The Mission

by David W. Brown

  —Look at this! said Alan, flipping midway through the thick report. Read that! That’s not acceptable! We can’t allow—

  —I did the best I could with the time I had!

  That is what it was like to work with Alan Stern. He wasn’t cruel or unkind. In fact, he was a really great guy, honorable. A genius. But that really great guy, honorable man, genius, really liked to work, seemed never to rest, read everything, knew everything, and seemed to think that everyone else ran at the same pace, which, I mean, Todd had been working since he was a fourteen-year-old boy, loved working and revered the work ethic, and it had taken him far, from chicken processing plant to launching a space station—so it’s not like he wasted weeks on a recliner in front of the television. But compared with Alan it sometimes seemed that he barely rated as animate because he did waste time occasionally on tasks like . . . sleep.

  No new Discovery mission had been chosen since 2001—six years and counting.252 The cadence of new missions to Venus, the moon, asteroids, and beyond thus ground to a halt. When the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander were lost in 1998, Dan Goldin and Ed Weiler scraped together the funds to get Mars back in the air, and it had to come from somewhere.253

  It particularly annoyed Alan that, in his view, Jet Propulsion Laboratory had misrepresented the price of Mars Science Laboratory. Every dollar over budget came from some other mission that didn’t cause the problem. NASA’s planetary science program had once managed to explore half the solar system simultaneously. Now? Only two major non-Mars missions were in active development: the medium-class spacecraft Juno to study the Jovian interior and poles, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to map the moon—and the science division wasn’t even paying for the moon mapper!254 Exploration Systems, essentially the human spaceflight support directorate, was footing the bill. The rest of planetary’s dollars were going—of course—to Mars.

  Alan had a plan to change that, though, and it involved adjusting Curt Niebur’s Quad Studies, which were baselined for three billion dollars. Alan had been looking closely at the books and realized that if he brought the Mars program in line and simultaneously imposed some serious fiscal discipline on the wider planetary science division, he could find two-point-one billion dollars—not to study more mission concepts, or to get things kickstarted and hope for funding down the line. No, for two-point-one billion, he could launch an outer planets flagship. Better still, the European Space Agency had offered to help; it wanted to get in on the science, too.

  So, although the Quad Studies were intended to take four potential missions and settle on a single destination, Stern directed a second round, reducing the competitors to two: a Europa mission (doing as much of the Ganymede mission science as possible) and a Titan mission (doing as much Enceladus science as it could). It would be a shootout—one with an unequivocal winner. The best study to hit the two-billion-dollar bull’s-eye would move immediately into development.

  But first he had to get the Science Directorate on sound fiscal footing. Based on his Pluto experience, he knew a balance was possible and was stunned by how resistant the people at headquarters were to change. It was as though they liked things broken and wanted to keep them broken. Alan had Todd and his team run the numbers. In the previous four years, missions across the agency had gone five billion dollars beyond their allotments.255 Get budgets under control, and you could do more missions of every size to targets across the solar system. And he wanted desperately to do more missions. So he would fix this, and if that meant being seen as the bad guy, then he’d point his death ray at Metropolis with pride.

  Stern’s first success in imposing fiscal sanity was the Kepler space observatory, which had been selected in 2001 with a budget cap of about two hundred ninety-nine million dollars and a mandate to launch in 2006. But when Alan took over science in 2007, Kepler was still on the ground and two hundred million over cost.256 And they needed more.257

  Alan offered to the Kepler team all the time it needed. Take years if you want, decades, generations, but if you need another cent, I will cancel you. And two months later, a miracle! A coincidence, surely! The Kepler project found a way to solve the problem, no new money required. The mission launched in 2009 and went on to discover thousands of exoplanets circling hundreds of stars.

  So Alan’s philosophy worked. Applied more broadly, when projects needed more money—really needed it—he would pay for overruns by taking from other projects in the same portfolio (e.g., if a Mars mission went over budget, he would pay for it with funds allocated across all Mars missions). Overruns would then proceed outward, concentrically. If a portfolio needed more, they had to tap funds already allocated to other projects in the same division (e.g., planetary or astrophysics), and if that wasn’t enough, go even larger: the entire Science Mission Directorate. It was a way to spread the pain equitably.

