Grant Tremblay

Zeron:

This is Montserrat Zeron, and this is an interview with Dr. Grant Tremblay. Today’s date is August 8, 2024. We’re recording this in Dr. Tremblay’s office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To start, if you could please state your title and your institutional affiliation.

Tremblay:

My name is Grant Tremblay. I’m an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. I will be that for approximately two more weeks, and then I will become the director of—we haven’t finalized the title yet, but the Associate Director of External Affairs for the Center for Astrophysics.

Zeron:

I know you were born in Brunswick, Maine.

Tremblay:

Yeah, I was technically born in Brunswick, Maine, but that was just the hospital that I was physically born in. But I lived for the first four years of my life in Bowdoinham, Maine, which is this tiny, tiny town of less than 1,000 people.

Zeron:

In 1984?

Tremblay:

Yep.

Zeron:

But I don’t know anything else about your parents or your family, so if you could tell me a little bit. Who are your parents? What do they do?

Tremblay:

My dad is an appliance repair guy and an electrician, and my mom worked at a bank. She began as a teller and eventually worked her way up to vice president of the bank over 20-plus years. I worked with my dad all through high school, so he taught me a lot. Brilliant guy, just a great electrician. Like, he can look at an appliance and know what’s wrong with it immediately. And my mom is just so incredible and wonderful. I had loving, wonderful parents. They’re still alive, they’re still together. I see them all the time. They live in Maine, still.

Zeron:

That’s wonderful. How did they meet?

Tremblay:

They met at a bar. [laughs] My dad was playing in a band, and my mom was there with her friends just to see the band. And then there was a hypnotist at some point, and mom got called up to be with the hypnotist who pretended to—tried to—hypnotize her to be a roadrunner. Mom felt bad for the guy and so just pretended to be a roadrunner, and that’s how they met. She was acting like a roadrunner, and my dad had been in the band that was in the bar, and that’s how they met—in Belfast, Maine.

Zeron:

What kind of education did they have?

Tremblay:

High school education, both of them.

Zeron:

Do you have any siblings?

Tremblay:

No, only child.

Zeron:

What kind of house did you grow up in?

Tremblay:

The first four years of my life, a very tiny house which still stands in Bowdoinham, Maine. Very tiny. I think they bought it for $30,000 or something back in—I don’t know—1980 or 1979. And then when I was age four or five, we moved to a slightly larger house in Brunswick, Maine, which is, relative to Bowdoin, a huge city; but Brunswick is also a small town.

Zeron:

Was there a library in your house?

Tremblay:

Oh, not a formal library. I mean, we had books, but we didn’t have a library library.

Zeron:

What kind of books did you read when you were young?

Tremblay:

I was really into dinosaurs. I remember when I was a kid, I was super into dinosaurs for four or five years, so I had a ton of dinosaur books. And it wasn’t until 1994—which I guess we can get into—before I started really going heavily into astronomy, but it was a lot of dinosaurs. [laughs] We had science books. My parents had high school educations, but they valued education so much. That was very important to them, so they filled our house with a lot of educational stuff.

Zeron:

Did your parents encourage any interest in science?

Tremblay:

Oh yeah, 100 percent. I was really into dinosaurs. That really skyrocketed when the movie, Jurassic Park, came out in 1993, and then I just really wanted to be a paleontologist for about a year. I was nine years old. But then one night—actually 30 years ago last month—I was eating spaghetti with my parents at the dining room table in Brunswick, Maine, and at the time—I don’t do this with my kids, but we were watching the evening news while we eat dinner—and a woman named Heidi Hammel, an astronomer, comes—you were just next to her office when you were at AURA in DC. A woman named Heidi Hammel comes on the screen. I think it was the CBS Evening News. It was Dan Rather or something, I can’t remember. And it was a report of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact of Jupiter, and there was a clip of Heidi Hammel coming into a cheering auditorium holding the first Hubble images of the impact of Jupiter, and I was blown away.

The cosmos at that point had been this static series of images in the kids’ science books that I had—the Voyager images of Neptune, Saturn, and Uranus. I didn’t understand, I didn’t realize that the universe was changing and dynamic, and an untold number of gigatons impact of this comet fragments into this massive planet, leaving scars many times larger than the Earth. It was just so viscerally awesome to a 10-year-old boy, and so magical. It was a demonstration that nature is as magical as I once suspected it was as a child. As you grow older, nature becomes less magical; you stop believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. And it was a confirmation that it was in fact as awesome as those dinosaurs, as those magical things that I was so into as a kid.

And then my mother, a couple months later we were in the grocery store, Hannaford—then called Shop ’n Save, on Main Street in Brunswick, Maine—and in the checkout aisle was a Sky & Telescope magazine with Heidi’s image of that impact of Jupiter. And it said in big bold letters, “IMPACT!” So, I had my mom buy it for me. She did. And then later—I think that winter—they bought me a subscription to the magazine, and for my birthday they bought me a small, cheap telescope. And that was really it.

Zeron:

How was your high school growing up?

Tremblay:

It was fine. I was teased a lot—like, a lot—in middle school and high school, but I had at least one or two really close friends. One of them is still my best friend to this day; I talked to him this morning. So, high school was okay. Getting teased a lot was hard for self-esteem. I didn’t have the greatest self-esteem, so I tried to—everyone in high school is always trying to make an identity for themselves; you’re trying to find yourself. So, the only identity that I could make was I was the smart kid. I got great grades but otherwise was not popular at all. So, high school was okay. It was fine.

Zeron:

Do you remember your science classes?

Tremblay:

Oh yeah, very vividly. I ended up skipping the freshman science course because I had tested out of it, basically, so I started with sophomores. So, I did three years of science at high school, and then by senior year had run out of the science courses that I had taken. I ended up taking my senior year science courses at Bowdoin College, which is a college that was literally right down the street. I was effectively auditing the classes, basically. No, that’s not even true. I actually was graded for the classes, and I got credit.

Zeron:

Dual enrollment?

Tremblay:

Yeah, I got credit. I actually got credit for it at my high school; they had some arrangement. So yeah, I was very heavily into science. I loved all forms of science. I really loved chemistry, really loved biology. But in senior year I took, at Bowdoin College, their intro astronomy course, physics, chemistry. I took a Spanish course just because the schedule was such that I couldn’t take my Spanish course at high school, so I just took it there. I wasn’t particularly great at Spanish. [both laugh]

Zeron:

Do you remember any teachers at that point who were particularly encouraging?

Tremblay:

Oh, 100 percent! Yeah, the most formative science teacher that I’ve ever had, her name is Diane Bowen. She was seventh grade, so this was back when I was in the middle school. I was super into astronomy, and she was so wonderful. She fostered just so much of her students’ innate curiosity about nature. Probably the greatest teacher I’ve ever had. I actually don’t know the prominence of it, but she got a grant from NASA and the Maine Space Grant Consortium to do something called the Moonlink project. Which at the time, the Lunar Prospector was a small mission that NASA launched in 1997, I think, that orbited the Moon. And they had attached to it a pretty ambitious public outreach campaign, or educational outreach campaign for students, so student groups got to be involved in something called Moonlink. That was an after school thing that we did for a year, and it culminated in us doing a fundraiser to bring our Moonlink group, which was about 12 or 13 kids, to see a space shuttle launch in Florida. So, I remember raking leaves and babysitting to raise money for it, and then we all flew to Florida. And that was so exciting, because prior, we had a meeting with one of the astronauts who was going to fly aboard—this was the STS-93. I think it was the last shuttle docking with the space station Mir, the Russian space station. I think it was STS-93, yeah. [Edit: It was STS-91.] It was the Space Shuttle Discovery, and it was just awesome.

Zeron:

That’s so exciting. So, at this point when you were nearing towards the end of high school, did you discuss college options with your parents or teachers?

Tremblay:

Yeah. It was never an option for my parents that I would not go to college. They didn’t get the opportunity to go to college. My mother, especially, grew up incredibly poor, in effectively a tar-paper shack in Belfast, Maine. They had no plumbing, they had no... So, my mother did not have the opportunity to go to college. It wasn’t even on the table. So, it was very important to my parents, none of whom got to go to college, to make sure that I went. So, that was always saved up. My grandfather—my dad’s dad—passed away, and he was not remotely a rich man, but he did have enough money in the bank that the money my dad inherited after he passed away really helped pay for my college, along with student loans that I had to take out. So, yes, we talked about college from freshman year.

I remember touring. I remember—God, I’m sitting right here in this office—I remember, vividly, touring Harvard and driving past this observatory. It was, like, 1998. Is that right? Yeah, probably ’99—and driving past the famous Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—which, I was such an astronomy geek that I knew about it. And I saw someone leaving. It was probably a young postdoc. I’m like, “Oh my God, they must be so smart! That’s the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics!” Now I work here, and I’m like, “We’re not that, you know—” [both laugh] “We’re just normal people.” But yeah, I vividly remember college tours.

Zeron:

That’s awesome. What made you choose the University of Rochester?

Tremblay:

It was one of the few places that I got into with some student aid. It was one of the better schools that I got into. I was insta-rejected from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. I had great grades in high school, but I didn’t have an amazing life story. My grades weren’t perfectly spectacular, so I just wasn’t that competitive in the fancy Ivy Leagues. So, it was one of the places I got into. My mom and I flew out to see it, and I really liked the tour after I got accepted, so I went.

Zeron:

This was 2002?

Tremblay:

Yeah. I think might have visited in 2001. No, oh my God, I remember. No, I visited it right before 9/11, because we went to the airport, and I didn’t have my ID because I was a stupid kid. And my mom was like, “Oh my God, they’re not going to let you on the plane!” And then she just waved me through. That would never happen today! [both laugh]

Zeron:

How did your interests develop while you were there at the University of Rochester?

Tremblay:

In high school I had worked at a super small observatory in Maine called the Blueberry Pond Observatory. It was not research; it was just basically privately funded by this lovely person named Thurston Searfoss. I knew from the very beginning that I wanted a major in astronomy. It was called a physics and astronomy major at Rochester, so that’s what I did. That was my major. I got into it from the very beginning. I had a wonderful education, wonderful experience at the University of Rochester. A professor named Alice Quillen was my mentor that whole time. She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, just absolutely brilliant, and was a great mentor. She was kind to me, and even as a frankly useless freshman, took me in as a mentee. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know how to do anything. Yeah, so I owe a lot of my career to her.

Zeron:

Do you remember any of your courses during those—?

Tremblay:

Yeah. It’s amazing, in college you think that your entire life will be defined by your performance in your college courses, and then it turns out a couple years later you barely remember. I remember vaguely my college courses, that was now more than 20 years ago. I took a lot of physics and astronomy courses, a lot of mathematics courses. They were all fine. [laughs] I was very used to getting great grades in high school, and then I got my first girlfriend in freshman year, and I had a linear algebra course that was at 8:00 a.m., and I just really bombed that course. [both laugh] I was close to getting a D, I think. I didn’t. So, I think it’s really important for kids who think that they’re smart to go to college and learn that they’re not remotely as smart as they think they are. It’s one of the more important lessons that a kid like that can learn. It teaches humility, and it teaches you, “Oh, I actually really need to work.” I had never studied for an exam before college. I just never studied. So, it was a great experience. It was a good learning experience.

Zeron:

Were you part of any clubs or anything like that at that point?

Tremblay:

Yeah, we had an astronomy club in college, and I was part of that. Go figure. Mostly because I was a physics major, we had just endless problem sets. There was a group of about 10 of us who were all physics and astronomy majors together, and we formed our own really close group of friends because we would be in the physics library every weeknight working on these endless problem sets until 2:00 in the morning, drinking shitty coffee from the library’s coffee pot. So, that’s how we became friends. That was the club that I was in. I didn’t do sports. I probably should have. And I was an RA, a resident advisor.

