The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Why didn’t the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn have something similar? And Uranus and Neptune. Pluto. The outer planets community, Curt came to see, needed a group of its own to organize, push for missions, and prepare for spacecraft arrival when they were flown. NASA obviously wasn’t willing to just throw a bone to the outer planets. Yes, four flagships had flown thus far, but each took decades of hard work to get to space, and the first—the two Voyagers of the 1970s—the proofs of concept for large strategic science missions—were beneficiaries of specific circumstances that would not be repeated for some time: an alignment of planets that came only once every hundred and seventy-six years. You could launch from Earth and quickly hit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in a single go.

  “The last time the planets were lined up like that,” said the NASA administrator to Richard Nixon, “President Jefferson was sitting at your desk—and he blew it.”

  “Do two of them,” replied Nixon.151, 152

  And they did. Later, the spacecraft Galileo to Jupiter and Cassini to Saturn were conceived and launched during what amounted to a fourteen-year hiatus in Mars exploration following the failure of the Viking landers to find life there. But those days were done, and Mars was back, a crimson Death Star fully armed and operational; no mission or moon would stand in its way. So for the outer solar system, missions of opportunity were past tense. Further exploration would require a concerted effort and the force of intellect. The outer planets community needed a group to coordinate and take full measure of its scientific strengths and shortcomings.

  To lead this prospective organization, Curt approached the University of Colorado’s Fran Bagenal, the British planetary scientist and lead editor of the magnum opus Jupiter: The Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere. Because each chapter had been written by a separate set of scientists, and those authors needed to be nurtured, encouraged, cajoled, and occasionally threatened with having their throats slit, Curt figured she would be perfect for calling cadence for the outer planets and making everyone march in the same direction.

  He staged his ambush at a planetary science conference in Kentucky in 2004. On the Sunday evening preceding proceedings, the American Astronomical Society held a reception at the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. The two, Curt and Fran, had never met, and before walking in, Curt had to google what she looked like. He spent half the night wandering around the museum, trying fervently to hold in his head a mental image of her and matching it to everyone he encountered.

  Fran? he asked a woman he thought was her. I’m Curt Niebur.153

  Curt who? she asked in her distinctive Dorset accent, having only the vaguest notion of who this NASA nobody was or what he wanted.

  How would you like to be the first chair of OPAG? he asked.

  What’s . . . oh-pag?

  Curt explained what it was: the Outer Planets Assessment Group. Like the Mars group, MEPAG, but . . . for outer planets. He went on to list the reasons why he thought she would be perfect for the job . . . and she rejected his overtures outright. The Jupiter book had been a grueling effort, Curt!—she was wounded!—needed time to recover, to give her psychological scars time to heal.154 Niebur, predictably, did not give up so easily. Surrounded by display boxes of baseball bats and wall murals of sports icons, the conversation continued, and the more they talked, the more assertive she became about how such a group could achieve its goals, how necessary such a group was.

  It has to be you, Fran, he said. Just do it for a year.

  And the once reluctant leader agreed, her mind steadied now, her scars healed as if on command. But if Bagenal was going to steer this ship, she was going to do it correctly. She didn’t want it run from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as MEPAG was. The Mars group had essentially become a lobbying arm of the lab, and she wanted OPAG to have total independence. MEPAG, with human spaceflight on its side, was a fierce competitor; therefore, OPAG would have to be aggressive in making the case for the outer solar system. The community would have to come together, Curt, to write the twenty-page document—the three-page document—the one-page document—the movie clip—the three-bullet slide—the elevator speech. We had to be ready to sell our science in any circumstance, and not just to the bureaucrats at the NASA centers. Mars had “Follow the water.” That was their mantra. Where there’s water, there’s life. The public loved it. Drank it up. It was something that made sense whether you held a doctorate in planetary science or not. Follow the water indeed. On Mars? Ha! Nothing had wiggled on Mars in a hundred million years. So . . . OPAG could follow the whales! By conversation’s end, she was exhilarated by the nascent organization’s prospects.

