The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Not everyone gets to be an astronaut, however, and that includes a little boy from Houston who wasn’t good enough at math, had feet too flat to run fast, and wore spectacles like windshields. If a boy like that wants to save the space program, he’d better get elected to Congress—be given signature authority for NASA’s checkbook—view a Mars landing from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where spaceships are built and textbooks written about worlds previously unseen by human eyes, and where rovers are made that explode into bags of microwave popcorn, collide with other planets, survive, settle, and roll away.

  Which is why later that day, the lab’s Powers That Be ushered the gimlet-eyed John across campus, up and down the rolling hills of Saint Gabe, and through alleyways between hangars and office space. They filed, the group of them, into a building that could have been any building on any college campus in America, into a briefing room that might well have been retrofitted from a classroom, lots of rolling chairs, but also desks and desktops that folded across laps. Whiteboards and projection screens lined the room’s walls, the phantom residuals of erased doodles in some corners, impenetrable physics equations on others, and John sat and the scientists sat and the lab managers sat when appropriate, while others perched and crowded in the room’s rear. Here, everyone settled in and introductions were made, starting with John Casani, engineer of legend—an icon—one of the four pillars of Jet Propulsion Laboratory—that’s what they called them, the “four pillars”—the other three (though not all present) being Kane Casani, John’s brother and a former lab manager, now retired; Gentry Lee, chief engineer of Galileo and who oversaw all engineering of the rover that had just landed; and Tom Gavin, responsible for the lab’s flight projects. Space exploration was young, and these guys were old. They had been at the lab . . . forever, had done . . . everything. Also in the room was Charles Elachi, the director of the lab, who offered similarly impressive qualifications. Down the line they went like this, one pioneer after another, John Culberson casting eyes on explorers he had been reading about in Aviation Week and the journal Nature for decades now. Then someone dimmed the lights of the lecture hall and presented to the congressman the past, present, and future of American space exploration, with the proviso that only he, a member of appropriations—a man who understood now what wonders were possible—could make that future happen.

  Lab leadership walked him through everything way up there or soon to head way up there: Opportunity, the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey satellites, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Over in Building 179—the Spacecraft Assembly Facility—the Mars Science Laboratory rover would soon be under construction. Congressman, number six is the charm: Mars Science Laboratory, the most ambitious effort ever attempted to understand another planet. When it launched (only a few more years!), it would determine at last the habitability of Mars. The Red Planet, they assured him, was covered.

  They updated him on the Cassini mission to Saturn, launched in 1997 and seven years later settling in at last to reach its destination. Its companion probe, Huygens, would likewise land soon on Titan, a world virtually impenetrable by earthly telescopes because of its dense atmosphere. Who knew what wonders waited on the Titanian surface? There was likely liquid there, and the Huygens probe was designed to float. Cassini itself had made some impressive findings already, and its prime science mission had yet to begin. Among other things, they discovered that the radiation environment surrounding Jupiter—scanned along the way—was way worse than previously thought: it was a real spacecraft computer killer for future long-duration missions.186 Sure, Congressman, Cassini had gone way over budget during development, but it was all payoff from here on out. This thing would be a textbook shredder, a bargain at twice the price.

  Then the presentation turned to missions in the making, and the septuagenarian John Casani stood up carefully to present a project that he had been developing with other engineers, and he slapped onto the board something called the Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter, or JIMO, part of a project called Prometheus. And before Casani could even begin explaining JIMO, Congressman Culberson just knew. It was a revelation! It was beautiful, this thing—it looked from the artist’s illustration like the spaceship Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It could go anywhere, Casani explained, this vessel of exploration—Prometheus-1, it was called—but was designed especially for the Galilean moons and one called Europa in particular.