  That’s how he would handle the Mars Science Laboratory overruns.

  Headquarters had received word that one of the rovers on Mars might not survive the winter because there was dust on its solar panels, which, along with the dim seasonal skies, would effectively put the craft into a hibernation from which it might not wake. The way Alan saw it, Spirit was built to last, but if it happened to die . . . you could reduce the project workforce and thus the Mars budget. Even if the rover survived, the Mars program could sustain a budget cut because a sleeping Spirit wouldn’t exactly need a full mission team working round the clock. So Alan proposed a twenty percent cut in the rover budget and sent a draft letter stating such to the program manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Somehow that letter leaked to the community, which, over the weekend, was radicalized en masse into an army of berserkers.258 This wasn’t some penny-ante project like Kepler that Alan was poking with a stick. This was Mars, and nobody was going to wait around for meetings or negotiations.

  Enter the administrator of NASA. Mike Griffin told Stern to just give them the money. Alan suggested instead that Mars Science Laboratory be put on ice for a while—find another launch window, find a team who could do it on cost. The Mars program had an annual budget—why not just slow the project’s development to keep the other rovers running? Make Mars live within its means rather than allowing it to eat off everyone else’s plate. Or they could descope the mission.

  Sure, it was a tough call, but Alan had made it and expected Mike to back him up.

  Griffin had made some tough calls himself—had made, in fact, the toughest call Alan had ever seen. It happened before the launch of New Horizons. Because of Pluto’s distance from the sun, you needed nuclear power—the same sort Cassini had carried a decade earlier (nearly grounded by alarmists). Despite Cassini’s success, nuclear launches had continued to be a giant headache for NASA, and this was no exception. Myriad federal agencies including the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy had to be satisfied before the spacecraft left Earth. Then the rocket itself needed a certification of flight readiness—another arduous process involving the agency, key contractors, Kennedy Space Center, and the Applied Physics Laboratory.

  It was during this process, at the Lockheed Martin plant where the rocket was built, that engineers happened to be testing the same sort of liquid oxygen tank that New Horizons would use in its first stage. It was a perfectly normal test—aerospace contractors conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of them in order to certify rockets. On this test, though, the tank ruptured, and the accompanying BOOM impeached every future Atlas launch, including—especially—ones with nuclear material onboard.

  Lockheed and NASA mounted an investigation so detailed that it reached the molecular structure of the tank, searching intently for the cause of the breach. Of greater, immediate importance: NASA had to determine whether the spacecraft should be allowed to launch.259 This would have been fine, except that the rupture occurred in mid-2005, and New Horizons was required to launch in January 2006. If it missed its two-week launch window to Pluto, t
he mission would be pointless, leaving New Horizons a seven-hundred-million-dollar monument to dashed dreams.

  One week before the launch window opened, after dozens of meetings at NASA centers, there was a final gathering at agency headquarters. A hundred or so people met in a single sweltering room, SRO. Mike Griffin was there, as were experienced engineers, high-level managers, center directors, and other agency brass. Alan Stern was there as principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, and Todd May was there as head of the Discovery and New Frontiers program office at Marshall Space Flight Center.

  James Wood, chief engineer of the Kennedy Space Center, ran down everything that was known and unknown. He gave the launch a GO.

  A question-and-answer followed, and a discussion among the high-level NASA executives followed that. And then it was time to poll the room.

  Rex Geveden, the chief engineer of NASA, was also GO.

  Mary Cleave, a former astronaut and the head of NASA science, said it wasn’t worth the risk. If the launch went bad, she didn’t want her fingerprints on it. NO GO.

  Andrew Dantzler, the head of the planetary science division, voted GO.

  Bryan O’Connor, another former astronaut and head of NASA safety and mission assurance, voted NO GO.

