During the late 1960s, while M.G. Lord was becoming a teenager in Southern California and her mother was dying of cancer, Lord's father--an archetypal, remote, Cold War-era rocket engineer--disappeared into his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, helping build the space probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission. Thirty years later, Lord found herself reporting on the JPL, triggering childhood memories and a desire to revisit her past as a way of understanding the ethos of rocket science.