The Cape Canaveral Astronomer Who Left the Launchpad

Dr. Kwame Adeyemi worked at Cape Canaveral for twenty-nine years, most of them on the trajectory team for a program he is not, even now, permitted to name. In 2021 he retired, ostensibly to fish. Six months later he took a job teaching seventh-grade science at a middle school in Merritt Island.

'The launchpad,' he told me, in his classroom, which is decorated with a hand-drawn poster of the Kuiper Belt, 'is a room full of adults who have already decided what a rocket is. The seventh grade is a room full of children who have not.' He gestured at a girl in the front row who had, that morning, asked him whether it was possible for a planet to be lonely. 'That,' he said, 'is a better question than most of the questions we asked at the pad.'

He teaches four sections a day and coaches an after-school astronomy club that meets, weather permitting, on the roof of the gymnasium. When I visited, the club was tracking Jupiter's moons through a donated telescope. A boy of about twelve, without looking up from the eyepiece, asked Dr. Adeyemi whether Io was, at that moment, closer to Jupiter than Merritt Island was to Titusville. Dr. Adeyemi did the math in his head. 'Yes,' he said. The boy nodded, satisfied, and wrote something in a notebook.