07: University Dropout to NASA Project Leader // The Story of Dr. Erika Hamden

I don't know if keep it from happening again is exactly the right way to phrase it, but to just make sure that I feel whatever the difficult parts of the day or the experience or the work are always outweighed by the joyful things. All of that sucks. But it is not the end. And it's never the end. And like you do what you have to do to get through it and then you go on to the next thing. Nothing is ever the end. And I said this at the end of my TED Talk, but the only failure is giving up.

Welcome to From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. I'm your host Eric Gilbert Williams, and this is the podcast where we explore personal stories of people who hit absolute rock bottom, then got back up, wiped off the dust, kicked failure to the curb, and now they're rocking it like you'd never believe if you didn't hear it live right here we cover subjects in business, sports, and life in general. If you like this podcast, please share it. These interviews are intended to inspire, to motivate, to give hope and vision. So please share this episode with someone who needs it. Use your Instagram account, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, hand signals. Trained pigeon sent smoke signals up in the air. Use Morse code, whatever you like. Just share the love and share this episode. Also, email me anytime. Podcasterricilbertwilliams.com Send me questions you would like to have asked of future guests and I will incorporate them. Or just send me some suggestions on how to run a better podcast. Or just say hello, I'd love to hear from you. That's podcasterrickgilbertwilliams.com I know you're going to love today's interview, so let's get started. With us here today on From Rock Bottom. The Rock on it is one of the professors of astrophysics at the University of Arizona, Erica Hamden. Erica is also a TED Fellow, which means basically that TED Talks believes she's extra awesome in the world of already awesome TED Talks. And after today's interview, I think that you'll agree with the TED Talks valuation. Erica is going to talk to us a bit about her rock bottom moments and also her rockin it experiences during her almost a decade of dedication towards building a revolutionary space telescope. It's is designed to float in our stratosphere which will literally change how we view the universe. Erica, welcome to From Rock Bottom to Rock' n It. I'm so glad to have you here. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to it.

Yeah. And you're in Arizona right now?

Yes, in Tucson, Arizona.

And what's the lockdown over there right now? How's things?

Things are okay. It's pretty quiet here. The summer in Tucson is actually always quiet. People leave for the summer because it gets so hot. So see how things go. But so far the weather's been nice and doing okay.

Are you teaching remotely right now?

Yeah, I'm teaching an intro astronomy class for undergrads. So I've been recording lectures and posting them on the website and trying to stay in touch with all the students. It's been a challenge, but we're getting through it.

It's an incredibly challenging time for everyone right now. Right. And we just got to do what we can.

Yeah. And just like everyone is doing the best that they can and that's all that you can hope for.

And how does that effect work with the telescope? It's called the Fireball 2, right?

Yeah. So it's actually basically put things on hold. We were in the process of putting the telescope back together. So I was in New York in February. We were realigning the spectrograph and putting the optics back in place and checking that they were right. And that process is really hands on. You have to be in the lab doing it. Since we can't really travel and New York has been the epicenter of the crisis. Basically it's on hold. And the launch process is very dependent on weather. And the weather is really only good for a few weeks in September. And so we're not going to be able to make it for. We had planned to do it to do a reflight in 2020, September 2020. And that's just. There's no way that we're going to make it for that so caused us. We're sort of just in a holding pattern and trying to do non hardware focused things, simulations and modeling and whatever we can kind of do in the meanwhile. But it's definitely put a pause on all of. All of the fun hardware stuff.

One more challenge to overcome. And you've overcome a lot of challenges with this telescope.

Oh yeah.

So tell me the story. I mean, people listening right now today are who might not be familiar with your story and with your project. Tell me in your own words, what are you working on right now? Why is it important? And what were some of the challenges?

Yes. The telescope is called Fireball and it's an acronym, as all good telescope names are. It stands for faint, the Faint Intergalactic Medium Redshifted emission balloon.

Say that 10 times fast.

