols with a diameter that would make a human hair look like heavy rope. Years later, IBM and other companies came out with machines using Pettit’s technology; they are still used by scientists and engineers today.
The only hitch came when, frustrated by what research equipment was then available, Pettit set up a glassblowing shop in a closet in the basement of the Harshbarger Building, where he started making custom instruments for his analytical chemistry work. In time, he became accomplished at taking bundles of glass rods and tubes and turning them into distilling beakers or, when he was feeling playful, even ships in bottles. But one afternoon, when he needed to spark a super-hot hydrogen flame to melt some quartz tubing, the tank’s regulator hose caught fire, and alarms went off, and the building was evacuated, leaving everybody standing on the grass in the sunshine, looking over at Pettit, wondering whether he had finally managed to burn the place down.
He had not. But almost two decades later, the walls of that closet betray scorch marks, and there are buckets of leftover glass waiting for the next Pettit to come along and turn them into whatever vision he wakes up with that morning.
Dr. Peterson—having become the head of the department—looked at those buckets, shook his head, and said with a smile: “If I could figure out how Don’s brain works, I’d patent that, too.”
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Bowersox, meanwhile, pursued a different kind of education. His first desert hole-up was the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in outback California, just as that junior-high career sheet had ordered.
Past the two-man guardhouse and through the gate, Edwards looms so big it’s almost hard to take in: just beyond the shoulder of a nowhere highway lies a virtual city, dedicated since World War II to the speed trials of men and flying machines. Dominating its center is Rogers Dry Lake, the world’s largest, sixty-five square miles of cracked yellow flats that are washed clean by rain and blown glass-smooth each winter, making for nature’s perfect launchpad. More than 240 aviation records have been set in the wide-open airspace above it, lending a hardscrabble spirit to the place. These skies have witnessed the first tests of American turbojet airplanes, like the XP-59A in 1942; Chuck Yeager’s sonic boom in the Bell X-1 on October 14, 1947; and, in the years after, the deaths of dozens of maniac pilots trying to go faster still. In 1948 alone, thirteen pilots were killed here (including Glen Edwards, the base’s namesake), mostly in fireballs. This otherwise featureless desert has been scarred by more than its share of “class-A mishaps,” technobabble for smoking holes in the ground.
The early 1950s saw more happily eventful times—and, famously, a lot of smoking, drinking, sex, and car wrecks. Scott Crossfield became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound. Altitude and speed records were broken and broken again until 1961, when pilots were finally forced to wear pressure suits and oxygen masks in the hypersonic X-15. It reached six times the speed of sound; it also, in the hands of Joe Engle, reached space. He was the first of eight Edwards cowboys to earn his astronaut’s wings without ever strapping into a rocket. Those eight men set a new standard, establishing that never again would the pilots stationed here pay mind to gravity. Even today—above the great hangars with rust-colored trim, the gun butts, the dozens of helicopters and planes parked in neat rows, like crops—test crews will purposely put their F-15s into tailslides, flying hard (and loud) enough to make sure that framed pictures never stay level in the houses below. Awesome planes named the Blackbird, the Nighthawk, the Stealth, and the Raptor have been born here, and, in the Test Pilot School, so have the men and women who will fly them. They will learn to push these new planes as fast and as high as they can, and they will sometimes die in them, lost in the building of preflight checklists and the future’s routine. In a lot of ways, then, this place is the same as it ever was.
Two classes of student pilots are pushed through each year, a select group of fifty of the best fliers the military has to offer. As always, each class comes up with a slogan steeped in manly bravado (“To Oblivion and Beyond,”
“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” or “No Permanent Damage”) and plays an elaborate prank on the other class, usually involving some form of explosive demolition. And, as always, each of the pilots walking through these halls wears the green flight suit like an Armani, with a sort of straight-backed pride.
But somewhere along the way, a different breed of pilot began springing out of Edwards. Over time, there would come to be less smoking, less drinking, less sex, and more sensible family sedans parked out front, replacing the cherry-red convertibles and motorcycles. Unlike Yeager’s generation, most of the new breed—Bowersox included—have gone to graduate school, receiving advanced degrees in science or engineering. Most of them, like Bowersox, boast perfect flying records and stellar efficiency reports.
Most of them, like Bowersox, take to heart the school’s official motto, Scientia est Virtus, Knowledge Is Power. And because of that, most of them, like Bowersox, will spend as much time in the classroom—learning aerodynamics, logic, propulsion physics, avionics, and systemology—as they will in the cockpit.
