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Dr.Erika Hamden is a TED fellow, Ph.D. Astrophysicist, and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona who has been nominated by NASA for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. Erika leads the team building FIREBALL, a project funded by NASA which is a large telescope that hangs from a giant balloon at the very edge of space and looks for clues on how our stars are created. Erika’s scientific endeavors have received close to $4 million in grant funding from partners like NASA and MSF.

She got her A.B., in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Harvard, a Ph.D., in Astronomy from Colombia and did her Postdoctoral Fellow at California Institute of Technology. 

Despite these achievements, Erika struggled early-on when she first attended college. She felt anxious and didn’t quite fit into student life. She dropped out of MIT after a short attendance period and worked at a local bookstore for 1 year. Oddly enough, she thought that maybe she was one of those smart people that couldn’t thrive in high-pressure situations.

She finally gathered her courage to try her luck at college again and got into Harvard. She gave herself permission to not ace everything, but rather ease into it. Her willingness to try again led to a career as an astrophysicist and innovator. She shares that being at the edge of what’s known, meaning, work to discover the unknown through cutting edge initiatives, has proved to teach her some of her most important lessons on failure and resilience.

Scientists fail 90% of the time as they navigate uncharted paths and Erika’s relationship to failure and resilience is fundamental in her success. In a candid discussion, she shares the ups and downs in her riveting journey to discover the universe.

Tune in to get the full conversation and learn about:

• • • Launching telescopes into space
    • FIREBALL project
    • What it takes to stand at the edge of what’s known
    • How to deal with failure
    • What role resilience plays in success
    • Science at it’s finest
    • Leadership lessons
    • How to manage a team
    • Dealing with uncertainty

Dr.Erika Hamden’s biography:

Dr.Erika Hamden is an astrophysicist.

She studies the universe. She builds telescopes and spectrographs to observe (mostly) hydrogen in its faintest and most diffuse forms throughout our galaxy and the universe. Primarily in the ultraviolet, but sometimes the visible.

She’s leading a proposal for a Small Explorer class UV telescope called Hyperion.

She’s a professor at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Erika Hamden used to be a chef.

Her instagram is excellent but her CV is something else.

Dr.Erika Hamden’s e-mail address is: hamden at email dot arizona dot edu

Connect with Dr.Erika Hamden:

• Website
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Instagram

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This is a picture of FIREBALL (the telescope that is supported by an air balloon) next to the moon, sent by your very own Dr.Erika Hamden and co.

Full Transcription:

Erika Hamden:  I was a pretty nerdy kid, oblivious about a lot of things actually.

Tanya:  That’s Professor Erika Hamden, TED fellow, Ph.D. Astrophysicist, and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona who was nominated by NASA for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. Erika leads the team building FIREBALL, a project funded by NASA which is a large telescope that hangs from a giant balloon at the very edge of space and looks for clues on how our stars are created. Erika’s scientific endeavors have received close to four million in grant funding from partners like NASA and MSF.

Erika Hamden:  My family, I have four sisters. I am the second to last one, so there was a lot of us around. In some ways, that was nice because no one gets too much focused attention. I spent a lot of time reading. I was always trying to talk somebody into driving me to the bookstore or the library so I could get more books. 

Tanya:  What were you reading?

Erika Hamden:  All sorts of things. I would read fiction and non-fiction. Partly, I wanted to always go to the bookstore because I just liked to look at all the new books that were out and peruse things. I developed this method of trying to figure out whether a book would – whether I would like it or not based on the cover, and the back page, the back description, and then the first couple pages. I just read almost anything if it caught my attention.

For a while, I had a phase where I was super into Star Wars novelization stuff. There’s a whole bunch of Star Wars books. I read a ton of them from the mid-’90s. I would get into things and just read a lot about it. Then I would go to a different subject. I varied all over.

Yeah, I read a lot. I was always really good in school. My family was super into academics, so we all had to get good grades. I always did my homework.

Tanya:  Where did you grow up?

Erika Hamden:  I grew up in New Jersey in a suburb of New York City called Montclair that actually Buzz Aldrin is from.   

Tanya: Oh my God, yeah. That’s amazing. First of all, I was just in Montclair Sunday.

Erika Hamden:  Oh, awesome.

Tanya:  Yeah, my uncle lives there. Yeah, no, beautiful suburb. 

Erika Hamden:  Yeah, it’s a really nice town. The schools were great.

Tanya:  Is that where Buzz is from?

Erika Hamden:  Yeah, he was born in the hospital in the next town over, but he grew up in Montclair. He went to my middle school, which at the time when I attended was called Mount Hebron and then they renamed it a couple of years ago to Buzz Aldrin Middle School. Then he went to the same high school. I met him one time actually when I was a senior in high school. He asked whether we still played football on the same field and stuff.

Tanya: Oh, wow, that must have been such an honor for you.

Erika Hamden:  Yeah, I used to joke in middle school. There’s a bust of him in the entrance lobby. I would say one day there was going to be a bust of me there, too.

