Why do you want to do this? asked Shipley, and Tom explained everything he knew about astronomy, the movie, everything he had read, and I mean, the future is in space travel!321
Shipley offered Tom a job on the spot.
A few months later, Tom, his pregnant wife, Betty, and their five-month-old son packed everything they owned into a 1956 Ford convertible, drove west, and replanted their life. Thus it was that in 1962 Mr. Tom Gavin premiered at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
They didn’t give him the keys to the spaceships right away. His first few jobs involved doing quality assurance work on electronic parts. The lab was gearing up for the first mission to Mars—a pair of spacecraft called Mariner 3 and 4—and early on, Gavin began developing an expertise in hardware reliability in general and semiconductors in particular—what they could handle and what they couldn’t. He was soon screening every electronic part used in the Mariner instruments, striving for total reliability under the inhospitable conditions of space. The Mariners would speed by Mars at eleven thousand miles per hour, scan it, and continue on into the inky void. It was a one-shot deal. So much was at stake—no one knew what to expect on its russet surface. Life? Maybe! The Mariner camera couldn’t capture animals scurrying about, of course, but it might give us the broad strokes of what the die-hard creatures of cruel, cold, crimson Mars were up against.322 So while the theoretical mattered, a lot of Gavin’s research required reading about the practical, and he zeroed in on the Minuteman 1 intercontinental ballistic missile program. Now there was a program where reliability mattered! And not only to aerospace engineers, who had a financial interest in flying solid hardware, but also to the survival of the human race, which had gone all in on the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. The Minutemen had to launch on command the first time, every time; they were, after all, the only thing standing between peace and the mine-shaft gap. The only difference between the Minuteman and Mariner, from Tom’s perspective, was total hardware lifetime: a Minuteman had a very short-duration mission, launch to flash. Mariners 3 and 4, on the other hand, had to survive ten months, from launch to the complete transmission of flyby data.323 So he studied everything that Minuteman overseers did programmatically. How did they achieve true reliability? How did they know their systems were totally dependable?
Mariner, in the end, was a success, and the lessons Tom learned became part of the lab’s institutional knowledgebase.324
Three years after the 1965 Martian flyby, the mountain people of Saint Gabe wanted desperately to build spacecraft for what was being called the outer planets Grand Tour. Astronomers did the math and realized that in the late seventies the planets of the solar system would align just so, and that pairs of spacecraft launched at just the right speed at just the right time could hit every world, Jupiter to Pluto, in a single go. And it was now or never, or at least, now or one hundred seventy-five years from now—the next time the solar system would so align.325 Virtually nothing was known about the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or the planets themselves, for that matter, and zero was known about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. To accomplish this feat of exploration, the lab decided to develop a new class of spacecraft: true flagships of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to be called, internally, at least, the Thermoelectric Outer Planets Spacecraft, or TOPS.326 (They would think of something loftier later.) It would take four ships to do the job, spacecraft redundancy already being the standard practice by NASA and the lab; only Mariner 4 reached Mars, for example. Mariner 3 died hours after liftoff, when half of its protective payload fairing—the rocket’s nose cone covering the spacecraft during launch—failed to detach. (This was outside of Tom’s reliability purview.) Unable to deploy solar panels, and with power being king in exploration, the spacecraft never recovered.