Zeron:

At that point, was it doing research that attracted you, or being a professor, or what?

Tremblay:

I was always in awe of space, so it was the science that got me into it. I never actually really wanted to be a professor. I of course did a lot of teaching assistantships in college, and I liked it fine, but with a lowercase “f” fine. It was fine. The teaching itself wasn’t anything that animated me. I like students. I like working with people. I like seeing the joy of discovery in the students, especially now; I have a wonderful PhD student. But I never really wanted to be a professor explicitly. I wanted to do research in science. So, Alice Quillen, this professor I mentioned, got me into undergraduate research. My first job was working on Fomalhaut protoplanetary disk, which is not remotely what I do nowadays. And then I was reducing—gosh, I can’t even remember. Oh! It was a new Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS image set of 3CR elliptical galaxies. So, that was my first research project, and it took me two days to install IRAF on this old Linux machine, because back then installing IRAF was incredibly difficult. Yeah, I loved undergraduate research.

Zeron:

Did you intend specifically to be an observer at that point?

Tremblay:

Yeah. I don’t know whether it was just by nature of Alice giving me pure classical observing projects, but I loved the fact—I would open this Hubble image of a galaxy, and frankly it would be this okay-looking blob—but I looked at elliptical galaxies, which are a little bit featureless elliptical blobs. But it never was lost on me—sometimes it’s lost on me nowadays because I see them a lot—but it was never lost on me that this blob was hundreds of billions of stars. At the time, we were learning that there are probably more planets than stars in that galaxy—and in all galaxies, in fact—and that there could be 10,000 advanced alien civilizations in this blob of stars that I’m looking at; and that this blob was an enormous kingdom of stars and planets and gas and dust. And that was never lost on me, so it was amazing. It was always amazing looking at this data. And to this day, my favorite aspect of this job is that when I get a new dataset from a space telescope or a ground-based telescope, even if the result isn’t going to be Nature-paper mind-blowing spectacular, it’s never lost on me that when I open it, I am for a brief moment the only person in all of human history who has seen this new piece of data. And even though I’m sitting in my pajamas on my laptop on a couch, or here in my office, you still feel like an explorer, and that’s just an incredible feeling. Because there’s not much in this world that you can do that no one else has ever done before, so that’s wonderful.

Zeron:

That’s amazing. After you graduated from University of Rochester, how did you decide what to do next?

Tremblay:

I needed to get into graduate school. I wanted to get my PhD in astrophysics, and I applied—I can’t remember how many schools I applied to, but I think it was between 14 and 16, and I was rejected from every single one of them. At the time, it was still true that getting into a PhD program was incredibly competitive. There would be a couple-hundred applications for maybe six slots or so. It’s way worse nowadays. I would never get into graduate school these days. Never. Not in a PhD program in astronomy. I would have been rejected like that. [snaps fingers] I wouldn’t even have made it to the top of the pile. But anyway, I was rejected from almost all of them, and then I remember I got an email from the chair of the University of Maryland Astronomy Department that read, “Grant, I’m pleased to offer you a PhD position at the U. Maryland Astronomy Department,” which is a great program. I was so excited. “Oh my God! Thank God! My last chance, and I got it! I’m going to get my PhD!” And then maybe it was a couple days later, he sent me an email saying, “Grant, I’m so sorry, I have made a mistake. I spoke with our,” I don’t know, dean or whatever, “and it turns out that we can’t actually fund that additional PhD program slot this year.” So, I was clearly the last rung of getting an offer, so they had to retract my offer. It felt awful. Oh my God. I thought I was a failure, a complete failure. I thought my career was over before it had even begun. I didn’t know what to do. I had no plan. This was May. I was about to graduate. I had no plan. Thank God, Alice Quillen basically saved me by sending an email to her colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute where you just were. Massimo Marengo’s office, I walk by all the time. Anyway, I had written my first paper in 2006 with a bunch of Space Telescope Science Institute authors. They were impressed with the paper, that it had been written by an undergrad. It was publishing some of this NICMOS Hubble data and WFPC2 Hubble data that I had been working on—that she had been working on. It’s called the Warped Nuclear Disk of Radio Galaxy 3C 449. And Bill Sparks, who was a coauthor of the paper and a collaborator with Alice, basically offered to rescue me for a year. He funded me to be a research assistant, basically, at the Space Telescope Science Institute, as a kind of bridge between undergrad and graduate school, and that’s what rescued my career.

Zeron:

Was that affiliated also with Johns Hopkins [University]?

Tremblay:

Yeah, that was. I got there; I worked for a year with Bill Sparks, Marco Chiaberge, and Duccio Macchetto in the last year before he retired; and then I ended up staying on another year, applying for a PhD program at Johns Hopkins, to stay. That almost got to an offer, but not quite, but I became a visiting graduate student at Johns Hopkins. And at the time, who would ultimately become my PhD advisor was moving from the Space Telescope Science Institute to become the head of the Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stefi Baum. So, I followed her, and they offered me a PhD slot. I didn’t even apply. They offered me a PhD slot, and I took it. So, I moved back to Rochester!

Zeron:

Before we move on to that, can you tell me a little bit more about your time at Space Telescope?

Tremblay:

It was awesome. I was really young. I only knew a little bit from undergrad, and I was working merely a couple of meters from the former control room that had moved after 9/11 to Goddard, but it used to be the controller of the Hubble Space Telescope. And it was in that room that Heidi Hammel obtained the images of Jupiter’s impact that inspired me 20 years prior into science in the first place. I’m sorry, at that point, 10 years prior. So, it was awesome, and I made a bunch of friends with the postdocs at the time. So, I was by far the youngest in this cohort of postdocs who had all gotten their PhDs, but they were wonderful and welcoming. I remember David Radburn-Smith and Elena Sabbi and [inaudible], and we were a close group of friends. I’d go out drinking with them. We’d go to the movies. They would help me because I was still a useless barely-graduate student. And yeah, I was working on Hubble data. It was awesome.

Zeron:

What kind of research specifically were you doing?

Tremblay:

I was working on still the 3CR sample of radio galaxies. We had more data coming in from the ACS, from a Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys program, and it was that ACS data that ultimately formed the foundation of my PhD thesis.

Zeron:

You said you then moved to the Rochester Institute of Technology, how were supported as a graduate student there?

Tremblay:

I taught for the first two years, but Stefi and Chris, my PhD advisors, were a husband and wife team. Stefi Baum, who is a legendary astronomer—you can look her up on Wikipedia—was formally my PhD advisor; but Chris O’Dea, her husband, who’s also a legendary astronomer, was my de facto co-advisor. So, I worked mostly with Chris, actually, because Stefi was so busy as the director for Center of Imaging Science. And they paid for me just like I pay for my graduate student, with grants. They had Hubble and Chandra grants, I think. I worked on Hubble data, Herschel Space Telescope, which the European Space Agency launched in 2009. I worked on that data. I worked on Spitzer Space Telescope data. So, it was a bunch of grant stuff that supported me.

Zeron:

From your time at Space Telescope, was that naturally what led you to choose that [data] for your dissertation?

Tremblay:

Yeah, it was totally natural. It was all a continuous stream. I was always working on the same group of projects with the same group of people, I just moved institutions, but the fundamental underlying project was the same.

Zeron:

So, Feedback Regulated Star Formation in Cool Core Clusters of Galaxies.

Tremblay:

That was my PhD thesis. It became that, because one morning I woke up and found the project that I was doing basically scooped on astro-ph. I was doing a project with a 3CR sample of radio galaxies, some of which are in cool core clusters, of course—many of which, these Fanaroff-Riley Class 1 type radio galaxies in the centers of rich cool core clusters. But anyway, I was doing a 3CR-related project, and Martin Hardcastle—I woke up one morning, checked astro-ph as I did every morning, and Martin Hardcastle had written a paper that was basically going to be the bulk of my PhD thesis. [laughs] It was a good paper. It wasn’t his fault. He was just doing his job. I don’t blame him. I like Martin a lot. But I was like, “Oh shit! That’s my project. What the hell am I going to do?” Chris and Stefi were chill about it. They were like, “Grant, don’t worry. This happens. We’ll figure something out.” And I quickly, rapidly transitioned into working more explicitly on cool core, low red-shift, brightest cluster galaxies, and these giant clusters of galaxies, so-called cooling flow clusters or cool core clusters, and that turned out to be a boon. I still work on them to this day. I love cool core clusters because the sheer volume of physics that is happening in these things is just bonkers. You get uplifted kiloparsec-scale multiphase filaments of gas that are draped around the rims of X-ray cavities, and cooling, and feedback, and star formation. It’s beautiful.

Zeron:

How long did it take you to do the thesis work?

Tremblay:

Five years total, including time at Space Telescope. So, it was five years.

Zeron:

After you had successfully defended your dissertation, what did you do next?

Tremblay:

Prior to that, I had applied to a bunch of postdocs, and my top choice, I really, really wanted to live outside the United States. I knew that maybe one day I might get married and have kids, or might get more tied down and not be able really to live in a country that was not the United States. I really wanted to do it, so my very top choice for a postdoc was the European Southern Observatory Fellowship. I had done a lot of research on it. I had, of course, known ESO and its work through La Silla Paranal. For a long time, I was a huge fan of the Very Large Telescope. I always wanted to go, so I applied. That was a spectacularly competitive fellowship, so I never thought I’d get it, and I was stunned when I got an interview. Also, ESO is kind of required to take Europeans because the Europeans are their stakeholders. They pay for ESO to exist. So, it was really rare that they took postdocs from the US, just super rare. But I was one of the few folks from the US who got an interview and was offered a fellowship, and I took it instantly. I didn’t even tell my mom and dad that I was going to move to Munich, Germany before I accepted. I remember I got it on my pre-iPhone smartphone in my crappy little apartment bed. I woke up, and I had the email, and I was like, “Holy shit, I got the ESO Fellowship!” And I emailed them back right away, and I said I accepted.

Zeron:

How long was that?

Tremblay:

It was three years, from 2011 to 2014. One of the biggest adventures of my life.

Zeron:

Were you a fellow astronomer at that point?

Tremblay:

I was an ESO Garching Fellow. Garching is a little city north of Munich; that’s where ESO’s headquarters are. The unique thing about the ESO Fellowship is that there is a small duty component. There’s a 25 percent duty component. So, you have 75 percent your own science, but there’s 25 percent duty to the observatory, whether that’s public outreach, user support for programs, or the Paranal duty, which is very heavily travel intensive. But that is the one that I wanted to do. So, I lived in Munich, yes, but every other month or so I would fly from Munich to Paris, Paris to Santiago, and then Santiago to Antofagasta, a three-hour bus into the desert, and operate one of the unit telescopes in Very Large Telescope. That was when I became a fellow astronomer. So yeah, I was traveling more than 50 percent of the time, so basically my effective rent in Munich was double what it was because I was only occupying the apartment less than half the time. But it was a huge adventure. I loved it.

Zeron:

You were also an ESO Fellow in Germany?

Tremblay:

Yeah, I was an ESO Fellow in Germany. My duty was at Paranal, so you get the title, fellow astronomer. I did more than a 100 nights operating Unit Telescope Two of the Very Large Telescope. Huge learning experience. It was a wonderful adventure.

Zeron:

What was your research focus there?

Tremblay:

It was still cool core brightest cluster galaxies. And when operating the observatory, you are operating users’ programs, whether that’s visitor-mode program or a remote-observing program, most of which were. So, I would be using the telescope to observe other people’s programs, not my own.

Zeron:

Do you remember some of the people that you worked with?

Tremblay:

Oh God, all of them! I’m still in touch with a lot of them today. It was a big crew of local Chilean staff who actually were the TIOs, the telescope instrument operators. They would literally move the telescope and the dome and stuff, and I would operate the instruments. They are a wonderful group of people. Some of them, like Claudia Cid, are still my friends to this day. I still talk to them on Facebook. I haven’t seen them in, now, more than a decade, but oh my gosh, I loved everybody at ESO. They’re wonderful, wonderful people, from the ESO staff in Munich to the local Chilean staff in Chile. It was awesome.

