A spacecraft engineer’s wisdom from Mars 2020 and a post-disaster island
The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover being prepared for encapsulation in the a payload facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 18, 2020. NASA/KSC Excerpt from The Boy Who Reached for the Stars: A Memoir by Elio Morillo. Published by HarperOne. Copyright © 2022 HarperCollins. On September 20, 2017, Category 5 Hurricane María hit my beloved Puerto Rico, hovering over the island for the next 48 hours, uprooting trees, causing power and phone outages, and inflicting catastrophic devastation throughout the land. It was a terrifying stretch of time when those of us with loved ones in the path of this destruction could only hope and pray they were okay. As we waited to get any type of news, my fix-it mentality kicked in—I needed to do something to channel my helplessness into action....