James Wallace: Ambassador of wonder
April 20, 2006

By Gisela Telis Staff Writer
Alamogordo Daily-News

Photo provided Solar system ambassador James Wallace helps his listeners study the stars.

"We were in a park at my apartment complex in England, and I had just taken out my telescope ... I had five or six kids around me, and this guy comes down the sidewalk and is looking at us. I asked him, 'Do you want to see Jupiter?'

"He said sure, and he saw four moons and he thought that was really cool. And then he had to go and we moved on to Saturn. He came back and said, 'I was almost late delivering this pizza, but this was really cool.' And he stayed to look at Saturn. He was so amazed that he got to see the planets with his very own eyes."

The storyteller is James Wallace, and his mission is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to see with their own eyes. He tells everyone to "keep looking up."

The line is everywhere -- on his business cards, on his e-mails, on his Internet audio program. He smiles knowingly when he recounts the adage, "If one person looks up, more will follow suit." He is that one person who looks up first, and he has a history of inspiring others to look up with him.

But Wallace, an Air Force space console operator and one of NASA's 2006 solar system ambassadors, stumbled across his career in science seemingly by chance.

Wallace was born in Royal Oak, Mich., to a trucking family with no scientific aspirations. His siblings and extended family all became mechanics of some kind. His mother and father drove buses. No one felt the draw of science as he did.

"I'm the only one who's not mechanically inclined," he said.

But he was space-inclined, and a lover of astronomy from an early age.

"I knew I wanted to do something with space from the time I was in high school," he said.

Wallace was a year out of high school and recently engaged, working as an assistant to the president of a tiny fabrics manufacturing company, when he joined the Air Force. Operation Desert Storm has begun only days before.

"A couple of us said, 'Let's join before we get drafted,'" he recalled. "We wanted to show we weren't being told to join, we were willing to join."

Wallace planned to work in a computer-related capacity, but the Air Force unexpectedly fulfilled his dreams by assigning him to work with space systems. Wallace went to work in a missile warning division, watching the world for missile launches from his post in Colorado.

Later he was transferred to England and worked in passive space surveillance, keeping track of and cataloging the satellites and other debris orbiting Earth. While there, Wallace convinced his squadron leader to allow the first tours of the dish used to track the debris. Watching visitors discover the technology and what it could do ignited Wallace's passion for science education, and it was then that his teaching career began.

"It was really impressive to do ... people would understand the impact of having this great big ear listening to space all the time," he said.

After eight years overseas, Wallace and his family found themselves on their way back to the States, this time bound for Holloman Air Force Base. They have now lived in the Alamogordo area for four years.

Here, Wallace divides his time between the Air Force Space Command on Holloman and Slooh.com, an online astronomers' community. Telescope Time, a commercial telescope company based out of New York, operates 14-inch Celestron telescopes on the Canary Islands and streams the results through the Slooh.com Web site.

Subscribers to Slooh's service can reserve telescope time to observe whatever point in the sky they wish to study and view their data on the site.

"They broadcast live images from their telescopes whenever it's dark there and the weather's good ... and they have really good weather," said Wallace.

Wallace started out as a subscriber, but then began helping his fellow subscribers online with their questions about observing. Soon Slooh asked Wallace to help subscribers on an official basis, answering their questions on an audio program. It was thus that Wallace became a host, or "SkyGuide," on Slooh's "Space Tracks" show.

"We talk about what they're viewing and help people with getting around the 'scopes ... we talk about what goes wrong," he explained. He even hosts the show when the weather fails, discussing general astronomy instead or talking listeners through building their own astronomy equipment -- a subject about which Wallace, a successful telescope builder, has some knowledge.

Wallace "skyguides" from his living room, and says he finds the experience exciting even 18 months in.

"Once it's done, I usually can't get to sleep for two hours because of the adrenaline," he laughed.

Slooh boasts more than 5,000 subscribers, but even these did not suffice for Wallace. He wanted to reach out even more, bringing astronomy to the community and schools that may not know of Slooh's existence.

"I was looking for a way to get into the local community," recalled Wallace. "One of the other SkyGuides is a solar system ambassador up in Detroit. He told me about it and I got interested."

Wallace submitted his application in September. On Jan. 1, he began his term as one of only 450 solar system ambassadors in the 50 states and Puerto Rico.

NASA's California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory sponsors the volunteer program, which is now in its ninth year. Solar system ambassadors train through Internet courses and teleconferences, including one-on-one briefings from scientists and engineers working on NASA missions. They then hold community activities -- a minimum of four each year -- to share their passion for astronomy and knowledge of the subject with the public.

Wallace faces deployment to the Middle East in May, so he plans to take his ideas for community events overseas.

"I've got a little telescope I'm taking out there, and I'm going to ask our (Air Force) health and morale staff to help out," he said.

After his deployment and the four-year station in California that will follow, Wallace hopes to retire and return to Alamogordo as a teacher.

"My wife and I have found we love it here," he said. "It's a great place for kids."

He says he also thinks about starting a company to help bring science into the classroom, and perhaps outside it as well.

"There're so many people who are grown and out of school and yet they look up at the sky and ask questions," he said.

He dreams of sharing science in hospitals and senior centers, places often overlooked in education outreach programs. He thinks of his grandparents, and what it has meant to him to be able to teach them about space.

"They have questions, too, and I've learned so much from them," said Wallace. "To be able to have that give and take is really neat."