Planetary Pitchman

With little more than a cursory hello, Bill Nye immediately directs my attention to a poster on one of the walls of the office of The Planetary Society.

On it is a picture of Saturn sitting among its dazzling particulate rings. One of the many images taken as part of NASA’s Cassini mission to the ringed planet, the photo has become a logo of the Pasadena-based Planetary Society.

Yes, it’s stunning, but what Nye really wants me to notice is a tiny speck barely visible through one of the rings. It looks like a defect, a reason to ask the printer for your money back.

“Right there,” he says pointing, “that’s the Earth. That’s the whole thing, everybody, every Rose Parade, every sea jelly, everything.”
As we move to his small upstairs office, Nye explains that it’s good for people to know Earth for the tiny, vulnerable speck in a chaotic universe it truly is. When we acquaint ourselves with how fragile and annihilable Earth’s atmosphere is, we might better understand just how lucky we are to be here.

Go one planet over to Venus, for example — where the sun’s heat vaporizes the carbon in the rocks at the surface and the clouds are made of sulfuric acid — and you’ve got essentially a recipe for hell that is “right down the planetary street,” he says.

At this point, it’s clear the interview with the newest executive director of The Planetary Society will not proceed on a typical trajectory. Instead, what will follow will be more of a haphazard, breakneck journey into the life and mind of a man who elegantly weaves between the higher echelons of scientific thought and regular appearances on TV, in films and children’s books as “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

From sundials to MarsDial
Nye, who lives in Studio City and commutes daily to Pasadena by bicycle or Nissan Leaf, is not a newcomer to the Society’s esteemed ranks. In fact, his first encounter with one of the organization’s founding fathers, famed astronomer, astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan, took place at Cornell University in the late ’70s, when Nye took an astronomy class of Sagan’s while pursuing his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

“He was fantastic,” he recalls of Sagan, who died due to complications with the blood disease myelodysplasia in 1996. “He was compelling — he talked just the way you’d expect him to talk.”

After leaving Cornell, Nye worked for several years as an engineer for Boeing in Seattle. It was there that he discovered his talent for stand-up comedy and entertainment; he eventually left his engineering job to become a comedy writer and performer on the ensemble show “Almost Live.” That, according to Nye’s own biography “is where Bill Nye the Science Guy® was born.”

The long-running science and discovery show for which Nye is most famously known won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing and producing and helped spawn five kids books related to science.

Although the show may be the 55-year-old Nye’s biggest claim to fame, it’s a claim to which he doesn’t allude much in the course of the interview. Instead, he walks me through a PowerPoint presentation on his enormous computer monitor. As the slides tick by, it becomes apparent that his seemingly disparate identities are actually slightly shifting orbital rings circling the same seminal influences in his life.

One slide shows Nye’s mother, Jacqueline Jenkins, whose aptitude at math led to her recruitment as a cryptographer for the US Navy.

Another slide shows his father, Edwin “Ned” Nye, who took a year off from law school in 1941 to work for a construction company building an airstrip for the US Navy on Wake Island in the North Pacific. When the island was bombed that December, the senior Nye was taken prisoner. In the camp, he fashioned sundials from sticks and studied the shadows that moved across the sand. “He used to tell me, ‘Sundials are like pretty girls — you don’t have to understand them to appreciate them,’” Nye recalls.

And yet, the study and creation of sundials became a particular point of interest for Nye, who would later develop a photometric calibration “MarsDial” that NASA would install on its two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. On the sides of the rovers themselves, Nye says, NASA installed placards that bear an inscription he finds especially relevant to his own life.

“To those who visit here, we wish you a safe journey and the joy of discovery,” he recites from memory, adding. “The joy of discovery — that’s what drives me. I want to know things”

Nye’s lifelong passion for scientific discovery is the driving force behind the utterly unique course he’s charted thus far. It’s what landed him a spot on the board of The Planetary Society in 2005, where he served as vice president until 2010. Nye was asked to become executive director when founding member Louis Friedman — who for decades served alongside fellow founders Sagan and longtime Caltech professor and former JPL Director Bruce Murray — retired in September 2010.

 “Now I’m on the payroll,” Nye says, explaining his job duties. “The biggest thing you do in your job is money. You’re getting it done. You’re in the engine room.”

His goal for the job and for his life in general is simple but hefty: change the world. In his new capacity at TPS, Nye has had several opportunities to travel, including speaking engagements at events like the International Astronautical Federation Congress in Glasgow, Scotland. Two weeks earlier, he says, he was in Florida’s Cape Canaveral for the launching of the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter, which will not reach its destination until 2016. In a couple of weeks, Nye will appear before a meeting of congressional aides to make a pitch for where NASA might best direct its efforts in the coming years.

Focus on Earth
The relatively staid office of The Planetary Society, located in a charming historic building on South Grand Avenue in West Pasadena, belies the reach and prominence the organization has garnered since its founding in 1980.

The group was started by Sagan, Murray and Friedman, who’d previously worked on civilian and military space programs at JPL and at AVCO Space Systems. Their vision was to create a nonprofit, non-governmental organization dedicated to encouraging space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life. Since then, the group has continued to expand its public education and outreach efforts.

Next door to Nye’s office sits Associate Director Charlene Anderson, who has worked at TPS for 31 years. In that time, she says the overall mission to encourage space exploration has remained the same. What’s new is a recent focus on observing Earth from space for the purpose of studying climate change and maintaining programs and interest in the face of NASA’s shrinking budget. To that end, Anderson is hopeful Nye’s tenure will engage new generations to become members and realize the necessity of continued exploration.
“It’s definitely going to help us attract younger people, people who grew up watching ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’ on PBS,” Anderson says. “That broadens the range of people we can reach with our message. That’s pretty exciting.”

The Mission
After a couple hours of talking about life, death and the fate of the planet, the interview moves downstairs to accommodate the Weekly’s photographer, who has set up lights and a Mylar backdrop in the conference room just for this article. It is at this point that Nye dutifully retrieves a jacket from a backroom and removes from its pocket a trademark bowtie — one selected from a collection of about 200 he keeps at home. “The Science Guy” comes to life as the shutter clicks, and I use this moment as an opportunity to look around the conference room for clues on how this amazing organization operates.

That’s when I hit the jackpot — in the conference room is a large pad of paper displayed on a stand. A diagram scribbled on the page in magic marker conveniently offers a summative look at The Planetary Society, which operates on a $3.5-million budget paid for by members from 125 countries around the world.

At the bottom of the page is the word “bedrocks,” with a dollar sign for the “s” to indicate that money is, ultimately, what makes everything possible. The bedrock is a foundation for three, hand-drawn columns delineating the basic function of TPS: advocacy, involvement and education for all. In turn, those three columns support a block representing the organization’s overall mission, vision and goal. The vision, according to the diagram is an “optimistic future made possible by exploration.” The mission is to explore space and for “people to know our place in the universe.” The goal is to “grow an involved international community of space exploration.” Lofty goals, indeed.

As the photo shoot winds down, the front door of the office opens. It is Friedman, one of the founders, who has stopped by but is on his way to another event. He is busy, but takes a moment to share his thoughts on passing the baton of directorship to Nye.

“We talk about going to new worlds and bigger worlds. That’s why we want Bill to do this,” Friedman says. “He represents a broader reach, a generational reach to people and an intellectual reach. He always says ‘Change the world,’ but that’s not enough — we want him to take us to new worlds.”

Can he?

Friedman smiles. “I think he can.”