Yeah, seriously. And this is actually the second version of the telescope. So that's why it's called Fireball 2, because there was a first version which flew a couple times in the 2000s, and it just wasn't sensitive enough. And so the entire telescope got redesigned to be basically more sensitive because the. What we're trying to observe with it is giant clouds of hydrogen gas outside of distant galaxies. So we're looking at galaxies that are about half the age of the universe. And we think that all galaxies have these big reservoirs of hydrogen outside of them, that the reservoirs are kind of formed in the Big Bang. It's like primordial hydrogen, and it flows into the galaxy eventually. And that's what gives the galaxy fuel to make new stars, because you can't make stars without hydrogen. But the problem with doing these observations is that it's hydrogen that is just a cloud of hydrogen. It's not a star. It doesn't put out a lot of light the way that a star does. So we're trying to observe this, like, very, very, very faint signature. So we need a telescope that's really good. And part of that process of making the telescope better than the first version of it was to make a better detector like a light sensor. The previous version had a light sensor, which was at the time was the state of the art, but it just wasn't particularly efficient. And there was a lot of other inefficiencies in the design that were kind of limited by the technology. So I first started working on the telescope as a grad student in 2008, and I started working on a project that was focused on the detector, not the telescope itself. And so I started, I joined a team at jpl. I was a grad student at Columbia University, but I would go out to JPL several times a year. And I learned all this stuff about like, material science. And the detectors are made of silicon. They're actually very similar to what's in your cell phone. That, like cell phone camera is not exactly the same, but it's close. So that was a whole multi year process of like learning how the detectors worked. The JPL does this custom process to make the detectors really efficient in the ultraviolet. And then my role was to do a second process on top of that. And all this stuff happens in a vacuum. It's like with nanotechnology. And it's ironic, everything happening now where people are like wearing face masks and all of the, like, ppe, because in the clean room at JPL you're wearing, like, a full bunny suit, a mask, a head covering, gloves all the time. So in some ways, I'm, like, used to all of the protective stuff because the equipment is so sensitive and it has to be kept so, so, so clean all the time. So that process was really interesting because I learned a lot. Like, one thing about this, the whole telescope project, is that every step of the way, it's been a new experience for me and, like, a new challenge. And I really like that. That's, like, partly what gets me up in the morning. And with the detector work, it took a lot of time to figure out the right process to do. Because the detectors are so sensitive, if you, like, expose them to an electric field, then they stop working. If they get too hot, if they. If you, like, touch them in the wrong way, they're just like these really delicate but quite beautiful pieces of equipment. But finally, after. Let's see. So I started that in 2008, and finally in, like, 2012 and 2013, we started getting really good results. And at that point, I had been in grad school doing other projects as well, not just only the detectors, but other science projects. And once we felt confident in the detector, we could actually rebuild the rest of the telescope around it. And I finished my PhD in 2014, and I went to Caltech as a postdoc researcher. And at that point, I sort of took over leading the telescope project. And so we spent a few more years actually building things because we had redesigned the spectrograph, we had redesigned a lot of the components, and so everything had to basically be built from scratch. And so that took a few years. And we have a really great collaboration between Caltech, Columbia University, jpl, and then two teams in France, a team in Marseille, and a team in Toulouse. And so we had a bunch of trips to France to put things together, and we finally got everything kind of going, and we were feeling really good about all the components. So we shipped the entire telescope to New Mexico, which is where the launches happen from. So this would have been 2016. And as I said before, the launches can only happen in September in a very short window. Basically, you need the stratospheric winds to be low enough that the balloon. Once you launch the balloon, it's not going to, like, go to California and head out over the Pacific Ocean, or it's not going to head to the East Coast. The winds die down in September for a few weeks, and then the balloon will basically just, like, meander.

Okay, so let's back up here. Just for a second. Now when I hear the word telescope, usually I think of a little home kit tripod stand that you might buy for home use, or a dome shaped type of a structure that has an opening at the top maybe you'd see on the top of a mountain or in a desert. Or I might think of a Hubble out in space. But your telescope, Erica, is neither of these. If I understand correctly, this is a balloon that essentially holds and brings a telescope up into our stratosphere, which is obviously neither on Earth in a desert or fully out in space, like Hubble, with the intention of essentially getting the telescope outside of the realm of light pollution on Earth without having to incur the cost of actually going into space. Is that about right? Am I describing this properly?

Yeah, so that's exactly right. But basically if you think of a telescope, yeah, you either think of like a telescope on the ground, like with a big dome that's very impressive looking on a mountaintop, or like the Hubble Space Telescope in space. But there's actually a few telescopes that are in between those things. And NASA has a whole kind of regime of telescopes that they call suborbital. So it's not on the ground, but it's not in orbit the way that the Hubble is. And so the balloon program, and there's also suborbital rockets where the rocket just goes up and comes down. And for balloons, yeah, you basically have like a gigantic 40 million cubic foot high altitude balloon and you hang the telescope from a cable from the balloon and then you inflate the balloon with helium, you let it go and it rises up to like 130,000ft. The exact height that it gets to depends on the size of the balloon because there's all sorts of sizes. The 40 million cubic foot is basically when it's inflated, it's the size of a football stadium. They're huge.

Is that all? Eh?

Oh yeah, you know, just that. But you can have ones as small as 40 million cubic feet and those go to 80,000ft in the stratosphere. And then there's actually one that's even bigger. There's a 60 million cubic foot, which is just a monster. So depending on like the weight of your telescope or what altitude you're trying to reach, there's kind of like a range of balloon sizes that you can have. And then, yeah, the telescope hangs about 100ft below the balloon. And the whole thing is like kind of a crazy. It's totally crazy when I think about.

Modern transportation and human evolution. And I look back maybe 200 years ago, back when hot air balloons were invented. I think it was in the late 1700s, if I remember correctly. So when I think about human advancement in transportation, I think about hot air balloons, because who uses them now? I took a date up on one a while ago, and that was pretty much the only use. It was for entertainment. Right. It wasn't for practical purposes. And what we've got here is NASA, one of the most funded and advanced groups of people and mines on the planet that are essentially using an archaic form of transportation and modernizing it to find the sweet spot for a telescope. Essentially, the cost of a hot air balloon is a fraction of a rocket. And we don't need a rocket to get the telescope to that sweet spot that we're aiming for. Am I describing this properly? Is this the purpose and intention of the fireball 2?

So there's a few components that come into play. The rocket launches are much shorter. If you do like a rocket telescope, you only have about five minutes of data, and the balloons, you get like a whole day. Okay, so that's one thing. The balloons are definitely cheaper and they're a lot more forgiving. Like you can have a much bigger telescope on a balloon, whereas the rocket has really strict size requirements. It has to be like really thin and like a cylinder. So you just have a lot more flexibility with the balloon. But for us, like, because the target that we're trying to observe is so faint, we need all that observing time, or at least like a full night of observing. And the balloon is. There's a lot more variables that can come into play with the balloon than the rocket. It's more challenging in some ways, but then in other ways it gives you like more flexibility in the design of your telescope.

Yeah, it's all about trade offs, right?

Yes, exactly.

