We do not know how the Jedi of Star Wars began, except for their own self-reported histories. Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke that “the Jedi protected peace and justice in the galaxy for a thousand generations.” Decades earlier, Mace Windu declares that the Jedi are “keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” while Yoda, at the time of their fall, muses that they “spent [a] millennium training to re-fight the last war” against the Sith – and still managed to lose. Whether any of these fragments factually represent the Jedi’s history is up for debate, because we are not shown how the Jedi began. We are, however, given a front-row seat to their end.

My journey to a PhD in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science is a tale of two inflection points. The first was when I walked into Alan Levander’s geophysics class as a freshman at Rice University, buoyed by curiosity and absolutely no advanced math knowledge. I walked out determined to be a geophysicist. The second is when David Kring led me up and down the walls of Meteor Crater, Arizona, with a single-minded determination to show me where physical evidence met destructive process. I left Meteor Crater possessed by the desire to become a planetary scientist. And now, seven years later, that is what I am.

The concept of a “moon base,” of helmet-clad people venturing across the lunar surface from their shining steel homes, has occupied the American consciousness since the dawn of the space age, as both an object of fantasy and a very real possibility. Humans living semi-permanently on the Moon has persisted as staple of the science fiction genre in film, literature, and beyond since 1953’s Project Moonbase. It’s popped up in classics across the decades from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 1966 to Andy Weir’s 2017 novel Artemis. There’s just something in the concept of moving human life onto another world, of standing in a quiet place looking out at the quieter dark of the empty beyond, of kicking up clouds of regolith in a wild drive across a rugged, exotic surface, that captures the imagination of the American spirit, raised on stories of the Wild West where frontierism and Manifest Destiny are not just good and right ideas, but an expression of divine providence.

On May 14, 2019, Jim Bridenstine announced NASA’s newest human-centered space exploration program: Artemis, an aspirational successor to Apollo that would land “the first woman and the next man” on the Moon’s south pole by 2024. His announcement came two months after the agency’s failed attempt at an all-women spacewalk, awkwardly canceled as representatives hastily cited a lack of suits in the proper size. For many of us who had eagerly anticipated a woman-led spacewalk, its cancellation came as a sinking disappointment, and an uncomfortable reminder that an agency that specializes in thinking of all emergencies necessary to keep its astronauts safe stumbled once again on the hurdle of women’s bodies. Even as NASA put women at the center of space exploration’s future, it couldn’t seem to take care of the female space explorers it employed in the present.

Over the summer of 2019, I choreographed and performed a dance about space exploration as part of DEVICES 6, a showcase produced by Doug Varone and Dancers in New York City. This is a piece about the process that led me to that point, and what I hope to take from it going forward.

On June 19, 1959, the Air Force Special Weapons Center based out of Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, published a new, comprehensive report. Its unclassified title: “A study of lunar research flights.” The somewhat unassuming name of this report belies its true purpose – to assess and describe, in detail, the scientific information that could be obtained from detonation of nuclear explosives on or in the vicinity of the Moon.

In its inaugural outing in Toronto, I found Women in Planetary Science and Exploration (as it was then called) to be a conference experience unlike any other. Scientists, engineers, humanities scholars, and educators were all welcomed to the space as valued contributors to our discussion. Now in its second year and in a new venue in Scottsdale, Arizona, Women in Space has grown and improved while continuing to be one of the only conferences of its kind: a conference where the experiences of women and non-binary people dictate the programming, rather than having programming made for us by an institution that bears us only a passing, cursory interest.

What use is a geologist in a nuclear age?