They still learn to fly between thirty and fifty different aircraft during their twelve months here (it didn’t hurt that Bowersox was short enough to fit into even the tightest seat); they still explore the outer limits of our most incredible machines; they still develop a respect for wind shear and wake turbulence that borders on the mystical. And yet, there is less swagger in them than in the great, lead-bellied ghosts of the past. They no longer fight their machines or seek to defy them. Rather, they have somehow become them, another part that’s been tooled into place. The romance has been waived for reason, and at the end of the day, today’s students are far more likely to retire to the in-school lounge with their textbooks and a cup of coffee than to some dusty desert bar with black-and-white photographs of dead pilots on the wall.
Instead, they study under pictures of dead astronauts, including a smiling Ellison Onizuka, a fellow graduate killed on Challenger.
The newest portrait hanging on the wall by the door is the painting of Rick Husband, class of 1987, just lost on Columbia. He had breezed through the Test Pilot School only two years after Bowersox, and yet now he is gone, reduced to art, the victim of one more class-A mishap.
The portrait is a fresh reminder that in a lot of ways—the most important ways—this place really is the same as it ever was.
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Upon his graduation in 1985, Bowersox was immediately assigned to the Naval Air Warfare Center at nearby China Lake. It’s a hard-seeming town; it’s not the side of California that is captured on postcards. Its heart is the intersection of China Lake and Ridgecrest Boulevards, which sits between two massive, mountainous tracts of land littered with the wreckage of planes. They have been shot down by missiles, new and improved, the latest in Sidewinders, Sparrows, and Stingers. Beyond these desert junkyards, there are pretty peaks in the near distance and patches of raw scrub beauty, but when the light’s unflattering and the sky closes up, China Lake can look as if a couple of warheads overshot their intended targets and landed in the center of town. On the left, there’s E Charro Avitia Mexican Food, which used to be El Charro Avitia Mexican Food until the “l” fell off the sign out front. Howard’s Mini Market has been boarded up and left to despair. The Desert Empire Fairgrounds are dusty and vacant, but China Lake Bail Bonds enjoys considerable walk-in traffic, as does the 40-X Gun Shop and Guns 4 Us (over 300 guns in stock!). A big night out might start at the Golden Ox Charbroil, pass through the Ridgecrest Cinemas—one of the original multiplexes, complete with reclining plastic seats—and end at the barn of a store with the neon sign that cuts to the chase like 90 proof: LIQUOR is all that it reads, red lights on green.
Speeding through town on the way to the coast will yield only a partial view of China Lake, however. (You’d miss the sprawling, fenced-in base for starters, a self-contained Pleasantville, clean and tidy as a ball field.) A look in the phone book is more truthfully revealing of the soul of the place. Under “Taverns” in the Kern County East Yellow Pages, there are only eight entries. Under “Churches,” there are twenty-four denominations listed—Assemblies of God, Baptist (further subdivided into American Baptist, American Baptist Association, Fundamental, Independent, and Southern Baptist Convention), Bible, Catholic, Roman Catholic, Charismatic, Christian, Christian Science, Church of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Episcopal, Fellowship of Christian Assemblies, Foursquare Gospel, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Lutheran, Methodist, Nazarene, Non-Denominational, Pentecostal, United Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Seventh-day Adventist, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist—good for eighty-nine houses of worship. That’s because for test pilots, touching the face of God is a full-time gig.
When Bowersox arrived here, he promptly began shooting down planes flown by a civilian pilot named Dick Wright. Fortunately for Wright, he wasn’t sitting in the planes at the time. He flew specially equipped F-86s and F-4 Phantoms from the ground, like full-scale radio-controlled models. Most of the time, Bowersox would chase these doomed planes and watch unarmed missiles punch holes through their wings, maybe spilling a few gallons of hydraulic fluid. But every now and then, just often enough to keep things interesting, Bowersox would drop in behind one of Wright’s drones, lock it in his sites, and launch the latest, greatest warhead straight up its ass. Bits of burning fuselage and engine parts would fall to the desert floor, and Bowersox would follow them down, turning in for a picture-perfect landing, taking off his helmet, and telling the weapons technicians waiting for his good word what he thought of their new toys. He loved the job, loved the excitement and the adrenaline of it, the speed and the power, but most of all he loved it because he remained, more than ever, and more than even most of his fellow test pilots, given to fly.