Zeron:

What were the working conditions?

Tremblay:

Look, for the fellows, they were great. ESO’s pretty rich. So, we’d fly, and I’d arrive in the Santiago airport—of course I was drinking that cheap wine on the Air France flight the entire 16-hour travel, so I would nurse the world’s worst headache in Chilean customs after not sleeping for 16 hours. But you’d get picked up basically by a limo that said Dr. Tremblay, and then they would take you to the ESO guest house, which is in Vitacura, Chile, which is this super fancy neighborhood of Chile. Spectacular guest house. And the staff there would serve you unbelievable home-cooked three-course meals, and even if you’re the only one in the guest house, would open two bottles of wine, one white and one red, just for you. And it was very colonial. One cannot do astronomy without understanding that the infrastructure of astronomy does ride on the back of both militarism and colonialism. I think that one can still do this enterprise and look at themselves in the mirror, of course, but one does need to be cognizant of the people who helped build our field that do not get credit for it and that were not treated as well as they should have been, for example. So, that extends all the way back from Harvard’s first observatories in Peru, et cetera. But the working conditions for the Europeans were great. To be clear, you’re up all night, and those long winter nights were exhausting, but the Residencia at the Very Large Telescope is so spectacularly awesome, it was literally filmed for a Bond movie. It was the villain’s lair in the Daniel Craig Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. Yeah, that’s the ESO Residencia. They blew it up in the movie. The hotel is spectacular at the observatory. The food’s really good. The people are really lovely. The telescope instrument operators would not have said that their working conditions were as good. They were unionized and had a lot of complaints and at one point almost went on strike. I think pay was pretty good, but they were on the mountain for a long period of time. That means that you’re away from your family a lot. So yeah, my working conditions were really good; that does not mean that everybody’s working conditions are really good.

Zeron:

What specialties, if any, were encouraged at ESO particularly, or was that just whatever everyone wanted to?

Tremblay:

The Very Large Telescope is four 8-meter class unit telescopes, plus four auxiliary telescopes, and you combine them all in an interferometric mode, so there are a ton of instruments on that observatory. VLT is incredibly flexible, like anything from long-slit spectroscopy, to integral field unit spectroscopy, to deep imaging, to adaptive optics imaging. The VLT is one of the greatest telescopes in all of history. It’s been transformative for astronomy. When I was there, the really new thing that was coming online was MUSE, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer. That is probably one of the greatest ground-based instruments ever created. It’s this one-by-one arcminute field of view, [seeing] limited, and then also AO assisted integral field unit spectrograph, where every pixel is a spectrum, so this you get this hyperdimensional data cube. It’s just a spectacular instrument, and I was involved in the early commissioning of it. I was there for first light. It was so awesome.

Zeron:

How valuable, both scientifically and personally, was it for you to have these experiences abroad?

Tremblay:

Oh my gosh, it was one of the greatest adventures of my life. I had so much fun. Munich is an incredible city to live in. I traveled Europe so much I basically lived out of a suitcase. I went to China, Australia, Moscow, and Armenia, and I went all over the world. I filled a passport completely. I had to get a new passport. I completely filled it with stamps, and it was new when I arrived, so literally complete. It was a wonderful adventure.

I kind of killed my love for traveling because I was on the plane so much, and I’m pretty tall. The flight from Paris to Santiago was brutal because I can’t sleep on a plane. So, I got really sick of long-haul flights, and that was the only downside, that you travel so much that you can almost get sick of it. But it was a wonderful experience.

Zeron:

After that, how did you become a NASA Einstein Fellow?

Tremblay:

I applied. The NASA Einstein Fellowship, like the Hubble Fellowship, has now merged. It’s now one program. It’s called the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program, which includes the Einstein and Sagan Fellows as part of it. It wasn’t that case when I was there; the Einstein and Hubble Fellows were technically separate. But it was super competitive. That’s the flagship prize fellowship in the United States. I applied and got really lucky. The truth is that I think that I’m a good scientist, but I’m not some super genius. I don’t work harder than other people. I’m actually less efficient than a lot of my other colleagues in the field. I’m definitely not the smartest. I walk by 25 people who are way smarter than me every single day in this building. So, I don’t think I got that because I was particularly unique. I think I got lucky in that I’m pretty sure one of the committee members on the Einstein Fellowship selection program saw me give a talk a couple of weeks prior in Italy. I was at [inaudible], Italy and I gave what was a good talk, and I think that really helped my chances, so I got lucky by having a committee member see the talk. I got lucky.

Zeron:

Hey, you earned it. So, how were you supported with that fellowship?

Tremblay:

That is a phenomenal fellowship. You get your own $20,000 research funding. The pay was really good for a postdoc, and what’s cool is that you get to take it basically wherever you want in the United States, to any institution. You say to Yale or Princeton or Harvard, say, “I have a Hubble Fellowship or an Einstein Fellowship, can I come?” And they’re like, “Yes, of course! Here, you have your own funding.” There’s prestige associated with it, so institutions always try to recruit Hubble and Einstein and Sagan Fellows. So, I was going to go here. There is a restriction that they can only have a certain number of fellows at any given time, but I had an opportunity to come here, which would have been close to my parents in Maine. At the time, I had been living in Germany, was pretty homesick, and didn’t see my parents very often, and felt like I wanted to be really close to home. This is only two hours from where my parents live, where we are right now. But I ended up—I had the fellowship offer, I was living in my last few months living in Germany, and I needed to decide where to take the fellowship within a couple of weeks or so. I went out to dinner with a speaker who had been visiting ESO, and we went to a Greek restaurant in Munich, and he ordered like three bottles of wine. And we all—the five of us—just drank the wine and got pretty drunk. And I drunkenly on my phone sent an email after a conversation with them that I should go to Yale and work Meg Urry, so that’s what I did. So, I didn’t go to Harvard, I went to Yale because I got drunk in a Greek restaurant in Munich. I otherwise probably would have come here. But then I wouldn’t have met my wife because I met my wife at Yale, and I wouldn’t have my three children who are my entire life right now. So, it’s funny how life branches like that. Had I not gone out to dinner that night, I probably would have come here, and my life would be fundamentally different.

Zeron:

How was your experience at the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics?

Tremblay:

It was great. I loved Yale. Wonderful people. Meg Urry was my fellowship advisor. She’s a legendary scientist. Very famous, but just a wonderful human being. I adored her. I still adore her. I’m still dear friends with her today. She’s a dear friend of mine. I loved Yale.

Zeron:

What was the environment like?

Tremblay:

It was close-knit. Everyone was kind. They were brilliant people, but they didn’t act like it. Yale and Harvard have this reputation for being really snooty and, like, up your own ass. You can definitely find those kind of people anywhere, but overwhelmingly that’s not true here. That’s wasn’t true at Yale. They’re all normal people. We all have our own insecurities. Everyone suffers from impostor syndrome. No one thinks they’re smart enough to be here. It was wonderful. I literally have no complaints about Yale. It was all really wonderful people.

Zeron:

What was your research focus there?

Tremblay:

One of the big accomplishments when I was at ESO was getting one of the early cycles of ALMA data. ALMA is the most powerful submillimeter telescope ever conceived, ever built, and I wrote a proposal and won time on that observatory in the first or second cycle that it was operating. So, that was very attractive data because of its brand new, powerful capability. I had made a discovery—what still is the most important discovery of my career so far—from this ALMA dataset that I had obtained, so my time at Yale was honestly focused a lot on writing papers associated with that.

Zeron:

How did you and your wife meet?

Tremblay:

Match.com, which was an online dating site. I was really busy with science. I really wanted to hunker down, so I didn’t have time to date or meet people naturally, so I just made a profile on this dating website, match.com, and she had done the same. She was a medical doctor–a resident–at Yale, and that’s how we met. We went on a date, we went on another date, and that was it.

Zeron:

What did you do after that?

Tremblay:

I finished up my Einstein Fellowship at Yale. At the time, in my last year, I had proposed to her, so we knew we were fiancés, therefore we were going to move together. I applied and was offered a job at the Space Telescope Science Institute, a permanent tenure-track astronomy job with 50 percent science. It was a really good job. James Webb Space Telescope, at the time, was going to launch in 2018. This was only a couple years away. Of course, it ended up being delayed until 2021. So, I was offered the job, but my wife was finishing her residency, and sometimes to subspecialize you do a fellowship, but this is also a part of the match program. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Residents match, and when you match, you have to go where you match. You’re basically obligated; you don’t have a choice. So, you can match in Alaska and you’re going. My wife matched at Boston Children’s Hospital for her fellowship, so I basically knew that I had to get a job in Boston, so I rejected the Space Telescope job. I didn’t have any other job offer at the time, and it’s really hard to get a permanent long-term job in astronomy. It’s just really, really, really hard. It’s getting harder and harder. They’re really competitive. Hundreds of applications for one position, so it’s basically a terrible dice roll. But I applied here to this HRC instrument scientist job for the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and I got it, and we came. We moved to Boston in 2017.

Zeron:

Like you said, since 2017 you’ve been at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian. At this point, I know we’ve talked about what you continuing your research, but how did the position align with your research interest specifically, or what you were looking to do?

Tremblay:

Absolutely. Chandra has formed a foundational part of my career. Chandra is the most powerful X-ray telescope ever flown. We’re all really sad. I can talk about it later after we resume. Chandra’s being canceled, you probably heard, so a lot of people are about to lose their jobs here. It’s a really sad time right here. But Chandra was right up the alley of my PhD work—of my postdoc work—because cool core brightest cluster galaxies reside in this big megaparsec-scale bath of ambient plasma. That plasma shines in X-rays. That plasma harbors the spatial inhomogeneities—these kiloparsec-scale buoyant cavities—so, all of that wonderful physics is encoded in the hot gas where all these feedback signatures lie. Chandra is the best observatory in history to observe those features in the X-ray, so being part of the Chandra Science Operations team was right up the alley of my research.

[End of first recording]

Zeron:

We’re resuming now after a brief break, and we left at around 2017 when you got here to the Center of Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian, and you told me about how you ended up here, and then you talked about how that aligned with your research interests. How is the work environment like here at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory?

Tremblay:

Phenomenal. Working here has been the highlight of my career. Just incredibly lovely people all around. The Center for Astrophysics is the largest astronomical research organization on the planet. There are upwards of 800 scientists, engineers, people just in this building and the one across street alone, so it’s been an enormously vibrant environment. The people in this building and this floor are absolutely lovely. The Chandra team, it just has been the greatest privilege of my life to work with them. They are a bunch of stone-cold pros. They’re all kind, warm people. They all take their jobs very seriously. So, it has been such an incredible learning experience joining the flight operations for an operating great observatory, but also participating in the development of mission concepts, which I’ve done a lot here.

Zeron:

How is the collaboration with other scientists here, both those who work here and those visiting?

Tremblay:

Really great. It’s a very collaborative environment. We all work together on individual scientific projects, and we all work together every single day developing mission proposals and flying this observatory. And when it’s required of people, when it needs to be an all hands-on deck situation—like, for a spacecraft anomaly, or we really have to get the Lynx proposal done—people really show up and we work together. It’s hard work, but it’s fun. It’s a great place.

Zeron:

How did you get involved with the Chandra X-ray Observatory?

Tremblay:

I was hired into the job. The principal investigator of the Chandra High Resolution Camera hired me, and that was the job I applied for and got. It was the instrument principal investigator team role; and since then, with a departure of one of my colleagues who’s been here for a long time, I’m now the Deputy Principal Investigator and the Project Scientist for the Chandra High Resolution Camera.

Zeron:

What’s your role as project scientist?

