The Mission

by David W. Brown

  It became clear to Curt early on that JIMO was one of those big ideas that just didn’t translate to the real world. But as long as Sean O’Keefe was NASA administrator, JIMO and Project Prometheus were untouchable, and it was Curt’s job to make it a mission worth flying. He worked closely with the members of the JIMO science definition team: the ad hoc beaker of scientists whose job it was to determine the detailed scientific concerns of the mission. It’s where Curt met Ron Greeley, the maestro conducting this symphony, and Bob Pappalardo and Louise Prockter. It’s where he came really to understand the complexities of NASA and How Things Worked. It’s also where he first learned to appreciate the dangers that an exploration gap would pose for worlds beyond Mars.

  NASA began exploring the outer planets in 1973, when the spacecraft Pioneer 10 became the first vessel to cross the asteroid belt. Astronomers had a pretty good handle on the big things in the belt; there were more than a million asteroids out there one kilometer or larger, but it wasn’t like The Empire Strikes Back or anything. You’d have a much harder time trying to hit an asteroid than miss it. (Space is big.) No, the tiny rocks were the problem. They were impossible to spot telescopically, and because Pioneer 10 was coursing along at thirty thousand miles per hour, an asteroid the size of a rice grain would pass through it like an armor-piercing shell. Before launch, scientists gave poor Pioneer 10 a name-appropriate ten-percent chance of being destroyed.158 But it wasn’t, and once it crossed the barrier impenetrable, NASA never stopped.

  One by one, the outer planets of the solar system flickered to life. Jupiter was first, lit by Pioneer 10. The same year, Pioneer 11 launched for Saturn. Voyagers 1 and 2 followed, sweeping through the Jovian system just as Pioneer 11 reached the ringed world. The Voyagers each in turn would maintain the light, with Voyager 2 continuing to Uranus. After it illuminated that inscrutable ice giant, Galileo launched, its target: Jupiter, to stay. Voyager 2, meanwhile, cast its beam on Neptune, and Cassini launched, cruising along as Galileo, safely in orbit, made Jupiter’s frozen and fiery moons real, and, while there, found an ocean at Europa. Just after Galileo’s eight-year residency ended, Cassini commenced its tenure at Saturn. Only one planet remained: Pluto, and New Horizons would get there soon enough.

  In all, it took seventeen years to go from inching past the asteroid belt to exploring every planet within three billion miles. From then on, humankind established a sort of permanent residency in the outer solar system with the orbiters Galileo and Cassini. But this was only possible because of a rigid exploration cadence: while one spacecraft was encountering a world, another was cruising to some other target. While one was cruising, another was being built. You break the chain—launch nothing new during another spacecraft’s encounter—and you would end up, at some point, with an exploration desert. The outer planets would go dark. It took seven years for Cassini to reach Saturn. Seven! Galileo took six years to reach Jupiter. Voyager 2 took twelve to turn up at Neptune. Had NASA, for example, waited until Galileo ended in 2003 to begin building Cassini, the outer planets would have gone dark for a full decade—if researchers were lucky. Nothing being explored meant no new data coming in meant fewer grants meant fewer scientists in the field meant fewer pushing for exploration in the first place, and repeat, the outer planets ensnared in a system of exponential decay.

  So the Quad Studies had to work. Something had to launch. Cassini was still fresh at Saturn, but it wouldn’t fly forever. Something needed to leave Earth, and soon. The field was counting on it. For that reason, Louise Prockter as the science co-lead for the Ganymede mission felt like an increasingly inspired choice. Curt knew that she and Dave Senske would devise a mission almost irresistible—Galileo on steroids—and he knew that the Europa leads knew that as well. Her presence would force the Europa study to produce the most astounding, affordable, and capable mission possible, and even if they did not, Louise and Dave would still get something to Jupiter.

