Transmutation

At some point when I was a child, I learned that there were people who designed airplanes for a living. I was told they were called aeronautical engineers. The minute I learned this, that was all I wanted to be when I grew up.

In some ways we’re not so different from the hemlocks and maple trees that line my neighborhood; we adapt to and fit ourselves to the context we grow in. Part of my context was coming of age just as the commercial space sector got really interesting for the first time. SpaceShipOne, Burt Rutan’s own personal 9th symphony of aircraft design, flew under power for the first time my freshman year in high school. SpaceX flew the first Falcon 1 with the B-nuts torqued correctly during my senior year. It would be a bit weird if a girl with a special interest in all things that fly didn’t get bit by the NewSpace (as we called it back then) bug, and bitten and smitten I became.

Penelope Scott’s song “Rät” sums up what it was like following the commercial launch industry as it began to accelerate. My dream job began to shift from “simply” designing new and interesting airplanes to wanting to be one of the people making space travel orders of magnitude more accessible than the standard set by the Apollo and Space Shuttle days. I studied aerospace engineering so that I could be someone like the billionaires paving the way here. I meant well, but given where those same billionaires are now and how much they’d like to see people like me disappear from the face of the Earth (and not in a Starship), the whole thing feels a bit awkward.

I spent four years of engineering school filling the margins of my notebooks with de Laval nozzles and turbopumps and spaceplanes, and the body of those notebooks with the equations and fundamentals of how to make these machines work. After I graduated I didn’t (thank fuck) become someone like Elon Musk, but in my own way I really was at the tip of the spear, doing as much as I could in my career to help humanity transition into a spacefaring civilization.

I loved a lot about doing that kind of work. Designing engineered systems is a special joy. Closing the analysis loop to make those systems as good as you reasonably can is satisfying. Picking the brains of experts in finite element analysis, avionics, composite structures, thermodynamics, and orbital mechanics is like getting a free sample of every flavor in an ice cream parlor for someone like me. Knowing that all of this was doing something to bring the cosmos closer to home made it feel worthwhile, and finding out that rocket scientists are generally a fun group of people to be around did more than anything else to keep me interested in coming to work.

Since I’m writing this post you can guess that that isn’t the whole story. The upside of the space industry is passion; the downside is that it’s an easy place to get burned out, in the best of circumstances. I didn’t work there in the best of circumstances. There was the pressure of navigating marriage and family for the first time. There was the pressure of supporting a spouse going through medical training. There was the cataclysmic pressure of surviving a pandemic while trying to carry on with all this as though everything was normal. Worst of all there was my refusal and denial and self-loathing for my gender eating me up like a parasite.

I’ve been on a bit of a break from engineering for the last few years, but the reality is I belong somewhere in this field. I love too much of the fundamentals of it, I’m suited to it, and it’s a decent way to make a living. But I need to be in engineering in a way that doesn’t use me up and burn me out.

Around the same time that I decided all I wanted to be was an aerospace engineer, I was given an assignment in school that asked what I would do to make the world a better place if I were in charge. “I would close all the nuclear power plants,” I wrote, which I was amused to find in an old binder of things I last touched in elementary school when I was visiting my parents a year or two ago. For so long I’ve been rooting for the industry from the sidelines and fascinated by every scrap of nuclear engineering knowledge I could get my hands on. It was strange to see that snippet of negativity, no doubt influenced by how close I was born to Chernobyl and the height of the anti-nuclear movement in general. Oh well. I thought I was a boy back then, too.

By the time I reached college I’d forgotten that early pessimism. In those notebook margins full of rocket nozzles I doodled plenty of reactor cores and cooling towers, too. I spent too much time poring over Wikipedia articles on all things nuclear for them not to show up. Later, when I was spending my workdays planning out the P&ID for orbital rockets, I wondered what the same diagram might look like for a reactor and the associated safety systems. When I was running myself ragged working and commuting and caring for the babies, I’d muse about things I might do “someday, when I have more free time” like “just” getting an advanced degree in nuclear engineering.

Anyway all those threads lead to here. In a few days I’ll be starting my next job as a nuclear steam supply system analysis engineer. It’s relatively easy to find the narrative arc and see this as a linear sort of progression. It’s not really that at all. Life is too chaotic and strange to be linear. But it makes sense, and it’s the right thing for me to be doing, and I’m excited about it. I’m glad I’ll have the simple pleasure of learning something new, with the comfort of knowledge gleaned from an earlier career like this new one in so many ways. I’m glad I’ll be doing as much as I can to put a dent in climate change. I’m glad I get to do all this from the beautiful little college town I now call home.

In a way it just feels like a new sort of transition. I spent the last three years of my life learning how to become a woman, and what fun that’s been. Now I get to learn how to become a nuclear engineer. I hope that I have plenty more decades and transitions ahead of me, but for now learning to harness the transmutation of the elements to make life a little better is the right one for me.