Tanya:  It very well might be. You’re getting there. You really are on a path to potentially uncover some incredible spatial stuff that we don’t know. What initially sparked your interest in space and specifically stars?

Erika Hamden:  I actually have a very particular incident that I feel started it. I was in second grade. I remember I was sitting reading on the couch, I think. My mom came over and she was making dinner. She had the news on. She said, “Oh, there was just a story about how scientists want to come up with a new name for the Big Bang. There’s a contest that people can enter so I think you should enter the contest.”

I looked at her and I was like, “Oh, what’s the Big Bang?” Since she was making dinner, she was too busy to explain the mysteries of the universe to me. She said, “Oh, go look it up.” I went upstairs. We had an encyclopedia, so I looked it up in the encyclopedia. I remember reading the entry. That was the first time that I realized that space was a thing.

It talked about the beginning of the universe. Then in the back of the encyclopedia, the last volume was an atlas. I remember going to the atlas, and in the end, it had a map of the solar system, and then it had a map of the galaxy, and then it had a map of the known universe. I read all of that. I just was like, oh my God, this is the greatest thing I have ever heard of. That was basically it.

Tanya:  How old were you?

Erika Hamden:  I think I was seven or eight. I knew how to read and I learned how to read in first grade. Yeah, I think I was seven.

Tanya:  Wow, so your love for space really started at a young age?

Erika Hamden:  Yeah, as soon as I learned that space was a thing, I was into it. Then I immediately wanted to be an astronaut because I was like, well if space is so awesome, I want to go there.

Tanya:  Wow, and is that still one of – a goal of yours to go there to [05:24]?

Erika Hamden:  It is, yeah. It’s a goal of mine. I’ve talked to a few astronauts and they always say that you should do the things that you love. If along the way, you can qualify for being an astronaut, then that’s great, but the odds of it are so low that you can’t design your whole life around something that is very unlikely to happen. I’ve tried to take that advice and do the stuff that I love. I still am qualified, so I’m going to try the next time around. I also know, well, the odds are small, but I’m going to give it a shot.

Tanya:  What do you need to qualify?

Erika Hamden: The very base qualifications are very basic. You need a bachelor’s degree in a hard science and then some years of experience in your fields. It could be engineering, or math, or if you have a Ph.D., then that meets the years of experience qualification. You have to be in good health and have good vision. That might be it. There’s very few actual requirements.

Then they will take the applicants and they split them into qualified versus highly qualified. Then they really only consider the highly qualified people. For that, they consider things like do you know how to scuba dive? Do you speak another language? What kind of experience do you have in a difficult environment or isolated conditions?

Do you know how to fly a plane? Are you the type of person that someone would want to be stuck in a tiny spaceship with for six months? They say things like, would someone want to go on a camping trip with you where you have to rely on the other person, but also you have a good attitude?

Tanya:  Wow, yeah, those are a little bit more ambiguous for sure. Okay, well, hopefully, you’ll get there. You’ve done work at the Jet Propulsion Labs which is connected with NASA just to switch gears a little bit. What was that experience like? What were you working on?

Erika Hamden:  The experience was awesome. I started in 2008 as a grad student. I was a grad student at Columbia. I worked on this project that was at JPL. I remember the first time that I went there to start working on a project. You’re driving on the highway and then the exit it says NASA JPL next exit.

I was so thrilled because JPL builds Mars Rovers. They build all these satellites that have gone to the outer planets. They built Voyager. I just have admired the work that they do for a really long time, so it was very thrilling to go there.

The project I was working on was this new type of detector technology that we were trying to develop to be very efficient in the ultraviolet. At the time, I didn’t know very much. It was my second year of grad school. I was drawn in this team of people who had been developing these detectors. I was going to work on one aspect of making them work better.

Tanya:  Just for people that don’t know, what is the purpose of working on these detectors? What do they do?

Erika Hamden:  In general, for building telescopes of any kind, the detector is really the heart of the telescope. It’s the most important component. It really sets a lot of the telescope capabilities. Most people associate telescopes with the big mirror; that is important, too, but the detector is really a key component.

What we were trying to do is develop this different type of detector technology. In the ultraviolet, the technology has lagged a lot compared to other wavelength ranges in astronomy. We were trying to develop this new sensor that was easier to operate; it’s easier to fabricate; it’s cheaper to make. Historically, this type of sensor didn’t work in the UV, and so we were – because the previous technology that had been used on a bunch of space missions was really not very efficient. For every 100 photons that hit the detector, it would actually record maybe 10 of them. That’s not a lot. We were working on this new technology that would be able to detect between 60 and 90% of the photons. 

Tanya:  Just so that I understand what you’re saying, basically the telescope would only record about 10% of what it was seeing?

Erika Hamden:  That’s just for the light sensor. The rest of the telescope also has different losses like every photon that hits a mirror, some of them get absorbed and they don’t necessarily reflect. The overall throughput of these telescopes is really low, but the detector is a huge part of that. If your detector only is 10% efficient versus 60 or 80% efficient, it makes a big difference.

Tanya:  Wow, no kidding; okay. 

