When visiting the Phoenix area, Carl Sagan was a regular dinner guest. There he was, in an animated discussion with Ron and Cindy’s ten-year-old daughter, just so good at talking to people. Of course, when Sagan was off to visit Hollywood and talking to Johnny Carson, somebody had to do Carl’s work for him on Viking. Carl can’t work today. He’s doing The Tonight Show again. Ron was among those who had to fill in. You weren’t bitter about it, exactly. It was more of an annoyed-eye-roll sort of thing. Carl was popularizing the work, and that brought great benefits. But on the Viking team, the science was relentless and sleep sometimes in short supply, and those doing Carl’s work weren’t above grumbling about picking up their celebrity’s slack.
Ron and Cindy were friends not only with Carl but also with the entire mission team. Later, on Galileo, Ron and Jim Head had split the planning of the Galilean moon imaging campaigns, with Ron receiving Europa—what he called the “gem of the solar system.”241 Of course, the mission was postponed for so long, and then lasted for so long, that it turned into this careerlong thing for most of the team. Ron, Cindy, and the scores of Jovian scientists from around the world would attend meetings in Germany or France or California or wherever, gather for dinner parties, and they would see one another’s children growing up. You really want to bond with someone? Watch their kids grow from pigtails to parenthood.
BY THE TIME Curt Niebur at NASA headquarters asked Greeley to co-lead the science side of the Europa flagship competition study, Ron had not only been around the block; he’d mapped it, paved it, built its public transit, and taught half of the block’s fellow travelers how to drive. He had advised everyone from the French to the Kuwaitis, been part of almost forty major committees and science definition teams (chairing the majority of them), been part of flight projects to Venus, Mars, Jupiter—even Earth, sending an experiment to space on the shuttle. But by now, his beard was white and he knew as well as anyone that were this Europa mission to prevail—were NASA, indeed, to spark welding torches and begin cutting metal tomorrow on a spacecraft—the years of development ahead, coupled with the nontrivial travel time necessary to achieve orbit around Europa, meant he’d never see it happen. He was pushing seventy. At best, he would be retired, traveling the world with Cindy. You become a scientist to answer questions, to ever elevate the threshold of collected human knowledge. You publish papers, get grants. But do it long enough, and you realize that raising the threshold is only half of it; your real job is to make sure that science doesn’t stop with you, that the threshold is ever rising. The Dark Ages are always one day away.
He didn’t make some maudlin show of any of this, of course, not Ron. He was too stoic for that. So as scholars since Socrates had done, he made it his mission to impart all he had learned so that others might be able to answer the questions he would never know were even asked.
Robert Pappalardo was the sorcerer’s apprentice, der konzertmeister, the first chair of the violin section, and in ways worthwhile and subtle, Ron was handing over the baton. Bob, would you help organize this group? Perhaps you could iterate on the meeting agenda? I’m thinking of this researcher and that as co-leads of this part of the project—what do you think? Relax, Bob—what happened at that meeting was normal; every committee has to go through it. Would you prioritize this list? Give this talk. Lead this section. What do you think of these notes? And those?
Up front, the two men huddled and worked through Europa questions big and small. Some were sophisticated, but some involved “first principles,” e.g., Why are we using an orbiter? What other mission scenarios can achieve the desired science? Do we keep the option for a lander alive? What about an impactor? What instruments would we need for each? It was brainstorming, mind mapping, standing before blackboards, arms crossed and eyebrows furrowed, and approaching the study with a beginner’s mind.
The basic objectives of Europa Explorer weren’t that different from those enumerated by small, previous internal lab studies; or the JIMO science definition team years earlier; or the Decadal Survey; or the Europa Orbiter proposal from 1998. The goals were refined further during regular meetings of the Outer Planets Assessment Group. Meanwhile, the left and right parameters of the mission were set in stone by Curt Niebur at headquarters: among them, a three-billion-dollar cap, standard radioactive power sources, and no “miracle” technologies.
