Laurie Leshin

Laurie Leshin shares stories about space exploration and her commitment to diversifying STEM fields. She is a distinguished geochemist and space scientist, and the director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Transcript

Laurie Leshin (00:05):

And when we successfully landed on Mars, we-- humanity, not "we JPL," we humanity-- in the middle of a global pandemic, I walked outside and I looked up at the sky and I just started bawling because there was just something that's like, okay, I remember what we're supposed to be doing. As human beings, this is the kind of thing that we can accomplish. This pandemic is a moment in time, but we have to remember that we can do these big things.

Ted Roosevelt (00:30):

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library's content studio. I am Ted Roosevelt. Today I have the privilege of speaking with the educator, geochemist and space scientist and STEMinist, Dr. Laurie Leshin. Laurie is the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She's its first female director in its history. She's transformed education championing project-based learning and played pivotal roles in NASA's missions that have reshaped our understanding of Mars. Laurie inspires me not just with her list of accomplishments, but with the joy and collaborative spirit that permeates her endeavors. During our conversation, she'll reveal the pivotal childhood moment that sparked her passion for space, explain why space exploration remains essential, and tackles the question are we alone in the universe? If anyone can venture an answer, it's my remarkable guest, Laurie Leshin. Here she is.

Laurie Leshin (01:38):

Ted, it's great to meet you.

Ted Roosevelt (01:39):

It's great to meet you, Laurie.

Laurie Leshin (01:41):

Huge fan of your family.

Ted Roosevelt (01:44):

Well, I appreciate it. I want to start with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I think most people know what NASA is. I think less people are familiar with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Laurie Leshin (01:56):

So JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab, as you said, we do not today do anything having to do with jet propulsion, so we often just call ourselves JPL. If you know about and love cool Mars rovers, that's us. So we are one of NASA's lead scientific organizations and we're really focused on the uncrewed, so robotic exploration of the solar system. We also do a ton of work sending spacecraft that look back at the earth to help us understand climate change and how our planet is changing and we work on big telescopes that look into deep space, so all kinds of cool robotic space exploration right here in LA's backyard.

Ted Roosevelt (02:39):

Which is so amazing. Tell me how you got interested. My sense is that everybody that spends their career focusing on space, I have this romantic image that of this sort of 7-year-old girl or 7-year-old boy looking up into space and just being enthralled by the possibilities out there. Did you have a moment that as a child?

Laurie Leshin (03:01):

For me, the wow moment came as a 10-year-old girl. I'll never forget it, standing in my mother's kitchen in Phoenix, Arizona and seeing the very first images from the Viking Landers back in the seventies, these are the very first pictures from the surface of Mars. It was in Time Magazine and I was obsessed. Just-- I wanted to reach out and touch those rocks and you kind of look at the picture, I look at the picture now and it's sort of this bleak desert landscape, but I grew up in a desert landscape, so I think there was something about it that felt homey to me and I just wanted to touch those rocks and that really did spark interest for me.

Ted Roosevelt (03:40):

Talk to us a little bit about that journey from 10-year-old girl to head of JPL. That's not an obvious path, certainly from the seventies to today, that's not an easy path to have imagined even at that point.

Laurie Leshin (03:54):

Yeah, it was not a straight road, a straight shot by any means, and even though I was enthralled with the surface of Mars and I was amazed by the Voyager missions flying by Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, I loved space, but it honestly, for most of my young life never occurred to me that I could have a job working in the space business. I had a lot of interests. I was interested in science, always have been and interested in rocks, always picking up and collecting rocks as a kid, but I was also editor of my high school yearbook and thought about journalism for a while and had lots of interests. So it wasn't until when I was 19 years old, I got a summer internship at NASA when I was 19 in Houston, and it was like a lightning bolt hit me. I actually got to do scientific research for the first time and I worked on data from that very same Viking mission that first enthralled me almost 10 years earlier. Then I stayed in school for a lot longer to get that PhD, which is really what you need to be a space scientist. Ultimately, when the JPL job came open, the JPL director job, it really is my dream job, and so the timing was right and so I've been here about a year and just loving every minute of it.

Ted Roosevelt (05:06):

When you're 19, I'm wondering when or if the moment comes where you start to realize that there may be fewer and fewer women in the programs that you're in.

