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INTRODUCTION

Z

TOM

SWEAN

eyed the our teenagers standing ner vous ly at the ront o the classroom. Te kids were backed by a green chalkboard, and a swarm o desks crowded the space between them and the three judges. Swean was a gruff 󿬁fy- eight- year- old who ran the Navy’s Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems program. At the Offi ce o Naval Research he developed million- dollar autonomous, underwater robots or the SEALs. He was not used to dealing with Mexican American kids sporting gold chains, ake diamond rings, and patchy, adolescent mustaches.“How’d you make the laser range- 󿬁nder work?” Swean growled.It was June 25, 2004— a hazy summer day at the University o Caliornia, Santa Barbara— and though the campus was largely empty due to the summer break, South Hall was crowded. It was the third annual Marine Advanced echnology Education Re-motely Operated Vehicle Competition, an event sponsored by NASA and the Navy. It was established to encourage and iden-tiy the country’s top engineering talent. Tere were teams rom across the country, including students rom MI, who were spon-sored by ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded com-pany. Te Latino kids were rom Carl Hayden Community High School in West Phoenix.“We used a helium-neon laser,” Cristian Arcega answered rapidly, keyed up on adrenaline. He was a skinny, 󿬁ve- oot- two science ace, one o the ew nerds at Carl Hayden, a school where 71.17 percent o students received ree or subsidized lunches be-cause they were below the poverty line. Cristian lived in an eight- oot- by- eight- oot plywood box slapped onto the side o a trailer

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JOSHUA DAVIS

in a mobile- home park. “We captured its readout with a CCD camera and manually corrected by thirty percent to account or the index o reraction,” Cristian explained to the judges.Swean raised a bushy, graying eyebrow.Lisa Spence, the 󿬂ight lead at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, sat beside Swean. At NASA, she was in charge o replicating the space station in a 6.2- million- gallon tank at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, exas. She had been at NASA or seventeen years and had worked with some o the most advanced underwater ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) in the world. Beore starting at NASA, she had majored in chemical engineering at Arizona State University in the seventies and knew the area o Phoenix where these kids lived.It wasn’t a positive association. She remembered West Phoe-nix as a place that she wouldn’t drive through by hersel. It was a poor area and the better schools were elsewhere. So she was surprised to see an underwater- robotics team coming out o that neighborhood.“Tere aren’t oceans in Phoenix,” she pointed out diplo-matically.“No, ma’am,” Lorenzo Santillan said. “But we got pools.”Spence couldn’t help but smile a little. Many o the teams had arrived at the competition with extraordinary underwater machines. Tey were made o machined metal, and some teams had bud gets o more than ten thousand dollars. Tese kids had shown up with a garishly painted plastic robot that was partially assembled rom scrap parts. Tey called their creation Stinky because it smelled so bad when they glued it together. It was their 󿬁rst time participating in any kind o underwater- robotics com-petition, but they had entered the highest division, going up against a 󿬁eld thick with veteran college teams. o some, their presence here seemed like a mistake.But Lorenzo was clearly proud o the contraption. o him, it was a major accomplishment. He was 󿬁feen years old and wore the

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SPARE PARTS

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back o his hair long so it ell past his shoulders. Kids in his neigh-borhood reerred to it as the Mexican mullet. He’d been a member o the WBP gang beore joining the robotics team, and he tried to walk with a tough guy’s swagger. In reality, he was desperately try-ing to build a lie outside the troubled world he’d grown up in.Swean ollowed up with a question on signal intererence, and Lorenzo looked at Oscar Vazquez, the team’s de acto leader. Oscar was seventeen years old and sported the crew cut o an Army Ranger. For our years, he had distinguished himsel as part o Carl Hayden’s Ju nior Reserve Offi cer raining Corps, eventu-ally becoming the group’s executive offi cer. Te previous year, the corps designated him Offi cer o the Year, the unit’s highest honor. He dreamed o being a soldier, and it had looked as i he had a bright uture in the military.But it turned out the Army didn’t want him. He had lived in Phoenix or six years and thought o himsel as an American, even though he’d been born in Mexico. His parents had snuck him into Arizona when he was twelve. No matter how many push- ups he did or how ast he ran, he couldn’t outpace the act that he was a ugitive, living in the country illegally, and thereore barred rom enlisting. When he realized this during his se nior year, he went looking or another 󿬁eld in which to distinguish himsel.“Sir, we experimented with a 󿬁feen- meter cable and ound very low levels o intererence,” Oscar told Swean. “So we decided to extend our tether to thirty- three meters.”“You’re very comortable with the metric system,” Swean observed.“I grew up in Mexico, sir,” Oscar said.Swean nodded. He didn’t care where the kids were rom as long as they were smart. He eyed their rudimentary 󿬂ip chart. “Why don’t you have a PowerPoint display?”“PowerPoint is a distraction,” Cristian replied. “People use it when they don’t know what to say.”“And you know what to say?”

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