  This continued for some time, but when you got right down to it, when the head of science and the head of NASA safety join forces and say, “No, do not launch this nuclear-powered science mission because it is too dangerous to do so,” you are not in a good place.

  Finally, it was Mike Griffin’s turn. He was of course the NASA administrator, but before that, he was head of the Applied Physics Laboratory’s space division. Like Dan Goldin, two administrators earlier, he was also a veteran of the Strategic Defense Initiative. He was, in short, as smart as anyone in the room—and he was usually in rooms with very smart people indeed. Griffin argued the case before them, repeated the critical points made and added a few of his own. Finally, he said to the NO-GOs in the room: Your advice is just that: advisory. We will fly New Horizons.

  GO, he said.260

  If you are Alan Stern (who was, of course, a GO) your knuckles would have been white if you had a table to clutch on to, which you didn’t because you lacked the rank to warrant a seat at the table. Look, had that launch gone south—and not only because of the tank, but if it had gone bad for any reason—Mike would have, at a minimum, lost his job. It would have ended everything the administrator hoped to do at NASA, shattering his dreams of putting astronauts back on the moon, of planting an American flag on Mars. A launch incident would have made the front page of every newspaper in the world: NASA NUCLEAR DISASTER LAUNCHED AGAINST ADVICE OF HEAD OF SAFETY. Mike Griffin’s neck would have been unburdened of its head.

  But he had been right, and New Horizons was flying even now on its way to Pluto. It was the culmination of Alan’s life’s work, and it happened because Mike Griffin made the tough call. And now it was Alan’s turn, and he needed Mike to validate his wisdom and authority.

  But Mike shot down Stern’s idea. Keep the budget overrun out of the press, he said. Let’s figure out how to pay for it. And that nauseated Alan. NASA’s culture could be shaped, but it would take a long time and required an adherence to principles. Alan Stern’s greatest strength was that he was uncompromising—that’s what got the Pluto mission launched. But Alan Stern’s greatest weakness was that he was uncompromising. His tragic flaw was almost Shakespearean. So there it was: They weren’t going to turn off Spirit or Opportunity or any of the orbiters. They weren’t going to delay, disrupt, or discipline Mars Science Laboratory. Indeed, Mars would feel no pain at all, which meant the only place to get the cash was outside the program. Other worlds. Other missions. Good missions.

  It was 2008. Alan’s oldest child was twenty years old, and his youngest, fourteen. When they were growing up, he told them that integrity comes when you look in the mirror. Regardless of whether somebody else knows if you did the right thing or the wrong thing, you know, and you have to look at that face. And that’s a very high standard. He couldn’t, he decided, have looked himself in the mirror if he punished the innocent by rewarding the guilty. There was a way to thread the needle, but Mike didn’t want to do it, and Alan understood why. Mars was Mars. Still, Alan didn’t want to be the firing squad. After a sleepless night, he got up, wrote Mike an email and said: I don’t think I’m your guy anymore. I don’t think I can do what you want me to do, and I think you ought to find somebody who will.

  He knew Mike would fire him. He knew it would cost his career deeply. But he was still proud that he had done it.

  He got his response.

  Your resignation is accepted.261

  TODD WAS AT Jet Propulsion Laboratory when he heard what had happened, and he heard it from Tom Gavin, pillar, who delivered the news with characteristic directness.

  Your boss just quit.262

  It was a Monday morning. May knew it had been a long weekend for Alan because of the Mars memo. Things with Alan always tended to come to a head around budgets and finances. And though Alan had succeeded with projects such as Kepler, Todd knew that Mars was different. The Mars community was large, and people succeeded in groups. They would work together and protect their interests.

  Still, in disbelief, he called Alan, who confirmed the news. And when May returned to headquarters, he had a new boss, just like that.

  Four years earlier, when Todd had been hired to help finish Gravity Probe B, the spacecraft had been in development for forty years. The running joke was that everyone at the agency had worked on it at some point. It was a rite of passage—a space explorer’s annaprashana. The mission had been canceled and then revived three times. By the time Todd came on board, there was this guy running the science division, Ed Weiler, and it seemed like it was the man’s life’s work to kill the probe.263 Ed threatened to terminate it seven separate times during Todd’s tenure alone, and Todd just thought, Wow, what a mean guy.