To develop Europa Explorer, there would be four meetings of the eleven-person science definition team, the first convening at JPL on February 19, 2007.242 The average meeting might last two and a half days, with science discussions, instrument presentations, lectures led by team members, and guest talks by experts unaffiliated with the team but with insights that could help the team better develop the mission. Louise might give a forty-five-minute master class on Europa’s geology. Don Blankenship, a geophysicist and Antarctica scholar from the University of Texas at Austin, would explain how an ice-penetrating radar would work and what it could do. Krishan Khurana would talk magnetic fields. Professor Christopher Chyba of Stanford University would tell you what you needed to know about astrobiology. Later meetings would look at such issues as planetary protection: If Europa has life, how do we protect it from Earth microbes that have stowed away on the spacecraft? And as study lead, Karla sought constantly to find the sublime intersection of what scientists wanted and what engineers could actually do.
The core of the Europa mission, they determined together: an ice-penetrating radar, a camera, and a composition instrument (the latter to figure out what the moon was made of—what those stripes were, and why the different hues). Those data—Europa’s makeup, its ice shell in three dimensions, and surface imagery to understand its geology—you didn’t even need to prioritize them. In fact, Ron specifically insisted that they not be prioritized, as they had already agreed that the mission wasn’t worth flying without every single one of them. Greeley was adamant that if there was no need to begin a difficult discussion, don’t.
Karla was ever astonished by the quiet intensity of the scientists, and the way Ron let them work. It was a dream team, for sure, which meant that you put a stick of chalk in anyone’s hand and had him or her debate the relative merits of some abstruse subsect of an abstruse subsect, suddenly you’re dealing with a weaponized mind, and if there was disagreement, how could you possibly bring them into accord? And there was Ron, this quiet force, never raising his voice no matter the room’s temperature, this wise grandpa saying, OK, let’s talk. What I’m hearing is . . . and suddenly—magically—maddeningly—when you really thought about how easily he did it—he pulled the whole thing back together, the tangents collapsed recursively, and Ron had somehow absorbed every argument, placed each one in context, finding the areas of overlap, finding the places of mutual disagreement and dispatching them, simplifying, simplifying, simplifying—he’d even write on the board K-I-S—the KIS principle: Keep It Simple (this was Ron Greeley; he’d never add an obscenity like “stupid”)—and by the end of the meeting, everyone was content and optimistic about the work they’d done and the work yet to do. A dozen scientists in total agreement? That’s hard—but he could do it. Karla had been doing this for twenty years, but to see Ron Greeley work? It was spellbinding.
A SCIENTIST ANSWERS to humanity. What she does, she does for the benefit of all humankind. It is the loftiest goal. But she’s also trying to make a living and not lose her job. She wants to get her mission approved and her spacecraft designed and built, or later, if she’s on an instrument team, she wants to keep her instrument on that spacecraft so that all of the engineers at her institution don’t lose their jobs. NASA wants to obtain the best science, but it also needs to keep civil servants employed at its many centers. NASA must also keep the White House Office of Management and Budget happy. The agency might choose a spacecraft or instrument that isn’t capable of carrying out the highest priority science but is low-risk and unlikely to go over budget and cause problems down the line. NASA must keep the public happy; it must engage the taxpa
yers and excite them about what is happening in space. It must also keep Congress happy. So the agency is thinking about a lot of things beyond whether a science goal is responsive to the Decadal Survey.
Three weeks before the final flagship competition study reports were due to NASA headquarters, Curt Niebur got a panicked call from an engineer at the Applied Physics Laboratory. A manager there had had lunch with Alan Stern and mentioned the flagship studies. Somehow the cost came up—three billion—and Stern stopped him cold. Why are you coming in that high? I only have two billion for this thing. Curt, the caller explained, management here is presenting the two-billion-dollar cost cap as a directive from headquarters.