What are you trying to discover about hydrogen that we don't already know right now? I mean, to my understanding, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe that we know of in terms of matter, regular matter, pardon my non technical terminology here, but I'm differentiating regular matter from dark matter here. But either way, what are you trying to discover about hydrogen that's going to revolutionize or change the way that we see the universe?

So we know that the Big Bang happened, or we have a pretty good theory for how the universe formed. And the prediction of the Big Bang theory is a certain amount of hydrogen out in the universe. And hydrogen, as you said, is the most abundant element in the universe. And we can do Like a census. If we look out into the universe around us, we can say, like, okay, here's a galaxy that has this much light. It's going to weigh this much. It has this much hydrogen. Here's another galaxy. It has this much hydrogen. You can count up how much hydrogen can we actually account for in the stuff that we see. And it's not even close to all of the hydrogen that we know was formed in the Big Bang. We're, like, under counting it because we're only looking at the really bright stuff. And so first, the, like, very base level is that we have these simulations of how the universe has evolved through time, how you form a galaxy. And the simulations say, oh, there should be all this hydrogen that's out in between galaxies that hasn't actually gotten into a galaxy yet, but it's there. We just can't. It's just not in a galaxy. So the very first order thing is to say, like, oh, well, there. That hydrogen is actually out in between galaxies. And we. Our kind of idea of how the universe has evolved is correct so that we can do a census of the stuff that we think is supposed to be there is actually there. And then the second thing is that when we look at galaxies out in the universe, they come in, like, all sorts of shapes and all sorts of sizes. There's the really beautiful spiral galaxies. There's kind of other galaxies that are having, like, interactions or they're, like, all disturbed and messed up. But we don't have a full picture of why galaxies look the way that they do. Like, what about a spiral galaxy is causing it to form new stars? And what about this other galaxy where it doesn't have any new stars? Like, why has that happened to it? And so being able to observe the environments that the galaxies are in, we think is a key to being able to explain that a galaxy with no new stars, if you look at the environment, something must have happened to kind of disrupt that galaxy from getting new hydrogen from farther out in its environment. Whereas a galaxy that's making lots of stars, maybe it has these big reservoirs of hydrogen, and they're still connected and flowing into the galaxy. So we're just at a point in our ability to, like, build these telescopes and make these observations where we can start to detect these big reservoirs of hydrogen. When we look out into the universe, we can tell that older galaxies, when you're looking through space, the farther away that you look, you're, like, actually looking back in time because light takes a certain amount of time to reach, reach Us. So older galaxies are making more stars than the galaxies that are right around us. If you look back through the history of the universe, galaxies used to make more stars than they do today. And we're in this era of, like, declining star formation, and we don't really know why that is. So we want to look at galaxies at all these different points in the history of the universe to see, like, well, maybe there's these big, large scale changes that are happening to the galaxy's environment that explain why, overall, the formation of new stars is kind of slowing down. And so this also connects to things like, well, the expansion of the universe and how galaxies interact with other galaxies in, like, big clusters. And so there's a lot of complicated stuff happening, but it's really important just because we still don't have a full, clear explanation for how you kind of go from, like, a big collection of hydrogen in the Big Bang to the Milky Way. And I want to know how that happens.

Yeah. Now, when we come back from this short little break, I want to ask you about some of these deep challenges that you went through, the ones that made you wonder, why the heck are you still doing this?

Right.

But first, I have this curiosity question I want to pose to you. I debate regularly in a friendly way with my friends here that work at NASA. So the framework is all right. We know that matter that we interpret with our regular senses essentially is 5% of the universe. If we take everything that is and call it 100%, the regular matter, including hydrogen, is about 5% of that, then we have another 20%, which to my understanding, is called dark matter. And please correct me at any point if I'm wrong on some of this, but that dark matter could be essentially black holes and the like. And then we have this remaining 75%, which is called dark energy. And both dark matter and dark energy are called dark simply because we don't know what it is yet. It's like a moon with the lights turned off.

We.

We haven't turned on the lights yet. We haven't been able to figure out and identify what it is. And so with that framework understanding, the question that comes up is, how much do we actually know? I mean, how close are we to discovering everything that is and understanding what's going on with dark matter and dark energy? Are we close or are we really far? Is it even possible or practical to try and make that prediction or give an answer to that question? It's a fun little chat. We have, you know, on one side it's, hey, we know everything and these are all the facts and this is everything that we understand. And on the other side, it's, look, we don't really understand a whole lot at all. We know some things, but the percentage of what we know compared to what we don't know is massive. It's fun. So how close are we to essentially understanding the universe?

I don't think we're very close to it.

I don't think so either. I'm not the professional though, so my opinion, it's a grain of salt.

Well, I think that there's not just with the universe in like space, but I think in almost all realms of knowledge we have these large scale stories that we can tell about how you form a star or how a cell divides, although we probably know that a lot better than how you form a star. But I think in a lot of science, the deeper that you dig into any process, the farther down that you get, the more there are questions that we don't know. And I think that's what makes it really interesting because you do know the whole story. Clearly. Stars form because we see them, we orbit one. So at least in my own specialty, all of the exact details of every step that has to happen along the way, that's where there's all these open questions where we like don't know a bunch of steps and the exact way that it happens. And in terms of the large scale understanding of the universe, there's so much stuff that we don't know yet. We don't know gravity, which is so fundamental to everything to do with astrophysics and life. Really, we're only here because of gravity. We don't understand gravity. We like, know how it affects things, but like a fundamental level, it's so weird. And there's a lot of stuff that we do understand and there's a lot of things that we can explain. But if you're getting to like a full understanding of like, okay, the Big Bang happens and then this happens and this happens and this happens and here's all the reasons why. We got so many, so many things to fill in. But I think that's good. I feel like the end of that is going to be like, what are we all going to do? I don't think we'll ever get there. But the idea of knowing everything, I just feel like, oh, that would be sad if there's no more things to discover. And that doesn't even cover stuff like the bottom of the ocean or all the things about the Earth that we don't know or in so many fields of science, there's so many things that we still don't know and stuff that I think is really profound and interesting and important for people.

