ABOUT THE BOOK
During the late 1960s, while M.G. Lord was growing up in Southern California and her mother was dying of cancer, Lord’s father disappeared into his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, building the probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission. Remembering her pain at his absence, Lord revisits her youthful fascination with space as a way of understanding what captivated her father. She also explores the history of JPL, from its start in 1936 to the Red Scare persecution of its founder, Frank Malina, to the triumphant 2004 landing of the Opportunity Rover on Mars.

PEOPLE ARE SAYING
“I was blown away by this book. Lord reminds us once again that good and evil really are inextricably intertwined.”—Carolyn See, Washington Post

“Absorbing…an unusually effective hybrid of corporate history and personal memoir.” –Michael Upchurch, American Scholar

“While on a mission to understand her dad, a Cold War-era NASA engineer, Lord unearths a good-ol’-boy, anticommunist culture inside the Jet Propulsion Lab. Her witty criticisms of rocket men who could imagine living on Mars but couldn’t dream of women becoming astronauts are tempered by heartfelt observations about her father.”—WIRED Magazine