Laurie Leshin (05:17):

Yeah. Well, it started actually as that 19-year-old when I saw the opportunity for the summer internship at nasa, and I really was not studying space stuff at the time. I didn't really understand most of the words on the application form, and I went and found, there was literally I think one full professor in the physical sciences at my local university, which was Arizona State, and I cold called her. I knocked on her door and said, Hey, can you help me? I'll just never forget. She literally dropped what she was doing, physically dropped what she was doing and had me come in and made a phone call and long story short, I got the internship. So she was amazing, but that the moment where I was like, wow, there really is not a lot of people who look like me. There are not people to choose from here. Thankfully, she was incredibly supportive.

Ted Roosevelt (06:06):

First of all, I love that idea of somebody literally dropping what they're doing to help you out. And you've talked quite a bit about the necessity for women to hold space for other women. I guess maybe what does that mean to you for women to hold space for other women in the STEM area?

Laurie Leshin (06:26):

It means whatever level you get to, you got to always be lighting the way for others, kicking down doors, not just sort of pointing in the right direction, but actually taking people by the hand and guiding them and knowing that it makes a difference, right? I am the leader of JPL L, not just for the women of JPL L but for everyone. But there is something special, and I have learned over the course of several firsts in my career that it really is meaningful to people to see someone like them in a position. And so I take that seriously.

Ted Roosevelt (06:59):

I don't know if you coined the phrase, but I've heard you use the phrase, "STEMinist."

Laurie Leshin (07:05):

No, I didn't coin it. I have a mug. I have a mug with it on it actually. Yeah.

Ted Roosevelt (07:10):

Well, it's a great phrase and I find that the best phraseologies are ones where you instantly know what they mean, but it's a word that doesn't otherwise exist prior to or an expression that you've never heard before and it gives you an insight that you didn't have about something. But I'd love to hear you define STEMinist and what that means to you.

Laurie Leshin (07:30):

I am proud to call myself a feminist. I was raised by feminists, just quickly story: my mom when I was a little girl when I was probably six years old, and we were actually living in Texas in the days of the Equal Rights Amendment and the real payday of the National Organization for Women. My mom was involved in these things and she used to take me with her to the meetings where they were trying to get the ERA passed, and I was too little to understand what was happening. All I knew were there was these very uppity women who were making a lot of noise and it was kind of cool. And again, I think of it so often. I really believe that they were doing that so that I could do this. And so my opportunity, whenever I have a chance to make a difference for folks is to embrace continuing to change the systems in ways that enable more women, more underrepresented people of color to succeed more L-G-B-T-Q folks to succeed and be their full selves at work. One way of doing that is women in STEM and continuing to remind people that our representation is not what it needs to be, and so we still need to be a little bit activist.

Ted Roosevelt (08:40):

I love that, and I think one of the themes that we keep hitting on in this podcast is that when people find themselves in situations where maybe they're the exception, they're underrepresented, I'll just speak for myself, I think it's easy to sort of get down and think, well, this isn't my space and so I'm going to walk away, and there are other people who respond very differently, and I'm going to put you into that category. It seems to spark an energy in you. It seems to spark a sense of moving forward, not retreating.

Laurie Leshin (09:13):

I'll tell you so often someone like myself is fortunate enough to find ourselves in a position that has some power and authority to be able to make even small changes to the system that are enabling for more diverse groups to succeed. And by the way, most of the time they're enabling for a majority folks to succeed too. Paid parental leave helps men as much as it helps women, right? There are incredible benefits to lots of folks, and I would say for me at JPL, one of the most inspiring things has just been to see the response of the women here. I am the first woman to lead this place in 86 years of existence and to have the women see this as a huge deal, it spurs me on to fight harder.

Ted Roosevelt (10:02):

I want to pivot a bit here and talk about we dare mighty things. What is that? It's all over JPL's website. I know it was in the rover landings parachute in code. What does that mean for JPL? What does it mean for you?

Laurie Leshin (10:19):

Well, it was written by a very famous president named Teddy Roosevelt originally, I believe in a journal about basically it's better to dare mighty things and fall short than to live a safe life. He embodied that so incredibly much, which is why I'm a huge fan of his, and it really does embody what we try and do here at JPL. Our thing is it's a rallying cry for us, and I will admit though, when I came here and I read about the quote, his quote was about a person, an individual. It's better for an individual to dare mighty things than to sort of live a life of obscurity. And here we don't do anything as individuals, we do everything, everything here as teams. It takes thousands of people, even beyond JPL to land a rover on Mars or to understand how Earth's climate is changing. And so, I have added, I probably should have asked permission for this, but I've added to this the word "together," so our current incarnation of this is "dare mighty things together." But yeah, it's a great connection between JPL and the Roosevelt family.

Ted Roosevelt (11:31):

Well, it's great and in so far that I have any authority to give you permission to add "together" to the end, I fully endorse it and think it's a great idea.