It's a fascinating journey and the journey is not always easy. It's very difficult sometimes. Please share with us what were the top two or the top three biggest challenges that you had? I'm talking about those moments when you wake up and you go into the office or you go into the lab and you're just like, man, why are we even doing this? Like, what is actually happening? What are those top two or top three challenges?

So I do have one that I would like to start with, which actually is way before I got involved in Fireball, but I think it's helped inform my entire life. So I want to take us back in time to 2001. I was just starting college. I was a freshman in college in the fall of 2001, and I had just started at MIT and I was, as you might imagine, I was like a super nerd in high school. And I was so excited to go to college.

I didn't say nothing.

Nerds have taken over the world, so it's fine.

Very true.

Yeah. But I was, like, so excited to go to mit. I had wanted to go there for a really long time. And I got there and I had a terrible experience.

Why?

A lot of things. I had, like, had a really sheltered childhood. And so going to college was like a big shock of not being like, with my family and having to like, navigate everything on my own. And I got there and I thought that everyone was going to be like, me, like super nerds who are really excited to learn about science. And like, I think that there are people like that at mit and there were at the time, but I didn't find them. Instead, I felt like I made friends with people who were going to. They all told me they were going to be bankers and make a lot of money. And it was just in this environment of where I felt like, well, why am I taking these classes? Like, I. I don't like this. Am I going to do a major that I don't like and then graduate and then have a job that I don't like and then have a life that I don't like? Which that whole thought process is like a very anxiety induced thing.

This is one of the seeds that comes up on the subject of mental health. This subject comes up a lot on this show about mental health and what makes up this disease of mental health. And for me, I was A very anxious kid. I struggled a lot when I was younger, and I hid in drugs, and other people aren't able to get through it. There's people both on this show and out in the world every day that sadly commit suicide because they are suffering from this mental health disease. So I would never discredit or undervalue the importance and the significance of mental health. Now, Erica, you made it through this without hitting those particular extremes, which is really great.

Yeah. At the time, I didn't know that just because I felt like that I didn't know that it wasn't true or that that was just my anxiety kind of like spinning me up, and I didn't know how to break out of it. And so I had a really. I struggled a lot to go to class. I felt like I was the only person who was feeling that way, and it was just a really isolating experience. And your freshman year of college, you're supposed to meet all these people and have new experiences. And I just felt really alone. And I ended up. MIT has done a lot to improve their mental health services since then. I mean, this was, like, almost 20 years ago.

We've come such a long way in 20 years on the subject of mental health.

In 20 years, I didn't even feel comfortable talking to the friends that I did have about it. I. They knew something was wrong, but it was really hard to articulate any of it.

And that's the whole point of this podcast, is to talk about this stuff. Right. To get it out there.

Yeah. So I took a leave of absence for two weeks before Thanksgiving, which didn't really solve anything, but it got me out of the environment, so I was at home and just kind of did nothing. And then after Thanksgiving, I went back, and then I realized I was there for a day, and I was just like, I don't want to be here. I don't know why I'm doing this. And my parents came and picked me up and took me home, and I dropped out of mit.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Yeah. My whole personality was. Part of it was about being, like, a high achiever and being really smart and being really good in academics. And I just decided, like, I needed to just get out of there. Felt like this colossal failure. And I got home, and it was weird in a lot of ways because, like, my parents still love me, my family still loved me. You know, my friends liked me. Not because of my, nobody likes you because you're good at school. But, you know, so much of my sense of Self and my self worth had been around achievement and I had just failed in this like really super fundamental way. And I felt like it was really a tough decision. But then I look back on that and that was like such a brave choice for me to do where I was like, why? This is not going well. I just need to get out of here.

Yeah. Does dropping out, does quitting represent failure or is it more like a reset button? Is it actually courageous to be able to objectively identify when it's time to stop and reset or stop and change course? I think it's courageous when you're coming from a place of logic.

Yeah. And I dropped out in time to still apply to college for the following year. So I did that in kind of this like depressive haze. And then I spent the rest of the year I worked at a borders in the coffee shop and I took classes at the state school in our town just to kind of like keep myself occupied. And I realized I had to like rebuild myself and my personality as, you know, like, I am valuable because I'm a person and all people are valuable and not because of the things that I achieve or anything else. And it also, I thought a lot about the decision that I had made to go to MIT and like, why was I doing things that I was doing there. I feel like I relied way too much on the input of other people. The other people around me are all going to parties. So should I go to parties or this desire to not want to do things on my own because I wanted, I was like making decisions for other people and not for myself. And so after that, I have tried really hard in every decision I've made to make sure that I'm doing things because I want to do them and because it's going to make me happy. And so I, I joke now that I have like almost no tolerance for being unhappy in a situation because I just feel like the only thing that matters is like, how is your day going? How was yesterday? How was tomorrow? And not like, well, in 10 years this is going to pay off for me because now, especially with my own experiences in science, like you don't know if that payoff is coming. You have to be satisfied. You have to be satisfied in the moment with what you're doing because that's all that you have.

We're talking about the journey and deferred happiness. In my opinion. It's almost an anti happiness.

Yes.

