Mark Wallace

Enthusiast

Mission design engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Skokie, Illinois

I was 9 in 1989 when my parents let me stay up to watch the PBS coverage of Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune. I remember my parents debating whether I would even be interested. I think I really wanted to see it because I'd heard about it. I was interested in space, and I wanted to be an astronaut, but only in a vague way.

What I remember most about that Neptune coverage was that they spent the first part of it talking about what the Voyager mission had done to date. The Voyagers had seen Jupiter and its Great Red Spot, and volcanoes on Io. They saw Saturn with its rings and its cloud bands, and its moon Titan. Then, there was Uranus -- which looked like a boring cue ball, tilted on its side (we know more about it today than we did in '89). The program talked about what we expected to see at Neptune -- about how we were not expecting to see any big storms or colorful cloud bands. Stellar occultations (the way a star’s light is blocked by a body such as a planet) had suggested there could be ring arcs (partial rings). But the commentators said ring arcs were borderline impossible.

Then, we started seeing pictures -- and there's the Great Dark Spot. There are the ring arcs. All of these things that all of these grown-ups who are on TV and are telling me things got wrong. It was like: This is so cool. This is awesome. This is exploration. I am among the first to see these pictures.

Then, about three weeks later, I fell off my bike and broke my knee. What does a slightly bookish kid who can't go out and play anymore do with his time? Well, he reads everything he can get his hands on. I started burning through every book about outer space I could find. That's the point I learned about Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, the space race generally, and other things. I remember reading and being very excited about astrophysics -- the birth and death of stars, where do black holes come from. Prior to Voyager, I thought space was cool. After I learned about the mission, I was like, "Let me tell you about space."

Voyager did that for me. I was interested in space in a vague way, and then Voyager solidified it for me.