Erika Hamden:  Yeah, the detectors at the time, we didn’t know if they were going to work or not. That’s the whole point of discovery, but they had a lot of potential. We thought it was worth putting basically years of work into it.

Tanya:  What did you actually accomplish in your time there?

Erika Hamden:  In addition to having a great time in all of my trips to JPL because it’s just a super cool place, you can go visit the Mars Rovers. They have these clean rooms. There’s viewing galleries where you can go and see the progress. They just build the most incredible stuff there.

We were successful in developing this detector. When we started, we had a couple of different technologies that we needed to try out individually, and then try them out altogether, and then show that they were robust and that they would work under a variety of conditions. Then the final step of that was actually putting the detector in a telescope and flying it to say, look, this even works in a telescope in the exact environment that we anticipate. FIREBALL was actually in addition to doing interesting science. The idea of it was to prove that this detector technology that we’ve been working on for a really long time would actually work.

Tanya:  Amazing; okay, before we get into FIREBALL because that’s a super interesting topic, how many people were on your team at JPL?

Erika Hamden:  At the time that started, it was a pretty small group. The woman that led the team, she’s still at JPL. Her name is [11:38 Sholay Nexodd]. She originated really the foundational technology that made this type of detector work in the UV. She was our group leader. Then there was me and maybe just a handful of other people, I want to say like three or four who were doing some of that initial basic work and testing.

Then as we progressed and as it seemed like the sensors were working, that group started hiring more people. I joke with them that I started as a grad student and then they’ve since hired three or four people that do the job that I was doing. They definitely expanded. They do a lot more detectors now since it’s much less experimental. They just have a much bigger – which I’m still a part of. I’m still working with them. This proposal that I’m writing right now uses the detectors. I was just on a telecom with the whole team [12:34] all about what we were going to do. 

Tanya:  Yeah, I’m assuming it’s just this beginning?

Erika Hamden:  Yes.

Tanya:  You guys have lots and lots of work to do. How long did it take you to develop this sensor where before it was capturing about 10 photons or about 10% of all the stuff and you got it to 60 or 70? What was the period? 

Erika Hamden:  That took about three years from the beginning to our very first sign that it worked. Then it took another – yeah, so those three years just we had proof from other things like we tested it out on just bare silicon wafers, not on actual detectors, but just test wafers. I could say, oh, it works in that environment, but that’s really different from saying it works in a real detector. Yeah, it took three years of mostly messing things up before we finally got it right. Then after that, it took another two years before I would say that we felt really good about the process and that we could make it work for anything. Then until the final flight, like the actual flight when we put it on FIREBALL, that was ten years.

Tanya:  Wow; okay, let’s talk about FIREBALL. What is FIREBALL?

Erika Hamden:  FIREBALL is a telescope; it’s an ultraviolet telescope. The name stands for the Faint Intergalactic-medium Redshifted Emission Balloon which is a very long acronym, so we now call it that.

Tanya:  Thank you for that.

Erika Hamden:  Sometimes, even I forget one of the words in that.

Tanya:  Yeah, that’s a long one; okay.

Erika Hamden:  Yeah, we call it FIREBALL. The version of the telescope that we flew in September was actually a second iteration, so we call it FIREBALL 2 because there was a FIREBALL 1. It’s an ultraviolet telescope which means that it has to be – in order to do its observations, we have to be above most of the atmosphere. If you have a UV telescope, you either have to do it from space or the stratosphere. Those are your options because ultraviolet light is the kind of light that gives us a sunburn but the atmosphere luckily for us, it blocks most of the UV light that is coming off of the sun or just from space. UV light is really damaging to DNA, to people’s skin. That’s one of the causes of skin cancer. It’s also damaging to all of your space hardware.

FIREBALL is weird for a telescope because it’s not actually a space telescope, but it’s not ground-based telescope; instead, it’s a balloon telescope. It goes up on these giant weather balloons. In our case, it observes for one night. It’s this strange hybrid of an atmospheric experiment, but we’re looking at space.

Tanya: Why just one night, like a 24-hour period?

Erika Hamden:  Mostly due to the FAA requirements and the fact that we want to get it back. You send it up, and the balloon – there’ s a branch of NASA that’s called the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facilities, CSBF. They do the balloon launches. They have a whole team of weather people.

The weather people determine once the balloon goes all the way up to the stratosphere, goes to 130,000 feet, they determine its potential trajectory across the United States. We do these launches from New Mexico. They’ll calculate, okay, if we launch today, then the balloon will ascend to 130,000 feet. Then the wind at that altitude is heading west at 20 knots. That means that we’re going to be above California in 15 hours.

The problem with being above California is that in order to come – to bring the telescope down, we have to pass through LAX airspace. The balloon people are friends with the FAA and they can make some accommodations. If we pass through other airspace like if you’re coming down in the middle of Arizona, there’s probably no major airport there, so that’s fine. If you’re coming down in the Texas panhandle, that’s probably fine, too, but if you’re coming down through LAX airspace, there’s no way that they will let you do that.