Yeah, it needs to be here today. And I'm not talking about instant gratification here. No, I'M talking about, does it make sense today? Because if it makes sense today, then it probably makes sense tomorrow. But if it doesn't make sense today, then there's a really good chance we might be off track here.

Yeah. And, like, a sense of satisfaction. And that doesn't mean that there aren't hard days, but that the balance of things is one where I, like, look back over the last year or two years or whatever, and I say, like, oh, I'm really proud of what I do and what I've been doing.

And out of curiosity, what was it like being a female at MIT? Was that a factor 20 years ago, or was that not really a factor? I have no idea.

Yeah, I think it was a factor. It's hard to know because, like, a fish doesn't know that it lives in water.

Right.

One issue for me was the. There was a big party culture at MIT because students were so stressed out. And a lot of the party culture revolved around fraternity parties. And I didn't know enough at the time to be able to articulate that. Like, I didn't feel comfortable in that environment, but I just knew I didn't like doing it. I think that was part of it. This kind of, like, the social life was really structured in a way where men and fraternities were like, the gatekeepers.

I guess we're talking about social pressure here and teen pressure and what matters more to a teenager than fitting in and feeling like they belong.

Yeah.

And that can be challenged. It's a source of power for so many people. Some people use that power to be a bully, and others who aren't bullies use it as you alluded to, use the power as, like, a gatekeeper. Well, we're not going to bully you, but you can't be one of us if you're not going to fill in the blank, whatever that is.

Yeah. And I think if you were a guy at mit, you joined a fraternity, and then you had a whole group of people who were your, like, support. And I didn't, like, really have access to that. So I think that was another way that was less overt. I haven't experienced a tremendous amount of overt sexism in my career, but I think there's been a lot of stuff that's just like, well, the structures are set up in such a way to support certain people and not other people.

So how did you get through this, Erica? I mean, you dropped out of mit, you're feeling the same essence of social pressure that so many other people experience and get Stuck in. But you did make it through. And what happened? Well, how did that work? How did you get through this?

I basically applied to college. I got into a few places and I ended up going to Harvard, which is only like 2 miles down the road from MIT, but is an entire, an entirely different world. I think I made it through because my parents are really supportive and you know, they were like, whatever I needed, they wanted to provide their tough and like, my dad is an immigrant and so there's a little bit of like, well, why aren't you getting hundreds on everything? But when I was in a tough situation, they still loved me and they just wanted me to be happy. So I think that like having the support of my family, I was really lucky, to be honest. I come from a pretty well to do family. My parents have enough money that they could pay for me to go to college. And a lot of people would have had to stay. Either stay in the school where they at, where they were at because of money, or they would drop out and never go back because of money. And like, that wasn't an issue for me. And I had access to like, I saw a therapist twice a week when I left mit and I kind of had the time and the space to like, figure out tools to help me when I did go back to college. When I went to Harvard, I did whatever I wanted and I kind of was much more my own person. I would go and I took classes because I was interested in them. I gave myself a break on like, if I get Bs, whatever, I get Bs. And for someone who was like not obsessed with grades, but I was so concerned about getting A's all the time in high school, getting Bs in college, I was like, okay, this is very freeing. Like, I can spend that time playing field hockey or just like going to museums or kind of doing things that make me happy.

So you reached out for a support group and you took some time for yourself.

Yeah, it was a lot of things. And just like the. I had a lot of really good friends who were there for me and who still cared about me on this show.

We have so many different types of stories. It's such a broad spectrum of rock bottom challenges, right from extreme drug addiction to suicide or bankruptcy. And I want to take a moment here to just tie a connection. When we're young adults, we're all experiencing our environments in a very relative way. There's no better or worse. There are more extremes, yes, of course, but there is no better or worse. When we're talking about mental health and struggles of the mind. Every person experiences this in their own unique way. And the relative challenge in my mind for whatever it is that I'm struggling with is going to represent the same sort of relative difference as the struggle in someone else's mind on a different subject. It doesn't matter if, in their perspective, my life is easier or in my perspective, that their life is harder. It doesn't really matter because the way that we experience these types of mental health challenges is just as real and just as powerful to each of us, no matter what it is that our circumstance happens to be. What I mean is suicide doesn't care where you come from. Suicide doesn't care what race you are or what, you know, the color of your skin or your background or how much money you had or how much money your parents had or what job you have. Suicide doesn't care about any of that stuff. And similarly, drug addiction doesn't care where you come from or who your friends are. Drug addiction is its own thing. It doesn't care who you are. It'll strike anyone equally as hard as anyone else. Every human is an equal when it comes to dealing with mental health. With suicide and with drug addiction, all that matters is how do we deal with the challenges that were presented? How do we interpret the challenge, and how do we find our solution? How do we move forward to tomorrow? It's a battle that rages inside of our own minds to figure out who we are and to find that passion deep inside of us so that we can move forward to the next step as people that know who listen to the show regularly. Sometimes I go on rants like I just did right now. Erica, what do you think about this subject and everything I said here? What are your thoughts?

I think that's absolutely right. I think that experience, for me, I had to. I think back on it now, and I feel like in that time, I've developed so many tools. They're actual tools to help me get through difficult situations or stressful situations that now I know myself well enough to say, like, okay, I am soothed by this and this. So if I do these things, it will make me feel better, and then I can make it through today and then I can make it through tomorrow. And sometimes, like, it is just getting through the day. Like Alcoholics Anonymous, they say, like, one day at a time.

Yeah.

