by Lee Billings
By the autumn of 2006, though the field’s fortunes had fallen when NASA pulled the plug on TPF, Seager’s star was continuing its rise. MIT had lured her from Carnegie with an offer of immediate full tenured professorship—the equivalent of a lifelong golden ticket for any academic, but one particularly valuable for a researcher so young and just starting a family. Seager and Wevrick placed a mortgage on a grand old house in Concord, Massachusetts, a fixer-upper not too far from Walden Pond. She would begin her professorship in January of the New Year. Seager was pleased with her progress, and broke the news to her father on a visit back home. He had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and though he was fighting hard, they both knew he was in rapid decline. Her gamble on astronomy had worked out, she said. She was thirty-five, already with tenure at one of the world’s premier institutions—she told him it was the best she could expect to do. Seager hoped he would be proud. Instead, he transfixed her with an icy stare and answered slowly, with a voice like cold steel, “I never want to hear you say that anything is the ‘best’ you can do,” he said. “I never want you to be limited by your own negative thinking. I know there’s an even better job, and I know you’ll get that one too, someday.” Not long after their talk, her father died. To the very end, he pushed Seager to never stop thinking big.
At MIT, she began thinking bigger than ever before, assembling several research groups and pursuing multiple different initiatives designed to extend her expertise from theory into observation, engineering, and project management. To have any hope of being at the helm of a future TPF, she would need experience in all four realms. Personally, professionally, her focus was fixed on the future—every day, it seemed, the boys grew, looking more and more to her eyes like their father. Wevrick taught Max and Alex how to paddle a canoe, bait a hook, and make a fire. Seager taught them, too. She would tell her wide-eyed boys about the origin of the Sun and the Moon, the history of the Earth and its companion planets, and the newly discovered worlds that circled so many stars like grains of sand. Max loved logic and numbers—perhaps he would become a mathematician. Alex enjoyed puzzles and games, and like his parents was drawn to the outdoors. Perhaps he would be an artist, an inventor, or a forester. By the time they were men, she thought, NASA could again be preparing for TPF. She would be ready, having raised a family and acquired new skills in the interim. Her life, intertwined with Wevrick’s, was coming into fuller bloom than she could have ever hoped or planned.
In late September of 2009, Wevrick began to notice a dull pain and occasional sharp cramps in his lower abdomen. It seemed to flare up randomly—he could find no correlation between the pain and anything he did. At first he didn’t worry much—after all, he regularly exercised, ate healthy food, and didn’t smoke—but after weeks of discomfort he began consulting medical websites, yielding indeterminate results. By mid-November, the pain had grown worse, and he was worried enough to seek advice from friends. His friends suggested one malady after another: appendicitis, inflamed gallbladder, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, diverticulitis, a hernia, Crohn’s disease. None perfectly matched his symptoms, which were stubbornly general. Seager convinced him to see a doctor, who, after cursory poking and prodding, found no signs of serious illness. Over the next two months, he experienced a few bouts of pain and vomiting, which he assumed to be food poisoning. In mid-January of 2010, he suffered another attack, more severe than before, and ended up in the emergency room. A CAT scan, colonoscopy, and biopsy revealed grim news: a large mass of what appeared to be cancerous cells had blocked most of his small intestine. He’d had Crohn’s disease after all, asymptomatic and undiagnosed for years, but the chronic inflammation had finally sparked cancer.
Surgery in early February excised the growth and surrounding tissue, and Wevrick began successive rounds of aggressive chemotherapy. He took it all in stride, displaying the same conservative equanimity he had relied on in the past when he faced life-threatening conditions in the wilderness far from home. He even felt well enough to go whitewater canoeing in Idaho in July. But by October, the cancer had returned and metastasized with renewed virulence, resuming rapid growth. Seager busied herself scouring the medical literature and consulting some of the nation’s top experts in small-bowel cancer. Perhaps there were new experimental treatments to be tried outside of the United States; maybe they could move to Europe to take part in some long-shot clinical trial. The experts gently downplayed such thinking; there was little hope. Seager told Wevrick they could drop everything, travel the world, do whatever he wanted while they still had the chance. Just say the word, and they would go. For now, he replied, he didn’t want to be disruptive, and was comfortable at home. He thought there was still time.