  There was nothing personal driving this intensity. Indeed, a pivotal adolescent event involving the Red Planet had led Fran to planetary science in the first place.

  It was, of course, a Carl Sagan Moment.

  Bagenal’s parents were musicians. Her father made medieval musical instruments. Her mother taught violin. They lived in a small house in Dorchester first built in 1666. In her youth, she stayed up to watch the Apollo landings. Her parents didn’t. That was fine. After the Apollo missions, there was talk of humans going to Mars—Mars!—and that interested her. More terrestrially, the study and understanding of plate tectonics had hit a high, and Fran was interested in that, too, this whole business of understanding how the Earth was put together.

  When she was sixteen, she learned through her older brother that Sagan was visiting Cambridge University, three-plus hours away. Well, she had to see him with her own eyes and made the trip northeast. His talk was about Mars. It fascinated her to see how effective Sagan was at arguing with stodgy British academics—his parries, ripostes, prises de fer. That stayed with her, and years later, when it came time to set the course of her own life, she studied physics and geophysics at Lancaster University. In Britain at the time, however, there were no opportunities to study planetary science—the field didn’t really exist yet beyond a few enclaves in American academia—so Fran went to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  It was her earlier work, however, that would involve her directly in the space program. Her senior project at Lancaster had been on space plasmas—gases in space so hot that their constituent atoms begin to break—and it turned into a paper published in the renowned Journal of Geophysical Research, a century-old, peer-reviewed scientific journal. She needed a job after coming to the United States, and while attending a one-off mixer at Harvard University for women in science, someone suggested, after learning that Fran did space plasmas, that she drop by the Center for Space Physics at Boston University. Scientists there were part of a NASA mission set to launch to Jupiter, a planet that, because of its massive magnetosphere, was to plasma what Paris was to writers. Fran didn’t realize at the time how historic the spacecraft would prove. Nobody did. When she joined the science team of Voyagers the First and Second, she became part of an expedition that would give humankind Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto—didn’t discover them, but made them real—and then Enceladus, Titan, Iapetus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea. Here was Jupiter, its crazy clouds aswirl, and here was Saturn, its rings suddenly so big, so close, so detailed, and more stunning than even the most fevered dreams of Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, or Arthur C. Clarke. And at once, we had to go back to both planetary systems to understand any of it.

  Yeah, Fran was up for this.

  IN LATE 2006, with the planetary science division at NASA headquarters fully behind the Quad Studies, Curt focused with Jim Green on a road map. Once a mission concept was selected, NASA would need to find three billion dollars. The basic budget for the agency’s planetary science division covered a spectrum of standard-sized spacecraft endeavors, but there was nowhere near enough money to stand up another large, strategic mission such as Galileo or Cassini, or a would-be one to Europa (or wherever). No, getting a flagship out of PowerPoint and onto a launch pad would require what was called a New Start: a dedicated, long-term funding wedge in the NASA
budget—something that didn’t happen often. New Start planning would have to begin straightaway.

  It was one thing to send something hundreds of millions of miles to distant worlds of frost and fire. If you wanted a real challenge, try sending something ten, twenty, thirty feet above Curt Niebur’s office to higher floors at NASA headquarters and higher links on the NASA chain. Then try and get it a mile and a half down the road to the White House Office of Management and Budget, and from there, another mile to Capitol Hill as part of the annual budget request, and then back and forth from House to Senate, three hundred feet at a go—“I’m just a bill . . .” —and then a final mile to the Oval Office for the president’s signature.

