Charles Elachi's stellar career from Bekaa to the great beyond

A remarkable journey has taken him from a village in Lebanon to the launch of 24 missions at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the golden age of space exploration

For about a week before Dr Charles Elachi stepped aside as director of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the behaviour of his long-time assistant was decidedly odd.

But, preoccupied as he was with all that needed doing as the clock ticked down, Elachi scarcely noticed being steered straight out the back door for his final meetings on the JPL campus or the neighbouring California Institute of Technology where he served as vice-president.

The reason became apparent at his leaving ceremony when his attention was directed to a tree across the mall. “I said: ‘Wow, looks like a Cedar of Lebanon’,’’ Elachi, 77, tells The National. “It was very touching that people thought to do that,’’ he says, clearly still moved at the consideration put into the surprise permanent tribute.

On the ground around the adolescent trunk is a metal ring with a 9ft diameter. The inscription on one side includes part of a quote from former US president Theodore Roosevelt that has guided Elachi and was adopted as a motto by the facility: “DARE MIGHTY THINGS. Charles Elachi, JPL Director 2001 – 2016.”

A second reads: “In two thousand years, this Cedar of Lebanon will fill the expanse of this ring in witness of mighty things to come.”

Eye of the storm

Elachi has certainly lived by example. His remarkable space odyssey began with the development of an airborne synthetic aperture radar designed to create high-resolution images through inclement weather that he once took on a Nasa CV-990 jet plane into the category two Atlantic Hurricane Gloria.

“I was nervous, of course, but the pilots love doing those kinds of things. We actually spiralled down inside the eye and then spiralled our way out again,” he says, with an almost imperceptible shrug. “It was amazingly quiet. I’ve done a lot of crazy things in my career.’’

Born in the Lebanese town of Riyak, Elachi’s father, Rokos, a Maronite Catholic who was a director of the busiest station on the railway, would take him to marvel at the feats of engineering in the workshops and construction depot.

Charles, his two brothers and a sister grew up cared for by their mother, Yvonne, a Roman Catholic born in Damascus, on the military airbase next door in a Colonial-style house that was the commandant’s residence during the French mandate.

Every summer, they journeyed by steam locomotive from the flat floor of the Bekaa Valley, through canyons, beside rivers and across the mountains to where an uncle was waiting with a horse-drawn coach in the Syrian capital. “Even until now, I love trains,” he says, with a touch of nostalgia.

Sense of wonder

On warm evenings, he often slept out on the wraparound balcony under the Milky Way, unaware that an object in orbit in the inner asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter would later be called Elachi 4116 in his honour. “I used to look up and wonder could there be somebody living on those stars who was watching us down here. It’s a sense of wonder and curiosity that I have carried with me.”

Neither could he have imagined overseeing the launch of 24 trailblazing missions during the “golden age of space exploration’’, including the aptly named Mars rover Curiosity.

Elachi is as loath to pick a favourite as he is to choose between his two grown-up daughters, Joanna and Lauren, but lowering that one-ton vehicle from a hovering rocket backpack on to the Red Planet after a 350 million-mile journey with an approach at 13,000mph is difficult to beat.

A land of opportunity

“The US is a land of opportunity. Everybody has a chance based on their merit. If you work really hard and are passionate about what you are doing, you can move up. I’m the perfect example. I was born in a little village in Lebanon, and I ended up being the director of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab.”

He has clear memories as a nine-year-old of listening to the “beep … beep … beep’’ sent back from Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, on a Zenith portable radio in 1957, and months later reading a magazine article about the launch of Explorer 1 by JPL.

“I had no idea where the Jet Propulsion Lab was but the fact that there was a race in space exploration between the US and the Soviet Union fascinated me, and I kept track of it.”

On becoming the eighth director of JPL in 2001 after the losses of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter, Elachi set about trying to improve morale and maintain the lab’s leadership position. “Every once in a while, you stumble and things don’t work, and that’s fine. We learnt.’’

Six impossible things before breakfast

He admits that it was difficult relinquishing the helm after nearly 16 years of leading 6,000 like-minded explorers who come to work not because it’s a job but because they’re captivated. “We would get together in the morning for breakfast to talk about impossible things, and then go and do them. No question, I miss it.”

When his tenure ended, the all-important room inside JPL’s famed Space Flight Operation Facility was renamed the Charles Elachi Mission Control Centre.

Then, as now, seated engineers monitor the flow of information from craft inside and outside the solar system. Among them over the years have been those that went up on Elachi’s watch, including Mars Odyssey (2001), and the planet’s rovers Spirit and Opportunity as well as the Spitzer Space Telescope (all 2003), the GRACE satellites that study Earth’s gravity field (2002), the lunar science mission GRAIL, the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter, and Curiosity (2011).

All feature in an extensive collection of miniature replica models just out of sight of the Zoom camera as Elachi, currently emeritus professor of electrical engineering and planetary science at CalTech, sits behind the desk in his office talking about an epiphany he had at mission control.

“One day, I was there with some colleagues and data was coming from Voyager, from Cassini, all the different missions the US has launched beyond the Moon, and I said: ‘Wow, we’re getting all that data from the solar system, this definitely must be the centre of the universe'. On my next visit, I saw in the middle of the room that they had put a little plaque on the floor saying: ‘This is the Centre of the Universe.’ I thought that was cool.”

