The Mission

by David W. Brown

  One month after the results were announced, Bob got a taste of Ed’s opinion directly while in Washington, DC, to attend the fall meeting of the Space Studies Board, the focal point of space research within the National Academies.351 Bob was a board member, one of only two or three planetary scientists out of twenty-two at the table. The meeting that day concerned two issues affecting space science: the president’s budget and the Decadal.

  The lobby of the Keck Center was lined with murals from floor to ceiling, engravings of four thousand years of scientific achievement, among them: the breeding of corn; Galileo’s star map; a silicon wafer for the manufacture of microchips. You walked down the hall, and you just felt the possible. Room 100, site of the meeting, was of standard size and layout: chairs, tables, wood-paneled walls with twin white screens for PowerPoint presentations. Bob was tired when he entered. It had been a busy month. But he came loaded with questions.

  Representatives from the White House Office of Management and Budget had stood at the podium a day earlier and given their take on the president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, and things, according to them, just could not have been better.352, 353 Sure, the next NASA budget request was flat, but you should be thanking us! Flat was the new up!

  That was NASA’s overall budget, however. Planetary science was set to lose money over time, as opposed to the flat (and thus up!) shape of the other science divisions. And not just a few dollars here and there: the proposed budget projections for fiscal years 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 would cumulatively carve nearly twenty percent from the planetary science budget. This was an extinction-level event. Already the division was eating ramen to pay its bills. Members of the Decadal steering committee were no fools in their recommendation, foreseeing a doomsday budget scenario. But what the Obama administration was proposing was so much worse than what the pessimistic Decadal committee members had foreseen.

  When Ed Weiler gave his talk to the board, he laid out the issues, financial and otherwise, affecting NASA science. In his opening, he said that NASA would try to follow the Decadal, budget permitting, adding later—twice—that Europa had an estimated cost of four-point-seven billion. Sure, he conceded, although Cassini—a comparable mission to that of Europa—would cost similarly if inflated to 2011 dollars, the climate had changed. And anyway, he said, there was now an agreement with the European Space Agency to do a joint first phase of Mars sample return (the sample cache mission) in 2018, meaning NASA would have to pay only one-point-five billion.

  When the floor opened up, Bob, having Ed pinned down and in public, decided to get some answers. Look, he said, on the Europa side, we get the message, and we are looking hard at less expensive options for a mission.354 But if we managed to slash costs, how could we be sure that, yet again, Mars mission overruns wouldn’t devour the funding that might get Europa going? How could we be assured that the Mars mission in 2018 wasn’t yet another case of—and here he was diplomatic—cost over-optimism?

  Ed promised to put independent cost reviews in place.

  Would there be a public airing of the Mars 2018 mission concept, asked Bob, and would the community be kept involved?

  Of course there would, said Ed.

  Then Bob pressed harder: It’s just that we need to ensure that this airing would include community commentary on whether the Mars 2018 mission would get through the gates set by the Decadal.

  And here Ed went into full Ed mode: What gates? They’ve cut costs considerably, two-point-five to one-point-five. The gates are crossed. The gates are past tense. There are no gates.

  Ah, said Bob, but what about cost realism? (That is, though he didn’t say this, the fictional fiscal promises that led to Curiosity consuming the budget of an entire Discovery mission.)

  All of this was starting to really annoy Ed. Bob, said he, you are coming at this as a Europa advocate, and, oh, by the way, even if you get the Europa cost down, we’re not going to start a Europa mission until 2030!

  TWENTY THIRTY!

  Well—and Bob was getting terse and testy, too—are you really suggesting that there won’t be a flagship mission until TWENTY THIRTY?

  No, said Ed. The Mars sample return spacecraft sequence is our flagship mission now, and yes, they are sequential, and no, they will not finish the job until 2030. You do the math, Bob.

  Bob was stunned. Ed saw in the Decadal what he wanted to see: that it was Mars missions all the way down. He seemed to overlook the part in the Decadal about getting a Europa mission in the cost box and thus on the flight manifest, and so of course Bob pushed back, and later that day (in an aside), Ed threw Bob a bone and noted that an inexpensive Europa mission would be a good thing, because budgets changed all the time. But it was clear where Ed’s heart was, and it wasn’t the Jovian system.

