The first few years working with the COBE Group were tremendously exciting. No sooner had I begun to look at the infrared data obtained by DIRBE, but a variety of interesting research projects literally leapt out and begged for attention. I tinkered with a new way to model the infrared emission of our galaxy using others as templates. I catalogued the infrared sources that COBE detected at 240 microns; new territory for astronomy! I then had a look at whether COBE/DIRBE could actually have detected some galaxies beyond the Milky Way. My favorite region was Cygnus, and I spent some time trying to extract new information about this region of the Milky Way before giving up; DIRBE was just not good enough to really study this complex region easily in the infrared.
I spent the first year pursuing these projects, and soon began to collaborate with a Postdoc, Dr. Sasha Kashlinsky, who had a very interesting research idea involving cosmology. As a theoretician, he had estimated that DIRBE could set important limits to the cosmic infrared background with out having to worry about the detailed modeling of the Zodiacal emission. We worked with Dr. John Mather to test out Sasha's ideas and found that they worked surprisingly well indeed.
By November, 1994 the astronomers who worked under contract to NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center ( GSFC) had come to the end of their first 'post-COBE' contract from NASA, and awaited the announcement from NASA/GSFC that our research support had been extended another 1.5 years until February, 1996. It was a rather anxious moment for us all, because there were no guarantees that NASA and its advisory board would accept the COBE argument made by its influential Principle Investigators, that the best was yet to come in our collective research. The COBE PIs had already presented their findings from the COBE, FIRAS and DMR experiments which drew world-wide acclaim from the scientific community. How could we possibly improve on what we had just accomplished in 1990 and 1991? The answer, the PIs said, was that we had LOTS more data which, when properly and carefully combined, could push our results a factor of two or more better in precision. Fortunately, NASA and its independent advisory board of astronomers agreed that it was worth a little more money to go the extra decimal point, and on Thanksgiving we made a smooth transition to the COBE Extension contract. We had received the continuation money, now the hard work of meeting our promises began in ernest.
The year was spent struggling with the calibration of the so-called Warm Era DIRBE data, improving the calibration of the FIRAS instrument, and adding together the rest of the DMR radio data covering 4 years of observations. For myself, I spent a lot of time with Sasha and John working with the DIRBE data to wrestle from it improved estimates for how bright the infrared background could be. The technique we were using was a different one than what the rest of the DIRBE team was working with, and in the end, ours proved to be a better method in some of the spectral bands covered by DIRBE.
During this year, John, Sasha and myself submitted a proposal to NASA to get a five-year 'Long Term Space Astrophysics' grant which is highly coveted. We described our program in detail, presented in the proposal some tentative results using our method, and asked that NASA support us to do a substantially more thorough investigation. To our shock and amazement, we WON! NASA ultimately only gave us $315,000 and over five years that would have to be enough to support all three of us, pay our office and lab overheads, our travel requirements and page charges, and various administrative fees over at Goddard. But, we were delighted that, in a tight research funding market, we had compelled NASA to give us what we needed to continue our work. For myself, it would, however, only support me for 1 day a week for the next five years. What would I do to get the rest of my weekly salary?
At least during the COBE-Extension period, I had plenty of work to do, to fill up the other 4 days a week. A post-facto agreement had also been made to support me with the DIRBE funds to do the 'LTSA' work, even though my actual work on the DIRBE Warm Era calibration was minimal. I also led a project with George Smoot and Jeffery Newmark, in which I investigated distant galaxies using the DIRBE data. This was written up during this time and submitted for publication in the Astrophysics Journal. By September, 1995 however, the galaxy survey project was finished, and I spent all of my time working on the NASA grant whose money had just come into my company's accounting office so that I could charge full time on it for the next 3 months.
Meanwhile, the February 27, 1996 termination date for this COBE-Extension work was fast approaching. My company and a company called GSC, had already 'teamed' together to go after the GSFC 'Code 680 Space Science Support Contract' under which the remaining COBE work would be performed after February. Our competitors were Hughes STX and Computer Sciences Corporation who also had a substantial science and engineering 'presence' at Goddard. We had worked side-by-side with the Hughes STX staff at the COBE Cosmology Data Analysis Center, and some of us had even developed friendships and scientific collaborations with the Hughes staff. I can think of no other situation in which employees are asked to work in such close quarters while their companies compete for the contracts under which we are expected to work in a winner-take-all environment.
We were supposed to hear, by the first week of December, the outcome of this competition. That deadline lapsed thanks to the brouhaha over the Federal Budget, the ensuing closing down of the government, and the gratuitous snow storms in January in the Washington D.C area. After 2 more deadlines passed, we finally heard the news on Wednesday, January 17 at 4:00 PM.
It was not good.