Seventeen marriage proposals have been made on that very spot, and Elachi expresses a wish to meet the couples to check that they’re living happily ever after.

Blessed are the geeks

“People who work at JPL are nerds. We carry our enthusiasm all the way to the romance part,” Elachi admits, neglecting to mention that he wooed his wife Valerie, an animated film producer, in much the same way.

When prompted, he laughs. “It must have worked because 40 years later we’re still together. We have completely different backgrounds – hers is artistic and mine is more scientific – but we kind of complement each other.”

Valerie is his unofficial publicist but Elachi concedes that attention being drawn to his many achievements can be embarrassing. There is much to boast of. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering at the age of 42, has written 129 research papers and received about 60 prestigious awards, including three of Nasa’s Outstanding Leadership Medals, two Lebanese Orders of the Cedar, the Legion of Honour, the Philip Habib Award for Distinguished Public Service, the Massey Award from the Royal Society of London, CalTech’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Carl Sagan Award.

The first came in 1964 when Elachi graduated as the top student in Maths and Science in the Lebanese Baccalaureate college examinations, before earning degrees in Physics at Joseph Fournier University and Engineering at the National Polytechnic Institute in Grenoble, France.

Celestial obsessions

When it was time for graduate school, friends encouraged Elachi to try for the US. The decision between MIT, CalTech and other renowned institutions was tipped by an obsession with a different type of stars – those such as John Wayne in the American movies at the local cinema on the Saturday afternoons of his youth.

“On the map, next to CalTech in Pasadena, I saw the word ‘Hollywood’. I said: ‘Oh, that’s the place I want to go.’”

Elachi had imagined film idols strolling the streets, but eventually, enough celebrities became interested in JPL to fill a photo album. He reserves special mentions for a show-stopping appearance by former governor of California and Terminator actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, film director James Cameron and, best of all, actress Jessica Chastain, the Ares III mission commander in his favourite space film, Ridley Scott's The Martian.

It wasn’t all about the “glitter and pizzazz”, though. “I did also factor in the full Ford Foundation Scholarship because there is no way I could have afforded to come to the US, and I got the opinion of the faculty in Grenoble.”

Paying it forward, he and Valerie set up a summer undergraduate research fund in 2006 to support one student a year and a graduate fellowship, the first recipient of which is a Lebanese student called Joudi Hajar.

Thanking his lucky stars

Thinking that his stay at CalTech would be only for a year or so, Elachi was surprised to learn of the proximity of JPL, and the university’s role in managing the facility for Nasa, over dinner with his host family. “It’s important to be smart but it’s important to be lucky, too. Choosing CalTech was probably the best decision I ever made in my life.”

He took a summer job at JPL, which traces its origins to some CalTech students called the “rocket boys’’ whose experiments were moved off campus to the more isolated current site in the 1930s after they destroyed part of a dormitory building.

“One of the things we do here at JPL is take a lot of risks but we take what we call calculated risks. We try to be adventurous without blowing ourselves up. But if everything is going perfectly then perhaps we’re not pushing the limits hard enough.’’

His big break came as principal investigator of the multimillion-dollar imaging radar instrument, which beat off stiff competition to become the first payload on the space shuttle series.

The Atlantis of the Sands

Data collected demonstrated the radar’s unexpected ability to penetrate several metres into desert sand sheets, leading to the discovery of ancient dried river valleys in the Sahara as well as Ubar, a legendary sunken frankincense trade hub in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula.

The latter came about after the amateur archaeologist and filmmaker Nick Clapp turned up at JPL with an arm full of historical documents and tales about the “Atlantis of the Sands’’. “Let me get this straight,’’ a deadpan Elachi responded, “you want to use my spaceship to find your lost city?’’

But Clapp had Elachi at hello. He was one of the first to volunteer for both field trips to verify the discoveries, which made the covers of National Geographic, Scientific American, and newspapers around the world.

He harbours no regrets about not having ventured into space himself or even experienced a parabolic zero flight, seemingly content to turn ideas – “the crazier they are, the more we like it’’ – into reality.

Efforts that paved the way for the Perseverance rover to touch down on Mars in 2021 with the Ingenuity helicopter strapped underneath to perform Nasa's “Wright Brothers moment'' was one of many times that Elachi has personified the names of missions.

“Yes,’’ he says, “You have to persevere. Don’t ever take no for an answer. You have to be ingenious to overcome road blocks. It’s not only in space but in everything you do. You have to be curious, you have to have the right spirit and look for every opportunity.’’

These days, Elachi dedicates a more sedate working week to doing research with some of his postdoctoral students, mentoring, serving on advisory councils and university boards around the world, and advocating for space exploration.

The scaled-back hours allow more time for pottering about the Sante Fe-style home in Altadena he shares with Valerie, which was built by the American Western author Zane Grey. His morning coffee is taken in the yard while listening to the Wilson Warblers and admiring the nearby forests of the San Gabriel Mountains where the ravens fly upside-down in high winds.

“Nature is fascinating,’’ Elachi says. “People sometimes ask if I would like to travel to Mars or Europa, and I say no. I love it here. I’m a nature person. I love hiking, seeing trees and flowers, and there isn’t that on Mars. I would rather send my robots.’’