Tremblay:

It’s keeping a watchful eye over all aspects of the instrument, from monitoring and trending, to health, planning of observations, reviewing of command loads. Every week, we upload a new set of commands to Chandra that will autonomously operate the spacecraft for anywhere between one day and five days, sometimes even two weeks. And because you are uploading commands to a multi-billion dollar great observatory, we are incredibly vigilant over every single line of that command load that gets uploaded, to make sure that there are no bugs, no issues. There are 17 different codes that independently review these command loads in all different ways. We have our own one for the High Resolution Camera where we look at every single command that will be sent to the High Resolution Camera to make sure it’s all okay, et cetera. So, it’s either a lot of work, or, now that we’re 25 years old, we’re a pretty well-oiled machine, so we’re a very efficient operation.

Zeron:

I know you had a major role in the recovery for critical spacecraft anomalies in 2020. Can you tell me more about that?

Tremblay:

Oh my gosh, I will never forget. One of the most stressful times of my career, for sure. Our top priority is: When you have a flight instrument in the sky that is a multi-billion dollar taxpayer investment—this whole observatory—and more than $100 million of taxpayer investment in the High Resolution Camera over 20 years, health and safety is your top priority. It’s August 24, 2020, height of COVID, we’re at home because no one was back at work. We were all working remotely. And I technically got paternity leave because my second child had been born a month prior. And she—my second daughter—did not sleep for the first basically eight months of her life, and it was really bad in that first month. Like, my wife and I would, multiple times a week, get zero hours of sleep—literally zero hours—because she’d wake up screaming every 45 minutes, so then you just can’t go back to sleep. Anyway, I’m just dead-exhausted tired. I’ve been up with her since like 4:00 in the morning. It’s around 9:00 in the morning, I’m sitting on the couch with her, and I get an alert on our phone that there is a major anomaly with our instrument. And Dan Patnaude, the instrument scientist on the SOT, the science operations team, texted all of us as a group saying, “There’s something majorly wrong. Go check telemetry.” And I was on my phone; like, my daughter was on my—so I had to log into the VPN on my phone to get to our private data servers, something called WebRTCat. And the board was red. Basically, the plus-and-minus 15-volt power-supply busses had collapsed to plus-and-minus 4 volts which caused total corruption of the data. And none of the data made any sense. Something was seriously, seriously wrong. So, we knew we had a major problem.

Our first hope was that it was something called a single-event upset. Every once in a while, you can get a bit flip: literally a cosmic ray can hit the part of your instrument board and cause a bit flip, for example, that basically can be repaired with a start and stop, like that classic IT line, “Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” So, during the course of that day, of course with the Space Telescope, one does not just simply do that. You have to plan, and you have to do something called a command action procedure. You have to get it approved. So, over the course that day, my wife took the babies. We had a two year old and our newborn at the time. And that night—it might have been the next day—we had a command action procedure to turn the HRC off and on again, basically. And we did that during a real time pass. Don’t forget, virtually. Normally we would have been in the control center on a full NASA control loop with the flight coordinators and flight directors, but we had to do it all through Google Meet with only an operations controller and command controller in the actual control room in Burlington, while everyone else was on Google Meet. We were just rolling out ways to operate the spacecraft via Zoom, basically, in COVID.

So, we successfully recovered the instrument. We turned it off, turned it on. Everything came back green. Totally fine. It was like, “Great! This was just a one off thing.” It was probably an SEU, a single-event upset. We’re going to go on with our lives. Of course, we’re going to look back at the data with a fine-tooth comb over the next couple of months to try to understand what happened, but we are back. And then 11 hours and 31 minutes later, the anomaly happened again in almost an identical way. And then you know something majorly is wrong at the hardware level, that it wasn’t just a one-off thing. So yeah, that was an unbelievable amount of work, because long story short, we had a [tiger] team to address the anomaly, blah blah blah. We decided that we are going to flip to side B redundant electronics. Every risk class A great observatory has multiple redundancies on everything you fly almost, so we had a second identical electronics board literally sitting next to it that has been dormant for 20 years operating in space, and we were going to switch to it. It had never been tested on orbit and had never been turned on in orbit, the B side electronics. And the really stressful thing is that required the flipping of four physical relay switches that had to physically move—they were electromagnetic relays—to switch to the B side that had never been moved on orbit. So, they’d been sitting in space for 21 years at that point, and they had never been fired. The space environment is very harsh. Chandra goes a third of the way to the Moon, so well above the Van Allen radiation belt of the Earth, so the radiation environment is very extreme. The thing can take up many, many Chernobyls of radiation over the course of its lifetime, and it was just it very unclear that the switches would flip.

Zeron:

It was a gamble.

Tremblay:

A huge gamble, yeah, because if you try to flip it and it fails midway, you’re done. You’ve lost the instrument. Not recoverable. So, that was a pretty risky situation. It required thousands of lines of new code, because for 20 years we’d been operating on the A side, so all of our code was tied to the A side. It was not designed to be nimbly flexible and switch the B side. That wasn’t in the plan. So, thousands of lines of code. Oh God, I remember my parents from Maine drove down and stayed with us for a week to help watch the babies because we weren’t sleeping, and I had to work nonstop. So, it was really hard. Anyway, we swapped the B side, I think, on August 30. I have a video of—I took a screen recording, because we were actually recording it for not just historical posterity, but to literally record what was happening with all of the boxes in real time in case something went wrong and we had to look at the record of what happened. So, I have a screen recording, and we’re all in the Google meeting, and there are four little boxes that need to switch from A to B, and we issue the command, and they all flipped. It all worked.

So yeah, long story short, that was the two A-side anomalies of the High Resolution Camera of 2020. We operated on the B side for 18 months successfully, doing great science. Everything was working great, and then a nearly identical anomaly happened again in 2022. Gosh was that 20—yeah, it was 2022, in February of 2022. So, it happened again, and we thought we had lost the instrument. Like, at that point, you’re dead. But very long story short—this is all recorded in the record on the Chandra newsletters and in a formal NASA flight note, but a long story short, not to get too far into it, but we ended up after the B side anomaly, “Well, what the hell. The instruments probably died. Let’s try to switch back to the A, because we once recovered it from an anomaly.” The B side, we couldn’t recover it. When we turned it off and turned it back on, it didn’t come back; it was still in the anomaly state. So, we swapped back to the A side. It came back. We knew that the anomaly would happen again because it happened only 11 hours after the first reset on the A side. But, after months of work with a team of engineers, with folks at the Marshall Space Flight Center, we had narrowed our fault tree to two possibilities: one, that it was a multilayer ceramic capacitor that had failed, or—and this is our primary thought—was that one of the DC-to-DC converters on the board was known to NASA to have a problem of oil canning. Basically, the lid, under vacuum for a long time, can pop. Under thermal flexure, it just basically pops open. And that can rip a solder joint that it was not sufficiently strain-relieved in the inside of the DC-to-DC converter.

We will never know what the actual problem is because we can’t fly up there with a screwdriver and take the thing apart, so we can only guess and do our best to prune the fault tree as much as we can. But one way to prevent the anomaly if it is caused by this oil canning popping DC-to-DC converter lid, it’s to keep the instrument really cold. So, we created a new operations paradigm that keeps the instrument at well-more than 20 degrees colder than we normally would have operated at. And since April 10, 2023, for more than 250 observations, more than 2 mega seconds on sky, the anomaly has never returned. Knock on wood. [knocks on wood] I’m sure it will come back again one day, but right now Chandra is honestly under a far greater threat in that our instrument will turn off because of budget cuts in two months anyway. So, these are the last months, probably, of the High Resolution Camera flying on the sky, which is sad.

Zeron:

We’ll come back to Chandra in a little bit, but I wanted to ask if you could tell me how you got involved with the Lynx X-ray Observatory.

Tremblay:

Long story short: you know this, but in order to fly a multi-billion dollar flagship great observatory at NASA, you need what is called the top recommendation of the Decadal Survey in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The Hubble Space Telescope was formally recommendation number nine in the 1972 Decadal Survey. It worked differently back then. It was called the Large Space Telescope at the time. But AXAF—the AXAF history project is right behind you—what was the original name for Chandra was the top recommendation of the 1980 Decadal Survey. Decadal surveys since the 2010 NASA reauthorization, by law, the NASA administrator is required to take into account the National Academy’s decadal surveys’ recommendations when submitting NASA budget to Congress. That’s a fancy way of saying that you should at least try to do whatever the top recommendations of the decadal surveys are. It’s not a perfect process, but in science, when we all have our own parochial interests—we’re always fighting for our own missions—the decadal survey is a quasi-democratic, nominally kind of unbiased way to just say, “What is the most urgent science for the next decade?” And these should drive the nation’s investments—sometimes multi-billion dollar investments—for the next decade, or even 20 years. So, for that reason, decadal surveys write the most powerful sentences in astrophysics. One sentence in a decadal survey can result in billions of dollars of national investment.

This is the sentence that created the Chandra X-ray Observatory, right there. “New programs, major new programs, advanced X-ray astrophysics facility, AXAF.” They thought it was going to cost $500 million in 1980 dollars, which actually wasn’t that far off. So, the Chandra came out of the 1980 Decadal Survey; it used to be called AXAF before launch. Spitzer was the result of the 1990 Decadal Survey. The James Webb Space Telescope, then called the NGST, the Next Generation Space Telescope, was top recommendation of Astro2000. 2010 was Roman, WFIRST. 2020 is nominally GOMAP, the Great Observatory Maturation Program with the Habitable Worlds Observatory as its first entry. We have tried for 30 years to win the top recommendation for what would be a Chandra replacement, or a Chandra successor. That vision was called Con-X, or Constellation-X, in 2000. I have a Con-X sticker around here somewhere, an old magnet. That’s failed. It did not get the top recommendation. It actually got the second recommendation in 2000, but that wasn’t enough. You need the top recommendation, really, because budgets just don’t accommodate two flagships in astrophysics. It was called the International X-ray Observatory in 2010. That was our concept that we developed here, in-house, of course with a big international coalition of stakeholders. That failed. And it was called Lynx in Astro2020.

A group led out of here by Alexey Vikhlinin, who’s sitting down the hallway right now—a brilliant, legendary, internationally regarded scientist—he was the co-chair of a NASA large-mission-funded concept study that was originally called the X-ray Surveyor that was going to be a Chandra successor. That was recommended by the so-called mid-decadal survey that recommended pursuit of four concept studies that would be funded by NASA: a far-infrared surveyor, X-ray surveyor, a Large UV-Optical-Infrared Surveyor, and Habitable Exoplanets Observatory with the starshade. And those became the four large mission concept studies: Lynx, Origins, HabEx, and LUVOIR. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. This was Lynx; we developed it in-house, and when I was hired in 2017, I knew that I wanted to help as much as possible to write and develop the most compelling, winnable, and competitive mission concept that we could possibly do. So, I did.

And when I joined, there was no shortage of brilliant scientists on the team. That was never in doubt. The mission design, the science pillars, it was all super strong, really, really good. But I came aboard, and I was like, “I’m a fine scientist, but I don’t have much new to contribute beyond all these brilliant people who are way smarter than I am developing the mission.” But what was immediately obvious is that all of the public facing materials looked like total shit. This mission concept couldn’t pass for a high school science project. I looked at a draft fact-sheet that was supposed to describe what the mission capabilities were. It was just the shittiest, ugliest looking thing I’ve ever seen. Like, who designed this? There was no sense of design, of graphic design, or thought to aesthetics, or visual appeal, or good layout. And it is absolutely true that a lot of developing a mission is marketing, in a way. You need stakeholders to buy in. You need politicians to buy in. They need to immediately understand why your mission is worth billions of dollars of taxpayer investment, why that’s more urgent than anything else at NASA science. And that is a really critical job, and it’s a really hard job to do, and we didn’t have anywhere close to that. We had descriptions of why you would build Lynx, but they were way too long, way too scientifically jargony.

