“From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!”
NASA astronaut Mike Massimino typed those words on May 12, 2009, the first tweet ever sent from space. He’d even asked his pal and fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong, who knew something about making grand statements from the lunar surface, for pre-tweet advice.
“I didn’t really think much about it,” Armstrong told him about crafting his legendary “one small step” speech, as Jeff Wilser recounts in the new book “The Explorers Club Presents: Letters from the Edge: Stories of Curiosity, Bravery, and Discovery” (Crown, out now). So Massimino kept his focus on the mission and then posted whatever came naturally.
That off-the-cuff tone became the point with Massimino’s tweets. He cued up Sting on his iPod while “watching the world go by—literally,” and marveled at “16 sunrises and sunsets in 24 hrs.”
He also let the homesickness show.
“You’re off the planet,” Massimino told the author. “You’re going to miss birthdays and holidays. The birth of a child. You’ll miss the day-to-day Little League games.”
But he tried to live in the moment, appreciating the experience he’d been given. “The Earth is so beautiful,” he tweeted, “it is like looking into paradise.”
Massimino knows these aren’t moon-landing poetry, and he’s fine with that. “Launch was awesome!” even got roasted on “Saturday Night Live.”
“In 40 years we’ve gone from ‘One giant leap for mankind’ to ‘Launch was awesome,’ ” Seth Meyers deadpanned.
Massimino’s tweets are just one of more than 45 dispatches collected in “Letters From the Edge,” from members of the Explorers Club, the New York-based society devoted to scientific fieldwork since 1904 — whose ranks have included Edmund Hillary, Theodore Roosevelt, James Cameron and Jeff Bezos. The book stitches together first-person notes that read like postcards from places most of us will never set foot.
“From the Silk Road to rovers on Mars, letters have always told the tale,” writes Wilser. But they do more than that, he adds. “They provide the benefit of immediacy, giving unfiltered insight into what the explorer was feeling in the moment, whether excitement or fear or despair or wonder.”
Another scientist in Wilser’s scrapbook is the Icelandic-Canadian Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. A bestselling evangelist for what he called the “Friendly Arctic,” Stefansson shaped public opinion (and fundraising) for polar ventures, masterminded expeditions he didn’t always join, and wrote confidently about ice as a place you could live, work and profit.
In 1921, as his Wrangel Island expedition starved and faltered, he kept upbeat letters and telegrams to families and newspapers, insisting there was “no cause for special anxiety.” Those missives — cheery, confident, wrong — are revealing because they show how explorers manage perception from the edge, making bold promises that can win headlines and money.
In 2008, dentist-turned-researcher Martin Nweeia sent the Explorers Club a post-expedition letter that belongs in a museum. He’d carried the club’s flag north to the Arctic to watch narwhals “in action,” and instead documented disaster: a shocking shooting in town on day one, nights stalked by polar bears, and then an Arctic hurricane that shredded his “high-tech” camp while a humble Inuit shelter held firm.
“On almost every level . . . a complete failure,” he wrote. And yet the same letter records the clue that moved the science — an elder’s rule of thumb about the “reddish brown” of young cod predicting when narwhals come — which dovetailed with his findings about the tusk’s sensory powers.
Ultimately, Wilser writes, “this open-mindedness to Inuit knowledge moved the science forward.”
Jessica Glass, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist who focuses on fish, writes from the part of science most of us never see: the grind. In her mission to “figure out the fish tree of life,” Glass traveled to Seychelles, South Africa, in 2017 to study the giant trevally fish. The only problem? She couldn’t seem to catch any.
“Skunked again!” she wrote in her journal. “What is the problem with these damn fish? Maybe this is why no one has studied them here . . . they are extremely evasive of scientists.”
She spent days striking out, then returned to a spot she nicknamed the “s - - t bridge,” a small overpass above a sewage outflow that reeks at low tide. She didn’t catch any GTs, but she did discover a new talent. “I caught 3 white-tip reef sharks (decently sized) and nothing else,” she wrote.
Her notes and emails matter because they show how knowledge is actually made. She documents misses, logs tiny wins, and keeps asking better questions. That persistence leads to the first thorough study of the species, not a single triumphant moment.
We prize the finished map, but the good stuff lives in the margins — those messy drafts written under sodium-vapor lights in orbit, at a jungle’s hot-blue bend, inside a plywood shack rattling as the Arctic decides what stays. That’s where the work gets honest, where plans fail and where the next question shows up.
“These letters show ‘what it’s really like to navigate the edge,’ ” Wilser writes, “with the spotlight on actual flesh-and-blood human beings, not exalted heroes.” Watching them struggle and negotiate, panic and then make sense of the moment, humanizes the process of discovery.
“Going to the edge, paradoxically, is a way to gain perspective at the center,” Wilser adds. “Understanding the edge is a way to understand ourselves.”
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