Laurie Leshin (11:41):

Excellent.

Ted Roosevelt (11:42):

I think what's interesting about the rest of that quote is that it's about failure. It's, dare mighty things. Even though checkered by failure, it's better to have tried and failed than to never have tried. And it strikes me that in JPL, my guess is that landing a rover on Mars, there's a lot of failure before you end up doing that.

Laurie Leshin (12:08):

There's all kinds of failure. There's failure along the way, but we've even, I mean for a long time, we've gotten much better at it now, but for a long time Mars was like, it was no better than one in three Mars missions that succeeded, right? So I mean, it was like Mars 10 Earth, almost nothing for a long time. And I've worked with JPL for decades, and in fact was standing in front of the building I'm sitting in right now and where my office is, standing in front of that building. 25 years ago when we crashed a lander on Mars, I was live on CNN. I was the team media spokesperson when we crashed a lander on Mars. And I will tell you, failing is part of exploring now, we hope, typically we figure out before we launch it, but pushing that boundary, pushing that edge, you have to be willing to accept setbacks to accept failure and learn from it. So the important thing is what you do when you have a setback, how you respond.

Ted Roosevelt (13:03):

Well, and I think to a certain degree, I think that it's an excellent point that the role of JPL, the role of NASA, and I'm not using them entirely interchangeably, but if I put 'em under a big umbrella, if that's fair, is only getting more important, particularly I think in the shorter term when we think about climate change and the role it's playing vis-a-vis climate change and our understanding of the earth. Can you talk a little bit about the science and our understanding about the changing atmosphere on this planet that's being informed by the work at JPL and NASA?

Laurie Leshin (13:39):

Yeah. I'll give you a couple of really recent examples of things that we're working on. So we just launched last July to the space station, a new sensor and instrument that they bolt to the outside of the space station that is looking--that's doing a bunch of things, but one of the things it's able to see is the emission of methane gas into the atmosphere from things like basically big trash dumps are producers of methane, but also leaky pipelines, and there are lots of sources around the world. So that's one thing. So we're sensing greenhouse gases and understanding kind of where they are, how they move, and what we can do to mitigate them. The other one is one we just, a mission we just launched in December called SWOT, which is a surface water mission. The SW stands for surface water. We're going to not only look at the oceans with much higher resolution to understand ocean height, look at closer to the shores, thinking about sea level rise and the impact on seaside communities.

(14:36):

But for the first time ever, we can actually detect the height of lakes and rivers from space. So we will be monitoring in near real time the changes to our surface water, which are really essential. We're all here in California, we're very worried about drought, and now we've got the opposite problem where it's raining all the time, but we're going to be able to really take the pulse of Earth's surface water, which is all about as we're sort of adapting to a new climate, really understanding what's happening with our water system. So, the climate is changing, so the question is what's the impact on real people and how are we going to help them understand it and mitigate it?

Ted Roosevelt (15:17):

How easy or hard is it for you as the head of JPL to keep everybody and people maybe that you report to focused on the long-term objectives?

Laurie Leshin (15:32):

Yeah, it's hard. I won't lie. It's not easy, and I very much am a believer that leadership is always about, it's about balance. It's about both ends. So yes, we have to look at the long-term, but guess what? We can't mess it up in the short term either. So we got to figure out how we hold both and to think about generational objectives, right? Things that are bold on generational timescales, and I take great joy in being able to imagine humans walking on Mars or us really moving the needle on climate change and being able to work in a place where you can start to make some of those things happen.

Ted Roosevelt (16:16):

I am reminded of the, and you can remember, you're going to have to remind me what mission it was, but when the first photograph of the planet of earth was ever taken from away from the Earth--

Laurie Leshin (16:28):

Apollo 8.

Ted Roosevelt (16:29):

Apollo 8, and the impact of that image was so profound of this sort of sense of the collective, sense of, I would actually say that there's a focus on the longer term that's inherent in that.

Laurie Leshin (16:44):

I think that's right. There's something about starting to comprehend the scope and the scale of space. It makes you feel small on one hand and you can feel very apart from this vastness or you can start to understand how we are connected across millennia, across generations, across massive timescales, across galaxies, and you become a part of the universe in a way that I think is very kind of uplifting. We have Voyager right now, Voyager one and two, who have left the solar system, the first human made objects that we are still in touch with them. They launched 46 years ago. We talk to them every day. When Voyager says, Hey, hello, I'm here, it takes 22 hours for that to get from where Voyager is to earth, right? Wow. And they're still going. They're still sending back information, the first ever human made objects to be sensing the edge of our solar system and beyond. I mean, it's incredible. I talk about these things as the modern cathedrals. These missions take generations to come into being. And then for something like Voyager, it's still going 46 years later.