And especially I've been thinking about that a lot in the last couple of weeks that, like, right now what I need to do is get through the day and with a lot of stuff with the telescope. There were days where I was like, I just need to get through today. I need to do this and this and this and that. Then I can make it. And I wish that my 18 year old self had known about any of those things because I look back on that time and I just didn't have any tools. I could only barely identify the feelings that I was going through. So I'm really grateful that I've been able to learn how to deal with those situations. And I'm grateful because I think the culture of mental health in that time has expanded so much that now there's words for the feelings that you have or the like. I think I barely even knew what anxiety was when I was going through. Basically, like I was having panic attacks, but I didn't know that that's what it was.

Yeah, I didn't discover that word until my late 20s or whatever it was. I had no idea what was going on. It was just happening. I was weird and awkward and there was something wrong with me. That's as far as my brain could interpret. Exactly.

And like, just having like a vocabulary and a language to talk about it is really powerful. And then a couple years ago, I made almost like a decision tree for myself about making decisions. And a lot of it is informed. That experience of like, am I doing this for me? Is it going to bring joy to my life? Is it going to be enriching? Is this like, will this experience help me build connections? And I've been trying, I don't know if keep it from happening again is exactly the right way to phrase it, but to just make sure that I feel whatever the difficult parts of the day or the experience or the work are always outweighed by the joyful things. But that's taken so much practice to get to that.

And then one day at a time, like you said. And when we go into the telescope project. So shifting gears here for a second, what would be a rock bottom moment in the subject of the telescope? And what was that, like 10 years, right?

Yeah, 10 years. I started it in 2008. So the first really rock bottom moment was in 2017. We had been out in New Mexico for the launch and it had been a really rough time. We were there from like the beginning of August until early October. And it's a stressful environment. We were like putting things together, testing things. Everything feels really critical. I was running the team of like 30 people, so I felt a lot of responsibility for how the season went and getting the telescope off the ground. And then in mid September, it started raining, and it rained for six weeks straight, of course. And you can't launch a balloon in the rain. The meteorologist said he had never seen anything like it. This is in the New Mexico desert, and it's not supposed to rain like that. But that was the year when there was a lot of hurricanes going through the Gulf and through Texas, and we would just get all of that tropical moisture, and we're really unlucky. And so the first really bad rock bottom moment was the day in early October. We had been there for 10 weeks, and NASA was like, this isn't going to happen.

Is this basically Murphy's Law?

Yes, absolutely.

Is there a scientific explanation for Murphy's Law? Like, has this been broken down yet?

I wish I could tell you. They just said, you know, it's not going to happen. The stratospheric winds had started to pick up. The weather was not going to turn. And so we packed everything up. We basically put a giant tarp over the telescope and wrapped it in plastic wrap to keep bugs from getting into it. And we left. And the issue is, like, a lot of things can happen in a year. People move jobs, people go on to other projects. And so I had to keep the team together to get everyone to come back the following year, because since the wins are only good in September, we couldn't. The delay means you delay for a full year. So that was a really tough day. But partly because we hadn't gotten the launch yet, I still felt like we had a lot of motivation to, like, well, we'll wait, we'll do it again. It'll be better. It gives us time to work on stuff. And so the second. And I thought that in 2017, that was a rock bottom, but I didn't know where the bottom was because in 2018, we go back, we're back in the same tiny town. We're still stressed out, but this time, the weather is good. On September 22, we get our launch. I was so tired. I was so excited. It was like. It was really a day. I had a lot of emotions. But the launch was. It seemed really good. The telescope took off. It, like, was really smooth. You know, everything was working. We could communicate with it. We were really happy, you know, the whole day. It takes about three hours for the telescope to get all the way up to the stratosphere, and you can see the balloon up in the sky above you, and it's like a little dot because there's no sense of Scale. It looks like it could be a regular balloon, but like kind of close to you, but it's not. It's a football field sized balloon that's at 130,000ft. It's so weird. And we were so excited and we were finally going to get to take the data and do our observations. And we start taking data at night because we need the sun to be set and we're starting operations and we acquire a target. And I was standing with my laptop kind of telling people what to do. And every so often I would read out the altitude of the balloon to the person who was keeping the log because there's a GPS on it. And so I would say, oh, the altitude is 115,000ft now, 112,000ft. And it was weird. So it goes up to 130,000ft and then as the sun sets, it drops a little bit, but it should stabilize it like 118 or 115,000ft. But it didn't do that. It just kept dropping. And then I remember saying, like, okay, now it's at 110,000ft. Like, that's. That seems weird. So this is around like 9pm and we've been taking data for less than an hour. And one of the balloons, the head of the balloon program comes and he says, we have bad news. The balloon has a hole in it and that's why you keep losing altitude. And I remember thinking in that moment, like, I do not have the emotional bandwidth to deal with this. Like, he said it, and I was just like, I don't even have the space to feel sad. We just have to do whatever we can to salvage this. And one of the issues that we have is that because of the type of telescope, we need a really high altitude because the atmosphere blocks a lot of the light that we're observing. It's an ultraviolet telescope, and the atmosphere just the lower you are, the less throughput you get. And so we scrambled to try and observe as much as we could in the time that we had, but for a lot of reasons, it just. We did our best. But that.

And that's basically worst case scenario, right? I'm just envisioning this right now. If I were in charge in an imaginary world of building this telescope, you could have a lot of little things that could go wrong everywhere. I mean, when I say a lot, I could say, you know, millions of little things could go wrong at any point. Little dust in the lens or dirt in one of the gears of the joints or something goes a little rusted Or a piece of metal warps or bends on the way up, whatever. But of all the things that could go wrong on a telescope that's latched onto a balloon, the balloon popping, this is worst case scenario. It's a game ender. It ends everything pretty much instantly.

