Brian O’Leary’s Preposterous Life – Part 1

From astronomer to astronaut to political activist to fringe scientist to free energy activist, there has never been anything quite like it.

My Substack posts are largely abbreviated versions of the writings on my site, as I try this Substack experiment.  I have an almost endless list of topics to write about, but I am trying to keep it from getting too arcane for now, such as discussing the Shuram excursion.  I have some biographical posts to make.  I made a brief post for Ed Herman, and it is time to cover Brian O’Leary’s life.  Brian was born in 1940 as a standard Bostonian Irish-Catholic.  The night that Truman beat Dewey, Brian looked through the telescope at the Harvard Observatory and his path to astronomy began.  As an adolescent, he avidly read Wernher von Braun’s Collier’s articles on space exploration, and Sputnik inspired him to become a scientist and astronaut.   

Brian was raised on that straight-and-narrow track and a teenage visit to Washington, D.C., staring in awe at the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, gave him a huge dose of nationalistic Kool-Aid and began Brian’s self-admitted “codependency” with our nation’s capital.  Brian also became an Eagle Scout in those years, as he checked off those “patriot” boxes.  Dennis Lee had a similar fixation on American nationalism while young, before he was rudely disabused of the notion and barely survived the experience, similar to Ralph McGehee’s moment of awakening, after a career spent in the CIA.

Brian seemed destined for the military as a teenager.  When Brian got into college, that all changed.  His first college years were his introduction to adulthood, with sex, inebriants, various escapades, and he was a mediocre student.  He was also an achiever, and ran the Boston Marathon and climbed the Matterhorn in those early-adult years.  After getting his bachelor’s degree, he went to Georgetown to study astronomy and was expelled as he got his degree, partly for writing a satirical play about the faculty.  But he had a NASA job while at Georgetown. 

Brian was relatively directionless, but got married, moved to California at age 24, and attended Berkeley.  Astronomer Donald Rae took Brian under his wing and they began publishing papers together, especially about Mars.  They got them published in Science, which was the house organ of American science.  Brian met Carl Sagan in those years, and they shared a fascination with Mars.  At age 26, as Brian was finishing up his doctoral studies, he saw an ad from NASA, which was looking to hire scientists to become astronauts.  Brian jumped at the opportunity and eventually had his astronaut interview in Houston, two weeks after I left it, for the first of the uncanny overlaps of our journeys.  At the interview, he was roommates with Gerard O’Neill, which led to a life-long friendship.  Brian proceeded to have one of the most bizarre interviews of all time. 

While Brian faced the interview panel, they asked him if he would go on a hazardous mission to Mars.  Brian was the first person publicly asked to go to another planet, and it stunned him.  When Brian hemmed and hawed, trying to take it in, they repeated the question and noted that he was a Mars specialist.  Brian then said that he would go, but without much enthusiasm, and a panel member, whom Brian later identified as Alan Shepard, demanded that Brian go.  That is a classic Shepard anecdote.  Years later, Brian was told by one of von Braun’s colleagues, and it may have been Arthur Rudolph, that von Braun was behind Brian’s selection, as the first talent in the stable for von Braun’s Martian ambitions. 

The bloom began coming off of the NASA rose with the Apollo 1 fire, which drove my father from NASA.  The next shoe dropped between Brian’s June 1967 interview and his first day as an astronaut in August.  Brian was one of 11 scientists hired as astronauts, and on their first day on the job, their boss, Deke Slayton, informed them that NASA had lost the budget battle with the Pentagon over the Vietnam War, so the ambitious plans that NASA had beyond Moon landings began fading.  Slayton told them that NASA no longer needed them and that if any of them wanted to quit right then, there would be no hard feelings.  With that sobering introduction to NASA, those astronauts named their group the XS-11 (AKA Excess 11), with the kind of droll humor that NASA is known for.  Four of Brian’s group, including Brian, quit before they ever went into space. 

Brian was warned by his colleagues against spending his most productive years as a scientist training for space missions, the members of his group who stayed all sacrificed their scientific careers, and nobody from that group went into space for 15 years, as they were at the bottom of the astronaut pecking order.  In his first autobiography, published in 1970, Brian discussed his NASA days and reasons for quitting.  In short, Brian was not really astronaut material.  He was hired because of his Martian studies, and before NASA began hiring scientists, all of the astronauts were test pilots, usually ex-fighter jocks.  On day one, it was obvious that Brian was not going to fit into the military atmosphere in the astronaut corps.

One chapter of Brian’s book was devoted to how much he hated living in Houston, and it read just like my father’s complaints about living there, especially when both moved from coastal California to be there.  Lyndon Johnson’s pork-barrel politics were why Mission Control is in Houston today. 

Because of that test-pilot culture, every astronaut was required to fly a supersonic plane, and each was assigned his own plane.  By the time that Brian was hired, three astronauts (1, 2) had already died flying those planes, and another died after Brian had been there only a couple of months.  Test-pilot astronauts were dying like flies, and Brian had never flown anything. 

After several months of astronaut training, which was largely classes, Brian went to flight school.  On the second flight after his first solo flight, Brian made a potentially fatal mistake, and that was the end for him.  He was no natural pilot, saw himself dying in a training accident, the Mars program was cancelled, he hated living in Houston, and it looked like he would never get into space.  He called up Slayton to say that he was quitting, and said that flying was not his “cup of tea,” which became an infamous quote that was broadcasted on radio the next day.  Brian even saw his statement as a Jeopardy! show question years later. 

Brian’s astronaut days were over.  Carl Sagan recruited Brian to teach at Cornell, where they became arguably the world’s two leading Mars experts.  This will take a few posts.