  John Culberson had heard of Europa. Had seen it countless times through his Celestron. But what they were describing here . . . They discussed the ice. They discussed the ocean beneath it, how the physics facilitated it—the tidal forces from Jupiter—and how it had been proven with the Galileo magnetometer. The water was warm down there, or anyway, warm enough. More research was needed, but there would be much more liquid water on Europa than on Earth. And as had driven the Mars program, the congressman knew, where there’s water, there might be life. They weren’t promising anything, the presenters. More research was needed. But at the bottom of Europa, water touched rock, which meant chemistry of some sort was taking place. More research was needed, but if that water and chemistry somehow encountered energy—hydrothermal vents, say, as on the bottom of Earth’s oceans (where life teemed), or—here was an idea—if Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment produced oxidants and simple organics on Europa’s surface, and if that material somehow made its way through the ice shell and into the ocean . . . Well, more research was needed. What were the engineering challenges of JIMO, really, next to what waited beneath the ice of this mysterious moon? And the congressman resolved immediately that JIMO, and a lander element, too, to scratch Europa’s surface, were goals worth meeting no matter the difficulty, whether engineering or legislative. If more research was needed, then he would find the money to make it happen, because . . . it just fit. All of it. JIMO’s place in the American space program and Europa’s place in space, infinite space, wondrous to behold and seeded by God with life. The more he learned about the origins of the universe, its growth and expansion and evolution—looking at the Prometheus-1, looking at the diagram of Europa and the descriptions of its chaotic, cracked crust—you could see the perfection and genius of God’s creation there, just as you could see it in every direction in the night sky, and those images from Hubble were snapshots of breathtaking arrangements of the same periodic table of elements found here on Earth, and the same fundamental rules of gravity, of thermodynamics, of physics, of mathematics. If life was here, it was there, in those other galaxies, and on the ice moon of Jupiter. Had to be. John was certain of it—perhaps more certain now than even the men giving the talks. But we needed to get there, which meant JIMO needed a patron—someone to push it firmly but gently through the legislative process. Congressman Culberson was resolved to do his part. And I mean, it was a sure thing! The Prometheus-1 was being built by the man who designed the Ranger and Mariner series of spacecraft, which, in the sixties and seventies, inaugurated an era of American exploration dominance of the inner solar system. The Rangers were instrumental in mapping the moon and enabling the Apollo landings; the Mariners mopped up the other planetary bodies. Mariner 2 was the first spacecraft to successfully encounter another planet (Venus), in 1962. Mariner 4 was the first spacecraft to successfully encounter Mars, in 1965. Mariner 10, first to Mercury, in 1974. Any single mission would have been an explorer’s crowning achievement. Casani did them all. Then he launched Voyager 1, was the project manager on the spacecraft Galileo to Jupiter, and then Cassini at launch. He was an engineer who knew how to get past the hardest part of any mission. Three billion miles? That was easy. The first inch off the launch pad? That was hard. But he wanted to do it again, on this thing called JIMO that might—though John had resolved already, would—find extant life elsewhere in our solar system. There was a second Garden of Eden beneath that ice shell, and its discovery—no, its confirmation—would outdo even the Apollo moon landings in the public imagination.

  By the end of the meeting, John Culberson had seen
enough, had seen his future and the future of humankind. He’d watched what the lab could do on Mars, knew what they’d done previously, seen the engineers who’d done it, and was given a glimpse of what they were yet to do, wanting only for a benefactor. He needed now only to insert funding into the federal budget, tell NASA to send it to the lab, and watch what happened next.

  And he did and did, and what happened next, of course, was that NASA took the money and rather than send it to JIMO and Project Prometheus, the agency sent it to a Mars program where it would be used to draft rockets on drawing boards and design crew vehicles that might never travel beyond the International Space Station, if they were ever built at all. What happened was that NASA headquarters had decided to tug on Superman’s cape. What happened, John would never let happen again.