It was like a bomb had gone off in Curt’s head. He was at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Georgetown with his wife when the call came. Seven weeks earlier, doctors discovered a two-centimeter something in Susan’s right breast. She had been having difficulty breast-feeding their newborn.243 The boy, their second, was five months old when the problems started. She thought maybe he wasn’t latching properly—left worked, right didn’t. Her lactation consultant suggested finally that she give up on the right and let it go back to normal. But it didn’t go back to normal. It hardened and hurt, had the texture of an orange peel. She wasn’t worried, really—there was no lump—but she went to see her obstetrician for reassurance. She didn’t receive it. He had never seen anything like it, he said, and ordered her to a specialist. The mammogram revealed something, they did a biopsy, and the next day, she was told that she had inflammatory breast cancer, invasive, fast spreading. There was no time, so her options—the list inclusive—were: chemotherapy. Two weeks later, they started. The nausea arrived promptly, the splitting headaches. Another two weeks, and her hair came out in clumps.244 She shaved her head.
Susan had left NASA the year before, wanting to work from home and spend more time with her first child, who was one at the time. An agency manager didn’t want her to telecommute, so she chose her family, and started a home-based consulting firm to help companies put together good proposals for missions in the Discovery and New Frontiers classes. She had run the Discovery program from headquarters for four years, so she certainly knew what the agency wanted. She was her own boss now, worked her own hours. Meanwhile, she blogged every step of her cancer treatment and built an online community of survivors. Susan didn’t do half measures. She kept in her office a talisman: a Lego minifig that she called Princess-Who-Can-Defend-Herself. The Lego princess wore eyeglasses and carried a sword. But now in addition to blogging, doing her job, and raising her sons, Susan was also doing things like explaining to her toddler why Mommy’s hair was falling out, and she’s at the store or the traffic light, and people look-don’t-look when they see the hair or lack thereof, and it hurts sometimes, a lot, and she’s carrying around stage three cancer and there is no stage five, and she knows math.245
The day Curt got the call from the APL manager, they were at the cancer center for a blood draw. Susan’s counts were down. She could feel it. She had taken her two-year-old on their weekly playdate and had to leave early, light-headed, and when they got home, she nearly passed out on the couch. It was all so frustrating for Susan, to slow down. She’d never not worked, never not, well, reached for new heights to reveal the unknown for the benefit of all humankind (as was the NASA vision statement). Curt accompanied her to the treatments, tried to lighten the mood. He would have quit rather than missed one. His boss, Jim Green, was a saint, though—take whatever time you need, stay home. The grandparents helped with the little ones. There was no balance—it was all happening so fast, each minute focused on whatever needed attention for the next sixty seconds.
And in this set of sixty seconds, while waiting for the latest counts, suddenly the flagship studies—two years of planning by Curt and eight months of intensive work by the study teams—had been cut by one billion dollars. It was a catastrophe.
When he got back to the office, Curt sat down with Jim, and they tried to figure out a way forward. There was no time for the study teams to descope, or “strategically abandon,” key objectives of their missions. Even slashing instrument payloads to the core wouldn’t get them down that far. It was an especially severe blow to a Europa spacecraft, given the heavy (and expensive) shielding required for it to survive marination in the Jovian radiation belt.
The next Monday, Curt flew to Boulder for a workshop called Ices, Oceans, and Fire, which brought together researchers studying the outer planets of the solar system, and their moons in particular. Ron, Bob, Louise, and Dave Senske (who co-led the Ganymede study with Louise) were there, and they weren’t thrilled. The big problems were: 1. we just lost one billion dollars, 2. our respective laboratories still want these missions to fly and will carve one billion dollars from our spacecraft without our consent or advice, 3. but those sorts of cuts would remove core science from the spacecraft, 4. and we are not going to sign off on the science value of a two-billion-dollar mission without full face-to-face consultations with our science definition teams, and 5. that will take months to organize and will push the study delivery dates well into 2008.