It wasn't a thing I had even thought to be worried about because, you know, there's a whole team of people at NASA who do the balloon launches. They're really good at their job and sometimes they have holes, but it's pretty unlikely. And so I just had been like, well, that's not going to happen to us. And yeah, so then because of the hole, the balloon loses altitude. We had to cut it down at around 1am, which on a normal flight we would have stayed up until the following morning. And we just didn't get. It was sort of obvious at the time that the data was not going to be good quality. And you know, the balloon, you separate the balloon and the telescope. The telescope has a parachute, but it like crash lands in the desert in someone's field. And so the next day we send a team of people out to go retrieve the telescope and two of the mirrors were cracked and it was just that day, the next day when it was over and I had the space to like think about it at all. I remember thinking to myself, like, why am I doing this? Like, I've been working on this telescope for 10 years.

This is like being an Olympic athlete and going to the Olympics. And then it's your moment to have that two minutes on stage to perform that amazing trick you practiced for your whole life and you pretty much trip out of the gate and it's over. All that training for 10 years and now you have to deal with it. And right when we come back from this short break, I want to ask you, Erica, how did you deal with it and what was your absolute rockin it moment afterwards, both when you were struggling when you were younger and also on this telescope project. I also have a specific question for you. On a funny note about this. What I heard was a rogue falcon that came and interrupted one of your operations. Those three questions when we come back from this short break. Thank you so much for sharing this show and spreading the love. Every time you click that share button or put it on your social media, it makes a big difference to those who listen to it, to the guests that I have on here as well, and to me personally, this is a passion project and so all of your help, sending me feedback, sending me an email, clicking that contact me button on my website. All of that is amazing and it really touches my heart because when I was little and struggled, I dropped out of school, I got into drugs and violence. It was very difficult and I hit rock bottom. My own rock bottom in that context was when I was around 17 years old and I thought I was going to jail for a long time and didn't know what was going to happen. And I got out because people reached out to me and helped me. People picked me back up and gave me motivation to move forward, just like you're hearing in these interviews. So this really is a passion project for me and I'd love it if you checked out my book as well. I tell my whole story on there. You can find it on my website, ericgilbertwilliams.com just click on my book. I would love for you to download a free copy of the intro and free prologue. It's there right now anytime there's an audio version as well. And now we're going to go back to the interview. Talk to you guys soon. We're back now here on From Rock Bottom to Rockin it with Erica Hampton. Erica, thank you again for being here. For everyone listening in right now, remember to obviously share this episode with all of your friends and with people that need to hear it. So, Erica, before we jump into the serious subjects, I have a question for you about this falcon. So what's the story with this falcon? I heard the balloon was under attack. Does it have a name?

So I've really refrained from naming it. One of the grad students who works on the project, she wanted to name it Flappy. And I don't like that name. But it's the closest thing to a name that it has. So after the 2017 campaign, when we didn't launch because of the rain, we were back in 2018 and we were working on the. Just some, like, random stuff. It was kind of like a, I was, it was a random day. I was like in one of the other buildings doing something. And I come back and the French guys on the team who are, they're so funny, they always crack me up. They come running and they're like, we need you to call animal control. And I was like, why? And they were like, we caught this baby falcon and they had this so beautiful, teeny, tiny little bird in a baseball cap. And basically the. And I was like, what? And they were like, oh, it landed on the spectrograph on part of the telescope. And we work in this hangar and there are these big hangar Doors that open. And a couple of falcons had made a nest in the top of the hangar doors. And they were open that morning because they were bringing in some equipment. And the baby falcon was trying to learn to fly. And basically they just like jump out of the nest and like fall and. And they keep falling until they actually fly instead. And so in his falling process, this falcon had just like swooped in and landed on the telescope and was very upset and like annoyed that we were around. And it was very surprised. So we put it in like a little box. I called animal control, which the town is so small it doesn't actually have animal control. So I ended up talking to the mayor of the town.

Talk about multitasking here.

I know. And I called the state. New Mexico has like a like wildlife and gaming department. And I talked to a really nice person from the state and he was like, put the box somewhere far away from people and the falcon will probably fly away. And actually that's what happened. Like, the falcon was fine in the end, but it was, it was just this like really funny, wonderful encounter with a super angry wild creature that if it was bigger, it was only 6 inches tall, but it clearly wanted to eat all of us.

Well, I'm glad you survived that experience.

Yeah.

So there's two rock bottom moments we're dealing with right now. One is when you were struggling when you were younger and with mental health. And then there was another one where this project after working on it for eight years. So on the flip side now, what are the rocking it moments in both of them? How did you know that you had finally overcome the mental health challenges when you were younger? And what's been your highest rockin it moment while working with the Fireball 2 telescope project? What's your best memory and experience with it to date?

So the mental health challenge, I think for me, the moment where I felt like I had overcome it was when I went back to college and maybe it was like a full year into having been back and I was like, oh, I like it here. Like, when I felt like this wasn't just a struggle to just keep going or it wasn't like I was scared every day, but it was actually like, oh, I am enjoying this, I'm having fun, I am thriving. I am like. And I realized that for that low bottom time, there is also a high. And I was in the high and it was really great. And I felt like I was in the right place and I was doing the things I was supposed to do.

You just found your flow yeah, exactly.

I was in it. And for the telescope project, there were highs all along, actually, before the low. And, like, when the detectors first worked and they worked the way that they were supposed to, it was such a thrilling moment. And it felt so satisfying that, like, oh, like this is doing what it's supposed to do. And I felt that a lot when we would put together a new component and test it out and then it would work. And I would always be like, oh, my God, it's working. That, like, anytime anything worked, it was like, it was so great. And even though we would build things to be robust, like the telescope flies up into the stratosphere, it's like a difficult environment. And every time we would turn stuff on and it would work, even if it was like, every day in a row, it would work. It was still. I was like, yes, it's working.