  Chapter 5

  Station

  TODD MAY GOT HIS FIRST JOB AT FOURTEEN AND FROM then on never went more than a week without working one place or another. The gas station job wasn’t the first time he worked, of course; during summers as a boy he had mowed lawns in his Fairhope, Alabama, neighborhood and built up a pretty good business: one or two yards a day. This was just his first official job, and he made two-fifteen an hour checking oil, pumping gas, cleaning windshields. His mom and dad were big on instilling a work ethic in their boy, and in high school his football coach was inflexible on the subject: you worked during the summer. The gas station job didn’t last forever, and he next found work at a farm, where he threw bushels of new potatoes onto trucks for fourteen hours a day, five days a week, side by side with migrant workers. He painted houses. He worked in a cement plant. He worked for a fiberglass pipe company in Biloxi. He worked in a chicken processing facility. He was the only white guy there, and he sat there all day long grabbing chickens as they passed by and hanging them up on hooks. So it was that before he was old enough to buy cigarettes, let alone beer, Todd had learned that he was a lunch pail guy. How to appreciate hard work and the people who did it. And he learned also that he was a pack mule, that he could work from sunup to sundown, too, sweat, do manual labor, and not think twice about it. And all that—the hanging of chickens, the hauling of cement sacks, the loading of potatoes, the scrubbing fingers free of fiberglass shards—almost prepared him to work for Alan Stern.

  The two men moved to NASA headquarters in 2007. Alan had been hired to run the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which meant if it went to space and did science, Associate Administrator Alan could touch it—and he had a long list of things he wanted to touch. A prolific scientist who spent his career trying to send a spacecraft to Pluto, Stern saw a science program flat on its back: a beleaguered bureaucracy bereft of innovation, inattentive to researchers, and flying far fewer missions than it could. The cause: cost overruns. The James Webb Space Telescope, which would succeed Hubble, was proposed as a low-cost five-hundred-million-dollar project, leveraging technology developed during the Strategic Defense Initiative.187, 188 The telescope was now flirting with five billion dollars.189 The Mars Science Laboratory, meanwhile, endorsed in the 2003 Decadal Survey as the top medium-class Mars mission (i.e., it would cost less than six hundred fifty million dollars), had, by 2007, ballooned by one billion and counting.190, 191 The new rover bothered Alan especially because it never had a prayer at coming in on budget. It would weigh five times more than Spirit or Opportunity—tilted the scales at nearly one ton—which meant everything from actuator lubricants to avionics software had to be redesigned and tested.192 And the schemes to land the wheeled beast on martis firma were evolving into increasingly elaborate Rube Goldberg devices. Airbags alone or retrorockets wouldn’t work. Parachutes wouldn’t work. No combination, it seemed, of those proven landing technologies would work. Simulation after simulation created crater after crater. What they finally proposed went way, way beyond the lab’s trademark So Crazy It Might Work. They designed an autonomous landing platform that would be delivered with parachute and retrorockets. Twenty-five feet above the Martian surface, it would stop, float in midair like a flying saucer scoping out a cow, and from there become a sky crane, lowering the rover onto the surface before cutting its tether and blasting away. This was certainly ambitious, but it was never “medium.” And Jet Propulsion Laboratory had really boxed headquarters into a corner on this one, because once any mission—but especially one to Mars—crossed the billion-dollar boundary, the world started watching. Failure, in short, would be untenable, would set the program back by decades. So it had to work.

  But whether you wanted to stare at stars or roll tracks across rusty alien dirt—difficult endeavors, both—Stern wasn’t taking excuses today. Setbacks may not have been your fault, but they were your responsibility. You were engineers, so solve them without help from the Bank of NASA. After all, the American space program was a Nice to Have. Was the future of humanity to live on other worlds? Almost certainly, but in the present and on this one, there was a Great Recession and a housing bubble beginning to burst, which meant when NASA went over budget, it had to do without, or rob from other internal initiatives. In space science, that meant scuttling disciplined missions to reward profligate ones.

  Alan didn’t like that way of doing business—he’d led missions that fell victim to the wastefulness of other people—and he intended to fix the problem. Not the national celestial malaise, or the fractured hand of Adam Smith, but the agency’s acquiescence to projects with swelling price tags. To get more missions to space, he would bludgeon overbudget projects into submission: this is the funding you agreed to, launch on it, or don’t launch at all, but the coffers are hereby closed. He had succeeded with New Horizons, his Pluto mission, which launched a year earlier. Why couldn’t fiscal discipline work across the Science Mission Directorate?193

  But Stern was an outsider when chosen for the job, and he knew it. Though he helped lift from Cape Canaveral one of NASA’s most prominent, promising missions, he had never actually worked for the agency. (He ran the Pluto mission from the Boulder branch of the Southwest Research Institute, a private science outfit.) So to help him navigate the alien agency bureaucracy, he recruited to be his deputy and compass Todd May, a longtime NASA manager at Marshall Space Flight Center. An insider.

