How to Plan a Family Around an Interplanetary Mission

Linda Spilker likes to tell her daughters that they were born when the planets aligned.

In the late 1970s, Spilker was a scientist on NASA’s Voyager mission, an unprecedented effort to send two spacecraft on a tour of the solar system. The timing of the mission was exquisite. The outer planets had sorted themselves in an arrangement that would allow the spacecraft to swing from one to the next, leaning in to take pictures and scientific measurements and then swiping gravitational boosts to continue the ride. The last time humankind had an opportunity like this, Thomas Jefferson was president. Over the next decade, the spacecraft would approach Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

As she prepared for the mission, Spilker noticed a window. It would take the second Voyager spacecraft five years to travel from Saturn to Uranus. Work would be slower than usual. It