Zeron:

Like, public-friendly.

Tremblay:

Yeah, you needed an elevator pitch that everyone said, “Oh, that sounds amazing! I want to do that.” And we had a competitor—it was technically competitor. They’re my friends. We all work together closely. But LUVOIR could say, “We’re going to search for alien life on alien worlds.”

Zeron:

I love that.

Tremblay:

Love it! You don’t beat that. And when asked, “Why do you want to build Lynx?” “Oh, well, our effective area is vastly greater than Chandra’s, and we have R of 10,000 spectral resolution on our grading spectrometer, and we’re going to have a micro-calorimeter with two EVs spectral resolution.” Nobody knows what that means outside of the X-ray astrophysics community! So, that was where I contributed the most. I took over basically all the public-facing marketing. I made our website. I did all the graphic design and developed most of the figures for the science section of the report. Because the truth was that when you make a report like this—and this is just the public facing document; it’s really 1,000 pages of material including, not classified, but sensitive but unclassified material—the overwhelming majority of people, when you get a hundreds-of-pages report like this, are going to go like this. [riffles through pages] They don’t read it. Astro2020 committee members would read it. Most people are going to go like this. [riffles through pages] So, it needs to look super professional. It needs to look really good, just doing this or scrolling through the PDF. So, we wanted all the figures to be beautiful and rigorous.

Working on Lynx was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life. I will always owe Alexey Vikhlinin more than you can imagine for that. So, that CTFM thing [points to sign on the wall], we were in the last days of the Lynx study. Alexey, John ZuHone and I, and a couple other people are working day and night to finish the proposal. We were writing it on GitHub, so we would write some text, push it to GitHub. Alexey was writing too, but we’d all merge his stuff. He’d look at the new text we wrote. And one time, I wrote a little bit of bullshit into a section of the science. It wasn’t wrong, but it was not rigorous. It was a little bit hand-wavy. Look, we’re trying to get this done. Like, just yeah. You know, it’s about—I can’t even remember what it was, but it was like, “Oh, and you know, and this is of order of this.” And it wasn’t wrong, but it was not rigorous. And he walks in, and he puts that on my desk [points to sign on the wall], and it means, “Check the fucking math.” And Alexey, to his credit, to this day would accept no bullshit in the report. DC thrives on bullshit in many ways. There’s a lot. Bullshit is fuel for a lot of things, but I’ll always give Alexey credit that he would not accept bullshit in our report. I’m not saying that the others did have bullshit in it. There are definitely mission-concept studies that have had bullshit in them before, but one thing I’ll always be proud of is that, in the end, our report is entirely bullshit free.

Zeron:

Through and through.

Tremblay:

Through and through. Every single page, every equation, and every number in there is fully defendable. Lynx both lost and kind of won. When Astra2020 came out, I had the report leaked to me early on, two weeks before it actually came out; and it wasn’t an outright loss, but the top recommendation for large space initiatives for Astro2020 was the Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program. We had, at the time, been really lobbying the committee through something called The New Great Observatories Coalition, which I co-founded—greatobservatory.org—to really push them to advocate for a new fleet of great observatories. It wasn’t that absurd. It was a little bit absurd given the total cost of flying three flagships, especially at the time; we had two flagships from the two prior Decadals still on the cleanroom floor. JWST hadn’t launched. Roman wasn’t even close to critical design review. But we were like, you’ve got to have a maximally ambitious vision for the future of discovery.

Zeron:

So, you’re thinking 20 to 30 years ahead.

Tremblay:

Oh, 40! Oh, totally. Yeah, totally. So, Astro2020 started meeting. We had submitted our report in August of 2019. The pandemic hits that fall. Right? That winter? Yeah. So that now Astro2020 is trying to complete the report in the height of COVID, and during that time, I knew that there was nothing that could be done... We had done the work on Lynx, and it was out of our hands, but what was in our hands was to be more politically effective. This observatory was really politically powerful in the 1980s, and it was a meeting at the White House using a strategy commissioned by one of my heroes—who worked in the office right over there with James Baker, Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff—that saved this mission from cancellation. We were really, really politically well-connected in DC when we needed Chandra to fly, and in the 20 years since launch, we lost our political connections. We lost the ability to effectively lobby, and we got way, way blown out of the water by AURA, where you just were. Matt Mountain is really, really good at this. And to be clear, Matt is a friend and a mentor for my—this is not a criticism. I actually really admired what he was able to do. But Matt and Space Telescope and AURA made friends with Barbara Mikulski. Senator Mikulski was maximally powerful.

Zeron:

She saved the telescope.

Tremblay:

The great observatories would not exist without Barbara Mikulski. She saved Hubble after it launched. She saved the James Webb Space Telescope. It was with her maximally powerful appropriations pen that she enabled our greatest missions. And one of the reasons that astronomy is really in trouble right now, to be totally frank, even though we’re in a new golden age—astronomy is really screwed in a lot of ways in this country. Big science is really screwed in the coming age of fiscal austerity. Maybe we can talk about that at the end. But one of the reasons for that is we do not have an equivalent of a Senator Mikulski defending astronomy anymore.

Zeron:

That was going to be my next question.

Tremblay:

Yeah, Barbara Mikulski retired, and there is no equivalent avatar for astronomy or big space telescopes on the Senate Appropriations Committee anymore.

Zeron:

Why do you think that is?

Tremblay:

Look, I want to be clear. When we go to the Hill—and we’re on the Hill a lot advocating for the growth of NASA’s astrophysics budget, the growth of NASA’s science budget—we astronomers can sound like spoiled little brats. We can sound like the kid on Santa’s knee who won’t shut up. Because we’re like, “I want this telescope, and then I want this telescope, and then I want all these telescopes, and I want two 30-meter telescopes on the ground, and I want a fleet of great observatories in space.” And any policymaker in DC with a straight face can say, “Excuse me. Astronomy enjoys immense support from the US taxpayer, and it always has, and it’s honestly been growing almost every year.” We are so lucky as astronomers that the national and global public just so instantly loves astronomy. Our poor particle-physics friends had to call the Higgs boson the damned “God particle” to get it on CNN for a couple of minutes. That was one of the greatest discoveries in particle physics in the last 40 years. Whereas I’ll write a stupid black-hole paper, and it gets a section in the New York Times. Part of the reason is we have beautiful images. Hubble is one of the great drivers of global interest and love for astronomy because the images are spectacular. But we’re really, really lucky. And because we’re really lucky and because everyone kind of loves astronomy, we in fact enjoy immense support from the taxpayer relative to other hard science disciplines. Relative to particle physics; the Superconducting Super Collider became vaporware in the 1993. So, we’re doing much better than other fields.

But what is absolutely happening right now is that we are entering a looming age of fiscal austerity. 2020 pandemic hits. Inflation kind of goes out of control for a little bit. It hits well north of eight percent in 2000 and 2022, and now because of interest rate on treasury bills, et cetera, servicing the national debt is now more than a trillion dollars a year. Overwhelmingly, spending in the United States is dominated by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, servicing the national debt, and defense. The Pentagon budget has nowhere to go other than northward of a trillion dollars as geopolitical tensions rise—Ukraine, if China invades Taiwan in 2026 or 2027. Unfortunately, we live in a—the military industrial congressional complex is real. It has been real since World War II, and the Pentagon budget is not touchable, which I have very private, very strong feelings about, but we’re not going to change that right now.

And then the income that we bring in is taxes, and taxes are a political anathema to Republicans, so raising taxes is not really politically in the cards for Congress. They don’t have the political capacity to do that at a major level. I wish this was not the case—the Simpson-Bowles plan tried it in the Obama years—but it’s unlikely that people are going to fix Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security anytime soon. So, the only knob that Congress has to turn on the budget as they get terrified of budget deficits and the mounting national debt that is soaring toward $50 trillion, the thing that they will turn off is nondefense discretionary spending, which is everything from meals on wheels, to poor kids, preschool, food stamp programs, and destroying NASA and NSF science. Destroying it. So, that’s the gloomy end. That NASA enjoys immense bipartisan support is not controversial. Any senator, whether they are the most liberal or the most MAGA whatever, likes NASA. The US public generally loves NASA, unlike any other federal agency. I was in rural, rural southern Chile, nobody spoke a word of English, not even close—it’s not Santiago—and they’re selling NASA sweatshirts on the side of a dirt road.

Zeron:

And it’s because they’ve done so much with them too.

Tremblay:

Yeah. Name me another federal agency worldwide. The German State Department?

Zeron:

ESA!

Tremblay:

The Malaysian foreign minister? ESA, exactly right. NASA and ESA. The global public loves space, and how could they not? I don’t blame them. So, we’re very lucky. We’re both lucky and super screwed right now, because what will happen is—right now we’re in a mini space race with China, again. NASA has always been a weapon of soft power in the Cold War. The Cold War is now over, but we’re in a new Cold War.

Zeron:

A new space race.

Tremblay:

One hundred percent. So, now it’s a new mini space race with China. It’s not really on the scale as it was with the Soviets in the Cold War, but it is a little bit like that. So, Artemis is our weaponized soft power for the Cold War, returning humans being to the Moon. The Artemis architecture is incredibly complicated, maybe sixteen super heavy-lift launches to get four people to the Moon for a week, for Artemis 3. I wasn’t even alive in 1969, but I recall us doing that with one rocket. Now to be clear, yes, I know, I’m fully aware the Artemis infrastructure, including gateway, et cetera, is to enable lot of mass to the lunar surface. I totally get it. But it is a really complicated architecture. The Starship HLS, Human Landing System, the crew egress hatch is 127 feet off lunar surface. They need an elevator to get down! And hopefully a ladder in case the elevator breaks. Everything is so complicated. And 16 super heavy-lift launches, so SLS on Orion, Orion on top of SLS, the Starship HLS—human landing—and then between 10 and 15 or 16 tankers filled with cryogenic propulsion starships, loaded with fuel to dock sixteen times maybe. It has to go perfectly with an on-orbit depot.

Zeron:

It’s like a ticking time bomb.

Tremblay:

It’s crazy! It’s nuts! I don’t know how we got here. I don’t know how we got locked into this architecture. I’m sorry—for the history books, I hope that I’m wrong, but I don’t know how we got here, and the only way this can go is that the thing collapses in on itself, or it goes so utterly vertical in cost and schedule that it eats NASA science for lunch. That NASA science is the piggy bank for Artemis. It’s already started to happen.

Zeron:

So that’s the problem, they’re just taking all the funding?

Tremblay:

Yes, because the NASA topline, especially under the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which is the debt-ceiling deal for fiscal year ’24 and ’25, caps the growth of nondefense discretionary spending to one percent annually. That’s really a big cut against inflation, like a huge one. So, the NASA topline is remaining basically flat-ish, and NASA to be clear is lucky relative to other agencies in this environment. NOAA is basically being totally destroyed. It’s unclear that we’ll have weather reports in a couple of years, so NASA is doing relatively well. But if the national priority for NASA is Artemis, which it is, Artemis has nowhere other to go than really ballooning in cost and schedule, because the mission complexity, the overall technology readiness level is really low, so NASA science will pay the price. And it risks being eaten alive.

Meanwhile, every single budget wedge is over pressured at NASA science. A lot of it is honestly the still effects of COVID. That causes this cascade of domino effect kind of, and NASA is more exposed to the long-tail effects of inflation than the consumer is. The consumer buys milk and bread, et cetera, so yes, inflation has been coming down, which is good, because the Fed has increased interest rates to cool off the economy to lower inflation. That has been successful to some degree, but NASA is still really exposed to a lot of these long-term effects, so everything’s much more expensive than it used to be. The federal workforce has gotten vastly more expensive. All contracts—you know, they skim 30 percent overhead at every contracting interface, so everything is really expensive. Any schedule slip is also a cost overrun because you have to carry that marching army, so every single budget wedge at NASA science is over pressured.

