Into the Exosphere
BBefore she reported on the stars of outer space professionally, Jackie Wattles ’14 (CLAS) spent her UConn journalism days reporting on the stars of student government.
“They were willing to stick around and debate late into the night, so I would rush to meet my deadlines by sprinting from the Student Union to the Daily Campus newspaper building,” Wattles recalls. Fortunately, the cross-campus dash didn’t take too many strides: Wattles is 6’2”.
Indeed, Wattles also played for the women’s volleyball team as a middle blocker, the center position in the front row usually held by the tallest person on the roster. Growing up 1,800 miles from Storrs in the small Texas town of Liberty Hill, Wattles was recruited by several DI volleyball squads. “I tell my dad I chose UConn to attend a school where the men’s basketball team could beat his University of Arizona.”
Wattles, a journalism and political science double major, remembers one particular assignment. Professor Marcel Dufresne tasked his investigative journalism students to find as much information as they could about him (through legal means only). While almost everyone else stuck to the internet for research, Wattles — recognizing that many municipal records hadn’t been digitized by then — drove to Dufresne’s hometown town hall, where she dug up his voter records and property deeds on paper. “For some assignments,” she admits, “I will go fully mentally deranged.”
Today, Wattles covers the private space industry for CNN — a beat she entered accidentally. Spending her first several years at CNN as a breaking news business reporter, she was often assigned nights and weekends, as early-career journalists often are. “A lot of rockets launch on nights and weekends!” she says. CNN eventually promoted her to their website’s full-time space reporter.
Her “mentally deranged” commitment to getting the story continued. Assigned to cover the SpaceX Demo-2 launch in 2020 while quarantining with family in Texas, she felt too apprehensive to fly to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center during a pandemic. So she drove. Google Maps lists the route at 18 hours.
Today, Wattles lives in New York City, where she’s never left since attending Columbia University’s graduate journalism school. “I got a full scholarship from UConn for volleyball, so I thought, ‘Don’t let my college fund go to waste!’”
Asked whether she’d ever want to travel to space herself, Wattles demurs: “I think Earth is more my speed.”
FIVE things to know about the booming private space industry:
1 NASA wants things to go commercial. You might assume private space companies — most famously Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — stand opposed to the publicly funded NASA. But since NASA’s final space shuttle launch in 2011, not so much anymore. “This has been a trend for a couple decades, with NASA awarding multibillion-dollar contracts to private companies,” Wattles says. “They’ve embraced this.”
2 Medicines can be developed or improved in space. “The microgravity environment allows crystals to form more perfectly,” Wattles explains. Merck’s attempts to develop an injectable version of its melanoma drug Keytruda here on Earth had a molasses-like viscosity, but their scientists cracked the code only after conducting International Space Station experiments. (See our class notes story on Nicole Wagner to learn about an alum using this research opportunity.)
3 Space actually has an impact on people’s everyday lives. “The ‘why’ can be lost on some of these projects, which seem like vanity or expensive endeavors that don’t help humanity, but they can have enormous spillover effects,” Wattles explains. “The GPS on your phone or in your car is controlled by satellites in orbit.”
4 This is a pivotal time in space commercialization. In 1963, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Great Britain signed the Test Ban Treaty agreeing not to test nuclear weapons on the Moon or in space. Similarly, “The limits of what commercial space will be allowed to do are being mapped out in federal and global policy right now,” says Wattles. The main such agreement is the Artemis Accords, developed by NASA and the State Department, now signed by 59 countries.
5 Space commercialization is not just tourism. Headlines often focus on celebrities going to space: Katy Perry, William Shatner, Michael Strahan. But the real money will likely be in natural resources. “There are entire companies centered around mining asteroids or extracting helium-3 from the Moon,” Wattles describes. The isotope, rare on Earth but abundant on the lunar surface, could be used to power nuclear reactors.
By Jesse Rifkin ’14 (CLAS)
Photo by CNN
Illustration by Yesenia Darling