  Four years later, Alan was out and Todd’s next meeting was with Alan’s replacement . . . Ed Weiler, who was being brought back to lead the science directorate. Todd didn’t know what to expect, but Ed asked him immediately to stay on as deputy.

  You have a job as long as I’m here, said Ed.264

  Todd thanked him, but he never wanted to make a career in DC, and said as much. He had four small children at home in Alabama that he missed. Weiler understood. May agreed to stay on for the Mars landing of the spacecraft Phoenix, and that would be it.

  He was glad he’d decided not to leave immediately. For one, he had never personally experienced the “seven minutes of terror”—the agonizing time it took for a spacecraft’s signal to travel from Mars to Earth with news that it had landed safely. And the morning after Phoenix’s successful touchdown, Todd flew to the University of Arizona to be with the science team for the first images to arrive from the Martian arctic. Some of the men and women had been working, dreaming, their entire careers to see something like this. Nobody had ever glimpsed the north pole of Mars, and there it was.265 The terrain was broken up in this soccer ball pattern—just as the scientists had predicted. People saw the images and started crying. Phoenix would finish what Mars Polar Lander had started ten years earlier. It was the perfect way for Todd the engineer to end his run at agency science.

  While concluding his tour of duty at headquarters, Todd asked Ed about Gravity Probe B. Ed admitted that the cancelations and resurrections were all a tactic. Kabuki theater. He knew Grav B was hard and that there would be overruns, but the cancelations forced those working on it to find better solutions to otherwise expensive problems and sent a message to the division that missions had to be run with accountability. Perhaps more importantly, the cancelations showed the science community that Ed would do whatever was necessary to keep mission overruns from harming other projects. There was a leadership lesson there.

  Long ago, when Todd applied for his first senior executive job at the agency, the position announcement r
ead: “NASA seeks executives with a sense of daring.”266 Todd thought, How awesome. How cool. I mean, sure you’d see that on army recruiting posters, but what kind of organization specifically sought executives with a sense of daring? It just resonated with Todd. When he was a kid, he had a bicycle that didn’t have handlebars. There was this big hill in his neighborhood on this road, Spanish Main. It was like a quarter mile long, or seemed that way at the time, and he would ride down it on that bike because he knew the centrifugal force of the wheels would keep everything lined up like a gyroscope, and it wouldn’t get wobbly unless you were going slow. You had to go fast. You went fast, you didn’t hit the brakes, you just had to go. No hands—hands in the air! And if you went over the front, it was going to be a bad day. But that—Todd connected with that when he saw the announcement. That’s NASA. That’s what’s cool about it. Everything they did had a sense of daring to it. And now Todd would have to find his next thing.

  Chapter 8

  Auto-da-fé

  BY SEVEN IN THE MORNING, KARLA CLARK HAD USUALLY switched on her office lights in Building 301 and pulled up her email. There were about a hundred buildings, S, M, and L, at JPL, each distinguished by some role in the spacecraft and mission development pipeline.267 Across the street from 301 (Mission Formulation) were 170 (Spacecraft Fabrication) and 179 (Spacecraft Assembly). Just down DSN Road was Building 230, the Space Flight Operations Facility—the Center of the Universe—where at any given time, messages might be sent to or from spacecraft scattered across the solar system. On the northern edge of the campus stood Building 150 (Environmental Testing), where a piece of hardware might be subjected to simulated space in a thermal vacuum chamber. Arrive early enough in the morning, and an errant mule deer might still be grazing the courtyard alongside ground squirrels, the morning mountain mist on Saint Gabe making everything ethereal, enchanted. Those kinds of mornings, before the daily grind of meetings and intractable problems and So Crazies It Might Work, it was a place where anything could happen. You might even build a spaceship to find space whales in alien oceans.