A Poem Hitches a Ride on a Rocket, to Infinity and Beyond
NASA and the U.S. Poet Laureate may not be obvious collaborators, but a Jupiter-bound mission helped them find common ground.
A Poem Hitches a Ride on a Rocket, to Infinity and Beyond
NASA and the U.S. Poet Laureate may not be obvious collaborators, but a Jupiter-bound mission helped them find common ground.
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Reporting from Merritt Island, Fla.
On Oct. 14, at six minutes past noon, a group of people stood on a balcony overlooking a launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. and watched Europa Clipper, the largest interplanetary craft NASA has ever built, blast off into the cosmos.
Most were scientists and engineers who had worked on the mission for more than a decade, some for their entire careers. Then there was Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, whose 150-word poem is engraved on an interior panel that’s roughly the size of a three-ring binder.
“At first you don’t hear anything,” Limón said of a view that went from bucolic to chaotic to astonishing in the time it takes a cloud to skid across the sun. “You see the explosion, then it hits you. It feels like a physical representation of the amount of work it takes to make a mission like this occur.”
Credit...NASA
Credit...NASA
Limón’s contribution, “In Praise of Mystery,” is a tiny piece of a complicated puzzle that has the potential to change humanity’s understanding of its place in the solar system. It isn’t the first poem to slip the surly bonds of Earth and it won’t be the last. But its origin story is a reminder of the link between art and science, and the way inspiration flows in both directions.
The collaboration started with an email from one government agency to another.
On Oct. 14, 2022, Bert Ulrich, NASA’s liaison for multimedia collaborations, sent a message to Brett Zongker, chief of media relations at the Library of Congress, asking if Limón would be interested in writing a poem to travel aboard Europa Clipper.
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