  Chapter 4

  The Center of the Universe

  IN FEBRUARY 2005 JOHN CULBERSON SQUEEZED HIS copy of the NASA budget request, all three hundred eighty-nine pages of it, blood draining from his knuckles and rising to his face as he read each elapsing line.159 There it was, in twelve-point Helvetica: “An investigation of Jupiter’s icy moons will not be the first demonstration for Prometheus Nuclear Systems and Technology.”160 JIMO had been “deferred,” and would soon be declared, formally, “indefinitely deferred,” and there was nothing he could do to save it. No one at NASA headquarters had even bothered telling him, a lowly congressman—from Houston, yes, but west Houston—a dilettante, then, who represented neither NASA nor its employees. He’d adopted JIMO as his thing, and he’d promised Jet Propulsion Laboratory the money, and it had appeared, and yet JIMO did not.161

  The insolence! Thanks for the check, Congress, but here at headquarters, we have some better ideas for the money. The shortsightedness! JIMO is too expensive, and we have more pressing needs elsewhere. Elsewhere? The parochialism! It was textbook NASA headquarters: no vision, no concept of its best interests, and a smug willingness to bite the hand. Inch when you should yard. Punt when you should throw long bombs. Not that there weren’t other worthy NASA programs out there, but JIMO was the will of Congress. If the agency wanted more money for moon rockets and space capsules (where the funds were now flowing), it could simply have asked him for it.162 Sure, NASA was technically allowed to cannibalize the money directed by Congress for JIMO, but this was can versus should. Congress appropriated in lump sums, and a concurrent conference committee report explained the breakdown: what the money was for and why. But while the budget was law, the report was not. Agencies of the federal government, including NASA, customarily followed the guidance of the committee report because it was just bad form to annoy the representative-attached hand that was writing the check. Clearly, however, this is how it would be with the new NASA administrator.

  Culberson wondered: Did headquarters not see that the Europa mission had it all? Did they not care? Finding life on Europa would be a turning point in human history and shift attitudes on a civilizational scale. John could see it, this magical and transformational moment, the announcement of life by the president on a stage stacked with scientists, scores of men and women wearing sobersided expressions commensurate with their roles in having changed everything evermore. He saw the stories the next day, the polls in the weeks that followed, reflecting the immediate invigoration of the instinctive love every American has for NASA. The agency wanted more money? Too easy. Find a fish in an alien ocean and watch the world rally. Even the gormless bureaucrats at headquarters had to know that. The public would demand deeper exploration yet, and JIMO’s Prometheus propulsion, flight proven, would power those newly urgent and energized missions beyond the asteroid belt.

  It was all set: the future of the agency, science, society, and spacecraft. And it was now “deferred,” with NASA rejecting not only Europa but also its best chance ever to do away with chemical propulsion—a really great thing in 1926, when Robert Goddard invented the liquid-fueled rocket, and eighty years was a good run, but I mean come on.163 NASA needed nuclear reactors in space, and knew it, and here was Congress, checkbook open, pen twirling between its fingers, clicky click, asking how much Mike Griffin, Sean O’Keefe’s successor, needed. There was only one answer to that, and it wasn’t Thanks for the offer of Gene Roddenberry, but we’re happy with Patrick O’Brian. Also: We’re keeping the money.

  Whether headquarters realized it or not, it just didn’t work that way. John had been doing this since he was a second-year student in law school. He was pushing fifty now. Had headquarters any idea what a personal affront this was? How heedless and self-destructive? Had they any idea what retaliation might mean if he were to affix their thumbs to a vise and tighten the screw? John Culberson knew how to make it very tight indeed.

  He first entered elected office in 1986 by way of an open seat in the Texas House of Representatives. He was boyish in those days, clean
-cut, single, eyeglasses then thick as a windshield, and nobody expected the seat to open in the first place, but without warning, the incumbent decided instead to mount a quixotic run for railroad commissioner, though not before endorsing an heir: Herman Botard, Texan, a real man of the people, a proven quantity.164 Which was nice for Herman, but there was no way a seat in the House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas was going to open up without a battle, and five other would-be Texas state representatives stepped forward, including a couple of multimillionaires, and John Culberson, who was, on happy occasion, a hundredaire.165 And don’t think they didn’t notice! A student without experience against men of ability, of achievement, of standing. And those glasses!—a bookworm child against Proven Quantities? Well, it was going to be ugly but lessons had to be taught.

