When the Quad Studies had started, NASA headquarters formed a science definition team for what Bob Pappalardo and Ron Greeley, who would lead it, would call Europa Explorer. A science definition team comes up with the science goals for a prospective mission. Team members are not doing new research but rather organizing and taking full measure of the collective knowledge of the planetary target in question. Each scientist brings his or her expertise to the table (e.g., geology, magnetic fields, composition) and says: Here is what we know. What are the biggest things we don’t? What are the most important questions that this mission should answer? How do we answer them? They use these questions to build a “science traceability matrix”—a straightforward but densely detailed grid listing the science goals of a mission and how to achieve them—and move forward from that.
Bob was essentially the assistant to Ron, who was conductor of this symphony of scientists, each cell and section adding a rich and complementary layer to the composition. You wouldn’t call Ron a “strong leader,” because it implied something he was not. Rather, he was a leader with gentle fortitude, and he prodded you in the right direction without your realizing it. This was even more impressive since Ron could have crushed you, whether with the weight of his experience or the force of his intellect or his blunt power in what was, after all, a political program. He could have dictated terms for the mission. But he did not. He’d been there from the start, in human and robotic exploration, in the field of planetary science, understood the whys of how things worked, had defined some of those whys in the first place, and perhaps that shaped him. When Ron first set foot on a NASA facility, Apollo science was practically a blank piece of paper. By the time he left, he had helped choose landing sites for moon missions and had pioneered the science of lunar caves. And it was just the beginning: of his career, of the space program, of true exploration, of a new realm of scientific inquiry.
The real start, though, was in Mississippi in 1957. Before that, there was Ohio. California. Texas. Alabama. Colorado. Greeley was an air force brat; he came from lots of different places. Ron had wanted to be a geologist, had known it since he was eight, and it gave him clarity of purpose, focus. The Greeleys would drive cross-country, back and forth, one base to the next, and when they’d roll through the mountains, where rock was cut away for road, you could see the stone stratigraphy, and it fascinated him. But Mississippi was where he met Cynthia—Cindy—and it all proceeded from there. They were in high school then, and he was the lifeguard at the Great Southern Country Club pool in Gulfport. She was there to swim. They struck up a conversation. He would be a junior when summer ended; she a sophomore, barely sixteen. He had lived all over the country. She was from here. She had a date that weekend. So did he. But after that? Yes.
So Ron and Cindy planned it out while they spent that overlapping year together. Her parents, wise and genteel, wouldn’t allow them to get engaged while she was still in high school. It was just . . . too much. He graduated, enrolled at Mississippi State University, a five-hour drive away, and during her senior year, he drove home to see her every weekend. The day she graduated from high school, Ron pulled out an engagement ring and proposed. She said yes. He was studying geology at Mississippi State, and she studied chemistry at Mississippi State College for Women, just twenty-five minutes away. The distance was more bearable, and the plan was to graduate and marry before he pursued his doctorate. She would have finished school by then, too, or have been on the cusp, and they could really get started on life.
During Cindy’s freshman year, his sophomore, he was headed her way to pick her up for one of their regular dates. It was always hot in Mississippi, but in March 1960, on that short stretch of Highway 82 between Starkville and Columbus, laced along the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, at night it could drop into the midthirties easy, and there’s not much between the two towns (or in the towns, really), but that night, there was another car, and tires crossed the yellow line, and the vehicles met head-on. Ron was in a sports car, and this was when automotive safety features consisted entirely of whose car was heaviest, and Ron’s was not. His head absorbed the worst of it, the concussive blow crunching it in places, slicing it in others. The emergency response team rushed him to Columbus Air Force Base (his father still an air force man), and they took one look at Ron, the surgeons on call, and they knew they could not save this one. They flew him to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, where maybe there was a chance.
Maxwell was a training base, its lineage beginning with a special school in 1910 set up by a man named Wilbur Wright, who felt certain that his heavier-than-air flying machine would be of benefit to civilian and soldier alike, and that those with surnames other than Wright should know how to fly them. The Wright school didn’t last long, but its legacy made it a natural choice, much later, for an air force training center. By the sixties, airmen and officers of every specialty converged there for advanced training, including physicians, and its hospital was first rate. When Ron Greeley arrived, this son of an air force officer, the prognosis was unfavorable, and the attending physicians knew it, and the race was on to stabilize the patient and find specialists who might be able to piece Ron back together.
He spent the next three months in that hospital room. Cindy was there, too. And when he could talk, they talked, and having had this close a shave with the reaper’s blade, they made some decisions. Life is too short. Yes. Anything can happen. Anything. Do we want to wait? No. When the finest doctors in the U.S. military had finally made Ron whole again, he was released, and he and Cindy married immediately.