What is happening is we are sitting in a golden age of astronomy. I have brand new JWST cycle-two data; it’s exquisite. A brand new $10 billion space telescope at L2. How the hell could I complain? Roman is going to fly. Roman will be phenomenal. Rubin: take a movie of the sky—the Rubin Observatory LSST. We’re so lucky in astronomy. Our friends ESA have just launched Euclid, also phenomenally beautiful data. There’s a lot of exciting missions that have just launched or are just about the launch. But what is absolutely true—and it’s the path we’re currently on—the global astronomical community will be looking down at our beautiful JWST and Roman and Euclid and Webb data, and we won’t realize that soon there’ll be no ground beneath our feet, that in 20 years...

Zeron:

I was going to say, the life of JWST, I know it’s longer than expected, but it’s what, 20 years tops?

Tremblay:

Twenty years, thanks to ESA. Our friends at ESA and Arianespace inserted JWST into a perfect transfer orbit which literally doubled the life of the observatory—almost literally doubled the life. That was the greatest Christmas gift beyond the actual Christmas Day launch. Thank you ESA. Thank you Arianespace. But yes, we are on a path in our new coming age of austerity, which we were probably going to enter regardless what happens with the election, regardless of what happens to Congress, where big science in the US doesn’t outright die. NASA will survive. NASA will existentially exist in 10 years. NSF will survive. Maybe. But things are going to get really bad before they get better.

Zeron:

What do you think an alternative to that science issue could be? Is it for an investment? Other space agencies entering that international cooperation? Private companies? Is there anything else? Because then you have to raise taxes, and that’s—

Tremblay:

Exactly, yeah. This institution right now is alongside many astronomical institutions around the world. You just said AURA, they’re trying to do this too. We’re trying to think of a new paradigm for the future of astronomy in the age of austerity, innovation in the age of austerity. So, what can you do? First of all, international partnership has always been a pillar of large space missions. It’s not the Hubble Space Telescope, but it’s the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. James Webb had huge European contribution, people all around the world. Chandra has international partnerships. All large science missions to some degree are multinational efforts. ESA’s big flagship coming up will be LISA, the Laser Interferometric Space Antenna. That has a huge NASA component. So, we are already doing international partnerships. We absolutely need to do more in the future.

In terms of the fiscal situation, things are arguably worse in Europe right now than they are in the United States. Our friends at ESA are in some ways under more pressure. And private philanthropy—look, we’re in a new era of new space, as you are fully aware; you work on this, the new era of commercial space. I go to the Hill all the time, and I’ve been asked multiple times by members of Congress, “Why can SpaceX launch the same mass for a quarter of the cost?” And that’s a great question. There are many answers. One of the answers is that SpaceX is willing to accept four times more risk, and that NASA, as a risk buy-down agency, and as part of the federal government, it looks bad when NASA blows up rockets, because that is torching taxpayer money. And losing satellites is a problem. Losing a human being is a catastrophe. So, when that happens—well, that was the first shuttle launch. When Challenger happened, that was a catastrophic human tragedy. That’s flag-draped coffins. Apollo 1, Columbia. So, one of the ways to think of NASA is as a massive risk buy-down agency, so they spend an absurd amount of money—

Zeron:

And time.

Tremblay:

—On time and complexity, on mission assurance. People are asking—so, we’re talking right now, and this is a focal moment in time, but there are two astronauts “stranded” on the International Space Station. They’re not actually stranded, but NASA is, right now at headquarters, as we speak, they’re really putting their heads down on a risk trade of, “Do we bring Butch and Suni home on the Starliner and risk more reaction control thrusters failing when they undock?” Because NASA basically does risk matrices. On one axis is the likelihood of this bad event happening, and the other axis is the consequences of that bad event happening. So, low likelihood and not a big deal if it happens: great, that’s a green box. But low likelihood and it’s a catastrophe if this happens, where you lose a human being or two of them: unacceptable. So, that’s one of the reasons why NASA missions are much more expensive. I don’t know how we got into this. I was rambling.

Zeron:

I was going to ask–then we’ll come back to Chandra in a little bit–what technically is the status of Lynx at the moment? I know you said—

Tremblay:

Yeah, so there are three worlds. There’s a world in which the budgets contract, in which you do less, in which you’re lucky if you get the top recommendation of the decadal survey. This is currently the world we’re in.

Zeron:

Waiting for 2030, then?

Tremblay:

Yeah, right. Formally, the top recommendation out of Astro2020 was both the Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program, and its first entrant, which was to be a ~6 meter IR/O/UV—optical, UV, infrared—space telescope optimized for exoplanet imaging in general astrophysics. That is now called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. The GOMAP was envisioned to have three entrants, which is habitable worlds, an X-ray mission like Lynx—literally, that’s what Astra2020 said—and a far-infrared mission similar to the proposed Origin Space Telescope. So, Lynx and Origins, or at least the visions for them, were included in what can be described as the top recommendation of Astro2020. If we were in the universe in which budgets continued to grow, it’s actually possible that we could fly a new fleet of great observatories. The New Great Observatories Coalition kind of got what it wanted out of Astro2020: a program designed to pursue a new fleet of great observatories. So, that is technically—one can argue, if I’m being really optimistic—Lynx is theoretically supposed to enter the GOMAP, the Great Observatories Maturation Program in the latter half of this decade. That is literally the language from Astro2020. The reality is that we will be lucky if HWO, Habitable Worlds, ever sees the sky in this current environment. Lynx and Origins are dead in the water because the budgets won’t even come close to accommodating significant technology maturation for two other flagship missions at NASA astrophysics in the coming five years. So, the status of Lynx is on the barest minimum of life support. We will recompete in Astro2030, which is coming right up actually. We’re already in the latter half of the decade almost.

Zeron:

It’s crazy.

Tremblay:

It’s crazy, yeah. But, unfortunately things are not looking good right now. It doesn’t mean it’s dead. And it seems totally absurd that we could ever come close to flying a new fleet of great observatories, but I will remind us that absurd things happen all the time.

Zeron:

You never know.

Tremblay:

They happen all the time. The half-life of the political universe is very short. You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone five years from now.

Zeron:

Could you tell me a little bit more about your experience with other space-based telescopes? For example, I know you said you were on the second cycle for JWST.

Tremblay:

Yeah, so most of my work is with space telescopes, with the exception of ground-based telescopes being Gemini, ALMA, and the VLT. I have a lot of data from there. But I love space telescopes. Outside of my kids and my family, they’re my biggest professional passion by far. I’m obsessed with them. My wife calls it a madness of telescopes. If I could have no other legacy in astronomy, it would be pushing forward the dream of a new fleet of great observatories to replace and build on the legacy of the original fleet: Hubble, Compton, Chandra, and Spitzer, and to some degree Roman and Webb. That is my dream. That’s one I’m not going to give up, I don’t care how bad the budgets are. So yeah, I work on space telescopes all time. My PhD was mostly Hubble data, some Spitzer data. Chandra, of course, is a major part of my research. And we just have brand new JWST data; I’m so excited. I gave all the great data to my PhD student, Osase Omoruyi. She’s a fourth year Harvard PhD student here. She’s doing great, so she’s leading that project.

Zeron:

I understand your technique is highly multiwavelength analysis. How have you incorporated that with the allocated time awarded to you?

Tremblay:

Yeah, I’m a very multiwavelength person. I believe there’s immense force-multiplying power, meaning when you have multiple datasets—an X-ray image of, say, a galaxy cluster, plus an optical image wide-band, narrow-band, infrared, submillimeter—that when you combine all those maps together, or all those data cubes or velocity maps, the physical intuition for the system that you get is far greater than the sum of those individual parts. So, I’m very multiwavelength. I’m not the only one, to be clear. We’re basically in a new golden age of multiwavelength astronomy. Basically, any working professional astronomer nowadays is becoming more and more multiwavelength every day. But yes, I love multiwavelength astronomy, and I believe in its power.

Zeron:

I know you mentioned briefly you’re working with a PhD student, so technically you’re affiliated with Harvard University’s Department of Astronomy. Is that as a professor, or just so you can supervise?

Tremblay:

Exactly, yeah. Formally, I’m an employee of the Smithsonian Institution. You’re sitting in a weird organization, in that the Center for Astrophysics is not formally a legal entity. You can’t be hired by the Center for Astrophysics. The CfA was created under a memorandum of understanding in 1974 between the Smithsonian Institution—the legendary suite of museums and research centers in Washington, DC—and Harvard University, here. And it moved here. SAO has existed for more than a century. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory began with studies of the Sun on the National Mall, literally adjacent to the Smithsonian Castle, but it moved here in 1974 and merged with Harvard to create the Center for Astrophysics under a memorandum of understanding. So, I’m a Smithsonian employee. Most of the people in this building are Smithsonian. Harvard’s much smaller than SAO, but I have a Harvard lectureship, a lecturer position–unpaid. I don’t have to teach classes, but it allows me to formally advise the PhD of Harvard students.

Zeron:

To this day, you’ve published two books for the general public. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Tremblay:

Yeah, one is this coffee-table book that just was done in celebration of Chandra’s 20th anniversary. So that was five years ago now, my God! And then I wrote a silly little children’s book with my friend Katie Copen. She’s a children’s author. The idea is that she is an elementary school teacher, so she would collect questions about space from her students. And kids always have the best questions about space, just the best. And then she would send them to me, and then I would give rigorous, astrophysically-correct answers, and then she would reinterpret those answers in a way that a kid can understand. So, that’s the book, What Do Black Holes Eat for Dinner? So, that’s the kids book.

Zeron:

That’s incredible.

Tremblay:

Yeah, it was fun. And then I’m writing a third now, but that won’t be until probably 2025 or 2026 by the time that finally comes out.

Zeron:

Now I would like to focus a little bit more on your different roles in the space policy and mission development, as we’ve covered a little bit. I guess this is a little bit more of a broad question, but talking about your involvement more specifically in space policy, what is the impact of congressional support for the development of these kinds of missions?

Tremblay:

I believe that one of the most critical things that astronomers worldwide, not just in the United States—I focus on the United States, of course, because I’m a United States citizen, so I can only advocate in the United States Congress, but this needs to happen worldwide. I believe from the bottom of my heart that discovery is one of the things we leave behind. That in a century, historians looking back at us in the year 2100 or 2200, when they look back on these times, they won’t really remember companies that were created. They’ll remember the big ones—Apple, Google. That will be in part of the historical record. The most important part of my life are—the most important part of anyone’s life—are the people you love, and who loved you, but it is also true that we will be forgotten in just a couple of generations. One day I’ll be a fading photograph. I have a photo of my great-grandfather on a shelf in my house. I look at it from time to time. I don’t even remember his name. I’m sure he was a good person. Soon we’ll all be forgotten, which is sad, but it’s true. And I think that one of the things that we remember throughout the course of civilization is discovery. It’s not the only thing, but we build upon discoveries.

So, I believe it is the job of the federal government—I’m sorry to be political—but it is the job of the federal government to invest in those things that have no immediate business model, or no immediate, obvious contribution to the Solow residual, which is basically like a measure of economic output. Space telescopes don’t really have a business model. I just get really worried because there’s a private billionaire who’s willing to spend $400 million flying a space telescope. That’s cool; I wish them the best, to be clear. I love space telescopes, but what scares me is that Congress gets word of this, and they’re like, “Oh, great! The private sector will fly your space telescopes.” I’m sorry, there’s no business model for space telescopes. We are in a new area of a commercial space, small satellites, et cetera, yes, but Starlink has a business model. People fucking subscribe to it. New space commercial launches, that’s for money. The job of a business is to make money eventually, in principle. The big companies don’t actually make money. Amazon has never recorded a profit, I guess. Space telescope, there is no sustainable future, at least as far as I can see, for private philanthropy and private companies building giant mirrors that you point upward. Maybe there will be some. But there are a countable number of human beings in the history of the planet with, one, enough disposable cash, and two, the willingness to spend half a billion dollars or a billion dollars of their own money on a space telescope. There are a couple. Eric Schmidt is one of them, but he’s one.