Once you hit California, you either have to cut down immediately or you have to fly all the way above California, across it, and then ditch in the Pacific Ocean. California is a very hard stop on where you can allow the balloon to go, so partly that sets the limit. Then in the other direction, if the wind is heading east, you can’t fly over Dallas. It just starts to get – the airspace becomes a lot busier. Even though we’re floating above it all, we still have to come down at some point. That sets the east-west limit. The wind tends not to go too far north or south although there are restrictions like we can’t fly into Mexico I think for obvious reasons.

Tanya:  FIREBALL is an incredible project which has involved a lot of different people, and entities, and players. How was it conceived? How do you get something like that green light?

Erika Hamden:  It was conceived in the early to mid-2000s by Chris Martin, the PI who was a professor at Caltech. Basically, the first thing that you do is you come up with a science question like what do you want to know about the universe that you don’t know and you also can’t find out using the telescopes that exist already? You have to motivate it and say, we want to do this really interesting thing, but we can’t do it any other way, so we need to build a telescope. Once you have that question, that actually – the question sets almost everything about the rest of the mission. It will set what type of telescope do you need. For our science question about trying to observe hydrogen around these distant galaxies, we need a UV telescope.

Tanya:  What’s the interest in observing hydrogen around the galaxies?

Erika Hamden:  It’s basically to understand how galaxies evolve through time. We look out into the universe and you can see galaxies. They have this wide, wonderful variety of shapes, and colors, and sizes. We can explain like, okay, well we see this is a newly formed galaxy. It’s making lots of new stars. It’s blue-colored because new stars are blue. It’s like a spiral versus this other galaxy that has no new stars in it. 

We can talk about their present state, but we can’t necessarily explain why they have these two different patents. What’s different from a galaxy that has lots of new stars versus a galaxy that has no new stars? We think that the reason is the environment that they’re in. A galaxy with lots of new stars has a connection to the larger – these large clouds of hydrogen that we think are in the what we call the intergalactic-medium, the space between galaxies. A galaxy that has big reservoirs of hydrogen flowing into it, those reservoirs will sustain star formation in the galaxy. A galaxy that doesn’t have those reservoirs, it’s not going to be able to keep making stars. It’s going to run out of hydrogen.

We think that the nature and the size of those reservoirs’ changes throughout the history of the universe. If you look at really distant old galaxies, they’re going to have a different hydrogen reservoir than ones that are right nearby to us. FIREBALL is trying to look at a very particular age of galaxy to understand the hydrogen reservoirs that are around galaxies of that age. It’s one step in a bigger question which is, what’s happening throughout the history of the universe; not just at the one stage that FIREBALL’s looking at, but earlier and later? It’s a really fundamental question.

Tanya: Yes, it is.

Erika Hamden:  Why do galaxies look the way that they do?

Tanya:  Awesome; and then in terms of green light, you were green-lighting the FIREBALL. You mentioned that it was originally created and then you had to come up with the big question and inquiry which sets the path forward for it. Then what needs to happen?

Erika Hamden:  At that point, you build a science team and you figure out, okay, how are we going to actually construct this? Chris, the PI, he had a long-standing collaboration with a number of scientists in France. The French have a very long history of ballooning and ultraviolet science, so that was a natural connection.

Basically, the process is like, Chris wrote a proposal to NASA and describes the mission. Then the French team also writes a proposal to the French space agency to describe the mission. Then both of those have to get funded. Then you can build, start building the telescope.

That proposal process is open. NASA has a website where they publish what they call Announcements of Opportunity, OAs, where you can propose to different calls. In principle, it’s straightforward, but in practice, it’s complicated because you have to do an initial design of your mission before you can actually propose it. You have to do a little work ahead of time. Then once you get the funding to build it, then you can start doing detailed designs and refining things. 

Tanya:  How much money did you estimated that you needed for FIREBALL to get it launched? 

Erika Hamden:  FIREBALL 1 had flown in 2006 and 2009. That was before I really worked on it. The team realized that they needed to improve the telescope and make the detector better in order to actually do the science we wanted to do. That’s partly what motivated my detector work.

Then we re-proposed in I want to say 2012 to reformulate the spectrograph to make it more efficient. That’s when changed from just FIREBALL to being FIREBALL 2. The total mission has been going on for I’d say for 15 years. Probably between the French and the US, the contribution is about $20 million.

Tanya:  Wow; and has the mission ever succeeded in actually addressing the initial inquiry to date?

Erika Hamden:  I hesitate to say no. We’re still working on the data from the most recent flight. I think we will have – we’ll be able to extract something, but it won’t be a complete success. The flight in 2018 for FIREBALL 2, we have – we did prove a lot of things. The technology development we have been able to prove that it worked in a space-like environment.

That’s part of the function of these missions. It’s not just to do the science, but it’s also to do technology development because NASA is very conservative about what it puts into space. If you want to purpose a detector for a space telescope, you have to show that it’s going to work in space which is a little bit of a catch 22 because you can’t send it to space until you’ve proved that it would work in space. Doing these balloon flights is an acceptable alternative.

In that sense, it was a success that we tested the detectors. We tested a bunch of other new technology that the French have contributed and that we had added. From a technology standpoint, it’s been great. From an observing hydrogen standpoint, it has been frustrating.