Cindy would make sacrifices for this change in plans. She quit school, found a job at the university press, first as a typist and then as an editor. She worked on things like Mississippi agricultural brochures, of which there were many, and she did it all: design, type-setting, and print prep. She continued taking classes on her lunch hour but belonged more to the Student Wives Club. Ron, meanwhile, back on his feet and in need of money to feed his new family, joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Everybody in those days did a stint in the service, it seemed, and certainly Greeley the Elder was an example to be followed. Anyway, that monthly thirty dollars from ROTC really helped the young student marriage. The downside was that eventually he’d have to serve two years on active duty, but they would cross that bridge soon enough. Global sanity seemed to be holding, and America’s presence in Vietnam consisted barely of a battalion of advisors. If President Kennedy upped that number even tenfold, that was still less than a division’s strength.
Soon enough, Ron graduated with a bachelor of science in geology, and the Student Wives Club threw Cindy a small ceremony of her own. Ron had to choose whether to knock out that two-year commitment to the army or postpone things to pursue a master’s degree. He went with the master’s.
They were a serious couple, always had been. Before they’d even married, Ron and Cindy made their first major purchase together: a canoe for sixty-five dollars—sixty-five!—exorbitant!—but they were outdoorsy, she a Mississippi woman, he a geologist. She taught him the water, and he loved it, learned to love boats. They ran rapids, paddled down rivers and tributaries, and found camping spots. Her folks had a house out on Cat Island in the Gulf of Mexico that they used for vacations, and they swam and skied and paddled away the summers.
When it came time to choose a doctoral program, it boiled down to the University of Nevada or the University of Missouri at Rolla. Nevada made him an offer, but he liked the micropaleontology program at Rolla and its attendant fellowship, and geography (Missouri was closer to home) put Rolla over the edge. Ron started teaching as part of the program, first as an assistant, and he was good at it, and soon stood on his own. Micropaleontology entailed studying tiny fossils under a microscope. If you were a geologist in the early sixties, that was about the best you could do financially, because it meant money from the oil industry. When Greeley graduated in 1966 (his dissertation was on lunulithiform bryozoans), the
military deferrals ended, and he had a nine-month window before having to report for training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore. Ron took a job at a Standard Oil office in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he put his expertise in micropaleontology to good use, and where, when his eventual army hitch was up, he’d have a good job waiting. Standard Oil subsidiaries and partners would bring in these giant cores drilled by oil rigs and extracted from deep within the Earth, and his job was to take slices from the core and study them under the microscope. He was looking for foraminifera (undersea invertebrates, though you just called them “bugs”), and if particular bugs presented in the slice, that would tell the drillers that they were boring the right holes—that oil was likely nearby. No bugs, and the rigs would relocate to begin the coring process anew.
Ron did this for nine months and absolutely hated every minute of it.
It was almost a relief in 1967 when he reported to Army Intelligence School. (Almost.) They put him through an intensive course on aerial photography—“imagery intelligence,” it was called—in which reconnaissance aircraft flew over an area and took standard and infrared images for later analysis. The training was geared to prepare him for Vietnam. Global sanity, it seemed, was never the best bet. By now, troop numbers were sky high—nearly a half million U.S. military personnel were there—a hundred thousand more than the year before, and thousands would spend the rest of their lives in Southeast Asia.237 It was going to happen, Ron’s tour, and he would experience that army marching cadence that begins:
Got a letter in the mail / Go to war or go to jail . . .
When Ron finished intelligence school, he got his letter in the mail.238 He opened it. He scanned it.
. . . Greeley is assigned . . .
. . . Presidio . . . San Francisco . . .
. . . attached to the Space Sciences Division . . .
. . . National Aeronautics and Space Administration . . .
. . . Ames Research Center, Moffett Field . . .
There weren’t many geologists in the U.S. Army, but being a geologist didn’t prevent you from going to Vietnam. There weren’t many imagery intelligence officers in the U.S. Army, either, and being one pretty much guaranteed you would go to Vietnam.
But there also weren’t many people in the army who could read the words lunulithiform bryozoans, which sounded like something moon related and could possibly be of benefit to perhaps the only institution in America that had a higher priority than the ongoing conflict overseas.
Got a letter in the mail, read Ron’s letter, essentially. Go to Ames or go to jail . . .
JFK had called for an astronaut on the moon by decade’s end, and his successor, LBJ—a real space hawk from the start—was going to see it through. But despite the urgency, and like every federal office, NASA had a maximum head count for civil servants. To meet the impossibly accelerated goal of a crewed lunar landing, the agency exploited a loophole that said that military service members tasked to NASA didn’t work against the agency’s head count limitation. And a guy like Lieutenant Ron Greeley was perfect for the moon mission. NASA now had miles of surface terrain photography from the Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter reconnaissance spacecraft. Geologically speaking, the moon was one big, baffling mystery. Where was it cement-solid and where was it limestone-porous and crumbly? Was it covered in places, meters deep, with ash-like cosmic dust? And what would astronauts do when they got there, anyway? What valuable geology could you do at the various proposed landing sites? Furthermore, the astronauts were going to take pristine samples back to Earth. What defined a good sample, and how could you teach a bunch of test pilots to tell the difference?