The discussion went on until ten thirty that evening, and, ultimately, all Niebur could propose was that they descope their missions as best they could. Don’t be drastic, he added. You cannot validate the appropriateness of billion-dollar descopes by the study deadline. Just do your best and make mention in the study reports that you can get lower given more time—and that the plan, indeed, is to go lower—but, again, look, we need more time.
THE FINAL REPORT of the Europa Explorer mission study came together on November 1, 2007, assembled physically from a hundred stacks of pages arranged in a grid on a conference room floor, Bob orchestrating it at this level, piecing the book together one section at a time. Karla’s job was to give NASA everything necessary for it to say yes to Europa. To win this thing for Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And she was proud of the Europa Explorer report. The thing was massive: hundreds and hundreds of pages, filling a three-and-a-half-inch-thick binder.246 You could use it as radiation shielding. Objectively speaking, all they had done was written a book, but, really . . . it was more than that. It was the first time in all the years she had been doing this that Karla knew without a doubt that this mission could go forward. That they could build it tomorrow and deliver on time. That they could travel to Europa, get back the science within the promised cost of less than three billion. They were ready to execute. It was a political decision now.
A couple of weeks after Karla handed in the study report, Curt pulled her aside. He had read it, of course, but needed to ask her, honestly, in that soft Breese accent of his, Do you really think you can do this mission for this cost? And she told him, honestly: If we can control the instrument costs, yes.247
It was always Europa’s to lose, and Karla’s report was everything Curt had hoped for. In fact, each study submitted was better than it should have been. Ganymede, Enceladus, and Titan . . . well, that last one was truly extraordinary, like something out of Victorian-era science fiction. As planned, Curt convened independent review panels of scientists and agency personnel, one for technical, one for science, and they studied the studies, then issued replies at the close of 2007. Only one should have emerged, but two came out on top: Europa and Titan.
At a three-hour meeting, Curt briefed Alan, as well as the chief scientist of the Science Mission Directorate and the division directors of planetary science, heliophysics, astrophysics, and earth science. Alan was especially taken by the Ganymede study led by Prockter and Senske. But since there wasn’t enough money to get any of the missions going at their current price points, they wouldn’t decide just yet.
So for the teams, each of which had whole worlds at stake, things got ugly.
Chapter 7
The Death Star
A DREAM MELTS INTO A RING, A RINGING. TODD MAY’S eyes open. He’s awake, he’s asleep—he’s—the phone is ringing. Dark. It’s night
. Where’s—nightstand—there, green numbers, 3:30. In the morning? His eyes close. It’s three thirty. The phone is ringing. He reaches for it.
Hello.248
thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpDid you read that report?thump thumpthump.
Alan. It’s Alan—thumpthumpthump—he’s awake? Three thirty. Read the report. Report? The Smithsonian thing? It arrived yesterday—yesterday?—it is three thirty a.m.—yesterday afternoon on his desk—thumpthumpthump—what is that sound?
No, Todd says, I haven’t had time to read it yet.
thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpWell, our comments are due in five hoursthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpYou really need to review the reportthumpthumpthumpthumpthump.
Todd is awake now. I—the thumping—is—ah, Alan is on a treadmill.
I’ll get on it, May says.
Todd dressed, drove to headquarters, and by four thirty in the morning was in his office, reading the report. The Smithsonian Institution had created, in conjunction with NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an exhibit on the Arctic, and a whistle-blower accused the museum’s director of acquiescing to Republican coercion to alter the exhibit and minimize the human element of global warming.249, 250, 251 Alan was all in on earth science, had made enhancing its budget a priority, and wanted to make sure the agency went to war in a subsequent report on the subject, making NASA’s affirmative stance on anthropomorphic contributions to climate change explicit. Todd’s first meeting of the day was in three hours. He wrote his comments and left the binder on Alan’s desk.
At nine he was back in his office, and Alan walked in.
—Did you actually read this?
—Sir, said Todd, I did the best I could in the time I had.
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