So, I believe fundamentally that it will remain the job of the United States government to invest in big, gee-whiz science. Some of that you can argue on actual economic terms in terms of arguing for long-tail returns. You can argue that it was government investment in gee-whiz, useless, pointless information theory in the 1920s that helped become a load-bearing pillar of the global Internet, which is today a third of the global economy. But that was a long-tail investment that took 80, 100 years. So yes, there is that, but people are always like, “Oh, talk about dual use. Talk about how when you build an X-ray telescope, some of that technology goes into building a scanner at an airport.” Or these sorts of plowshare, dual-use technology arguments. That’s fine. NASA has a big economic-impact study that they publish every year with all the unbelievable returns on taxpayer investment. It is absolutely true that every single dime of taxpayer investment that goes into things like NASA and NSF can often return many-fold on anything from years to decades, even centuries-long time scales. Absolutely. But I don’t worry much about the business model for discovery. I think discovery is something that we need to pursue as a species.

Zeron:

As a driver itself.

Tremblay:

Yeah, if it’s not self-evident, then I don’t have an articulate explanation for why discovery is worth it. It’s the thing that we leave behind. It’s our imprint in the long-term history of our civilization and of future civilizations. We’re all going to be forgotten. One day, people are not going to remember the names of the biggest companies on the planet, but discoveries we’ll remember. They remain. So, that was a long way of saying that I believe science policy must be a greater focus, and advocacy amongst stakeholders—stakeholders being the broad definition of the group of people without whose support your pursuits of discovery will not work. Your mission will fail, meaning if you don’t have the right senator. A senator is a stakeholder because they need to write your line item in an appropriations bill.

Zeron:

To push it forward.

Tremblay:

Yeah. The global public, high school students, average working-class people in Appalachia, everything—they’re your stakeholders. They need to want it. They need to say, “Oh, I like that James Webb Space Telescope! That was cool!” We need that everywhere, and it’s going to be needed much more in the future than it was in the past.

Zeron:

Now, I know you currently serve as the vice-chair for NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee, how were you selected or appointed to that?

Tremblay:

The reason I was selected—I was asked—is because I was the then chair of the NASA Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group, which is called the PhysPAG. Long story. But I was the chair of that, and it wasn’t by requirement, but typically the chairs of those individual PAGs are invited to serve on the APAC, so I got invited and I accepted because the APAC is NASA astrophysics’ only FACA-empowered committee, the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The United States government does not take advice from anything other than a FACA-empowered committee, so when FACA recommendations are created, US government federal agencies are required to respond to them. They don’t have to say yes, but they’re required at least to respond in writing, and even in presentations, to every FACA recommendation. So, they can be powerful. They can be really powerful sometimes. They can also be useless. It depends on the committee. It depends on the recommendation. Depends on the fiscal environment. But yeah, I sit on the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee. I take it very seriously because we need to help advise NASA going forward in making really hard decisions amid these terrible budgets.

Zeron:

That was my next question, what your role is there.

Tremblay:

Right now, NASA science has lost a billion dollars annually in buying power since 2020, and if you integrate that out, it’s been about three and a half billion dollars lost from the program that we otherwise would have spent, on an inflation-adjusted basis. And what that means is that the NASA science leadership, beginning with Dr. Nicky Fox, my friend—she leads NASA science—and at the astrophysics level, Dr. Mark Clampin, also my friend—they have a really painful, hard job. They wanted to get into this to explore the stars. Absolutely no doubt. To explore the solar system, to launch space telescopes. And they arrived at a time in which their primary job is deciding where to spread the pain in their portfolio and deciding which missions to kill. To be clear, NASA science still does awesome things. Even under these bad budgets, they will continue to fly awesome things. JWST is in the sky. It’s totally awesome. We’re launching CubeSats, balloons. We’re going to launch a freaking helicopter to go fly on fucking Titan, a moon of Saturn. It’s called Dragonfly.

Zeron:

And Europa.

Tremblay:

Europa Clipper is going to launch. NASA will continue to do awesome things, inspire the world, inspire kids worldwide, even under these bad budgets. So, they do have a great job in many ways, but they also have a terrible job right now. And that poor Nicky just had to decide to disassemble a $450,000,000 Lunar Rover already assembled basically, almost complete, torching half a billion dollars of taxpayer cost basically to save $80,000,000 in a program, and a big delay of the clips schedule. Disaster.

Zeron:

Heartbreaking.

Tremblay:

Yeah, and they’re turning off our observatory—an operating, healthy, maximally efficient, and never more relevant than now, great observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is basically on a path to cancellation. NASA won’t say that. NASA will say—and they’re technically correct, and I give them credit—that, “We don’t want to cancel Chandra. We just want to find a more efficient way to operate it.” They need to save money. What that means is that we are, at this observatory right now, about to layoff 65 people, which is a little bit under half the observatory. Everyone here is super talented, has a world-leading, very unique expertise that only a countable number of human beings on the planet can do, but they also have mortgages, and kids, and jobs, and they need to pay the bills. So, when we are laid off in the coming two months, we’re all going to have to find jobs. I’m not willing to move my family. I’m sorry, but my daughter’s in kindergarten and loves it. My wife loves her job. She has her dream job. We bought a house in 2020. I love my home. My hydrangeas are just finally doing well. I’m not moving! Astronomy is the animating passion of my life, but family is more important to me now, and I’m not willing to move my kids out of their home. They’re making friends.

My case is true for many people here, so what that means is that the Cambridge area astronomy job market will not bear 65 people looking for jobs in astronomy. They will maybe absorb two or three of them, maybe. The CfA people think the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is super rich. It’s not true. Harvard is rich. The CfA does well, but we absolutely can’t absorb more than a couple of people, so a lot of these people just leave astronomy. And then once you leave, you never get them back. So, it is a loss from the field. It’s an evaporation of talent, and it’s stepping back on a lead that we have held since 1963 in leading global X-ray astronomy. So yeah, it’s bad.

Zeron:

When it comes to the committee itself, for example, the one you—

Tremblay:

APAC.

Zeron:

Yeah, so what are the major influences? Is it mainly just the different perspectives that people in the committee have? Is it outside influences from maybe research institutes?

Tremblay:

Oh, yeah. The APAC members, we all have to be very deconflicted. Conflicts of interest we take very seriously. I can’t speak about Chandra on the APAC because I’m maximally conflicted on Chandra. Chandra pays for my mortgage and my daughter’s dance lessons, so I can’t write a recommendation to NASA that, “Oh, don’t cancel Chandra,” because I’m obviously conflicted. So, conflicts of interest are really important, but yes, otherwise it is the perspective the individual members. We are meant to try as best as we possibly can to represent what we think are the broad interests of the national astronomical community within the United States. We try our very best to do that, and we take that job very seriously. But it also means we get a lot of email and lobbying from astronomers around the country: “Oh! The APAC should say this, should say that.” Almost all of that is done in good faith; it is the right of the community to defend your own science. Yes, you should advocate for why your science is important, because no one else will.

Zeron:

I know we’ve talked a lot about the impact of budget issues and potential cancellations of the development of missions and their current operation, but could you just explain a little bit more? How is budget allocated to specific NASA missions? I guess talking about NASA science.

Tremblay:

Yeah. NASA is an executive agency which means it does its planning—it’s called the PPV process and ultimately boils up to the OMB pass-back process—but basically NASA effectively is a White House agency. And NASA, like many other federal agencies, are in a tough bind because they have to plan to OMB—Office of Management and Budget—president budget requests, but they operate by appropriations and authorization. The only budget that is real is the one that is appropriated and authorized by Congress. Meanwhile, NASA has to plan to whatever the White House tells them to do. So, NASA every year will send a budget request to the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. That will go back and forth to align with the administration’s priorities for NASA—whatever President Obama, or Trump, or Harris, or Bush, or whoever wanted it to be.

So, NASA has to plan out years to the OMB budget requests, but the classic rhyme within DC is that “The president proposes, and Congress disposes.” Congress is very protective of the fact that it controls the purse strings of the United States government, not the President. That’s part of separation of powers. They take it very seriously, even when the president holds both chambers of Congress in their party. When Obama had both chambers of Congress in 2008 for two years, you can still argue that Congress disposed of his budget. It’s appropriations and authorization language that is real. So, how SMD priorities get decided is complicated and messy as hell because they have to plan to OMB out years by the sort of budget request process, but they operate by appropriations and authorization language because appropriators actually give them the money and authorizers tell them how they’re allowed to spend it. NASA builds things that are really complicated. They take a decade, sometimes two decades to develop, and yet they have to operate like a dog being yanked on a chain in every single direction. Priority shift all the time. You can never really predict what your appropriation will be in the coming year, so projects can be massively underfunded or deprioritized in one year, and then the appropriations committee will be outraged that NASA hasn’t been funding the mission that Congress itself underfunded last year. I mean, the NASA STMD once received $700 million in line items for a $600 million topline.

The appropriations process in the United States is broken and weaponized and has been for years. This is why we have, every once in a while, a “We’re going to shut down the government” fight. We have brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, and federal agencies are victim to all of that. Last year, NASA had to spend so much time just planning to shut down under the threat of government shutdowns. That takes a lot of work! I’m sorry, but NASA doesn’t make sweaters; you don’t just shut the factory down. NASA operates missions. They have human beings in space.

Zeron:

You can’t just be like, “You’re not working today.”

Tremblay:

Yeah, exactly. You don’t just shut the government down. And literally, on a government shutdown, you’re not even allowed to check email. So, it’s crazy, yeah. So, the answer to your question, “How do NASA science priorities get assigned?” Nominally, under authorization language, “the science mission directorate shall be responsive to Decadal priorities.” We have a planetary Decadal, astronomy Decadal, a heliophysics Decadal; those drive the large missions, and even, yes, smaller mission portfolios, but it’s a complicated, messy balance between the OMB pass-back process, administration, priorities at NASA headquarters itself, Decadal surveys, budgets, et cetera.

Zeron:

We also talked a little bit about this, but what would be the impact of a possible, if actual, Chandra cancellation in the context of the relationship between NASA and other space agencies, now ESA, CSA, JAXA?

Tremblay:

Look, none of us here is under any illusion that Chandra was going to last forever. We all know the mission is in its twilight years. It was supposed to be a five-year mission, and we’re on mission on year twenty-five. We always thought that NASA, because Hubble and Chandra are two of the last original fleet of great observatories, they are super-efficient, they are maximally in community demand, and basically never more relevant than now, especially as we enter our new era of time-domain astrophysics multiwavelength synergy with JWST, Roman, and Rubin. So, we always thought—I always hoped—that NASA would give the two last great observatories the grace to end the mission on their own terms, which is breaking on orbit. Fund Chandra until it breaks. Fund Hubble until it dies. It’s only a couple more years. The science is great until the very last day. Just do it!

Canceling Chandra right now would be like you have a $3,000,000 beautiful house that you raised your kids in, the house is in great shape, you love it, you want to operate it, you want to live in it for many more years to come. It can operate and be around for many more years come. There’s no reason why—it’s not falling apart at all, and yet you shudder the house and literally burn it to the ground. You don’t even sell it. You don’t get the money back. You just burn it to the ground because you’re unwilling to pay one year of utility bills. So, that works out to about two percent of the total taxpayer cost every year just to operate the thing. So, we’re killing the thing to save two percent of what taxpayers have already spent on it. So, it’s a waste of money. It’s blowing taxpayer money to turn off an operating-grade observatory. It’s just a waste of money. But NASA is in such a bad situation right now that they’re making those tough decisions.