  In his favor: John knew forward and back the rules of politics. He understood the commonsense issues that mattered to his fellow Lone Star State residents: Taxes. Traffic. Trade. He was a good, God-fearing Christian, went to church on Sundays, and fit the spirit, if not necessarily the image, of a Texas Republican. He learned political survival and success at the feet of his father, Jim Culberson, a photographer turned campaign consultant, who believed before most how a new form of media would win elections. Television advertising was practically a dark art in those days, but Jim was a real artist who knew the right incantations: how to point a camera, focus a lens, compose a shot, and tell a story. He went all in on televised campaign commercials and dispelled any doubts about radio’s replacement by reelecting John Tower to the U.S. Senate in 1966. Tower, previously a Democrat, had slipped into the job by way of a special election when Lyndon Johnson left the Senate to become vice president. Tower was one of just two Republicans representing the South in the Senate and was Texas’s first GOP senator since Reconstruction. The Democrats, who otherwise had the region in a hammerlock, should have picked off Tower with ease. But Jim had delivered the Republicans a W, and after that, for the family Culberson, it was T-minus-five and counting. And all the while, there was young John, hauling his dad’s cameras around, watching how the game was played.

  That’s where he learned to turn this thing around, his done-for campaign for the Texas House in 1986, learned that the way to win is to sell your weakness as your strength, so that when they attack you, it paradoxically helps. In the end, the eyeglasses saved his campaign. Unlike his millionaire, middle-aged adversaries, John was still young enough to have books such as Xenophon’s Anabasis on his nightstand, and in those pages, the solution to his problem. He read and relished the story of a Spartan army of mercenaries moving to seize the Persian throne. He learned how that army—the “marching republic of ten thousand”—was beaten, its generals slain. He saw how, being built of good Greeks, the leaderless army did what good Greeks do: they held an election. Who would lead them on a desperate drive from the Fertile Crescent to the Black Sea? No winner emerged. Again they voted, and then again, until finally, young Xenophon, watching from the periphery, stepped up, threw his laurels into the ring, and said, “If you bid me lead you, my age shall be no excuse to stand between me and your orders.”166

  Well, who wouldn’t vote for that sort of pluck and vigor? You need a leader, and I won’t hide behind my youth to avoid the burdens of the job. And there it was! John’s campaign strategy, written by the designers of democracy itself. It had certainly been validated, and he pushed his freshness and willingness all the way to the voting booth. It was the first of a string of decisive Culberson wins to the Texas legislature until the turn of the millennium, when George H. W.’s old seat in the U.S. House of Representatives opened up. (It had been filled for the previous thirty years by Bill Archer, but I mean it would always be George Herbert Walker’s.)

  John’s opponent spent three and a half million dollars against him, while John spent dimes in comparison (he had no millions to spend) and he kissed the grandbabies of constituents who first voted him into office all those years ago, shook hands, and posed for pictures, his boyishness still there, even as crow’s-feet crawled toward his temples—and in the end, John’s handshaking and backslapping and Hey, I haven’t seen you in years! I wanna fix the freeway and I need your vote. How’s the little one? What? In college now? Last time I saw him, he was on the T-ball team! Traffic’s a mess, and I want to solve it won the day.167

  John Culberson was sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives on January 20, 2001, all of this perhaps a footnote in American political history, this changing of letterheads but not of the guard, this sliding of now-dominant Texas Republicans across the political chessboard—as inevitable in retrospect as the tides in nature—if not for the intervention of Tom DeLay, the majority whip in the House. The two men had much in common: both were native Texans, both represented Houston (a quietly massive city, fourth largest in the United States, behind Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City), and both were whips, charged with keeping party members in line, John having once served in that role in the Texas House.

