NASA Headquarters Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript

John C. Mather
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright
Greenbelt, Maryland – 11 June 2013

Wright: Today is June 11th, 2013. This oral history is being conducted with Dr. John Mather at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the NASA Headquarters Oral History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Sandra Johnson. He currently serves as the Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at the Goddard Space Flight Center, as a Senior Project Scientist for the agency’s James Webb [Space] Telescope Project [JWST], and he is a recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics. Congratulations from us, and thank you so much for finding time in your busy schedule to talk with us today.

Mather: Happy to do it.

Wright: Thank you, we’re glad to hear that. Let’s start at an interesting point in your time, how your life began to change once you learned that you were going to be receiving the award.

Mather: Oh, golly. I knew immediately that it was going to be all different, but I couldn’t tell how it was going to be different. I realized suddenly I was going to be on the public stage a lot, even more than before. I was already doing a lot of public talks about the new telescope and telling people this history of the universe in one way or another, so I already had a public lecture more or less ready for updating for the Nobel events. I was a little afraid because suddenly, you make your mistakes in public, so I thought, “How is this going to go?”

It went fine. Right away, we had a press conference that very day, and then the next day, we had a giant party over here at Goddard Space Flight Center, which was a very moving experience for everyone involved, because many hundreds of people here worked personally on that project. In the back of the book [The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe], there are about 1,500 names, and most of them are here at Goddard, people that really did something. It was our community, our family project together had been recognized, so they were so thrilled and I was so thrilled and overwhelmed by this process.

I still remember the feeling of coming into this giant hall, Building 8 auditorium, which holds many hundreds of people, everybody standing up, and I’m a little late for the event—because I’d just come back from [NASA] Headquarters—so, how am I going to get to the front? I pulled out my badge and I held it up and I walked to the front, and everybody knew that was me coming. I realized, as I did that, I’m signaling to everyone that I’m one of us. This is us that are doing this. I’m still getting goose bumps, remembering that feeling.

Then, I talked to them about what we had done, and most people knew already what we had done, but it was a chance to be very appreciative and recognize what everyone had done together. To me, it’s so much not me that did this project; it’s so much us, and so much the people who gave their nights and weekends and their thoughts and their dream time to make sure that it would come out right. People that woke up at two o’clock in the morning and said, “Oh, my God, it’s not going to be right and we have to fix it.” That happened to me, too, of course, but people that just put their hearts and souls into this project to make it go. That was much more tangible to me even than the science results. It’s interesting.

Curiously enough, the scientific results, one of them was a big surprise—although not totally—and one of them was very much expected. That was also a little interesting change. We should maybe come back to that because your question was how did my life change, I guess.

Suddenly, I’m very much in the public eye. It became clear to me that I didn’t really like being that much in the public eye. When I got to the hotel in Stockholm [Sweden] and there were all these autograph-seekers hanging out, and I just wanted to go inside and go to the bathroom, and they wanted their autograph. Now, six years later, I find, you know what they do with them? They sell them. It’s just a business, and I don’t like them because they thought they had the right to interrupt my process and to challenge me when I wanted to go into the hotel because they had to have their thing. Oh, golly, it just doesn’t feel that good anymore. Every day, I get emails, “Please send me your autograph,” and I ignore them all. That’s their thing. Just imagine, what if you’re really a movie star or something, and people are always all over you with their hands and their mitts and they’re trying to get a piece of your body? I think that must be terrible!

Wright: It must be.

Mather: I’m glad I’m not that kind of a star. There’s sort of this little worry about, am I going to do it right? It was still there with me up on the platform with the King [King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden], as all of us filed in, in front of the Nobel party and we were all going to get all awards. Of course, we have to remember what to do. We’ve been instructed that we’re going to walk across the stage to talk to the King, and we’re going to bow three times, I think first to the King, then to the committee behind him, and then to the audience. Then you accept your prize and then you go back and sit down. You’re a performer now, and some people are good at this—and I was just nervous—but it all worked.

The other thing about the Nobel ceremony is that it’s not just, “Here it is, go home,” it’s 10 days of parties and speeches, parties and speeches, go visit this, talk to those people, be interviewed on the radio. This is way far beyond what any of the other big prizes are about. They made a huge process out of it, and the Nobel Foundation’s working very well and very hard to make the information available to the public. If you haven’t seen it, they’ve got an archive of all of the Nobel events. My autobiography is over there, my slides that I used for my talk are there, there’s a video of everything. There’s a little video, I think, of me giving my two-minute dinner talk. Actually, I’m pretty proud of that little one. That’s a long story about what it’s like to be in the public eye now. Now, I’m pretty much back at Goddard, doing my work with the project and doing a lot of public outreach stuff.

