E

D

aniel Goldin is one of the
few people whose work is
truly universal.
For sure, .his job does
take a rocket scientist to understand.
Goldin is the first Jewish administra-
tor of the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration — a position to
which he was appointed by former
President George Bush in 1992.
That's a long way from the cracked
sidewalks of the South Bronx, where he
was reared in an "itty bitty house" with
his parents, maternal grandparents, an
uncle and two sisters.
a.
Goldin's father passed away last year,
after scientists discovered a martian
rock on our planet and before he could
witness, like his son, the stunning mar-
tian discoveries NASA is making. As
for his mother, "It blows her away.
She's a little gray lady in Florida. She
lives in a condo development with
thousands of little gray people," he
laughed. "The whole Bronx moved
a into that condominium development.
She's quite happy there. Until my
father died, they used to go dancing all
the time. They were active in B'nai
B'rith, they golfed and played tennis."
Goldin, who now answers to
President Clinton, speaks with a dis-
arming casualness more reminiscent of
a New York cabby than a man with his
hands on the controls of a $13.6 billion
• agency.
Both sets of grandparents were
Orthodox, although his own parents
rebelled against the strictness of their
upbringing and refused to keep kosher
in their house.
"My grandfather and grandmother
were ultra-Orthodox. They even had
the ceremony with live chickens over
their heads. It was heavy-duty stuff and
my father didn't like it much. He was
the most irreligious in the bunch,"
Goldin said.
His father went on to become an
elementary school principal.
Young Daniel learned about Judaism
from his grandfather, whom he'd
accompany to a neighborhood shul.
They'd go to the service in the base-
ment — "no air conditioning, High
Holy Days with all these sweaty old
men, eyeballs glazed over, all the mur-
muring of the prayers. We went for
years," he recalled.
In southern California, where
Goldin served as vice president of the
TRW Space and Technology Group
before joining NASA, he and his family

•

Pho to by 'Gismo H

JULIE EDGAR
News Editor

NASA
Administrator
Daniel Goldin
speaks to a
crowd at Cobo.

— wife, Judith, and two daughters —
belonged to a synagogue. Both daugh-
ters became bat mitzvah in Los Angeles
and still live there. Neither pursued an
engineering career like their dad.
But in Washington, Goldin and his
wife_synagogue-hop on the High Holy
Days and occasionally attend services at
a neighborhood Hillel.
"We never quite joined, because
Washington is a place where I carry out
my 10 years. Los Angeles still feels like
home," he said.
Addressing a huge crowd at an
Economic Club of Detroit luncheon at
Cobo Center last week, he spoke of a
leaner and meaner space agency and
the kinds of missions, manned and
unmanned, that have not only taught
us about our universe but have provid-
ed new applications for industry and
medicine.
Under his watch, NASA's budget has
been cut by 36 percent, but productivi-
ty is up. Goldin said an average of eight
spacecraft are sent into orbit yearly, as
opposed to two of just a few years ago.
"We're having many more launches
and many more bolder missions now,"
he said.
Gushing like a boy who just built
his first model rocket, Goldin, 57,
mentioned the Pathfinder Mission,
which brought back photographs and
other data that seem to support the

theory that life once existed on Mars.
Although the mission has been aborted,
the Sojourner vehicle that roved around
the red planet brought back much
more than NASA had hoped, he said.
Goldin spoke of the Hubble tele-
scope, which has brought back evi-
dence of undiscovered planets that may
have their own moons. He talked of
the bioreactor created by Jewish cosmo-
naut David Wolf which will be used to
construct 3D tumors for breast cancer
research and to build red blood cells
that will eventually pave the way for
manned missions to Mars.
And then he mentioned the interna-
tional space station that will soon hover
200 miles above the Earth's surface.
"What a time to be alive on this
planet," Goldin beamed.
Despite the out-of-this-world nature
of his professional mission — setting the
beat for NASA — Goldin still encoun-
ters questions of the spiritual kind.
For example, Wolf; the cosmonaut
who was launched to the Russian space
station Mir in late September, needed
to know how to observe Yom Kippur
in space, where the sun rises and sets
every 90 minutes. Goldin doesn't yet
know how the issue was resolved, but
he knows that the rabbinical authority
in Houston defined the reference
points for a 24-hour day for Wolf.
"So see? He went to a higher author-

ity," he said.
What about encounters with differ-
ent life forms or at least evidence of
long-ago life on other planets, includ-
ing our own? Does that conflict with
the creation story, for example?
"I don't think there is conflict
between religious belief and science we
find in space. I find zero conflict,"
Goldin said. "If anything, my religious
upbringing has taught me to be more
critical. Thinking about Talmudic
scholars, the quest for knowledge and
understanding, it has been very helpful
to me. I've had talks with leading rab-
binic scholars and leading Catholic
scholars. They don't see a conflict."
Goldin would have been that guy in
space were it not for progressive
myopia that even kept him off the
playground.
"Because I couldn't play sports, I
read prolifically. It didn't hurt me," he
noted. But bad eyesight also kept him
out of the Air Force, in which he tried
to enlist after college.
"After I got,married, the Air Force
said they'd let me in but wouldn't let
me fly. I said 'no thank you,"' Goldin
recalled. After corrective surgery, his
vision is now nearly perfect. He plans
to get his pilot's certification when he
leaves NASA.
"Maybe there's a flight in my
future," he said.

❑

11/14
1997

9