The powers that be had weighed the proposals ( hopefully not in a literal sense!), and decided that they were all technically excellent, but that Hughes STX had managed to come in with a lower cost estimate for the work. NASA and the Federal Government liked that a lot! This tipped the balance soundly in favor of Hughes STX, and eventually caused GSC and ARC to loose the contract, even though, we argued, it was only ARC/GSC that had the 'scientists' who were qualified to do the work on COBE. Well, as true as this may seem, the business world knows how to play hard ball. In a well-planned move, Hughes STX had correctly understood that we astronomers are more loyal to our research and our careers, than we often are to our companies. Think about it. If a doctor working for a hospital was told their branch was being phased out, but that they had openings in the hospital's Veterinary Division, what do you think the doctors would do? Stay with the hospital out of loyalty, give up a job as a vascular surgeon and learn how to spay dogs? Or do you think they would go down the street to the next hospital with their resume in hand?
No sooner had the announcement been made by NASA, when one by one the COBE astronomers at GSC and ARC were invited to join Hughes STX to continue their research. It didn't take a rocket scientist to decide what to do. For some of us, the decision had already been made for us, in some cases by our own companies. GSC's COBE astronomers were called into a meeting to sign their own RIF notices while their company tried to find work for them. In small companies, no one can be temporarily 'stored' on overhead because this increases the companies indirect costs and makes them that much more expensive when it comes time to bid on new contracts. Some of my friends and colleagues on the COBE DIRBE Team are now working on GSC projects for the Earth Observing System as software writers, managers, or staff scientists and mathematicians. The ARC staff had an easier decision to make. Our company had fallen on hard financial times, and there were no open contracts available for our 8-person COBE Team to 'transition' onto, except for one very lucky individual who now works with the SOHO Project. The rest of us, though never told directly, understood that we could in principle loose our jobs on February 28th, or even sooner, if it proved to be financially expedient to ARC to RIF us in order to pay its bills!
Between January 19th and the 30th I was in an almost constant state of stress. Our offices were being moved over to Goddard. We were all asked to pack up our books, save whatever disk files we wanted, and turn in our keys. On January 20th, a cold dismal day, I began the odious task of schlepping all of my books home to store them in my basement; A condition that I hoped would be temporary. Although we all had desk assignments over at Goddard in Building 21 for the next few weeks, there would be no room for our books and file cabinets at least until the hiring and RIFing activity had run its course and reduced us to a paltry handful of very lucky staff members. There were 15 astronomers working on COBE when the music started. By the time the music stopped, only 7 of us remained standing.
Thankfully, I recall little of that time, although I scribbled furiously in my daily diary to capture the essence of what this was like. There were many mornings when I awoke at 4AM and scanned through the Washington Post want ads looking for leads to other careers. A cacophony of computer languages I had never heard of swam before my eyes. Even my acquisition of C programming skills seemed insufficient as the adds now clamored for C++, JAVA and other languages I had not had the time to learn. You cannot do everything, and learning ADA, MOTIF and a vegetable soup of other languages of the week, were not things that a scientist needed to worry about in the land of pure research. Many astronomers still only know FORTRAN! Meanwhile, I had been approached by Hughes, and had submitted my resume to them, not knowing exactly what kind of calculus was going on behind closed doors to decide who would be offered a job and who would be passed-by.
Meanwhile, the deadline for responding to the new round of NASA research grants was rushing up to meet me on February 15th, and as difficult as it was, I had to focus my energies, not on today's impending joblessness, but on the optimistic prospect that with this grant I might have some research money 6 months from now to spend. There were over 20 of us at GSC, ARC and Hughes STX who were submitting proposals, and during these weeks we had to try not to thing of today's instability. We had to think creatively about what research we most wanted to pursue next year, and to phrase the proposal in the usual optimistic hard-sell that now seems par for the course in modern, late 20th century grantsmanship.
The water continued to flow under the bridge in the ensuing weeks. Hughes DID offer me a position as a Chief Scientist, and with astonishing haste I might add! I was immediately encouraged to speak face to face with the President, Ashoke Kaveeshoir, and the Vice President of Marketing, Richard Bishop to discuss my future with the company and what opportunities there were for doing creative work. It was obvious that infrared astronomy was only a minor key in the complex symphony of what Hughes STX was all about. I was, at the same time, heartened, and anxious about the possibilities and how I would ultimately fit into it all.
It has now been three months since all of this happened, and I am adjusting to the new reality that, like so many other wonderful people I have met over the years, I will always have to live with significant job insecurity. It has been a constant companion of mine since leaving graduate school, and after 14 years of year-to-year living, you either adapt to it, or you don't. I am grateful for the stints I manage to get doing astronomical research, but in today's rapidly changing research climate, I cannot even expect that these brief interludes will be the norm. In a way, it is a curiously liberating experience, and a welcome one as I enter middle age. Of course I would have preferred getting tenure somewhere, but this is a goal that is rapidly becoming out of reach for better astronomers than myself. My good fortune is to have made a certain accommodation with my career, and now be willing to venture into non-astronomical, and certainly non-traditional, work venues.
I'm I still an astronomer? It is hard to walk away, emotionally, from a mind set that I have had since I was 10 years old. So long as I can write articles for the public, support my internet site, and provide some meager inspiration for others who are curious about our universe, I will always continue to think of myself in this way. If by chance I manage to continue even part time my research, then the question is a moot one. And who knows, we can never see what the future will bring. Today's anxieties may, in the end, fall away as new opportunities make themselves known.