Tanya:  You talked about the flight in 2018. You gave a brilliant TED talk about that, which by the way, I highly recommend anybody listening to go check out the TED talk. Erika was just really incredible on failure actually. Can you talk about the flight and some of the most challenging parts as well as the thing that you’re most proud of?

Erika Hamden:  Yeah, the flight was in September of 2018. We had actually been in – we do the flights from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, this little town. We had been there for about eight weeks, six weeks by the time we actually had the flight. We’re testing things out. We’ve put everything together. We checked that it works. Then we wait for the weather to be good.

Finally, after a long time, on the morning of September 22, we – the weather was good. Everything looked great and so we had our launch. The telescope ascended up to the stratosphere. That was really a thrilling experience for me because I almost never thought it was really going to happen. I had been working on it for so long that it just seemed like this endless thing. Then we finally got it off the ground.

It took off at 10:30. It takes about three hours to reach the float altitude. Then we wait for the sun to set because it’s a UV telescope; we needed the sun to be down to do the observations of space. Throughout the day, we were just checking that we could still communicate with it. We all took a nap. 

Then that evening, we got back to the base where we work. We were starting our operations. I was running the mission control. I remember telling the person who was taking the log, I would read out the altitude every so often. I remember I’m reading the altitude out and I’m like why is this number still going down? Because it drops a little bit and then it’s supposed to stabilize. It did not stabilize; it kept falling.

Eventually, about an hour after sunset, the balloon people came downstairs, and they told us that there was a hole in the balloon. That’s why we kept losing altitude. The altitude is really important for us because the lower you are in the atmosphere, the more the UV light gets blocked. The altitude was such a crucial thing.

All of our equipment actually worked beautifully which was a nice. Maybe that’s my favorite thing about the day that we worked so hard on all of these different complicated components and they all worked really well. Then the altitude was so low by the time the sun set that we really didn’t get a lot of good data. The more time went on, the farther we dropped. We were scrambling to change from our planned targets to something brighter that at least we could just get some data, a brighter object. We ended up pointing at Andromeda because Andromeda is a super bright UV source even though that was not at all in our science plan, but by the end of the night – or not even by the end of the night; it was a few hours in. We just were like, well, we need to look at the brightest thing around.

That was really a huge disappointment. It was the kind of thing that we can’t plan for because we don’t do the balloon launches and we can’t control it. That’s a thing that happens sometimes with them. Personally, when they told us, I was – we were so in it and I was like I do not have time to have an emotional response to this new development.

The next day, I cried. It was a huge accomplishment that we got the telescope off the ground, and we had built it, and it worked, but still, that one tiny piece that would have told us that the mission was a total success, that we – we didn’t have that. It was really hard because I – and I talk about this in the TED talk. It made me think a lot about why I do the things that I do and what keeps me going in times when, inevitably, things go wrong. In some senses, it’s been a point of reflection. If everything had worked, I wouldn’t have stopped to really think about why I do the work I do. I’ve tried to at least take the positive things out of that experience.

Tanya:  Actually, the people that are listening, on your website, you have this incredible, and you also show it on your TED talk, this incredible picture of FIREBALL 2 that is out there in space right next to the moon. It’s pretty amazing. When you see that, obviously, it’s a huge bittersweet moment like you just shared.

What was the conversations like the next day within the team? How do you pick yourself up and keep going? What do you say to the team? What were the internal discussions like if I was a fly on the wall?

Erika Hamden:  One of the great things about the team – well, all the people on the team I’m really grateful to work with. A number of them, they have a lot of experience in balloon flights in general for FIREBALL. There are people who have been on it since the very beginning. They all have had experiences where you do the flight and then something goes wrong. For them, there was no question. One of the French guys came up to me the next day and he was like, alright, so when are we going again? He was 100% ready for trying the next time. 

For the newer people, I think – this was my first balloon flight, and so for me, I would put myself into that category of, I had to really work through the feelings of let’s say we do this again and the same thing happens, will it be worth it to me. I think from my position now, I would say, yes, absolutely. You get way more out of it than just the data at the very end and so that process is worthwhile. I think the other members, who are new, they’ve all had to make that assessment for themselves.

The internal discussions, we had a meeting of everybody – actually, we had a party. It was that we rent houses in this town and so I had them run over to the house I had rented, I made a bunch of food, we all brought a ton of drinks and we tried to just be positive about having made it through a flight because that was a huge accomplishment. Not let what happened take away from the fact that we had done it. I would say we were mostly positive.

Since then, we’ve had a lot of discussions about, okay, what do we do need to do – what can we improve for next time, what do we keep the same, more logistics of getting it put back together for the next time around.

Tanya:  It sounds like you were pointing to this, the more senior people, the time in which they were ready to go again and jump back on it, was very, very small. It happened, things didn’t go well, when are we doing it again versus this was your first flight and you really had to work through that emotion. That’s actually a really great way to experience failure and process it. First of all, what did you learn about that on failure, and what do you think, perhaps, allowed the more senior people to reduce the time they maybe felt bad and to get back on it?

