When I was about 5 years old I asked my mother 鈥淲hat鈥檚 an astronaut?鈥� 鈥淒on鈥檛 worry,鈥� she told me, 鈥測ou鈥檙e not going to be one.鈥� This convinced me I was inadequate in some way 鈥� probably not smart enough.
I felt stupid and to make matters worse a favourite expression in my family was 鈥淏ehind every cloud is a black lining.鈥� Hardly a boost to self-esteem. The world was portrayed as a dangerous, untrustworthy place. I worked hard, nevertheless, and in 1981 received a PhD in mathematics from New York University鈥檚 Courant Institute. Yet the feelings of inadequacy were still there.
My field is celestial mechanics, the way things move in space, and I specialised in studying unstable, chaotic kinds of motion. I had always been drawn to outer space, and this was a way to study it. Another interest of mine is oil painting, and since I was 7 years old I have painted scenes of distant alien worlds 鈥� landscapes of serene majesty and beauty. In some sense, I felt I never really belonged here.
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After a spell as a mathematician at Boston University I went to work at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, designing trajectories from Earth to Jupiter for the Galileo spacecraft. How cool!
Working at JPL was exciting and I became interested in applying chaos theory to the design of spacecraft trajectories. I wanted to find a way for vehicles to go from Earth to the moon without using rocket engines to achieve lunar orbit. This would save lots of fuel 鈥� and money 鈥� and had never been shown to be possible.
In early 1986 I found such a route, which I called 鈥渓unar get away special鈥�. The journey would take two years, however, and my colleagues thought it was all a waste of time. My breakthrough was ignored.
Then in January 1990 I got fired. The feeling, said my boss, when he called me into his office, was that my ideas would never be useful. Without a job I thought my world would come to an end. The clouds really did seem to have a black lining.
The turnaround came when I was clearing out my office. I realised that to get my life back on track I needed to let go of the notion that I was stupid. I had nothing to prove to anyone. To my amazement it worked. The stress just suddenly went away.
Then a miracle happened. There was a knock on the door. It was an engineer telling me about a Japanese lunar spacecraft that was stuck in Earth orbit with little fuel, and he asked if I could save it.
By next day we had devised a new route to the moon based on my ideas. The craft was called Hiten, after a Buddhist angel who plays music in heaven. A year later it started out on our plotted path, and in October 1991 it arrived at the moon, a mission that had been considered impossible a few months earlier.
I never got my job back at JPL, but some years later the importance of my work was formally acknowledged by NASA. Thanks to the Buddhist angel, my career has flourished in spite of all I have been through.
Ed Belbruno is a mathematician at Princeton University. His book Fly Me to the Moon (Princeton University Press, 拢12.95, ISBN 9780691128221) is published in March