Ron wasn’t a moon expert, but this was the sort of gee-whiz geology that not even his eight-year-old self could have imagined because of its fantasticality and preposterous ambition, so, of course, he was beside himself. And even without considering the Southeast Asian alternative, as far as army hitches went, an assignment to Ames was about as good a posting as any soldier was ever likely to get. A bonus: where the doctors had reassembled Ron following the car crash as a young man, scars remained, and he had grown a beard to help conceal them. But Mother Green sanctioned no facial hair—this isn’t the navy at sea, Lieutenant. NASA, however, didn’t care. Grow it as long as you’d like, Dr. Greeley! And that was his rank at Ames: doctor. It turned out that his only actual connection to the Presidio was the PX (for tax-free grocery shopping) and to pick up his paycheck. He didn’t report to anyone. He didn’t file reports with anyone. He didn’t wear a uniform. He just . . . showed up at NASA like a standard-issue civil servant. If you didn’t see his personnel file, you would never have known.
They had driven from Missouri to California, Ron and Cindy and Randall, their firstborn, packed in a blue Chevy station wagon, and rolled across rolling prairies, waved at the passing amber waves, and drove through mountains carved away, stratigraphy showing, Ron’s life, full circle. Cindy found work near Ron at the naval air station in Sunnyvale. She was an administrative assistant; they called her the secretary of the navy. The air force was building a test center for satellites, and the navy was in charge of its construction. Cindy mostly handled paperwork related to that project. It was interesting stuff. Artificial satellites were still a pretty new invention and the Defense Department didn’t want any single contractor knowing everything there was to know about one of them being built, so each floor in the new building was sealed off, keeping things physically compartmentalized. Cindy also took night classes that year at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Deciding finally that it was her turn to go back to school full-time, she enrolled at San Jose State College, but changed majors from chemistry to history. She soon, at last, earned her degree.
And there they were: the historian and the moon scientist, making lunar history. At night, the two of them would sometimes go outside and look up at the moon and just think . . . wow. Not only about the Apollo program, but where their lives had taken them. They’d look up, and they knew it would happen, the moon landings—had no doubt. What they didn’t know was that with Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon and his second sentence on its powdery surface—an instant geologic analysis—this would not be the capstone of some brief, bracing phase of Ron’s career in geology but rather would mark the beginning of something new entirely. After his two-year army hitch ended, Ron was supposed to go back to Lafayette and look for bugs, but you put men on the moon, be among the first to apply scientific rigor to something so spectacular and unsullied, unpack the geology of a pristine world unspoiled by humankind, and you look around yourself at Ames, see not only what they’re doing—they—us—what we’re doing—and not temporarily: Armstrong was the starting point—and he knew Armstrong! There were astronauts to train and more celestial geology to do, and not only here—von Braun was talking about Mars! Knowing now what Ron and Cindy knew, having done what they did, you don’t pack the station wagon and head back south to pick petroleum-portending bugs from oil rig cores, you just don’t.
Job openings at Ames were scarce, so he applied annually for independent research grants, and he was successful. Their new life unfolding before them, Ron and Cindy bought a little gray Eichler house on Somerset Drive in Cupertino—red door, glass from floor to ceiling—for thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars.239 By now, Ron was doing deep dives on proposed Apollo landing sites and training the astronauts of Apollos 15 and 17 to conduct geology experiments. He was one of a small group of such trainers, including a guy named Jim Head, who later ended up teaching geological science at Brown University.
In 1977, a decade after his arrival at Ames, Ron joined Arizona State University as a full professor and brought with him a Regional Planetary Image Facility: a NASA library of maps, texts, and tomes.240 Among his Tempe colleagues, there was resistance to this Greeley guy setting up shop and shaking things up. He’d unbalance the department, they warned—turn us into a school of space exploration! But you met Ron and felt . . . better about things. He was a g
entleman, soft-spoken. By then, he had been part of multiple missions to the moon; had run the Apollo Data Analysis program, the Mars Data Analysis program, the Mars Geological Mapping program, NASA’s Planetary Geology and Geophysics program; and on the Viking mission to Mars, had been in charge of geological mapping and helped certify the landing site for Viking 2. Now, as a lead on the Galileo imaging team, he was standing up the Jupiter Data Analysis program for when that spacecraft finally got off the ground. So at least he knew what he was doing.
The Mission Page 18