Meanwhile, Seager still needed to work; she could not allow herself to crumble into grief. She made arrangements for babysitters, and found nurses to provide palliative care. Having watched her father succumb to cancer, she knew this was the calm before the storm. Some evenings she would walk to nearby Walden Pond, to the same still water and sweet scents of oak and hickory that the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau had so cherished more than a century before. One day, she promised herself, whether with her two boys or any grandchildren, she would stand beneath the dark sky of Walden Pond and, pointing to a bright point of light, tell them that star possessed a planet very much like the Earth. “Each time you look up at it,” she would say, “someone there may be looking right back.” The thought gave her solace, and a feeling of being very big and oh so small, all at once. She would not give up; she would endure and grow stronger. She would help map the nearby stars; she would seek out those other Earths. In those moments, the death and loss that surrounded her would shrink, becoming infinitesimal in a vista of such magnitude its full expanse surpassed all sight.
“Men frequently say to me, ‘I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially,’” Thoreau wrote in Walden, his classic 1854 chronicle of two years spent alone on the pond’s shores. “I am tempted to reply to such—This whole Earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?”
By March of 2011, Wevrick sensed time was running out. He drew up an orderly three-page list of practicalities: upkeep tips for the house and the car, contact information for relatives and their life insurance agent. Grim milestones ticked by, like life’s beginnings glimpsed in a rearview mirror: the last days of walking, sitting up, speaking, moving. He fought each step of the way with characteristic strength, but death would not wait. The home nurses brought in more medical equipment, with long tubes and beeping monitors, as well as a hospital bed. A final vigil began only days before Seager’s planned “Next 40 Years of Exoplanets” conference, where she announced her strategic career shifts in pursuit of TPF. At night, she recalled, she would curl beside Wevrick in his bed to talk as he drifted in and out of fog. She whispered that she loved him, that he had changed her life forever for the better, that everything would be all right, that he could let go. She told him he had inspired her to take the risks required to achieve her dream and change the world. Wevrick cracked a wan smile. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “You would have done that anyway.” It would be one of their last conversations.
At their home, two days after Seager’s fortieth birthday, Mike Wevrick passed on into peace, Seager by his side. Their long journey together had come to an end.
• • •
Seven months later, I was in Seager’s seventeenth-floor office overlooking the Charles River. She sat across from me in an overstuffed red chair, radiant in a beam of bright morning sunlight streaming through the large windows. B
ehind her stretched a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall chalkboard, covered with arcane notations and diagrams. Seager was in the midst of an ambitious new project: attempting to quantify the alternate biosignatures that could manifest on the wide variety of unearthly habitable planets that might exist. She looked good, relaxed, with an easy smile. I told her so.
“Thanks,” she said, her smile fading. “I feel terrible. A little depressed.”
The month after Wevrick’s death had been a blur, Seager said. She had found a small support group of widows in Concord who occasionally met to socialize and share their stories. She had planned a series of trips to spend reconstructive time with Max and Alex—they watched NASA rocket launches in Florida, hiked in New Hampshire and Hawaii, camped out in the Southwest, visited the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and traveled through Europe. She had also poured herself into work with renewed vigor—she felt there was little other choice.
Other than her children, TPF remained Seager’s dream, goal, and driving force. “There are three paths to it,” she said, looking at me intently. “One is NASA, the government way, where I’ll put myself in the right position so that I could be a principal investigator in the future. The second way is to pursue it through some private initiative. And the third way is, I’ll simply make so much money that I can literally fund it all by myself.”