Wright: It’s an amazing story. I did have an opportunity to read your book that you wrote with John Boslough that captured the amazing journey of the COBE [Cosmic Background Explorer] project. As you mentioned already here this morning, one of the choices that you made in that book is to mention so many names, about each person—and not just here—as you went through that 15-, 18-year journey of making that work. One of the people that you mentioned there, I believe, was Nancy Boggess.

Mather: Nancy Boggess, yes.

Wright: Which was an interesting name because it was one of the few female names. Did you have a lot of experience during this journey working with other female scientists, or was that a pretty rare event at the time?

Mather: It’s a changing phenomenon. Many more women are going into science now than were then. Times have changed a lot. Nancy is a fine scientist. She was among the first really well-known professional women astronomers. She made the choice to go work for NASA, so she stopped actually doing astronomy, and she has made the astronomy happen with other people. She found—this is sort of reporting on her behalf—that people tended to assume she wasn’t a scientist because she was a woman.

Even our secretarial staff here, they would write “To Mrs. Boggess and Dr. John,” so, she was pretty annoyed. She had every good reason to be annoyed, too, because she’s good! People don’t know because they didn’t. Things have changed now. When I go see who’s coming up in science now, quite often, more than half of the young people are women, so it’s changing quickly. I think that’s good; there’s a lot of talent there, so I think we need the talent. I’m glad people can do it now.

Wright: No matter if they’re male or female, they’ll still go through that wonderful or grueling bureaucratic process that you endured, going through all those years.

Mather: I would change those words. Nothing was grueling about it. It was all fun.

Wright: Was it fun?

Mather: As far as I was concerned. I don’t know whether other people find it grueling. It’s long hours, but it’s what you choose to do. Nobody says, “I don’t want to do this; I’m doing it anyway.” Once in a while, it’s frightening, once in a while, it’s tiring, but I don’t know any scientist who regrets doing that. I haven’t heard a single one say, “I’m sorry I went into science.”

Wright: I know you have opportunities to meet many students, as you mentioned, these up-and-coming researchers. What are some of the suggestions that you give them, or even some insight that you share with them, about the process that they’re about to undertake? That it’s possibly not going to have results in a hurry, it may take 15 or 18 years?

Mather: I don’t know. I don’t feel very wise about what they need to know, but a few observations – number one is the perpetual state of scientists is not knowing, always working on something that’s unknown. I have a funny feeling that the public thinks the opposite, they think we’re so smart and we know everything. How it feels to me is we’re always, “I don’t know this, I don’t know that, I can’t figure this out, how am I going to do this one? I never saw that problem before.” It’s day-in and day-out, “I don’t know how, but I’m going to figure it out.” That’s a different process.

The other thing I remind young people of is if you can’t explain your idea to your mom, you probably don’t really understand it. Try to understand how to explain in an intuitive way, so that there’s a physical picture of what you’re up to, and that’ll help you. Then, that goes a little farther because if you want to do the work that’s your own idea, you’re going to have to explain to someone else why that’s cool, you’re going to have to write proposals, write reports, tell people in some way that inspires them to support you, that your work is exciting. Study a little bit about and practice a little bit giving presentations and reading good English, writing good English, because that’s so important for us. That was a shock for me because, well, maybe it should have been obvious. When I finished my thesis I thought, “Thank goodness I don’t have to write anything again.” And I’ve spent the rest of my life writing.

Wright: For many audiences.

Mather: Yes. I did not really know how to write. I had to just practice and practice. That’s something I urge students to think about, is take your chance while you’re in school to find somebody who can help you learn. Another thing to tell them is the future’s very unpredictable, it always is, and chances are low that you’re going to just replace your professor. Here you are in a school full of professors and researchers, and in a more or less equilibrium state, one person retires and one person can have that job. The rest of you are going somewhere else, so don’t just focus on one thing, be flexible, be open to opportunity, look around to pay attention to things that could be interesting, and say yes when opportunity turns up.

That’s how I feel I got where I am. If somebody had said, “Well, do you want to write a proposal for a satellite, knowing that the odds are very low you’ll ever be chosen?” I don’t know, but I just said, “I’ll try! It could work, it’s a good idea, it could work. I might as well see what happens.” As it turns out, we were supported well enough, we could take the time to write the proposal, and eventually, it was chosen. Here we are.

Wright: At that time, NASA had opened up, I believe it was called, Announcements of Opportunity [AO]. They were looking at possibly going into new fields of study.