  Members of Congress are placed on committees, the work of government parceled between the lot, with some working on, say, military procurement, some working on education, and so on down the line, all the business of a functioning democracy.168 In 2003 DeLay called Culberson into his office and made him an offer: he wanted John on the appropriations committee, and John turned it down cold. He represented west Houston, Tom. He was already on transportation, and if there was going to be a committee change, he needed to get on energy (oil and gas being to his constituents what computers are to workers in Silicon Valley).169 Appropriations? Try telling a district of Republicans that you spend the government’s money for a living.

  DeLay was insistent, though, in the way that a man called the Hammer can be. See, said DeLay, you get on the energy committee or armed services or agriculture or education, and you can pump out legislation all day long, day or night—exhaust the nation’s supply of ink and toner if you’d like—and every single bill you write can be killed or left to die by the full House. That’s politics. But appropriations, John? The House cannot ignore it. The Senate cannot ignore it. The president cannot ignore it. There are only twelve bills that Congress absolutely must pass each year, and those are the twelve appropriations bills—one for each committee. The appropriations committee is the only one with jurisdiction over these twelve bills that must be signed into law. Every year. Do you see what I’m getting at, John? It’s the power of the purse. Appropriators dole dollars to the entire apparatus of government. If an office has a single employee, spends a thin dime on paperclips, the appropriations committee can touch them. But wait, hear me out, just so there’s no ambiguity here: even if the whole of the Congress decides to skip work for a year, those twelve bills absolutely must pass no matter what, and—hold on, John, because it gets better—in addition to designating money, you can make small, permanent law changes within an appropriations bill. You can do this to ensure that the people’s money is spent wisely.

  Well, who would pass up that kind of power? John agreed under the condition that DeLay accept that his (i.e., John’s) starting answer would be no on everything, that he was a Jeffersonian Republican, didn’t like spending borrowed money. And DeLay was OK with that because we’re all Republicans for crying out loud! And John said he’d only do it if he could be on the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA. He’d grown up loving space, wanted desperately as a boy to be an astronaut, lived a few miles from Rice Stadium, where, in September 1961, President Kennedy vowed to the world that the United States would put a man on the moon and then bring him back safely before the end of the decade. NASA’s aspirations had fallen a bit since JFK, and if John could touch NASA as a junior appropriator, what could he do once he had real authority?

  All of this coincided with a multiyear reorganization by the House and Senate of their respective appropriations subcommittees, to account for a new Department of Homeland Security and, later, to reduce the number of subcommittees from thirteen to t
en.170 NASA—now without a home—was moved to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary, which was renamed the Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice and Commerce, and Related Agencies. (State would soon be pulled from that pile.) Aside from making sentences veritable battlefields littered with commas, here is the upshot: in 2003, during a particularly grim stretch of fighting and loss in Iraq and Afghanistan, NASA no longer had to compete with its former committee-mate, the Department of Veterans Affairs, for the same pile of money. The following year, John Culberson learned about JIMO.

  BEFORE THE UNION Pacific Railroad came to town in 1895, Katy was little more than a rest stop for stagecoaches running between Houston and San Antonio.171 In those days, it wasn’t yet called Katy, and Texas was still the Old West as seen on film and in faded photographs, sunbaked clay on every horizon and stern, sun-bitten men, their mustaches, muskets, and hat stars. It was older, perhaps, even than the Old West as we imagine it. The cowboy hat had been around for only thirty years, and John Stetson still made them, personally. Santa Anna had been dead for less than twenty years, and the rallying cry “Remember the Alamo!” might well have been a question, because men and women still walked the Earth who were there, and actually did.

  Katy’s big break came on May 10, 1869, when railroad magnate Leland Stanford—later founder of the university—drove a golden spike through a steel rail in Utah, at last hammering together the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans with the skinny, sun-warmed lines of the Transcontinental Railroad. Over time railways spiderwebbed outward from the main line to junction towns, and here, just west of Houston, this sleepy stagecoach stopover with its verdant fields of farmland suddenly became one such interchange, connecting Missouri, Kansas, and Texas by way of a new junction: the MKT, but what locals and passers-through called simply the KT.172 The town built a train depot, and the name stuck, but spelled phonetically.