If we were to take this position here and your project, how many failures do you have to go through in order to find that success? I mean, are we talking about a Thomas Edison type of experience here where you have a thousand failures or 999 failures to find that next one that finally works?

Yeah.

What's it like to be in a career where essentially you have to deal with failure every single day, continuously, nonstop? It's an expectation that there's going to be tons of failure. What's that like?

I feel incredibly grateful for it because I'm in, you know, as a professor and like a scientist, your job is to discover new things, and discovery is mostly finding things that don't work. Like, that's what I've discovered. I've discovered a lot of ways to break stuff, a lot of ways to put things together wrong, a lot of designs that are bad, and you go through so many of those before you get to the one that is right or right enough to keep going? And. And so mostly I feel grateful. I feel like the. Like, I've learned so many things, and the best way to learn something is to mess it up and then be given the space to figure out what went wrong and why and then fix it, and it's humbling, which I think is good. And it's. It's. Like sometimes it's. It's stressful and infuriating, and I think, like, oh, wouldn't I just like to have a job where I, like, do it at work and then I go home and I can, like, turn my brain off, But I think I would hate that. I like the challenge and the fact that it's never the Same. And yeah, I love.

Sounds like failure is a discovery process. That's what you're saying.

Yeah, I think that's the only way that you discover things. That if you do something and the first time it works out right, it's probably not a new thing. And we used to. I remember talking with some of the professors that I worked with when I was a student, and I would say, like, God, this is so hard. And they would say, like, if it was easy, someone else would have done it.

And then what? Where's the fun in that? Yeah.

And then it's not discovery anymore if someone else has done it. So I try to appreciate the fact that, like, discovery is hard, but it's so interesting. And the only reason that we know anything about anything is because people kept going through the hard things. And so that helps me keep going.

What was it like to talk about all this stuff up on the stage on TED Talks? What's it like to be a TED Fellow? How's that?

Giving the talk was so. I was so nervous about it.

You did great, by the way.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I worked really hard on it. I really tried to convey a little bit of the science involved, but also just the scientists are people. And we have a lot of feelings about the work that we do. And I loved being a TED Fellow. I'm still a TED Fellow. And the other people, like, the community is so wonderful. Like, I've met so many super cool, interesting, like, fantastic people. But giving the talk was so stressful. I was backstage waiting to go out, and I remember thinking, like, this is why I never went into the theater or, like, Academy or anything like this, because I was so nervous. And then I gave the talk, and then I went back and I cried after it was over because I just had, like, so much emotion. And I was really happy with how it went because I wanted to convey the. Like, I feel so deeply about the work that I do, and I really wanted to convey that. And to do that, you have to be vulnerable and emotional, and it's scary. Yeah. But I was really happy with it.

When I look back at one of my past companies in construction, and I have to put it in context that my construction company was so small compared to the world economy and to what you're doing on a global scale with telescopes and NASA. But regardless, there was this one time where I had this multimillion dollar contract and I was really excited. It was the biggest contract I had done at the time. I had the whole team out on the project. There was 40 of us, I think, at the time. And we had processes and structure and quality assurance, checks and balances. And I'd bought a man lift to help us reach the higher up and hard to reach areas. And the damn thing exploded. Like, it literally erupted into flames. People were running around everywhere. There was smoke all over the place. You could see it from a long way away. And there I am watching all of the money I invested in this machine just burn away right in front of our eyes. And when dealing with a multimillion dollar contract like that, especially when it was early in my career, like if that contract fails, then everything's over. It's a game ender.

Yeah.

And then here's this thing, this big giant plumes and piles of smoke billowing up into the air. And those types of moments when shit really hits the fan, when disaster strikes, when you get a rip in your balloon and your telescope comes plummeting back down to the earth after eight years of working towards that moment. To people that are listening to this right now, Erica, what would you say to them? What kind of advice do you have for people who are going through their own rock bottom moment right now? Their balloon popped, their equipment exploded, they just went bankrupt, their company just foreclosed, they just got divorced. What kind of advice do you have? What would you say to these people who are listening right now and experiencing their own rock bottom moment?

I would tell them that all of that sucks, but it is not the end.

It's never the end, is it?

It's never the end. And like, you do what you have to do to get through it and then you go on to the next thing. Nothing is ever the end. And I said this at the end of my TED Talk, but the only failure is giving up.

Ain't that the truth?

Yeah.

So all the listeners here today don't give up. It's never the end. Remember to take things one day at a time. And also remember, of course, to share this show, please, with everyone who you think that would benefit from listening to these conversations. Check out Erica's ted talk on YouTube as well. Just go to YouTube and type in her name. There's going to be a URL to that presentation on the show. Notes to this episode here, just go online and scroll down to the bottom of my website page that has this episode and you'll see the URL. You can click it and have a listen. It's a great talk. And remember to tune in to the next interview. I hope everyone out there has a rockin it day. We will see you next time. Erica, thank you again for coming out here. I appreciate your time. Bye for now.

Thank you so much for having me.

And that's it, my friends, for this episode. We will see you next time. Please send me an email, say hello, give me some feedback, let me know what you think, give me some tips and suggestions. I'd love to hear from you. Also, please share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, doesn't matter. Just get it out there. I really appreciate it. And we'll see you next time on From a Rock Bottom to Rockin It. Have a rocking it day.