Mather: Yes, that was in ’74. There was Announcement of Opportunity Six and Seven, for two different classes of rockets that you could be using. Scout launchers, which are small rockets, and Delta rockets, which are a little bigger. This was five years after the Moon landing, so what is NASA going to do? They’d closed the Moon program. As I heard the story, NASA was persuaded, “We should ask for scientific ideas,” and they expected few, and they got 150, of which about 12 were chosen for flight, and I think they all flew. The COBE was one of the 12.

Wright: It had an interesting process along the way.

Mather: Didn’t it, though? Yes.

Wright: Which leads me to my next question because I remember reading that you talked about yourself as having some wild ideas, but you were able to contain that focus to this one project all that time. Is that a difficult challenge, or is that one, as you mentioned earlier, that it was fun, that you were able to keep working on just one project?

Mather: Yes, I was able to keep on working on one project because it became pretty clear if I didn’t, that it might not work. That’s how it felt to me. It was a time when resources were short. You might remember Mr. [Jimmy] Carter was going to balance the federal budget by turning down the heat, and that was stupid, but it sort of made it clear that we are short of resources. How are we going to deal with our project, well, we’re going to work harder. There was no thinking, “Well, I’ve got time to do something else.”

For me, it also felt like, well, you’re trying to steer the tiger, you’re riding on the back of the tiger—you do not get off. You got where you should be; don’t stop. I was full-time, every minute of every day, I was thinking about how to make this project go. I remember very clearly, when I first came to this area, I thought, “Oh, who am I going to meet? I’m going to have some fun.” I started taking ballroom dancing lessons, and that was fun, but I couldn’t remember for 10 seconds what my instructor had just told me because I was always thinking about the satellite project. So, it was really hard to learn. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t get to be that great. I thought, “I just cannot concentrate on something else. I’m just always totally distracted with how am I going to do this?” That shows you how completely your mind can be taken over by a really demanding project. I think a lot of us were in that shape. Nobody said, “I think it’s time to go to the beach.”

Wright: It sounded like you were busy all the time, that’s for sure. As you were going through some of the plans that you made, on those first few years, changed, one definitely having impact on you was the [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS-51L] accident.

Mather: Yes, yes.

Wright: Can you share with us? At the beginning, you were making plans and building this project based on a rocket, or a transportation system, that hadn’t even been proven yet that was going to work.

Mather: Actually, stepping back a further step, we mentioned the AO Six and Seven, where they had a standard Scout or Delta rocket available, so that’s what we proposed in 1974. In ’76, I was hired here at Goddard because it looked like we might really have a chance to do this project. Around ’77 or ’78, we had gotten into the engineering enough, and that was also the time that NASA was trying to get the Space Shuttle approved, and the deal with the devil was made, which was, “We are going to close down all other launch vehicles in order to get the money together into one heap so we could build the Space Shuttle. Whether it’s a good idea or not, you are all going to use the Space Shuttle.”

It was a vehicle that had never been flown, of course, but we were directed to use it. It was actually a wrong decision, but it turned out in the end, of course, and it was technically very hard to do. It was a very expensive way to go, and the Space Shuttle never did fly from the California launch site where we needed it to go. We would have been the first and only Space Shuttle launch from California.

Then, that was interrupted because of the Challenger explosion, so didn’t even do that one. Yes, that was a complete change of plans. I don’t think I knew anyone here who thought it was a good idea to put this satellite on the Space Shuttle, but we were directed to do it, so we did it, and it could have worked, but we were much better off the way we finally ended up.

Wright: You went down one path, and then it was changed, and then again, you had to change again.

Mather: Some of the story’s in the book there, but there were a few people here on the engineering side, the management, who figured out that we were this close to being able to stuff it back into the Delta rocket, and it needed a certain kind of major surgery, but the hard parts about the instruments didn’t have to be changed much at all. Which was almost a miracle—we were within a few pounds of not being able to fit, but we fit. There were a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvers that went into getting that Delta rocket, and many people that you’ve heard of, like Mike [Michael D.] Griffin, were involved in that. He wasn’t even at NASA then, but he was on the other side of the fence, and he knew about all that process. He told me once that he had something to do with it.

Wright: That was kind.

Mather: As it happened, his wife was a thermal engineer here at Goddard, and she worked on the COBE project, so it’s a small world.

Wright: Yes, so there’s a little inside information there.

Mather: Yes, her name’s Becky [Rebecca Griffin].

Wright: Talk about the working relationship between engineers and scientists, and how that works well and then how the two different sides communicate.

Mather: It doesn’t always work well. I would observe that a typical engineering personality is very different from the typical science personality, and we have two very different jobs. The science personality is, “I’ve got to imagine something that’s never been done before and imagine a way to do this, and so I’m all about imagination.”

The engineer’