  Over time, others in the planetary science community pushed back against Ed’s interpretation of the Decadal as well. Every time Ed came back from a trip, he would lament that Europa Squad—both the uniformed regulars like Bob and the underground resistance in the community—had not gotten the message. So he went to Curt Niebur with some instructions.

  Europa is dead, Curt! It is your job to carry that message to them, and YOU ARE NOT DOING A VERY GOOD JOB OF IT, ARE YOU?355

  But Ed, said Curt, Europa is not dead. You keep misquoting the Decadal. If you want to drive a stake through Europa’s rocky, saltwater-wrapped heart, you need to say, Yea verily, I, Ed Weiler, hereby slay the icy enigma circling Jupiter. Because you have that power, Ed. But the Decadal cannot be your justification.

  And Ed did have that power. But he never killed Europa. Ed was Ed, doing what Ed did, always did, did best: speaking loudly, in very declarative sentences designed with astrophysical precision, to challenge, rile, or annoy—with ninety-five percent of the time, his words not matching his actual thinking on the matter. Ed was making a point, gauging his opponent’s reaction, poking a stick into the soft spots and waiting for the opposition to fly off the handle. It was all by design and intended to take them off-balance.

  It was exasperating but Curt loved it. From his little glass office at NASA headquarters, his bookcases filled with binders of mission concept studies for outer planets exploration, Curt watched associate administrators come and go, some effective, some not, some professorial, some political, but Ed was the only one who would walk in, sit down, look you in the eye, and say: Let’s debate this. And Ed never phoned it in. I am going to push all your buttons and force you to consider every single way of looking at this. That’s my job, and we are going to hash this out right now. Without heat there can be no light. The discussions would come just short of name calling, but Ed would change his mind when presented with a credible argument, and either way, by the time he left, you would think differently about the problem, and progress would be made.

  It was the kabuki dance that Ed had once described to Todd May. Ed slayed Gravity Probe B repeatedly and with mirth and quiet calm. But the probe did launch in 2004. Ed killed Alan Stern’s Pluto mission in September 2000, banned scientists from even studying the mission, vowed publicly that Pluto was “Dead! Dead! Dead!”—his actual words!—his actual exclamation marks!—because of Pluto’s price problems, and two months later, Pluto’s partisans having found a fiscally feasible way forward, why, Ed hopped on board, and New Horizons launched in 2006.356 Similarly, Ed killed the entire Mars program back in 1999, before presiding over five consecutive Mars mission successes, culminating with the Mars Phoenix landing in 2008, and there were possible sixth and seventh successes in the pipeline—Mars Science Laboratory and the orbiter MAVEN—both wrapping up development.357 Numbers eight, nine, and ten—the multidecadal Mars Sample Return campaign now embraced by the planetary science community—would follow thereafter.

  So when Curt and Jim Green came pounding on Ed’s office door, saying no, Ed, you cannot end Europa entirely under the guise of a Decadal decision—there is more work to be done, as expressly, unambiguously described in the Decadal, more studie
s needed to bring down costs, Ed said: OK. You have a budget, Jim. You find the money for another Europa habitability mission study and knock yourselves out. And Jim found the money.

  THE RECONSTITUTED EUROPA science definition team, as directed by Curt, was thirteen strong and had eighteen months to do its job. After that, the money would be gone, and none would likely follow. In the official paperwork, Bob called them the Europa Tiger Team to really drive home the point that this was an agile group of lean and hungry scientists.358

  Most of the Tiger Team met for dinner on May 2, 2011, at a place called Il Fornaio in a part of town called Old Pasadena. The restaurant was in Smith Alley, named for Willis Smith, a small-time businessman who, a hundred years and change before, had sold saddlery and harnesses to Pasadenans when saddlery and harnesses were what Pasadenans needed. When a three-hundred-room hotel called the Raymond opened a few miles down the road, Smith went into the laundry business. (Someone had to wash those sheets.) The resort catered to wintering well-to-do northeasterners, and with the influx of wealthy tourists, the city boomed and bustled, renovated and thrived. The Raymond attracted presidents and silent screen stars alike, and eventually, residents of obscure stock who knew a good sunset when they saw one.