Bill Shipley, the TOPS study lead, brought Tom on board. When TOPS was conceived, everyone at the lab was busy with Mariners 8 and 9, which would be the first spacecraft to orbit Mars, and Vikings 1 and 2—a set of landers and orbiters that would touch down to study Martian protozoa, plants, and prairie dogs. Tom was placed in charge of the TOPS team responsible for the long-term reliability of electronic parts. It was a significant challenge because, unlike the Mariner spacecraft, which had to last ten months (itself a challenge), the TOPS spacecraft would have to survive seventeen years. (The farthest planets of the outer solar system were very far away indeed.) No one had ever designed a spacecraft to fly functionally for so long or so far from Earth. In every respect, it was unlike anything ever attempted. And after the TOPS team did a lot of worthwhile work on a then untackled problem, when its anticipated cost was calculated, the total was . . . unwelcome by Congress and the Nixon White House: one billion dollars, and at the worst possible time. The Apollo program was effectively over, and a thing they were calling a “space shuttle” was the shiny new object, looking likely to consume much of the agency’s dwindling dollars. Moreover, what wasn’t eaten by the shuttle would be swallowed by a proposed “orbiting space telescope.”327
The lab didn’t give up, however. TOPS had already paid dividends: in the course of studying the spacecraft concept, Tom’s team carried out the lab’s first large-scale work on integrated circuits, and that in itself was exciting. Out of TOPS came Mariner Jupiter-Saturn—twin spacecraft now, instead of four, and designed to visit exactly two planets: Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecraft used Mariner designs and Viking orbiter subsystems whenever possible, reducing risk and freeing up cash. And though only Jupiter and Saturn were the goal, the lab quietly asked the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to develop batteries with life spans longer than ten years. And if, say, one of these spacecraft happened to keep going past Saturn—flew for years and years and years—and, look, the whole point of the mission was to launch because of an exceedingly rare planetary alignment—if one of these spacecraft happened to encounter Uranus and fly a little father and then encounter Neptune, well, why, what a happy coincidence! (Only Pluto would be missed.)
So Project Voyager, as it was branded, emerged like a phoenix from the ashes of TOPS. It was less expensive and less ambitious, which spoke to the hearts of White House officials and congressional overseers. Though funding was ever imperiled in emaciating budgets—in the aftermath of Apollo, NASA’s budget was halved—the officially trim Voyager effort rolled right along.
While most senior engineers at the lab weren’t about to leave guaranteed work—Mars missions were sure things—for this flighty outer planets adventurism, Tom asked to stay on and became the Voyager spacecraft mission assurance manager, which is just what it sounded like: his job was to make sure this particular So Crazy It Might Work actually worked. (A twenty-year lifespan? Yeah, good luck with that, Tom.) And right away, and though Gavin was no dilettante, he realized he was in way over his head. The Jovian radiation environment alone was enough to overwhelm even the most experienced engineer, and years of Tom’s life would soon be devoted to tackling the problem. He played out all the everythings that could possibly go wrong and then brainstormed how to guard against them. The Voyager team made quiet progress on their mission—the group bonded as it worked on the impossible, really became a family—and soon study became spacecraft, blueprints to hardware, with a course heading that would take them to every outer planet in the solar system, sans Pluto, and then, driven only by gravity, onward for millions of years. These two spacecraft would be the emissaries of humankind. To that end, an astronomer of some celebrity named Carl Sagan, as well as Frank Drake, author Ann Druyan, and a handful of others, assembled what they called a “Golden Record” of humanity: a recording of laughter, the ambient sounds of Earth, greetings in multiple languages, the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Chuck Berry, and an astonishing assortment of other data related to our primitive little species. Each of the twin spacecraft carried one of these gold-plated records . . . but it wasn’t the only message they carried.
A few days before the engineers buttoned up the Voyagers for stacking onto their respective rockets, R
ay Heacock, the spacecraft system manager, called the flight team together. He presented small titanium plates and an electric pencil, and invited each member to inscribe a message of his or her very own—separate from the Golden Record—to send to the stars. And everyone did. When Tom took the pencil, he engraved his name, his wife’s name, each of his children’s names, and “Godspeed Voyager.” It wasn’t profound, he knew. All that mattered were the names of his family. They would soon be flying evermore through star systems and the breathtaking beyond. Out there. When all of them had finished their engravings, the plates were tucked into the spacecraft thermal protection material and sewn safely inside. Baggage checked, the two spacecraft Voyager launched in August and September 1977.
Tom’s grandfather came to America on the first of June 1903. He settled in Philadelphia, was penniless, and worked as a laborer. His father drove a subway train. And Tom had now been part of something that would likely outlive the human race.