  Deep space had nothing on DC. The American government was a taffy machine of forces competing and in opposition even when working toward common ends, itself not often the case. A New Start proposal could be (and generally was) killed as it made its way across desks in four separate buildings. It had to survive the division director, the associate administrator, the administrator, the NASA chief financial officer, the White House budgeteer, the president’s science advisor, the appropriations subcommittees of the House and Senate, the full appropriations committees, the two houses of Congress, and, finally, the president of the United States. Things got even messier when a spacecraft or mission concept originated not at NASA headquarters but in Congress or the White House. NASA headquarters would have no choice but to salute the president and do as it was told—the wisdom of a mission or lack thereof irrelevant.

  Niebur knew long journeys, having taken one of his own to the nation’s capital from Breese, Illinois (pop. 3,000), all cow pastures and cornfields. It was as idyllic a place as you might find on the Earth planet, and Breese was the big town in his part of the windy prairie state. One birthday as a boy, he received a little three-inch refracting telescope. To the extent that it had a brand, it was “the white one,” and that very first night, he hauled it to the backyard and aimed it expectantly at a pristine pitch of rural American sky. Curt got his celestial bearings, pressed expectant eye to eyepiece, and suddenly these points of distant light inflated into worlds as real as Breese. And each was so different! Mars, the color of rust and capped with white. Jupiter and its watchful red eye and tan and brown bands of clouds—and moons! It had moons! Four of them! AND YOU COULD SEE THEM. There was Saturn, rings and all, just as the textbooks promised! You’re in sixth grade learning about this stuff and it’s a few photos in science class and that lightbulb solar system circled by bead planets on wire arms, but then you strap on that telescope for the first time and all at once you’re not dealing in the theoretical. You’re a space traveler. Science suddenly isn’t a class you take in school, something that begins and ends with fill-in-the-blanks and multiple-choice questions—it is a thing that is absolutely, metaphysically happening and I have seen it and there’s no going back from that.

  He majored in aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, figuring that spacecraft design was the closest he could come to exploring other worlds up close. As years elapsed, however, Curt’s Trek-fueled fantasies faded, and statements like “let’s be real, here” and “imagine the competition” suffused his thoughts, and he soon set sights on what would be realistic. Spacecraft design yielded to aircraft design—a good gig if you could get it, after all, and those firms paid good money.

  Then he met Susan Mahan.

  Susan was an Alpha Gamma Delta, Curt was a Delta Upsilon, and her sorority was just down the street. A mutual friend introduced them, and he asked her to the football game—go Jackets!—and she said yes. The school allotted each student a free pass to invite one nonstudent guest. Curt brought his dad. Susan used her pass to bring his mom. It was a great date, she said. He was so taken with her that afterward he had no idea who won the game. And I mean Susan had it all. She studied physics, her path fixed, laid with iron rails: she was going to work for NASA. She made the plan at three years of age, when her family visited Johnson Space Center in Houston. She played on an old Saturn V booster—saw mission control—the works—and at the end of the tour there was a visitors’ center where stood actual astronaut spacesuits, and I mean, that was just something that a three-year-old sees and never forgets, and lining the wall, there were framed photographs of every astronaut, and that was something else a three-year-old sees and never forgets, because she noticed a conspicuous oversight.

  Where were the women astronauts?155

  Well, that just wouldn’t do at all, and from then on, Susan was committed to solving that particular problem. During her youth and adolescence in Jackson, Mississippi, she put the full measure of her energies into following the “astronaut track”: a literal checklist of things you needed to study and be able to do in order to qualify for astronaut training. (She considered also becoming a NASA physicist, though the agency issued no such list for scientists; she’d just have to nose her way through on that one.)156 She followed the list with the devotion of Saint Sebastian, and it led her to Georgia Tech, and here was this guy, this Curt Niebur of Breese, Illinois, and he once harbored hopes of exploring the cosmos, too? But no longer? It made no sense—how could you lose your faith in space?

  What about planetary science? Susan asked Curt.157

  Curt had never heard of it. There’s such a thing?

  There was indeed! He could go to graduate school, get a doctorate in it. Sure, there were engineers bending metal and building the spacecraft, but why limit yourself? You become a planetary scientist with a background in engineering, and you could do it all.