Erika:  For me, I feel like personally I learned that I can get through anything. That experience, from the launch to when it crashed and we had to go get it, I would say that was one of the best and also one of the worst days of my life. Having been able to get through it and do all the stuff that I needed to do in the moment, I felt very proud of myself. Then being able to think back on it and try to understand how can I go into the same situation again? That’s been something I’ve had to figure out. Am I prepared to rebuild this telescope, show up, again, in this tiny town in New Mexico and do this all over again, knowing that the outcome could be the same? That I feel like I’ve thought about it and I think it’s worth it because I don’t know that the outcome will be the same, so I’m willing to take that risk, just because I think the payoff of understanding is worth it.

I think for the senior people on the team, they’ve just seen everything. They’ve been through a lot and so they know that this one failure is not a killer, but there’s no endpoint. We try again and then we get better results the next time. They can see that this process is iterative, that and the, I don’t know, wisdom that comes with age.

Tanya:  That’s also a muscle. That’s something I was wondering, resilience. You said FIREBall initially started in 2006. That was the first launch, right but when did it actually start?

Erika:  Yeah. It started in 2002 or 3.

Tanya:  Yeah, so from 2002 to today, 17 years, that takes commitment, and unquestionably you guys are going to get there, it’s just a matter of time. You’re going to work through whatever needs to get worked through. Resilience, what are your thoughts on that and what has it taken, from your standpoint, to keep going?

Erika:  Resilience is really – you can think of it is like a muscle that you can choose to exercise and the more you use it, the better you get at it. I sometimes think about it as self-knowledge or confidence. I know that I will be able to do something, or that I can handle whatever gets thrown at me. I guess those two are probably two sides of the same coin. I think for me, really the first serious experience that I had was going to college and dropping out of college and realizing after I dropped out of college that I was still a valuable person who mattered. I was able to rebuild my sense of self and go to college again and succeed and feel like I could take this devastating experience and move passed it and use it to inform my future choices.

Tanya:  What made you drop out of college because your academic accomplishments are outstanding, completely academic. What happened?

Erika:  I went to MIT and I was 18. Maybe all freshmen are very naïve but I was especially naïve. You asked me what I was like as a kid, and I don’t think I was that different. When I was a teenager, I liked to read. I was very straightforward. I thought that people were going to go to MIT because they really loved science and they wanted to discovery things. Then the reality of college was just not what I was anticipating, and I wasn’t really equipped to deal with that. I didn’t know how to do things for myself or, I don’t know, soothe myself. I felt a lot of anxiety and I had panic attacks, which I never used to have.

MIT, it may be better, I don’t know, but they, sort of, said, “Well, you can just leave, if you want.”  That’s what I did. I just dropped out and they took my name off of things. That was really hard because my whole identity was about academic achievements.

Tanya:  Yeah, I can imagine.

Erika:  Then I took the rest of that year, I worked at a Borders in the café and I read a lot of books. I worked –

Tanya:  [26:38] 

Erika:  Yeah, I took classes at the [Youth Montclair State], the university in our town. Yeah, I just tried to exist and figure out what actually drove me, and to make sure that my identity and my choices were around things that I wanted to do and not what I thought people wanted me to do.

Tanya:  That’s a big one. That’s a huge one, actually. I just want to highlight this because what you said is so important and it’s something that I hear over and over and I’ve also experienced. When you’re doing something that is not in alignment with your higher purposes, whatever that is, you get these signs: anxiety, depression, no energy. It’s just like, life feels clunky. It sounds like that’s – it’s amazing that you were astute enough to recognize that and put a pause because most people don’t. They go through it.

Erika:  Push through it, yeah.

Tanya:  Yeah.

Erika:  I struggled with that too because I don’t want to be a quitter, I didn’t want to be a quitter. There’s a lot of stigma about just saying, now I need to give up.

Tanya:  Even if that’s the right thing to do.

Erika:  Yeah, and for me it absolutely was. I would joke with my graduate school adviser about how I didn’t have a lot of grit because I have no tolerance for just being stuck in a bad situation. I don’t do all-nighters because I know I need to sleep. You could interpret that as I’m not committed or I’m not going to do whatever it takes. I guess, from my perspective, I feel like I know what I need to do the work that I love and so I have to do those things first.

Tanya:  There’s also not one way of doing it.

Erika:  Yeah. For me, I have to be happy every day in my work and in the place where I am, to keep going. I guess the lesson I really learned was I need to – at MIT, I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t taking the steps that I needed to make myself happy, and I didn’t even know what those steps were. Now, I know what I need and I know how to get it and I do not let anything keep me from that. 

Tanya:  You spent a year – you said a year, reading a lot of books, working at Borders, taking classes at the local university. At what point did something click for you and you’re like, okay, I’m ready to go back out?