Ted Roosevelt (18:00):

It's so amazing. And there's something about space exploration that in best way makes you feel very small, but somehow in a sort of way that it makes the problems of your day seem small, not you feel small. I think it makes you feel highly connected to something infinite.

Laurie Leshin (18:22):

Yes, that's called awe, right? That's what it's awe and awe is a super healthy thing for humans to have. Humans in the absence of awe, it's pretty depressing. I mean, I think back to when we landed Perseverance on Mars, our latest big rover that got there in February of 2021. Okay, peak Covid-- awful, awful time. But I paced around my kitchen as they were getting ready to do the entry and I was watching it all live, of course on NASA TV. And when we successfully landed on Mars-- we humanity, not we-JPL, we humanity-- in the middle of a global pandemic. I walked outside and I looked up at the sky and I just started bawling because there was just something that's like, okay, I remember what we're supposed to be doing as human beings. This is the kind of thing that we can accomplish. We can do these things and this pandemic is a moment in time, but we have to remember that we can do these big things.

Ted Roosevelt (19:18):

People are asking questions about spending on space exploration and the value of doing that for a period of time, there was a real collaborative support of space exploration for a window. I don't know if it's the value of that awe or what's happening kind of in the zeitgeist that makes it seem like this isn't as important, if not more important than it's ever been. How do you respond to people that feel like we should be spending money elsewhere?

Laurie Leshin (19:49):

I would say a couple of things. I'm not sure I have a perfect answer, but--never in the history of ever have we actually taken the money and strapped it on top of a rocket and launched it into space. So literally every dollar that we spend on space exploration is spent here on earth, on good high tech jobs that are actually advancing innovation in our country. And I somehow think people think we strap a billion dollars to the top of a rocket. There is a penny on Curiosity rover that's like a-- geologists use a penny in the field when they're taking a picture of a rock to get scale. So there is actually a penny on it. So we did launch a penny into space, but that's, I think about it on the dollar front. The rest of it's all spent here on earth.

(20:29):

And the other thing we talk about a lot is the incredible technology transfer that happens. The things we try and do in space are really hard and it makes us invent new stuff. Just yesterday, one of our teams was presenting at an innovation conference here in LA because when Covid hit, our best minds got together and made a cheap accessible ventilator in 30 days. And in some ways, this is why you have these kind of folks is that yes, we work on space exploration, we can also do other things in the national interest, but increasingly now there's a massive commercial infrastructure that's built up. There is massive economic gain that comes from having the high ground of space in the western world, and people are understanding more that the future of humanity is synonymous with space exploration.

Ted Roosevelt (21:21):

And just for listeners who don't know, NASA makes up less than half a percent of the total budget. So it is not a big line item by any stretch of the imagination.

Laurie Leshin (21:31):

Half a penny, half a penny of every federal dollar.

Ted Roosevelt (21:34):

Although we do want that penny back. So what's after Mars? What happens? First of all, what are we trying to know about Mars that we don't already know, and then what's the next step?

Laurie Leshin (21:49):

So the big question as we look beyond earth is the biggest question the scientists can ask, which is, are we alone in the universe? We literally are trying to answer that question, and I think we have a good shot at in the next 10 to 15 years. We've been getting ready for this for a couple of decades and now it's upon us, and there are lots of different places you can try to answer that question. One is Mars. Another is there are really fascinating other objects in our solar system. For example, moons of Jupiter. So there's a moon of Jupiter called Europa, which is covered in water, ice, it's very cold out of Jupiter, five times further from the sun than the earth. We think underneath the icy shell on the outside is a liquid water ocean, a global ocean with rock beneath it, ocean water, and then ice on top.

(22:37):

We are sending a mission next year called Europa Clipper to go and explore this fascinating moon. It goes into orbit around Jupiter does multiple close flybys of this fascinating ocean world. But really the main target of our exploration on this front is Mars. And we have spent 25 years learning about Mars, learning how to explore it, learning where to go the most interesting places. And right now Perseverance is running around in one of these really interesting spots that used to be a big lake and has deposited all these lake sediments. And this lake was, there was liquid water around and this sort of happy habitable lake right around the time when life was getting started here at home on earth. And so the question is, did it start there on Mars two? And so we are drilling into these rocks and preserving these rock cores. So this will be the first time ever that we will have done the round trip, go to Mars, get some stuff, come back. So that's the next big thing, Mars sample return, it's called. We're doing it in full partnership with the European Space Agency. So it's really a global effort and hopefully in the next few years we'll be launching that mission to bring Mars home, as I like to say. Let's bring those rocks home.