SEEING THE SPACECRAFT from stacking through launch kept Tom at Cape Canaveral for four months, and when he got back to the lab, he strode to the Voyager mission support area, swiped his access card to get in the building, and . . . nothing happened. He swiped again. Nothing. So he pressed the intercom buzzer to have someone let him in, and a voice on the other end answered, and Tom said: This is Tom Gavin. I’m trying to get in the building, and the incredulous voice responded: Can I help you? Who are you and why are you here?
And now Tom understood the nature of the job. Voyager wasn’t his career. It came and went. And it was a hard lesson to learn, inducing a surprisingly strong sense of loss. The hundreds of people who had come together to turn a dream into a space-borne explorer—the story ended, just like that! And you moved on to the next thing.
His next thing was called Galileo, which he worked on from 1978 until 1989. Tom was in charge of reliability and especially radiation, and it was like being in purgatory, because the spacecraft was tied to the beleaguered space shuttle. After a brief sojourn running the hardware assurance division for the lab, he was conscripted into the problematic Cassini program as spacecraft manager. This was also his introduction to the money side of spacecraft development, the scalpel an unwelcome bit of instrumentation, where previously Tom had been concerned chiefly with engineering requirements.
He was next made deputy director of space and earth science programs, and came on just as the ill-fated Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander (collectively: Mars Surveyor 98) missions were wrapping up work. When the first either missed the planet completely or burned up on entry (neither outcome considered nominal), and then Mars Polar Lander became the Mars Polar Crasher, Gavin found himself suddenly in a leadership position during the darkest time, it certainly seemed, in the laboratory’s history.
Over the decades, Tom had seen many vessels lost in space, and it was just part of the job, and everybody understood that. “Beware, Diomedês! Forbear, Diomedês!” shouted Apollo in the Iliad. “Do not try to put yourself on a level with the gods; that is too high for a man’s ambition.”328 But that was exactly what Jet Propulsion Laboratory existed to do. The lab’s motto: Dare Mighty Things, and with audacity came catastrophes along the way. It was the business they were in. Everyone accepted that fact, at home, on the Hill, at headquarters. But you lose two spacecraft consecutively while trying to do things faster and cheaper at the apparent expense of better, and the letters J, P, and L are stamped on the sides of each of those lost spacecraft, and it’s the lab that absorbs the blows. Tom was a company man, and the life’s works of so many great engineers were being tarnished in the name of saving a few bucks.
To restore morale and forestall future disasters, he began an initiative to craft a comprehensive, unified set of principles by which the lab would do design, verification and validation, and operations for all flight systems. He partnered with Tony Spear, who had led and launched the successful Mars Pathfinder in 1996, and the pair sharpened their pencils and put to paper what they thought were the lab’s design principles. Then Tom commissioned every engineer in technical areas to get together and write down what they thought the lab’s design principles were. What came out of the review boards was a document called, unsurprisingly, “Design Principles.”329 (Tom called them principles rather than rules because it is harder for engineers to complain about a principle.) Because this study of best practices had emerged from the bottom up, as opposed to being imposed from the top down, it was adopted quickly. It wasn’t management saying, Here is what thou shalt now do. Rather, it was engineers themselves saying, Here is how we ought to do things. Tom’s team also developed a set of flight project practices to which all teams would adhere, a report that said: This is how we run a mission, and why we must. This is how we build reliable hardware, how we review progress, how we avert disaster and safeguard taxpayer funds. These are the key decision points that every project encounters along the way, and the reviews that will determine whether said project progresses to the next. They titled it “Flight Project Practices.”330 Collectively, it took three years to draft the documents, which would quickly become sacred texts at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In June 2009 Tom Gavin retired. It was star-crossed Mars Science Laboratory that finally did him in. The director of the lab assigned Tom to devote himself fully to the Mars mission. All day, every day and into the night, he would work and then go home exhausted, fall into bed, and then wake up in the middle of the night thinking, What about this? What about this? Is there some solution for that? He was a seventy-year-old man! And it affected his home life. Betty had been putting up with his hours at the lab and his constant travel for nearly fifty years. She was a saint. It was . . . he had done enough.