  So that’s what he did. It was a revelation, and Susan, his deliverance. They ended up together at Washington University in St. Louis, Susan studying physics, and Curt, planetary science. His graduate advisor was Ray Arvidson, the deputy lead on proposals for a pair of Mars rovers—the same robots that Curt would one day add to his portfolio as program scientist at NASA headquarters. Ray expected his students to get real-world experience in addition to doing research. (You were going to do research.) Thus spake Ray: Your day job is your research. Your night job is teaching assistant. Your sleep job is Mars rover operations.

  So to give him that experience, Arvidson and his colleagues would say, Hey, Curt, we need you to look over this part of the Mars proposal and tell us what you think. And Curt would do his best and offer his suggestions. Could he have really swayed the opinions of Jedi masters like Arvidson or the mission lead, Steve Squyres? Unlikely. But they were giving him the chance to try and exposure to a planetary mission at its earliest iterations: PowerPoint, paperwork, and prayer. One of Curt’s tasks involved developing different operational scenarios. Here’s your rover. It’s on Mars. You only have so much power and so much room on your hard drive. When the rover rolls, it takes this many resources. When it drills, it takes that many. They dumped those constraints on him and said, Curt, figure out the first ninety days of the mission. How many times are we going to drive? How far? How many drill sites will we do? How much data can we collect? When do we recharge? When do we return the science? It was a complicated simulation, and they gave it to him, this guy from Breese whose white telescope first brought Mars into his universe, the same Mars he was now planning space missions for. Curt, fortunately (in keeping with his character), was too young and naive to realize how intimidated he should have been, and when the proposal was selected by NASA for flight, he took it as a great compliment when one day he was told by a JPL engineer that the very complicated spreadsheet he wrote tracking a kazillion details would now be a part of operations planning—that the professionals at the lab would take it from here, expanding upon it, modifying it, making it more realistic. Curt was now some small part of space exploration. Just like that! Four years earlier, if not for Susan—who was herself plowing through a physics doctorate—his life’s work might have been building bolts for Airbus fuselages.

  They married in 1999. By graduation, Susan still had her sights on joining the agency. She wanted to work at he
adquarters, and few goals could have been more preposterous. NASA, everyone explained, just didn’t work that way. If you were under fifty, to send a résumé there was to waste a stamp. So she attacked from the side, earned her way into the prestigious Presidential Management Fellows program, an internship operation run by the U.S. Office of Personnel and Management. Through it she managed to get that headquarters assignment.

  The fellowship didn’t pay much, so to make it work, Curt took a job at Raytheon, a defense contractor that paid pretty well. His work was hodgepodge: they just wanted someone with an advanced degree to take a look at different programs from a broad perspective and to help pull pieces together. Later, he transferred to a nonmilitary division, and his job was to encourage nonscientists—farmers, for example—to use Earth satellite data to do things like monitor the health of their crops.

  It was good work, but after two years of Susan coming home each evening beaming with joy at the Best Job in the World, he was primed to move on. A position at NASA headquarters opened, and it was a long shot because—look, Susan aside, there were no young people at headquarters—none! But Susan, having kicked open the door as a fellow and now leading the entire Discovery mission program at headquarters, demonstrated to the AARP crowd that you didn’t have to be sixty to do good work. And so when this Curt kid, this scamp, applied—Hey, is he related to Susan?—he was hired.

  Three weeks after Curt started, his boss sent Susan an email asking if her husband would like to take over the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter as program scientist. You had to actually memorize email addresses back then, and everyone knew Susan’s and no one knew Curt’s, so that’s just how people did things. He and his wife were a team. For his part, Curt had only a passing familiarity with Europa (he knew it was a moon of Jupiter) and knew next to nothing about this thing called JIMO. What little he did had come recently from a guy named Dave Senske at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Still, replied Curt, resplendent with that new car smell: “I’m definitely interested!”