From costumes to novels, NASA is trending everywhere
It’s not surprising that astronaut costumes are among the top picks for Halloween this year. NASA is trending everywhere.
Purdue football proudly unveiled uniforms that pay tribute to NASA for the homecoming game against Maryland. The Boilermakers deserve the bragging rights, having educated 25 astronauts, including Neil Armstrong.
Ohio State’s marching band featured an incredible nod to the moon landing during a recent halftime show. Didn’t see the video? Search it on ESPN. So cool.
Now New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell has released her newest book, “Quantum,” which features the story of Captain Calli Chase — a NASA test pilot, quantum physicist and cybercrime investigator. Just prior to a top-secret space mission, Chase detects a tripped alarm in the tunnels deep below NASA’s research center. Chase relies on her cybersecurity knowledge as she searches for answers.
For this thriller, Cornwell spent two years in immersive research with NASA and studied cutting-edge law enforcement and security techniques with the Secret Service, the United States Air Force, NASA Protective Services, Scotland Yard and Interpol, according to a press release about the book.
Journalists had an opportunity to submit questions to Cornwell about her research, so I sent a few to her publicist.
Cornwell said the idea for the book was “an accidental thing. I was in London two years ago and someone said ‘You know, there is talk of creating a female James Bond. Would you be interested in that? I started thinking that if someone creates a female James Bond, I would like it to be me.”
She considered where she would go for research, and decided to reach out to NASA.
“I started doing research at NASA and discovered that they have an amazing police department, which I didn’t know about. Captain Chase is not only a protective service agent where she’s a cyber investigator for NASA. She’s also a scientist, a test pilot, on her way to becoming an astronaut. There is a huge merger of these two things — criminal investigation and the military and our space exploration. That’s why we have a space force because we will be sending people up there, doing more than what they’ve done before as there’s more and more territories up there, as we have habitats on the moon, as we go to Mars. This is not fantasy. This is happening as we speak, and so I want to take my readers now to a new place.
“We have to be aware that what we are doing in space is not just about exploring.”
Forensics is going to be turned on its head in the Quantum world, Cornwell says, “because when you’re dealing with weightlessness, with no gravity, what happens to blood up there? What happens to a crime scene? Everything is going to be different.”
Throughout the story, that is something Captain Chase learns.
“Crime investigation will be different because the laws of nature are different up there,” Cornwell says. “We’re also dealing with the invisible enemy of electromagnetic energy. Satellites, computers, things that can be hacked and hijacked are major concerns of our military and our government today.”
To write the book, Cornwell researched her topic at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
“Without the immersion process, I don’t think I could do what I do,” Cornwell says. “I’m so research-driven. It goes back to being a journalist. You go out and you find the story. You go out on the street, you get in the car, you go talk to people. Also, it’s very important for me to do things myself so I can describe it. Not because I’m trying to show off, because I’m not all that good at a lot of it.
“I want to know what it feels like to be weightless in that harness or to put on a spacesuit. Or to be on a treadmill like they use on the space station. That is where I get my energy, my passion and my ideas.”
Cornwell’s book is currently No. 10 on the amazon.com reading chart.