So when Tom felt he had implemented the changes necessary to place Mars Science Laboratory on a path to success, he went to Elachi and said, “Charles, I’m tired.”331 He had done all he could.
Gavin asked officially to step down in April 2009, with full retirement in June. He agreed to take a long vacation and maybe work, if they needed, a couple of days a week—to act as an advisor to the Mars team, or wherever else his expertise might be needed. But he would do it on his terms. And when he returned, the Powers That Be asked him to mentor the Jupiter Europa Orbiter study team, and he agreed. Most of his career had been spent in the outer planets. He knew the radiation environment, knew how to build a spacecraft, and this kind of role, advising a study team, was ideally suited to his vision of a part-time, postretirement life at the lab.
KARLA CLARK WORKED with Tom on Cassini, had learned her philosophy of decision making from him, just as she had learned teaming from John Casani. In those Cassini days, Tom had been very, very good at making decisions. He wasn’t afraid to shoot from the hip, and if you didn’t know any differently, you would have thought his calls were arbitrary, that he was dictatorial, leaping headlong to conclusions with insufficient information. Part of it was his gruff exterior, his conspicuous working-class Philly accent, the clip and cadence of his speech. The warmth was there—here was a good man, a happy man, a jovial man—but if you didn’t know that, a simple “Good morning!” from him might seem like a direct order: Have a good morning. But Karla knew better. She knew that Tom’s choices were made with extraordinary, almost extrasensory insight. The man was very smart and very experienced, and the speed of his decisions reflected that. In those Cassini days, Tom would revisit a decision if presented with a compelling argument or if the data demanded it. He was not at all afraid to change his mind.
But somewhere along the way, Karla came to believe, the longer Tom worked at the lab, the higher his status, the greater his responsibility—no longer for single spacecraft but for every spacecraft and for their reliability—the more rigid he had become in his rulings. And by the time he joined Jupiter Europa Orbiter as advisor, his decision-making style was almost unrecognizable. In meetings, Tom would sit at the head of the table, that position of power. Karla was still the study lead. She was still the top of the chain and
had the responsibility for making the calls, but Tom was coming in after being JPL’s associate director of flight projects and mission success—a position of astounding import and influence. Tom had fifty years of experience behind his decisions, so nobody was going to second-guess him. Nobody was going to tell him no. Tom, Karla began to think, wanted to make Europa his own, was not there to mentor.
The orbiter was always going to change significantly, be almost unrecognizable by launch relative to what won the shootout, but whatever eventually flew would be evolved from a common engineering origin and philosophy. Rob Lock, the lead systems engineer on the orbiter, was still there. The original engineering team was still there. Karla was still there. But the new team members seemed to exert an outsized influence, had their own ideas about the mission they wanted, and had no compunction about consigning three years of effort on the Jupiter Europa Orbiter to oblivion.
In February 2010 the lab formally established the Europa Jupiter System Mission pre-project office and installed Tom as its manager. No one even bothered to tell Karla.
Tom tried awkwardly to find a role for her in his new project, but the positions offered were beyond insulting to her: junior jobs, one under a previous subordinate on the project. Finally, Tom—it wasn’t magnanimity, exactly, what he did next, because Karla didn’t think he really realized what he had even done—helped her find another job at the lab, and it was a good one: manager of mission assurance for flight projects. She would be running the only office that touched every flight project at the lab, from the smallest experiments that would launch to the International Space Station, to the biggest spacecraft ever conceived. But after twelve years of keeping the flame of Europa alive, of wrestling with one of the most challenging problems in all of planetary exploration and eventually finding a solution—it was hard at the end. Something dear had been taken from her.
The Mission Page 25