Ted Roosevelt (23:45):

Of course, the sort of other side of that spectrum of more intelligent life and that I think is the one that often captures people's imagination is there's intelligent life out there. Do you have a theory, a thesis about why we haven't heard from anyone else, given the sort of multitudes of options and locales in which it could exist?

Laurie Leshin (24:07):

Well, I do think intelligent life's very interesting to think about. And as we start looking outside our solar system, I think if there was other intelligent beings in our solar system, we would know that by now. But beyond in our galaxy, in the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are 200 billion stars and then there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there each with a couple hundred billion stars. So again, the numbers are overwhelming, so you just think we can't possibly be the only one, right? We just can't. So I believe that anyway. So then it's a question of well, how do we find it? And so this is why some of the extra solar planet work, like looking at other solar systems is so interesting. That is where I think you would have a higher likelihood of finding something with more evolved life forms. We haven't yet. We don't have any evidence of that. Please know that if we did, we'd be shouting it from the rooftops because money wouldn't be a problem anymore. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Ted Roosevelt (25:04):

I'd love to know what you might say to yourself at 19 when you started facing some of the challenges that you face going from the 19-year-old applying for a role at NASA to the head of JPL.

Laurie Leshin (25:22):

I think to me, so much of it was, as I look back on my career, I think it was about taking interesting opportunities as they came up, having a general directional plan, but not having too specific of a plan because the most impactful things have come on things I never expected to work on. A phone call that led in a different direction for me as a young professor to start working on space missions, which I wasn't really, I was more lab-based. And then I started working on space missions and realized I love this big team environment, and by the way, I think I'm pretty good at leading big teams. I learned that and there have been many kind of right turns like that ditching my tenure to join the government. People were like, you're crazy. Just go on leave. Don't give up your tenure. Like, you know what? Nobody's going to follow me if they think I've got one foot back in the other organization. So take the leap. Not every day, not every time, but to me work to develop intuition and experience and judgment about what the good opportunities are so you can make leaps at the right time.

Ted Roosevelt (26:26):

Yeah. Laurie, there are two questions we ask everybody that's on this podcast, and you've addressed one of 'em a little bit, but I want to still ask it, which is: what advice would you give people, our listeners today that would help them bring about positive change?

Laurie Leshin (26:42):

There is power in community and there is power in thinking hard about how the systems that we've built over decades and even centuries are advancing humanity. And if there are ways they're holding it back that even small changes can make a big difference in those systems. And so you don't have to think about throwing everything out and starting over because that's overwhelming. But I have personally seen it and personally been involved in making a small change that can make a big difference. Small change that you can make that might make a big difference in your community and your family for the planet, which by the way is all communities too. It's local. So just getting involved in local community and thinking about small changes to the system that can really be enabling.

Ted Roosevelt (27:34):

Is there a specific organization that you think people should check out?

Laurie Leshin (27:39):

Full disclosure, I'm the vice chair of the board of this organization. It's called FIRST. It turns cool robot competition into the Super Bowl. It's like sports and robotics altogether. You go to these first events and see teams competing and cooperating with each other. It's a wonderful vibe, but they've got purple hair and matching outfits and screaming and it's the only sport you can play where everyone can turn pro. So to me, we are in danger in this country of not enabling, having enough STEM participants, leaders, whatever you want to call it in our country, to continue our drive to be a leading innovator in the world. And things like FIRST, things that allow kids to do hands-on STEM work are a great enabler of that. So I love FIRST, it's a special organization and it changes kids' lives every day.

Ted Roosevelt (28:41):

Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been just for me personally, a really enjoyable conversation. You're quite compelling and I have enjoyed it immensely. So thank you for taking the time to chat with me today.

Laurie Leshin (28:55):

Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure. And I love the connection between our JPL family and your family, so let's keep that going.

Ted Roosevelt (29:04):

Alright, well thank you very much.

(29:08):

What a great conversation. Huge thanks to Dr. Laurie Leshin for her time and her enthusiasm. Her work is awe-inspiring, and she does a great job of highlighting why continued exploration and curiosity in our world and beyond is so important. I hope her enthusiasm will inspire us to consider the role we can play in empowering and educating the next generation of scientists. As Laurie's work with her team of thousands at JPL proves, great things come when we dare mighty things together. If you liked this episode, please leave us a rating and review and don't forget to hit the follow button. Good Citizen is produced by the Theore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts and Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.