Article Review: "O-Rings" by Sarah Stewart Johnson

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Author Sarah Stewart Johnson is a planetary scientist who was six years old when the shuttle Challenger blew up on national television with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard. She begins her article at a time much earlier, however, describing British Royal Navy Captain Robert F. Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, and the remains of their huts, which stand to this day in Antarctica pretty much as the men left them. They’re not museums. With the dry climate, not much deteriorates. She spent the coldest summer of her life studying bacteria in Antarctica because the climate is presumed to be something of an analogue to that of Mars. These sound like disparate ideas, but they are all tied together with O-rings, flexible seals. On the way back to their huts from successfully (but belatedly) reaching the South Pole, Scott’s crew found the supply of fuel they had counted on for their return trip had evaporated through the gaskets in the canisters where it had been stored. In the extreme cold, the material had turned brittle and cracked. While she may have been too young to understand what was happening when Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman demonstrated what cold can do to an O-ring on a space shuttle, she recalls the Challenger disaster clearly. Neither that, nor the loss of the crew of the Columbia in 2003, nor the end of NASA’s manned space program has dampened her desire to be an astronaut. This is a beautiful and human piece of writing. Without denying the horrors or the tragedies of exploration, the author seems to be exhilarated at the prospect. She’s not a wide-eyed kid. She knows what can happen—some of it which is often not talked about. According to the contributors’ notes, Johnson is an assistant professor at Georgetown University where she studies planetary science. An online bio notes some dozen publications on such topic as DNA repair in ancient bacteria and SO2 in the ancient Martian atmosphere. A pdf of the article can be found here. _____ Title: “O-Rings” Published in: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 First Published: Harvard Review Winter 2013 Author: Sarah Stewart Johnson *An earlier version of this review was posted at another site. It has been updated and expanded for its inclusion in myLot*