Healthvues

I recently had the opportunity to interview some of the people who were my childhood behind-the-scenes “heroes.” I grew up during the Apollo NASA program and my father took us to Florida every winter to visit Kennedy Space Center. While we didn’t get to see a launch, we were there several times during astronaut training - so it was a very cool time to be a kid. I had all the Mercury and Saturn V rocket models, the astronaut GI Joe, all that stuff. Except for the fact that I did not posses an affinity for math (and I was somewhat lazy), a career in astronautics was not in my future.

Fast forward to 2008… I was contacted by the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) to help them tape interviews during their annual convention in Reno. Their program, “When Did You Know,” asked the question of rocket scientists, what was your lightbulb moment - when you knew you wanted to do this for a career? Over the course of two days, we shot 6 hours of interviews (over green screen), ranging from Undersecretaries of the Air Force, Shuttle technicians, grad students and old guard flight directors. I was in awe of these men and women - some of them were the behind-the-scenes “heroes” who got the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights off the ground. But as I sat there interviewing them, I realized that most everyone had that lightbulb moment sometime between the ages of 5 and 10. What was fascinating was that they all remembered in vivid detail where they were, who they were with and what they were doing - whether it was the launch of Sputnik, first taking the controls of a 2-seater plane, or a chance encounter with the sound of the afterburners of an experimental jet… And yes, even one high level engineer credited Tony Nelson (I Dream of Jeannie) with providing his inspiration! I have to say that some of my most interesting projects involve just sitting down and having a conversation - and I’m almost always surprised that the subjects (victims?) with my least expectations are usually the most compelling.

So it begs the question: What was my own lightbulb moment, getting into this profession? I could point to the day I got my first “rock” album (John Lennon’s Imagine), on 8-track, and wrote and directed an entire music video for the record in my head… or the day I walked into the Dean of Engineering’s office at Maryland, after having flunking advanced calculus for the third time, and changing my major to Radio, TV and Film (and getting straight A’s thereafter in my major classes) on the recommendation Bernie Gutwald, who supposedly went to jail shortly thereafter… or walking into a computer room at my first job and seeing a lonely, early computer graphics system sitting in the corner and thinking to myself, “I should learn how to use that” and proceeded to teach myself the inner workings of the DEC PDP-11. So perhaps it’s not just one moment, but a series of accidents that has pointed me in this direction.

Or maybe just laziness.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Production Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.