She had methodically devised overlapping preparations for each path, and explained them to me in more detail. An MIT/Draper Laboratory project she helmed called “ExoplanetSat” lay at the crux of Seager’s interlinked plans. Already well along in development, ExoplanetSat was a “nanosatellite,” a golden metal rectangular box no bigger than a loaf of bread, jam-packed with a tiny telescope, deployable solar panels, and a miniaturized avionics package for precision pointing and ground communications. It was designed solely for the purpose of constantly monitoring a single nearby Sun-like star for any signs of transiting planets, and possessed sufficient sensitivity to detect planets just a bit larger than Earth. The first ExoplanetSat would cost some $5 million to develop and launch, but subsequent copies could practically roll off the assembly line at a cost of a half million dollars apiece—dirt cheap for any hardware destined for orbit. Each would operate in low Earth orbit for a minimum of one to two years. Nanosatellites are so small that they typically do not require dedicated launch vehicles; instead, they piggyback on rockets launching larger primary payloads. Seager envisioned eventually launching a whole fleet of low-cost ExoplanetSats to surveil all the nearest, brightest stars for potentially habitable transiting planets. The first prototype was set to launch as early as 2013 as part of a NASA program supporting nanosatellites.
The practical expertise she would gain in engineering and management from ExoplanetSat’s success would make Seager a more appealing choice for involvement in future NASA missions, but would also serve as a stepping-stone for her own development of more ambitious spacecraft. Her second path, the private route, involved raising money to build and launch a downsized and simplified TPF that could survey the nearest hundred Sun-like stars for any exoplanets. Such a telescope would not be large or sophisticated enough to gather spectra for any habitable worlds, Seager said, though it could potentially characterize them via the photometric techniques she had pioneered earlier in her career. For the second path, she had already found a powerful partner, Scot Galliher, a fifty-something technologist who decades earlier had cofounded Goldman Sachs’s Financial Institutions Technology Group. Together they had recently formed the nonprofit Nexterra Foundation to pursue a private planet-finding space telescope, though they were still sorting out its finer details.
“Nexterra’s goal is to map the nearest Sun-like stars, no more, no less,” Seager told me. “Maybe it only finds the pale blue dots, and then the next generations will get their spectra, maybe even find a way to go there. It’s unconventional, but possible. . . . The idea is to not have to do the gory details of endless trade studies. We’ll just choose a [starlight-suppression] technology that has been progressing since the dawn of TPF as an idea, whichever one it is, and we’ll throw our weight behind it, and if it fails, we walk away. You have to be willing to take risks. I know you’ve been talking to the guys at Space Telescope Science Institute, and they are my friends and they support this, but this is obviously not the approach they’re taking. You can’t take risks like this in federally funded space science, and as a result, that model of building big, complicated things is not very efficient. But if you’re a private venture, you do it your own way, on your own time and your own money, and you bear the risk. That can make things smaller, more specialized, and more affordable.”
And what of the third path? I asked. Did Seager have a get-rich-quick scheme I didn’t know about?
She smiled. “This sounds like a joke, but it’s very serious: mining asteroids. If that happens in thirty, forty years, I’ll be too old to run TPF, but at least I’d have the money to make it personally happen.” Seager had signed on as a scientific advisor with a new venture, Planetary Resources, Inc., which would publicly debut two months after our conversation. The company was cofounded by two influential entrepreneurs of the emerging private spaceflight industry, Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis; among its investors were Eric Schmidt and Larry Page of Google, and the billionaire space tourist and software developer Charles Simonyi. Other than Seager, its advisors included the Hollywood filmmaker and deep-ocean explorer James Cameron and a former U.S. Air Force chief of staff, General T. Michael Moseley. The business plan was, at its core, quite simple: locate and extract valuable resources from near-Earth asteroids, many of which are thought to contain deposits of platinum and other rare metals valued at trillions of dollars based on existing market prices. If, against long odds, the venture eventually proved successful, its core team stood to net multibillion-dollar profits.