Erika:  I would actually say that it didn’t really happen until I was back in college. I reapplied to college and I knew that I was ready to stop living at my parents’ house. When I got to Harvard, which is where I ended up going, that first day I was so scared. I was like, what if the same – what if I just can’t go to college. What if I’m one of those smart people who is unable to perform in a stressful environment. I had all these fears and I just was like; I’m going to take this one day at a time. I signed up for classes that I felt would make me happy and would keep me interested, and I gave myself permission to do okay and make it through the semester. It took a while to really feel like I could do it. I had to be kind with myself about being scared and give myself leeway to have all those feelings and not just assume that everything was going to be perfect.

I think that’s helped a lot to – even when we were doing the balloon flights and we’re in this tiny town in New Mexico and it’s really stressful and there’s nothing to do for fun, but I know from – now, from all these experiences, I know, okay, if I have the right food with me, if I make sure that we have a good schedule, that we take breaks, that we sleep, that we take the time to have fun, that we’ll be able to get through it and it will be enjoyable. At the time – I remember driving home from MIT in my parents’ car, they had come to pick me up, and feeling like I was so worthless and like my life was over. Now I look back on that and I feel like that was the bravest, most valuable thing that I could have ever done.

Tanya:  Absolutely, yeah.

Erika:  I’m really glad that 18-year old Erika did that.

Tanya:  That’s amazing!  First of all, thank you for sharing that because it takes balls. It’s a very vulnerable moment. Especially coming form somebody that has received so many unbelievable awards, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 2019, nominated by NASA, TED fellow –

Erika:  Yeah, I’m very thrilled at that.

Tanya:  Yeah, I’m even nervous about reading some of these awards because I probably will mispronounce them, it sounds so great. That’s incredible. It seems like the experience that happened to you in college, at least initially, allowed you to trust yourself and trust that you are going to make the right decisions for you. That’s your path and since then, you’ve accomplished some incredible things. That’s amazing. Actually, I’m going to quote you for a second, something that you said in your TED talk, which I thought was pretty amazing. You said, “Discovery is mostly about finding things that don’t work, and failure is inevitable when you’re pushing the boundaries of knowledge.”  As someone that primarily deals with the unknown – it’s an uncharted path. Nobody’s telling you, Erika, if you do this, this, this, you’ll get there. You’re completely unchartered.

What does it take from you to really hold that space and tackle some of these enormous inquiries and questions?

Erika:  I’ve had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time. I’ve spent so many days – I’ve even told people working on the detector stuff, I’ve said, my God, I wish someone else had done this so I knew what to do. I tell myself, I’m like, Chris, the professor I worked with at CalTech, the PI of FIREBall, so many times he says, “If it was easy, someone else would have done it.”  I have to remind myself that what I’m doing is hard and no one has done it before and that’s why it’s hard so it’ okay. I can’t ever guarantee that I’ve going to discover something, I can’t know that it’s going to work, but I also know that if I don’t try, then I’m definitely never going to find out.

I think that’s actually part of what keeps me going is the fact that I insist on being happy in it every day. I have a good life. I work with people I like and admire. I still find the problems interesting. That helps keep me going because I can’t rely on a discovery as the thing that will make it worthwhile. I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, so it has to be worthwhile today.

Tanya:  That’s very interesting. It’s a different context that you apply to your work and your life. Instead of being hungry for a major discovery and being miserable in the meantime, whether it happens or not you invented, or created, for yourself a context of, I’m going to enjoy the journey, working with people that I love, and be happy in my work and connect to the actual enquiry and the mission.

Erika:  Yeah. 

Tanya:  That’s very powerful. In other words, nothing changed except the context that you created for yourself.

Erika:  Yeah.

Tanya:  Amazing. That is brilliant, brilliant. Okay, so what are you working on now?

Erika:  Right now, I’m working on a proposal for a new space telescope. This is my own idea, which is pretty exciting because up until now, I’ve really been carrying out other people’s ideas. This is first mission that I’m PI of. It’s an ultraviolet space telescope called Hyperion. It’s designed to observe clouds of hydrogen in our own galaxy that are parts of star-forming regions. Right now, we don’t know what is required. We can’t look at a nebula in the galaxy and say, in 2 million years this will form this many stars. Even though the process is it should be something we can understand, right now we don’t have that level of knowledge yet. This telescope is focused on that, on trying to understand the origin of stars. The tag line is that it’s a Hyperion origin of the stars.

Tanya:  Very nice. Who are you going to submit the proposal to?

Erika:  This is also a submission to NASA. It’s due on August 1st, which as of this recording, is not that long from now. We’re going to submit it actually on Monday because we have to do it a couple of days ahead of time, for logistical purposes. I have six days until it’s done and we’re in the final stage of just polishing things. The cost of this telescope size for NASA is modest, it’s $145 million, which is a lot of money, but compared to a Hubble space telescope, it’s a small telescope. I’m working on it with people from Ball Aerospace and Ames Research Center and JPL. It’s been a really interesting process, to take something from just an idea, like my science question, all the way to a concept for a mission and it’s been a really great time.

Tanya:  When do you know if NASA is going to give you the grant?

Erika:  We’ll find out probably in December. It goes through a big review process.

Tanya:  I can imagine. You’re asking $145 million; did I get that right?

Erika:  Yes.