  Todd, a classically trained materials engineer, had been with the agency for eighteen years by then, though working at NASA had never really been the plan. He was always going to be an engineer of some sort, and an Auburn University engineer if he could help it. His dad was an Alabama entrepreneur in the chemical and paper business, and Todd figured that one day he would do that, too. And his dad was a real worker, an inventive guy—held four patents in dual laminate plastic piping. Pre-May-père, the industry used pipes made of stainless steel because of its strength and resistance to corrosion. But resistance to corrosion was not the same as doesn’t corrode. The secret to solving the corrosion problem, knew the elder May, was one word: plastics. The problem was that plastic lacked strength. So he invented a way of marrying a plastic lining to fiberglass outers so that a plastic pipe could be rhinoceros strong. That sort of bare-knuckle engineering suffused life at chez May. Once, when it snowed—which was almost never on the Gulf Coast, but it happened—his dad got this big piece of clear plexiglass, put it in the oven, and then bent it into the shape of a sled, and—well, it was the coolest sled in the neighborhood. When Todd was a little older, his dad made him a plexiglass skateboard, two layers, clear on the top and this marble pattern on the bottom. So Todd grew up around materials, had an intuitive understanding of their strengths, would even chew on things—just gnaw gently in an improvised effort to interpret intrinsic material properties, and it was normal, this homespun structural analysis, a thing you did as a kid.

  When he enrolled at Auburn, however, he checked the box marked “electrical engineering.” He knew even then that it was a mistake, and one day, while sitting in a circuits class, it hit him hard: you could spend a lifetime doing this, and you’d die of old age never having seen an electron actually traveli
ng down a wire. He liked stuff he could touch, really feel. The very culture of electrical engineering felt wrong—right for some, but not for Todd. So, when reps from the materials engineering program came along and pitched the field of the physical, Todd called his dad and took the leap.

  Until that switch, May’s academic performance might have measured as mediocre to good. He was the class clown in high school and an infrequent presence in the classrooms of Auburn. He’d turn up to learn the exam dates, and, thanks to a photographic memory, would read the material the day before and appear for tests just long enough to bubble in the correct answers. His heretofore most comprehensive science at Auburn had involved the tasting of the salts and occasional ethyl alcohol experiments with his fraternity brothers. But when Todd switched—returned home, really—to materials engineering, he was all in. Devout and born again. Loved it. Straight-A student. Not only attended every class but exhausted the course catalog. He took every materials engineering class offered by the best engineering university on the planet, and when they finally made him don cap and gown, he’d completed his undergrad with work just shy of a doctorate. He was an ABD: all but dissertation. He’d aced every doctoral course, but minus that D, lacked the degree. Todd figured he could always go back later and pick it up, and anyway, he already had a great job lined up and was ready to get to work. Atlanta Gas Light, a natural gas wholesaler, had hired him to help work out the bugs in its system—literally. Actual bugs. The company’s pipelines were made of a particular polymer that, it turned out, grubs found delectable and would eat right through. It was a public hazard, and they needed someone to reformulate the material such that it wasn’t grub grub. It was a good materials job and they made him a good material offer. But before he started, a friend who worked at Marshall gave him some advice: forget fighting this boring battle against beetle larvae and come to NASA. The agency needed a guy like Todd, this fellow who looked like a linebacker, who had Einstein’s eyes and von Braun’s brains. And what kind of engineer says no to NASA? Especially an Auburn engineer. An Alabama engineer. It’s where American space flight was born—Huntsville, of all places!—where von Braun’s bevy built the Redstone rocket that sent Alan Shepard to space, and where was born the behemoth Saturn V that put Armstrong on the moon.