Planetary Resources planned to begin by building and launching small space telescopes, both to remotely “prospect” asteroids and to sell observing time to public and private parties. The next steps involved creating a low-cost interplanetary communications network and sending fleets of nimble robotic spacecraft to rendezvous with the most promising asteroids for closer inspection and eventual recovery of their rich resources. Water and other volatiles could be processed into rocket fuel, allowing the creation of orbital fuel depots, space-based gas stations to supply paying customers. Platinum-group metals would be imported to Earth, where they could be used to vastly expand the consumer market for computing devices and renewable energy. Additional revenue would come from third-party licensing of the interplanetary comm network and the technology for cheap interplanetary spacecraft. Seager would provide her expertise in building small telescopes and on-orbit communications, acquired via her work with nanosatellites, as well as her access to MIT’s community of researchers and her knowledge of remote photometric and spectroscopic observations. She saw the venture as part of a broader strategy for aiding the expansion of Earth’s economic sphere into the rest of the solar system, and, someday, beyond.
“People forget that right now [space science] is considered a luxury field,” she said. “It’s not seen as an obligation like fighting poverty, or trying to cure AIDS or cancer, or combating global warming. We really can’t just expect the government to do it for us; we very well may have to do it on our own, and having a robust commercial space industry can only help.”
Later, she introduced me to the more concrete but no less futuristic portion of her plans: the young members of the various high-level MIT research groups she mentored, directed, and supervised. Some—Diana Valencia, Renyu Hu, Brice Demory, Vlada Stamenkovic—were already considered rising stars in their subfields, and had come from across Europe, Asia, and South America to work with Seager. Others—Becky Jensen-Clem, Christopher Pong, Mary Knapp, Matt Smith—were home-grown graduate or undergraduate students at MIT, earlier in their trajectories toward eminence and distinction. Each filled a crucial role in Seager’s efforts toward studying exoplanet
s or building spacecraft. “They’re almost like my extended family,” Seager told me after I had met her young protégés. “They’re another part of the legacy. They will grow up and fly away and populate the world with the next generation of great work in exoplanet atmospheres and interiors. . . . If I don’t find the biosignatures, maybe some of them will.”
In the evening, we took a train from Cambridge back to Seager’s Concord home. The house was a spacious three-story affair with a cozy screened-in porch and large backyard ringed with trees. Inside, Max and Alex greeted us from the living-room floor, sprawled on their bellies, brown-haired and barefoot, assembling Legos and scribbling in coloring books. Their babysitter packed her things and bid us goodnight. Seager pulled a sheet of poster board and some index cards from a nearby pile of papers. It was a game she had made with her children; “ALIENOPOLY” was handwritten in block letters across the poster board, above an image of a smiling, slug-like alien with eyes on stalks. Instead of buying Boardwalk and Park Place, players could individually purchase the planets of the Gliese 581 system, or the worlds of Alpha Centauri. Rolling the dice might place you on a wormhole, allowing you access to anywhere on the board, or could subject you to the indignity of an alien abduction and quarantine aboard a UFO. Seager excused herself to assemble a dinner of baked chicken, rice pilaf, and artichoke hearts in the cornflower-blue tiled kitchen, leaving me with the boys, who showed little interest in discussing their mother’s work or playing Alienopoly.
“Do you like Star Wars?” they chirped in near-unison. I nodded. They exchanged a meaningful glance. Alex ran to a nearby couch, produced three toy light sabers from between the cushions, and padded back to thrust one into my hand. “Defend yourself, Darth Vader!” Max cried, raising his weapon. In two forty-five-minute bloodbaths before and after dinner, despite my Sith training I died many deaths at the hands of the young Jedis, repeatedly disemboweled, dismembered, and decapitated in a flailing whirlwind of gangly arms and Day-Glo plastic. Finally, well past their bedtime, Max and Alex reluctantly trudged upstairs to their beds. Seager and I stayed downstairs to chat over glasses of red wine while she did laundry.