Zeron:

I wanted to ask if you could explain a little bit more of your role in mission development. I know we’ve talked a little bit about Lynx, but what is it specifically your role as the head of the Lynx Science Support Office?

Tremblay:

You probably read that on my website, and that technically is still my title, but what is the Lynx Science Support Office for a mission that might never see the sky? That was definitely relevant during the mission-concept study phase when we were writing it, so that is a little bit of a vestigial title, but we, to be clear, are not giving up on Lynx. We’ll fight for it every single day until the very end, because I believe fundamentally that we do need to fly a Lynx-like mission in the future. We also have great probe concepts that have been submitted to NASA. Those are all great, to be absolutely clear. I believe in a multi-scale portfolio, small missions to medium missions to large missions. They’re all valuable, all worth it. So, the Lynx Science Support Office doesn’t really exist, certainly not in this budget scenario. If we were doing a full GOMAP—a Great Observatory Maturation Program—and really about to enter aggressive, $50,000,000-a-year technology maturation for Lynx, then yeah, I would have a big role. But not in this budget.

Zeron:

You’ve also served as the vice president of the American Astronomical Society. Could you tell me just a little bit more about that?

Tremblay:

Yeah, I love the AAS. The AAS is a load-bearing pillar of the national astronomy community. It’s not attractively described, but it was best described to me once as the plumbing of the national enterprise of astronomy. Plumbing is a thing that you don’t notice and you don’t think about when it’s working, and when it doesn’t exist, you really notice it—or when it breaks. “Oh my God, I have no toilet! I have no running water.” You don’t think about when you’re taking a shower and your shower always works, but the second on the morning you wake up and there’s no water, like, “Oh my God, I really needed this!” That is true for the American Astronomical Society. It does vastly more than just hold meetings and publish journals. It really is an advocacy infrastructure that needs to become much more aggressive and larger in the coming years. But we’re definitely trying.

So, I joined the American Astronomical Society. I was in my daughter’s room in 2021 or something like that, and I got an email from the past president saying, “Grant, I’d like you to run for vice president.” And I basically on my phone said, “Oh Megan, that’s so sweet of you. I’m so honored that you thought of me. Of course, I’d be happy to run.” And I never thought about it since. And then a couple months later, it’s like, “Your candidate statement is due.” It’s like, “Oh, right. I guess I should probably write that.” So, I quickly wrote it and then never really thought about it. And then I just won the election. It turned out to be an enormous amount of work, an unbelievable amount of work, to be clear–I just had to break for a AAS thing, but it’s been very rewarding. There are great people in the AAS who are trying their best and working really hard, especially in this really tough time for astronomy, or this coming tough future for astronomy. And I do love the society. I believe in its mission, its vision, its values, so being vice president has been very busy, but it’s been rewarding.

Zeron:

You also touched on this a little bit, but in 2020 you founded the New Great Observatories Community Coalition. Could you just tell me a little bit more about that as well?

Tremblay:

Yeah. We are friends with all of the leads and the teams on our notional competitors for the four large mission concept studies. They’re nominally our competitors. We were all competing for that top recommendation in Astro2020, but on the day we submitted our reports and all our reports became public online, I downloaded the other three reports—Origins, LUVOIR, and HabEx—and over the next couple of weeks, I read all of them. I didn’t read them all totally cover to cover, but I read almost all of the science sections for all three reports. And you’d want to be like, “These idiots, we’re way better than them. All this is shit. This is stupid. This is not worth the money.” But really, when you read all of them, I was blown away by how visionary, and how exciting, and how well motivated, and scientifically relevant, and visionary all four reports were—ours included, but also our friends on the Origins, HabEx, and LUVOIR teams.

And what happened is the pandemic hit. The economy, as you remember, was tanking. It was not clear for a brief moment there that we were not about to enter a great depression—like, it was like not off the table—or at least a great recession. Meanwhile, JWST is dropping nuts and bolts on the cleanroom floor. I get a leak because I made my job to become more politically well-connected and create a vast network of little birds [both laugh] because I thrive and live on gossip and intel. Mostly unactionable gossip, but I love gossip. I love astro gossip. I love astropolitics. So, I had made a lot of connections. I sent a lot of text messages to some friends trying to get leaks, and we got some leaks that, on the top-level committee of Astro2020, the pandemic’s out of control. We’re all locked in at home unclear how bad this pandemic is going to get–how many people are going to die. JWST is not in a great place right now, and I heard that someone on the top-level committee said the words, “JWST will never fly.” Will never fly. That was after the nuts and bolts thing; people went nuts. My buddy is Lee Feinberg; he was one of the telescope scientists for James Webb Space Telescope. He was the first NASA person on the cleanroom floor at Redondo Beach when the nuts and bolts thing happened, and there were, like, 150 bolts under the sunshade. This is a $1,000,000,000 sunshade. And he called Bill Ochs, the program manager, and said, “Bill, we have a problem. Things are falling off the sunshade.” And Bill, allegedly—I wasn’t there, but Lee told me over lunch—Bill didn’t even say anything; he just hung up the phone. [laughs] So anyway, JWST was very not clear that thing would ever fly, or definitely not work great.

Zeron:

Super stressful.

Tremblay:

Yeah, it was super stressful. Things were looking really bad. My friend, Heidi Hammel, who inspired me into science when I was eating spaghetti with my parents in 1994 because of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact, emailed me and a couple other people, the leaders of the four large mission concept studies, and we had a Zoom, because everyone was Zooming. And through the course of that period, I had already created something called greatobservatories.org. I did it while drinking wine at night, like after we had all submitted our reports. This was pre-pandemic. I created a mirror logo where all four mirrors are combined. I was like, “Fuck it, let’s advocate for all four of them. These are all great. They’re all worth doing. Why don’t we just advocate for doing great observatories?” We did that in the ’80s, and it worked! So, I was inspired by this. I have a signed copy of one of the original ones at home. I love this brochure. And I was like, “God, let’s do that again!” So, I had created greatobservatories.org, which really was a landing site for the four large mission concept study reports, with a beautiful logo.

Heidi and the other leaders had seen that, and they loved it, so that’s why that partly motivated this, “Let’s get together and just chat.” We chatted strategies. We met weekly at that point. God, we met so often to talk about strategies to initially lobby Astro2020 to, like, “Don’t get cold feet. Don’t not recommend a flagship.” Because big visions inspire big budgets, and if you don’t ask for it. You’re guaranteed not to get it. And we don’t know what is going to happen with the economy. Things could turn around. We could have a vaccine. We could be all back at work soon. So yeah, that was the beginning of the New Great Observatories Coalition. It really grew. It really did. Now we have members who are the former associate administrator for science at NASA, two NASA division directors. We have contacts with former NASA administrators. A lot of support. It’s getting really hard now to talk about a fleet of great observatories when it’s not even clear that we’re going to launch anything. Never been more absurd than now, but absurd things happen all the time, and we’re a candle in the wind, and we’re going to keep the vision alive even during this tough fiscal time. We’ve always known that this is a multi-decade pursuit.

One of the important things about astronomy is that it’s incumbent upon all of us to plant trees whose shade we don’t sit in. The people who worked on JWST, for most of their careers, they’re on the verge of—a lot of them are retired now. They’re not using the data for their own papers. They built it for other people; they built it for the next generation of explorers. It’s incumbent upon us, in this building and around the world, to do the same thing for the next generation. I don’t plan to use the new great observatories. Habitable World Observatory, honestly, will probably launch at the end of my career. So, it’s not for me; it’s for the next generation. Because people who believe in discovery, it is required of us that we fight for it at all times, because it doesn’t happen naturally.

Zeron:

This is my last question, but given your experience with multiple large-scale projects throughout your career, what can you say about the impact of international partnerships on the success of extremely complex scientific missions?

Tremblay:

I’m in DC all the time, and that town thrives on bullshit. Stakeholders, a lot members of Congress, hear bullshit all the time, and that means they have really good bullshit detectors. They’re not actually stupid. On a bipartisan basis, they’re mostly not stupid, overwhelmingly not stupid people. So, they have really good bullshit detectors because they hear it every single day. And one of the big pieces of it that they hear is competition with China. Everything is competition with China. That’s seemingly the only thing that Congress cares about. I can’t go to DC and make that argument. I’m rooting for our Chinese colleagues. They’re building a space telescope called Xuntian, like a Chinese Hubble. I wish them the very best. I hope it works. I hope it delivers beautiful data. I can’t, from a place of honesty, advocate in the context of national leadership and international competition. I believe that science is best done through international cooperation, especially big science. And we’re going to have to work with our partners, because the United States, from a stakeholder’s perspective, can’t afford it to do it by ourselves. And to be clear, we can afford it. We spend something like 30 NASAs on Medicare overpayments every year alone. The Pentagon will spend one NASA in ammunition next year alone.

Zeron:

You just have to get the budget for it.

Tremblay:

All spending on NASA history, ever, adjusted for inflation, is less than 2.2 Pentagon budgets—the last two Pentagon budgets. Ever. Since 1959. That’s 63 budgets. So, international cooperation is critically important and will be ever more important as we go forward. I understand intellectually that Congress and stakeholders in DC view NASA as fundamentally a national security agency. Mike Griffin—I put this in my talk—he had a talk recently, and he said, “I’m sorry scientists, but I don’t care what you say. It’s nice when it does nice science, but Hubble is a national security program.” It is about, “We’re better than you are.” It’s about prestige couture. The Superconducting Super Collider, all of this big science, you can draw, first of all, a straight line from it, from the Manhattan project to today; but the biggest driver of all of the big science stuff the United States has done since World War II is about national prestige. It is weaponized soft power. It is about the James Webb Space Telescope image being on the front page of newspapers in Pyongyang and Beijing. They care about the science at the congressional level. They’re happy when James Webb enables a cool science result. They like it. But what they care about more is that it makes the United States look awesome.

I sit on the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee, and I hear all the time, “Well, NASA is fundamentally a community service organization. They need to be responsive to the scientific interests of the community.” And as much as I wish that were true, I say, “I’m sorry, but that’s just bullshit.” NASA’s job, from the stakeholders perspective, the people who actually enable NASA to do anything at all by giving it money–NASA’s job is to put awesome shit in the sky, and it always has been. It has always been a national security agency weaponized soft power, and we will be idiots if we don’t try to enable science within that context. So, we have to go to the Hill, and the most effective arguments are the ones that are true, because people have good bullshit detectors on the Hill. But a member of Congress—I don’t care whether it’s a Democrat or the most MAGA Republican you’ve ever met—really does love to hear a young student talk excitedly about the cool science they’re doing with JWST. They love it! They love it. It’s one of the few things that is bipartisan and well liked on the Hill. Everything’s up; no one likes anything nowadays. No one can agree on anything, but we’re so lucky in astronomy. “Oh, that’s totally worth it. Yeah, we probably can’t afford it, but I think it’s totally worth it.”

This is all to say that we have a compelling, full-hearted, entirely true story to tell about how the future of cosmic discovery needs to be through international partnerships. Yes, you can talk about soft power, but for us, the discovery is the soft power in a way. That’s not articulate. I don’t even remember what the question was, but international partnerships are going to be ever more important going forward. But at the same time, it is true that in the past, big science missions have been enabled not in the spirit of cooperation, but in the spirit of competition. And both things can be true at once, and you’re kind of a naive idiot if you don’t go to the Hill knowing that and have an argument that is about both national security and inspiring elementary schoolers in Scranton. And most critically, that needs to be in Scranton because you need to know where the appropriations committee members are. [both laugh]

Zeron:

Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?

Tremblay:

No, it’s your interview.

Zeron:

Okay, Dr. Tremblay, thank you very much. I know this was a very long session, but we will not release the tape or the transcript without your express approval. Thank you so much for your time.

Tremblay:

It was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you.

[End]