Tanya:  Wow!  Well, I’m sure that if this project gets approved, which I really hope it does, the learning when you’re really the architect of the idea, is brutal, but it’s unbelievable.

Erika:  Yeah, it’s already been brutal.

Tanya:  Yeah, I can imagine. What about FIREBall? Are you still planning to launch, I guess, FIREBall-3 in 2020?

Erika:  It’s going to be just like a second launch of FIREBall-2 because we’re not really going to change too many things about it. Our plan is, yes, for 2020. As soon as this is submitted, I’m going to France to work on it. Partly, the schedule depends on how things shake out with other balloon missions. The campaign for this year is starting and we have to see who flies, how the weather is and then that will determine where we are in the list of missions for next year, but we’re still going. There is another team member who’s taking over some of my responsibilities so that she can get experience running the team too, so I have a little bit less work to do on it. 

Tanya:  Okay that’s great. Given that this will not be your first rodeo, I’m sure the ups and downs will be a little bit smoother.

Do you have a funny or interesting story that sticks out in our mind about your time working at the labs or any other project?

Erika:  I have a lot of funny stories about being in New Mexico for the balloon launches. The town has very limited – there’s a very small grocery store and the food options are pretty slim. Half of the team is French and they really like their food. One night, we were doing this night-time test and one of the French guys didn’t have anything to do at that moment, so he came over and was chatting with me. He was like, “You know, Erika, I have to tell you that I am so tired of eating white bread and Cheddar cheese!”  I’m like, [Johan], you can buy Brie from the Wholefoods in Albuquerque. It’s two and a half hours away. They’re so funny. They’re so great at what they do and they’re such lovely people but he just like that day he had had it and I was like, you can eat other things. 

Tanya:  The French take their bread and their cheese very seriously, and rightfully so.

Erika:  Partly in my role as running the team, I want all of my team members to be happy and fulfilled and so I had French cheese Fed-Ex’d in from Murray’s Cheese shop in New York City. Two days later, I gave him a box and I was like, Johan, for you!

Tanya:  Oh my God!  What was his reaction?

Erika:  He was so excited and all of them were so excited and they like – I think they don’t really appreciate the power of Fed-Ex and [51:15]. They could not believe. They were like, how did you get this? How did this happen? I was like, we can get anything in America in two days.

Tanya:  That’s awesome. This is a really, really awesome example of a way to just connect with your team and really keep them motivated. Going through such a long process and such a challenging process, how do you get your team motivated and connected

Erika:  Well, I think the most important thing is that I make sure that they know that I really value their time. People do a job because they care about it and because they need the money, but I want them to know that it’s not – I think that their time is the most valuable thing that they have and so I’m not going to waste it. They know that if I ask them to do something it’s important, and I only ask them to do things that I think are important. That helps a lot that people really trust you with their time, if they know that you think that they’re valuable.

Then I pay close attention to what motivates people because different people are motivated by different things and so they need to be treated in a different way. The French are a good example because to manage them, they prefer to know all the bad things right away. They don’t want me to tell them everything that worked; they’re not concerned with that. They want to know what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed. Whereas some of the grad students who are still starting out, I can’t just leave with a giant list of everything that they did wrong, they will feel attacked, so I have to handle them in a different way.

I just pay really close attention to individual people and try and treat them in a way that is respectful but also – I change my style depending on what I think they need and then I adjust that. It’s like a continuous process, which requires a lot of attention. I have to really pay attention, but I feel like that’s the way I can get good work out of them and they can be happy and feel supported. I think that also contributes. The people that were in New Mexico with me, all of them have said that they’ll come back.

Tanya:  Wow that’s an incredible testament to your leadership. That’s actually one of the signals that we look for in a great leader. Do people follow you? In your case, the answer is yes. That’s great.

Erika:  We had been there in 2017 and we didn’t even get a flight and everyone came back. I think that’s also because they all know, on their own, why they’re doing it.

Tanya:  Erika, how do people get in touch with you, if they want to check in, keep up to date?

Erika:  You can follow me on Instagram. I’m tooting my own horn now, but I have an excellent Instagram account. I post one post a day but I try and find something that is beautiful in my life every day, so it changes. Sometimes it’s about my work and sometimes it’s my cactuses at my house. I have an active Instagram and the handle’s just my name, erika.hamden, so follow me on Instagram. I have a Twitter account, that’s also @erikahamden and that’s a lot more science and technically focused. Yeah, those are the best ways. I have a website, which does not have a ton of information. You can see my very technical CV and links to my papers, which are also very technical.

Tanya:  They can also see the picture of FIREBall-2 next to the moon, which is amazing.

Erika:  Yes, and I am working on a website that I will link to on my personal website. That’s about Hyperion, the mission that I’m proposing. 

Tanya:  That’s awesome. Well, Erika, thank you so much for taking the time amidst the final deadline to submit the upcoming project, I really appreciate it and I wish you all the best. I’m going to send a lot of positive energy for this project. Amazing, amazing story. Thank you so much.

Erika:  Thank you so much for having me, it’s been really great talking with you.