  The hotel didn’t survive the Great Depression, but Old Pasadena did, as it always did, from the moment Spanish soldiers stacked the first two bricks that would become San Gabriel Arcángel, the now ancient and still photogenic mission of mortar and stone. Everything proceeded from there.

  In a private room in the back of the Smith Alley restaurant, the Europa team was at a standstill. A bottle of white selected by Don Blankenship was passed around. After a day of discourse, the scientists wore rims under their eyes like it was the new black. For four years, Bob and Co. had built the perfect mission for what they wanted at Europa. Their orbiter was derived from the Europa Explorer, which won the Quad Studies in 2006, which in turn traced some of its heritage to the Europa Geophysical Explorer (2005), an internal lab study. The Europa Geophysical Explorer drew much of its science from the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (2005), which drew much of its science from the Europa Orbiter, itself canceled formally in 2001. Europa Explorer became the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, which became one half of the Europa Jupiter System Mission (deceased, March 2011). This didn’t even count the dozens of internal variation studies of these missions. The point is: it had been a long time since a Europa mission started from a blank sheet.

  Which is how this one would begin.

  The Europans had begun the day atop Saint Gabe, on the fifth floor of Gavin Tower, Building 321 at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Bob welcomed them, dimmed the lights of the conference room, and projected onto a screen a PowerPoint slide, solid white and free of text. They were starting over.

  The science side of the team included the usual suspects: Bob, Louise, and Dave, the three of whom would run the project science; Don Blankenship from the University of Texas at Austin was there and would lead ice; Jeff Moore from NASA Ames Research Center was in charge of the geology working group; Bruce Bills and Diana Blaney from Jet Propulsion Laboratory would handle ocean and composition science, respectively; and Melissa McGrath from Marshall Space Flight Center would run the local environment group.

  Because Ron Greeley, the maestro who had led the previous studies, was now chair of the Planetary Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council, and thus unavailable, Curt tapped Bob to stand up the team, with some strings attached: first, invite all the critics (though that’s not the word Niebur used)—the members of the community who had real problems with the cost or ambition of the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, or even the orbiter concept itself. So Bob brought on board Fran Bagenal, who was hostile to the ossified structure of flagship-class missions, preferring instead the nimble New Frontiers model of small, agile missions; Bill Kurth and Amy Barr, who had been part of the competing Titan Saturn System Mission and the Enceladus study, respectively; Jack Connerney from Goddard Space Flight Center, who seemed to hate everything Jet Propulsion Laboratory did (too expensive, too big); and David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was listed as lead author of a white paper submitted a year earlier to the Decadal, asserting that Europa exploration should be divided into smaller, more manageable missions and implying that science definition teams were clueless to the programmatic and political realities of space exploration today.359 The British-born research scientist spoke from authority, having placed scientific instruments on nearly every major object in the solar system. At the time, Bob and Louise mocked Smith’s paper as ridiculous, given the challenges of selling a single mission, but he was on the team now, and no one was mocking. No idea was ridiculous anymore.

  Next came hours of recap, debating head-on the problems of cost, mission design, and the general malevolence of mighty Jove. Earlier, the team had invited speakers to give insights from other missions and the successful strategies for separating a spacecraft from Earth.360 Alan Stern talked about how he helped get New Horizons in the cost box and off the ground. Connerney described the spacecraft Juno, set to launch three months hence, and the lessons learned along the way. Alfred McEwan of the University of Arizona described his idea for an Io mission that, rather than orbit the moon, would circle Jupiter nine times or so, capturing a little more of Io with each successive flyby.

  A procession of engineers at the meeting described the problems with Jupiter Europa Orbiter, and they discussed mission options: orbiters and multiple flybys and trajectories and what science we could do on the cheap. A lot of ground was covered that day, and by the close of business, everyone needed that wine. Once it was procured in the little room in the back of Il Fornaio, Bob asked what everyone was already thinking: What are we doing here? And they filled glasses.