During those rare times when he wasn’t flying for work, he went flying for pleasure. Although a test pilot’s salary isn’t the sort of wage that lends itself to luxuries, Bowersox, still a bachelor and living on the base, poured every spare dollar into a decrepit twin-engine beater that he’d gun toward the horizon, riding low like a crop duster. His young stud colleagues couldn’t see the reason for it; after bolting across the sky in jacked-up F-18s, they saw it like so much of a comedown. Only older fliers like Wright saw the pleasure in it, saw even the God in it. In flights like that, gliding alone on a route run by heart, he saw a kind of beautiful solitude, something meditative in the engine noise and instruments, like riding a motorcycle through sunflower fields. In his plane, Bowersox was free, untethered, far removed from his roughneck desert home, but even it looked better from altitude. He could see the other side of the mountains and the desert changing color when winter came. He was one of the few men who had seen how China Lake could make for a decent postcard.
On his bravest days, he would push his flying heap higher still, sometimes high enough to catch a glimpse of the curvature of the earth. For Bowersox, moments like those were holier than he could have ever found in any one of those eighty-nine churches, his eyes still catching the last of the sun even while it got dark below, squeezing out just a few more minutes until the lights came on at the airfield and called him home. Flight after flight, he never tired of the view or the mechanics of soaring. He never tired of the solitude either, the feeling that he could just as soon keep flying over the rocky coast and out into the ocean, happy for being lost in so much blue.
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Pettit pushed different envelopes, after he found work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1984. Today’s Los Alamos, New Mexico, looks like any other small mountain town; they play high-school football and drive up to buy cheeseburgers from Sonic. But behind that anywhere façade, there lurks a darker history. During World War II, Los Alamos was a closed camp, guarded and gated, the most secure place on earth. A team of top military scientists, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, were secreted away there, and together, they learned how to split the atom. Next they learned how to turn the desert into glass and make clouds shaped like mushrooms, and the bulk of what they learned was soon dropped on two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the years of peace that followed, the scientists who remained behind became part of a larger government laboratory. In it, work continued apace on making and maintaining bombs, but Los Alamos also became a larger mecca for the microscope set. More than 14,000 employees now come in from as far afield as White Rock, Santa Fe, and even Albuquerque. It has become a place where chemists and physicists and engineers are free to explore every corner of the universe. It is a lab without limits.
When Pettit first came aboard, he was assigned to the Dynamic Testing Group, which meant that he toyed with detonation physics, making conventional high explosives. But true to form, and with the encouragement of his superiors, he started to
develop his own research programs on the side. He jumped from project to project as fast as he could dream them up, confined only by the number of hours in a day. Even after he was told to go home, he would work away in his garage, which, after driving through a blizzard to an otherwise unattended auction, he had filled with surplus from the lab. It came to look as though it had been pulled out of a cheap science-fiction serial or a comic book. His garage even boasted a collection of three-phase tools, which required Pettit to sneak out and tap into his neighborhood’s electrical grid to power them. He might have risked casting a good chunk of Los Alamos in darkness had he not been working since childhood on his touch.
In particular, his skill at building instruments soon earned him a spot in the Earth and Environmental Science Group. First, Pettit found a way to sample and analyze the fumarole gas spewed out by active volcanoes. He would travel to lava-born places like New Zealand and tap what bubbled up from the center of the earth. Next, he began firing up sounding rockets to probe noctilucent clouds—eerie, electric-blue clouds that glow brightest at night, usually over polar regions, and always on the fringes of space. (They were first observed in 1885, about two years after Krakatau exploded and coated the upper atmosphere with a thin layer of ash. But the clouds have inexplicably persisted and spread in the centuryplus that’s passed since, and Pettit never could resist an unsolved mystery.) Finally, he studied materials processing in reduced gravity. That vein of exploration gave Pettit the chance to make several flights on board the KC-135, the infamous “Vomit Comet” that dives and climbs in a series of parabolas to simulate weightlessness. Its passengers know something of what astronauts know; the feeling is as close to space as most of us will ever get.
But it wasn’t close enough for Pettit. Even before he began working at the lab, he had put in an application at NASA. After more than six months in Los Alamos, he was finally flown down to Houston for an interview but was ultimately rejected—despite the fact that his father had delivered one of the nurses who had helped evaluate his fitness. He remained optimistic, however, and every year he kept his application updated. Every year he dressed up his project résumé with more lines like “solved problems in detonation physics” and “conducted atmospheric spectroscopy measurements.” He eventually won another interview in 1986, but he was again rejected. A third interview and rejection came in 1993.
