In 1992 Bill Borucki presented NASA with an audacious proposal: a space telescope that would detect Earth-size planets quadrillions of miles away. NASA quickly rejected it. After all, nobody knew if there were any planets beyond our solar system. But Borucki, a veteran of the never-say-never Apollo era that put men on the moon, does not give up easily. He spent the next decade building parts and performing experiments to show that his vision could become reality. In 2001 NASA finally caved and approved the Kepler space telescope, with spectacular results. Since its launch in 2009, Kepler has spotted more than 3,000 potential planets and definitively confirmed the existence of over 100, including searing gas giants and eerie worlds with two suns. By 2016, Kepler should start delivering its biggest payoff yet: planets whose size and distance from their stars are very similar to Earth’s. DISCOVER associate editor Andrew Grant caught up with Borucki at his modest office at NASA’s Ames Research Center on a typically pleasant northern Californian afternoon.
What steered you toward the moon and planets? Were you always interested in space? As a boy I was certainly interested in astronomy. My friends and I would bike to Yerkes Observatory, about 15 miles from my hometown of Delavan, Wisconsin. The skies were very dark, so you could just climb up on a roof and watch meteor showers.
Did your interest go beyond observing? My friends and I built rockets. I remember one of our early models: about two inches high, with a little drilled hole where we put gunpowder. Gunpowder was easy to get at in those days—there weren’t terrorists around. After a while our rockets got fairly big. We used steel tubes several inches in diameter, with many pounds of propellant, and radios inside so that we could pick up the signal from them. We’d call the sheriff and tell him we wanted to launch, and he would shut down the roads in the area. The real problem was if the rocket came down and killed a cow. That was a bad thing. You had to pay the farmer for that cow.
So did you ever kill a cow? We never killed a cow.
How did you get started at NASA? After I got a master’s degree in physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1962, NASA was the only place I wanted to work. Two of their labs gave me an offer: the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory [now Glenn Research Center] in Cleveland and Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. Glenn was doing propulsion research; Ames was designing heat shields for the Apollo program. They both looked like good possibilities, but my father told me to go west. I said, “Well, OK. He’s got some wisdom I’ll take advantage of.” So I took the offer from Ames.