  In retrospect, it was the inclusion of Jupiter research that likely killed the orbiter’s chances to get the Decadal flagship endorsement. The Europa Jupiter System Mission went out of its way to incorporate as much Jupiter science as possible, which should have garnered the support of the giant planets panel, thus tipping the results to the Europa mission over Mars. The icy satellites panel was, of course, on board (Europa was an icy satellite) but the giant planets people went their own way, literally choosing nothing over a Jupiter system mission. A Uranus mission, which they wanted, wasn’t going to happen.

  Accordingly, Curt directed the new science definition team that, when developing their mission, in accordance with the recommendation of the Decadal Survey, remember this: We will never point the cameras of this spacecraft at the planet Jupiter. Period. It wasn’t pettiness. It was following the Decadal Survey, hip and thigh, chapter and verse. The Giant Planets people didn’t want this mission, and so we would not spend a dime to burden them with it.

  Over that bottle of wine or three—Don kept ordering them, and Bob forgot even the color imbibed by evening’s end—they came back to Dave Smith’s white paper. Smith had proposed three small spacecraft concepts: an orbiter, a multiple flyby, and a lander. At the table that night, they dismissed the lander out of hand as too expensive and unable to meet the science objectives set down by the Decadal. But what would a small orbiter at Europa look like? How much would it cost? What about a multiple flyby spacecraft, orbiting Jupiter rather than Europa, and just encountering Europa at intervals, one slice at a time? What science would one do that the other couldn’t, and vice versa? The orbiter would handle remote sensing. The multiple flyby would do the geophysics. You break up the mission, a flagship no more. And Bob would captain not some mighty vessel splitting shimmering trails of light on an infinite eighth sea—the HMS Enterprize of the eighteenth century or the USS Enterprise of the twenty-third—but rather . . . two somethings smaller.

  They had laughed bitterly at this idea before the Decadal was released, but (and maybe it was the wine) the way they were now describing it, the orbiter would be the best little orbiter it could be, and doing only the science that you absolutely needed an orbiter to do, and nothing mor
e. And the multiple flyby would be the best multiple flyby spacecraft it could be, doing only what multiple flybys do best, and nothing more. It could circle Jupiter scores of times, maybe hundreds (why not, after all—this was still a thought experiment), and in its hundreds of flybys, capture Europa one strip at a time. You didn’t have to launch the two spacecraft simultaneously. You’d launch one, get your science, and later, when the budgets were favorable, send up the second. Collectively, with this “split mission” concept, you’d get everything the larger Jupiter Europa Orbiter would have done.

  The more they talked, the better it sounded. Blankenship, as leader of the ice working group, thought a multiple flyby mission might do a better job with his radar instrument than an orbiter. Don first came to the project in 1998, when he chaired the original Europa Orbiter radar study.361 He had by then been flying terrestrial radar in aircraft over Antarctica for fifteen years, a science he pioneered, and he recruited colleagues from Europe and the United States to converge on JPL sporadically and offer counsel regarding how best to use a radar at Europa. Not everyone in the earth science community jumped at the chance to help, of course; competition in Earth’s polar regions was steep, and academic rivals had no interest in sharing their secrets, seeing it as career suicide, an insane act. By the dinner at Il Fornaio, Don was the singular ice scholar who hadn’t given up, Ishmael of the cryosphere. He only was escaped alone to tell thee. The surfaces of a planetary body, he knew, were inadequate to the task of assessing whether life arose and flourished on the body. That secret could be found only in the subsurface.

  On Earth, if you didn’t understand the ocean, you wouldn’t understand our planet’s ability to sustain life and evolution. The ocean interior—Earth’s subsurface—was everything when you were talking about habitability. Which is what made Europa special. For celestial objects generally, and Mars being the obvious example, the most a spacecraft instrument could see were the top few microns, the width of a human hair, or, if you were absurdly lucky, a millimeter or two. For all the orbiters and rovers NASA had there, scientists didn’t understand the subsurface of Mars—not even a single inch beneath its veneer. Mars is not made of stuff you can see through. But Europa? Its surface was made of ice. And Don’s job—his calling—was to see through ice.