A poem hitches a ride on a rocket, to infinity and beyond

On Oct 14, at six minutes past noon, a group of people stood on a balcony overlooking a launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. and watched Europa Clipper, the largest interplanetary craft NASA has ever built, blast off into the cosmos.

Most were scientists and engineers who had worked on the mission for more than a decade, some for their entire careers. Then there was Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, whose 150-word poem is engraved on an interior panel that's roughly the size of a three-ring binder.

"At first you don't hear anything," Limón said of a view that went from bucolic to chaotic to astonishing in the time it takes a cloud to skid across the sun. "You see the explosion, then it hits you. It feels like a physical representation of the amount of work it takes to make a mission like this occur."

Limón's contribution, "In Praise of Mystery," is a tiny piece of a complicated puzzle that has the potential to change humanity's understanding of its place in the solar system. It isn't the first poem to slip the surly bonds of Earth and it won't be the last. But its origin story is a reminder of the link between art and science, and the way inspiration flows in both directions.

The collaboration started with an email from one government agency to another.

On Oct. 14, 2022, Bert Ulrich, NASA's liaison for multimedia collaborations, sent a message to Brett Zongker, chief of media relations at the Library of Congress, asking if Limón would be interested in writing a poem to travel aboard Europa Clipper.

Over the course of five and a half years, the probe will travel 1.8 billion miles to Europa, Jupiter's second moon, where it will conduct 49 flybys in order to determine whether the watery landscape there might be conducive to life. The Clipper team wanted to send earthling signatures along for the ride, and they hoped Limón might be able to dream up a message from, well, humanity.

Limón was up for the challenge. She's been writing about constellations and the moon since she was a kid pondering the heavens in Sonoma County, Calif. She already had six books and a National Book Award nomination under her belt. She loves Star Trek and voyages of all stripes.

After all, Limón said,"Poetry is the language of mystery and the unknown."

There were parameters, however. This poem was due in three months, give or take. The text had to be under 200 words. Ideally it would contain water imagery, and it needed to be accessible to people on a fourth grade reading level.

Ever the diligent student, Limón immersed herself in a trove of documents and scientific facts provided by NASA. These were meant to be helpful, but they had the opposite effect: Limón became so hellbent on including certain details -- Europa's thick icy crust, for instance -- she quickly lost her way.

"It was failure after failure after failure," she said. "Over and over and over again."

Poetry isn't like eggs made to order, of course. It's hard to cook up a collection of words for a specific palate; the process is more alchemy than science.

Eventually, Limón husband, Lucas Marquardt, told her, "'You need to stop writing a NASA poem and start writing a poem you would actually write."

The point was to deliver a message, not a lesson, she realized.

"That was where the poem took off," Limón said. "I wanted to make sure it was a poem of praise and wonder. Yes, we're going to this incredible place; and yes, we might find all of the ingredients for life and this could be an incredible moment in history. But we're also on the most incredible planet, and it is full of life."

"In Praise of Mystery" functions as an introduction of Earth to Europa. It includes songbirds and wind-shaken trees, grief and pleasure, sun and shadow. It strikes a liquid note -- "O second moon, we, too, are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas" -- and gives a solid sense of what unites human beings: awe, mystery, wishes.

To borrow a phrase from another laureate-level auteur, the poem contains multitudes.

Limón was relieved, and NASA was pleased. As part of its Message in a Bottle initiative, it managed to collect 2.6 million signatures to accompany the poem into space.

In early 2023, Limón traveled to Flintridge, Calif. to visit Europa Clipper at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There, during an interview for NASA Television, she learned that her words would actually be engraved on the craft's vault plate, a small tantalum metal panel designed to protect electronics from Jupiter's punishing radiation. (Imagine the door on a fuse box, with a bigger job.)

This surprised Limón. "The physicality of that, that it's an actual piece -- ," she said, pulling her chin toward her neck. "In my mind, the poem was on a tiny little chip. No one would see it; it would be more of an ethereal experience."

At J.P.L., Limón met with Bob Pappalardo, the Clipper mission's project scientist, who was on hand to decode the various components of the probe.

"She wanted to talk about the spacecraft; I wanted to talk about poetry," Pappalardo said. "We got to talking about how poetry touches our lives. When the project manager was describing the spacecraft, the conversation turned toward how every part was special. It was made by people. It was made by human hands."

The idea applies to poetry too, and to many other beautiful things.

For Pappalardo and his team, that phrase -- "by human hands" -- became a touchstone of sorts: "It influenced the language we use, the way we think about our work." It inspired them to ask Limón if she would jot down the poem in her own handwriting.

Limón wrote "In Praise of Mystery" in tidy script on a sheet of printer paper, then sent it to NASA to be inscribed on the vault plate alongside the Drake Equation (in Frank Drake's handwriting), which is used to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy. The plate also includes visual representations of "water" in 103 languages, plus a symbol representing the word in American Sign Language

Then there's the picture book rendition of "In Praise of Mystery," published by Norton Young Readers on a NASA-tight schedule so it would be ready in time for the launch. The book is extravagantly, kaleidoscopically illustrated by Peter Sís, who took an analog approach to his work from creation to delivery. As in, he zipped his watercolors into a portfolio and carried them by train to Norton.

Limón said, "When I saw those images, I wept."

Simon Boughton, who edited the book, said, "There's something beautiful about the craft in creating a poem and the craft in creating the pictures and the fact that in both cases they exist in the hand of their authors."

The launch of Europa Clipper was originally scheduled for Oct. 10. Limón planned to attend after unveiling a picnic table inscribed with "Ecology" by June Jordan in Everglades National Park, part of her signature project, "You Are Here: Poetry in Parks," which also inspired a book.

Hurricane Milton scuttled both occasions.

"What hubris," Limón said. "To think humans can plan anything. What better reminder that we're on a planet, and we're not in charge."

On Oct. 13, at a prelaunch celebration replete with bouncy balls designed to look like Europa, NASA presented the Library of Congress with a facsimile of the vault plate. Pappalardo delivered a poetry-infused speech about the herculean effort behind Europa Clipper, referring to colleagues' "obsession over an icy sphere which our hands will never touch."

In all, more than 4,000 pairs of hands worked on the spacecraft in some way.

The next morning, two years after NASA first emailed the Library of Congress, an ancient-looking tortoise lumbered across a hot sidewalk near the digital countdown clock at Kennedy Space Center -- a reminder of the proximity of the natural world. Spectators ate palm fulls of peanuts, according to NASA liftoff tradition. Then they looked skyward as Europa Clipper sailed forth, trailed by fire, smoke and a bone-shaking rumble that was both otherworldly and deeply familiar. It was a poetic moment, made possible by science.

For those present, it was hard not to wonder what Europa Clipper will report back, years from now, about the prospect of extraterrestrial life.

"What I hope for," Limón said, "is a sort of soothing. I don't mean just for humans, but for animals, plants and every living creature."