Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin

Author:Janna Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

11

Skunkworks

Rochus E. Vogt had been fired as Caltech’s provost, which might not sound like a very good recommendation for director of a highly unusual, technologically cryptic, titanic nascent project. Let’s not read too much into it, but Vogt was a title given to a manager who presided over certain territories in the Holy Roman Empire. In other words, Vogt sort of means “provost.”

Despite the prophetic name, Robbie says of himself, “I am well known as a person who detests any authority.”

As provost he expressed an allegiance to Caltech that exceeded any to a specific country, and while he didn’t love the phrase, he concedes “hired gun” was an accurate portrayal of the provost’s errand. His loyalty to intellectual institution over country might be partly defensive. German nationals who grew up in parallel with Nazism are better off with a personal story that puts them at odds with the rising authority, or implicit collusion is the fallback scenario and would make for an awkward provost’s bio. For the record and on record, he had all of the right political reactions to totalitarianism (horror and rejection) and all the right political reactions to the Constitution and the protection of individual rights (admiration and acceptance). But Vogt’s staunch fealty toward Caltech was a good alternative to any nationalism.

When I meet him in his Caltech office he says, “Yesterday was the eighth of May. On the eighth of May 1945, I was fifteen years old. I had just been a prisoner of war, and I swore to myself never in my life will any stupid authority have any power over me.”

I knew going into the conversation that the Nazis had dismantled his privileged upbringing in southern Germany. After the war, he was demoted to a farmhand and then steel mill worker. Eventually his studies brought him to the more prosperous United States, and by then he had already become Robbie, nicknamed by an American soldier turned unlikely friend. The American was effectively a weapons inspector assigned to his German university to ensure there would be no manufacturing of nuclear weapons, and the German steel industry engineer Rochus, in his capacity as student representative, was liaison. None of this explains why Vogt got fired.

Vogt was the principal investigator on one of the primary experiments on the Voyager mission, the Cosmic Ray System. Currently the two Voyager spacecraft are more than 15 billion kilometers from the Earth, hurled farther than any other human-made objects. They are very nearly between stars, interstellar, shrugging off the Sun’s magnetic cloak, outer steel exposed and brushed by the winds of more distant stars. A little dramatic, but true. Vogt fought to extend the mission objectives to interstellar space. He argued for the spacecraft to carry more hydrazine—an unpleasant chemical needed to orient the spacecraft beyond the solar system—which took payload away from the planetary scientists. He explains, “The farther we get away we have to reduce the bitrate in order for it to transmit….The plutonium generators, which provide the power, will be good for another five to ten years and then it’s over.

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