Women should never be afraid to ask questions, says Nicola Fox, Nasa’s new science chief and only the second woman to hold this position in the agency’s history. In her view, being curious and having a ton of questions are the hallmarks of a successful scientist – even if asking them can feel intimidating.
“Sometimes you feel if you’re the only woman in the room that you probably shouldn’t speak up, because everybody might think you’re stupid. But I’ve worked really hard on trying to tell people that there are no stupid questions – most of the time if you speak up, at least 30% of the people in the room will have the same question and weren’t brave enough to ask it.”
Growing up in Hitchin, in rural Hertfordshire, Fox was encouraged to think big from an early age. One of her earliest memories is of a family holiday to Spain when she was three, where instead of a bedtime story, her father used objects from their hotel room to illustrate how the solar system works. On clear nights, he would look up wistfully at the moon and ask if she could imagine what it must be like to walk up there. “Every time we saw a [space] launch, particularly the shuttle launches, he would make comments like ‘There couldn’t be any better job in the world than working for Nasa,’” Fox says. “I definitely grew up sort of starstruck by space.”
But while her father may take the credit for inspiring her, Fox credits her “quietly determined” mother for pushing her to succeed at school and beyond. “She may not have dreamed of walking on the moon, but she was damn sure I was going to have every opportunity I needed, if I wanted to,” Fox says.
When she asked whether she should take up her current position as administrator for the science mission unit, overseeing some of Nasa’s best-known programmes with an annual budget of roughly $7bn (£5.8bn), her mother’s response was straightforward and encouraging. “She was like: ‘Of course you should, absolutely, go take it.’”
Fox says she always knew she wanted to be a scientist – agreeing with her father that the best thing in the world would be to work for Nasa – although it wasn’t until she was a PhD student at Imperial College London that she realised this was a genuine possibility.
She was researching solar substorms – brief disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field that cause energy to be injected into the upper atmosphere, resulting in a sudden brightening of the northern lights – and had been using data from Nasa spacecraft, when a Nasa scientist asked if she would be interested in applying for a postdoctoral fellowship.
“It was one of those ‘all the air left the room’ kind of moments,” she says. “I’m sure my knees went wobbly. It was an enormous thing for somebody to ask if I’d consider it, rather than me having to sort of beg for it.”
Fox submitted her application and got through, gradually working her way up to head Nasa’s heliophysics division, which studies the sun, its planets and the space environment. Its Parker solar probe mission, which aims to gather the first ever samples of a star’s atmosphere by flying to within 4m miles of the sun’s surface, remains close to her heart. “It is the mission I get most excited by because I was the project scientist for that. Seeing it continuing to do great things – travelling through the sun’s corona closer than anything that’s ever been before – is something that I have personal pride in.”
But there are other close contenders. In her new role, Fox will oversee more than 100 Nasa missions, probing such questions as how hurricanes form on Earth, how to best support astronauts on the moon and whether we are alone in the universe, as well as supporting a diverse team of scientists and engineers at all stages of their careers.
“The inspiring thing about Nasa is just the sheer breadth of what we do. We’re all excited about putting astronauts on the moon again through the Artemis programme and sending people to the south pole of the moon, which is very challenging. But we have some other amazing launches coming up this year, including Psyche, which is going to a very interesting asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter that contains a lot of heavy metals.”
Another theme that excites Fox is the search for life. “I don’t mean that in the sci-fi way, but looking for planets in different stellar systems that could sustain life,” she says. “We’re working on completely new concepts like the Habitable Worlds Observatory, our next big astrophysics telescope, which will look for the biometric signatures that would tell us if life could be sustained on [other] planets.”
Later this year, the Osiris-Rex mission is expected to return samples from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, which could provide new insights into how our solar system formed, and the emergence of water on Earth. The Europa Clipper and Dragonfly missions scheduled for 2024 and 2027 will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan – including whether they have conditions suitable for life.
“I’m very hopeful that we will find great exoplanets and life-sustainable planets in other stellar systems,” says Fox.
“Within your lifetime?” I ask.
“Golly, yes, I’m hopeful,” she says.
Finding actual life on such planets may take a little longer though, due to their distance from Earth and the challenges of getting there. “That’s for somebody that comes after me, I think,” Fox says.
