The Mission

by David W. Brown

  He was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois, spent his childhood and adolescence on the till plains, which were as boring a geology as a human being could imagine. To find a single rock in his whole county, you’d need a shovel and patience enough to dig down three hundred feet. But his dad built factories for a living, and in the summer, they would travel, and when Don saw mountains, he would just become transfixed. As a freshman in college in the early seventies, he took every senior-level geology course at the school. It was there that he discovered he was really into ice and glaciers, and when he told his father about it—“I’m really into ice and glaciers”—his dad didn’t even blink. Well go figure out glaciers, said the elder Blankenship, reaching into his pocket, pulling out the car keys, and tossing them to his eighteen-year-old son. Go for it.

  That summer, Don took the car to Glacier National Park in northern Montana to see what he could learn, spent weeks skulking around, hiking every glacier he could find, and when the season ended, he came home and promptly quit the university because nobody there could teach him what he had just taught himself. Pocketing his newly acquired knowledge, he then focused his efforts on racing motorcycles.

  He first got into dirt bikes as a kid. His part of Illinois didn’t have much, but the till plains did lay claim to the best motocross tracks in the world. Don was moderately good at the sport, raced on the weekends, and took jobs here and there to keep the gas tank full. He tried working in factories but found almost immediately that you couldn’t race hard and then work at a factory—the human body could take only so much. So he found a job at a bank, worked the drive-up windows. Ahhh—it was heaven. You could sit down all day, like he was being paid to recover from his weekend exertions. After working there for a while, he ran a bank vault, which taught him that giant stacks of money were meaningless (an important lesson to learn if you were in science, as he came to discover). He raced for four years—was a shade away from going pro—and had plans to try for two more years to see how far he could take this thing.

  Then young Don Blankenship, not long after turning twenty-one, crashed and suffered a severe knee injury, was told he might never walk again. He spent six weeks in recovery sitting on the sofa next to his mother watching daytime soaps, and when at last he found he could hobble about, he went back to school with vim and verve. This time it was Eastern Illinois University. He was a little more mature, and the geology program was as serious as he was. He hit it hard. To rehabilitate his leg, he hiked tirelessly in the mountains. Don eventually hitched a ride to the Appalachian Trail, hiked a hundred miles in the winter cold. His shanks held up, and it paid off academically: he earned a pretty solid reputation as a field geology guy. After taking a sequence of physics classes, however, Don realized to his shock and horror that he liked physics more than geology—that maybe his future was in geophysics, which in the rock community was heretical, like renouncing one religion for another. Ever the infidel, however, graduate school in geophysics it was.

  Six months after he arrived at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, his advisor, the famed glaciologist Charlie Bentley, had him in the back of a C-141 cargo plane—landing gear stuck—as the aircraft went in for a final approach at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. (They survived the landing.) The continent, he found, was a land of punishing extremes: cold, obviously, blizzards occasionally, but also bright: the sunlight from open skies reflected on pristine white below, and without sunglasses, it was utterly blinding, like staring directly at the sun. You went out in the field, and you were in the last real wilderness on Earth, and there was such solitude that only astronauts knew, perhaps, or ships lost at sea. Yet after all Don had done, Antarctic expeditions were fairly inside the box. An essential element of the productivity of a geophysicist working “on the ice,” he soon learned, was the ability to tune Rotax two-stroke engines in snowmobiles—a skill he’d picked up in his dirt bike days. This made him really, really effective in the field. He’d be out there, another scientist staring at a snowmobile, lamenting: It won’t run anymore; I can’t do my work. And Don would walk over, rip apart the engine, fix it, make it go. Thus did motorcycle racing prove critical to the success of his Ph.D.

  That doctoral thesis was on mobilized till beneath ice sheets in West Antarctica. At the time, mountain glacier people thought that the glaciers moved on highly pressurized water; that the ice just slid across like a puck on a hockey rink. Don conducted geophysical studies of the bottom ten meters of sheets a thousand meters thick using acoustic waves. It was like doing a high-resolution sonogram of a child, and he discovered that glaciers moved quickly not because of pressurized water, but because they were sliding on mobilized, saturated sediments—real sloppy stuff. Those findings were an absolute affront to classical glaciology. Sliding along mud was just not attractive to the orthodoxy, and they confronted Don at conferences, but he stood his ground. And years later, the part of Antarctica he had studied was drilled. He was sitting in a galley at McMurdo at two thirty in the morning one day when a driller walked in, sat down at the table, and said, I have something for you.

  He pulled a baggie out of his pocket. It was the mud!

  What’s the porosity? asked Don.362

  Forty percent!

  And the pressure?

  One hundred kilopascals!

  It was exactly as Don had predicted. Poetically, the Illinois till plains that so bored him all his life were created by mud on which glaciers glided. Blankenship grew up on the sort of mud that he discovered in West Antarctica beneath fast-flowing ice streams.

  He spent the next twenty-five years studying how the geology of Antarctica controlled the evolution of its ice. He did this concurrently with his Europa work, and by the time he was uncorking a bottle at Il Fornaio, he and his team at the University of Texas at Austin had completed the geophysical mapping of most of the continent through a project he founded called ICECAP. He was ready to get to work on Europa as well. His instruments could see through kilometers and kilometers of ice on Earth, and they could do the same at Europa to reveal the secrets of the ice-ocean interface—a key to understanding habitability. If Earth was any indication, if Europa’s ocean floor was populated, the ice-ocean interface would be populated as well. Though the ice on Antarctica’s surface was paper white, the underside over water was pretty gnarly, rich in biology, coated in brown webs of algae—entire ecosystems of microorganisms, really—with fish swimming up, nibbling away. Europa’s ice might be no different.

  But the cost. An orbiter radar would have to be radiation hardened, running about a million dollars per chip to build. And radars were data intensive, which meant a lot of chips. Not so on a multiple flyby mission, however. You wouldn’t have to soak in thermonuclear bathwater; you could dip in and out and do so for years. So it was clear which of the two spacecraft the radar belonged on. And by removing the pricey radar from the small orbiter, that spacecraft was suddenly a bargain!

  It was a breakthrough—not technical, scientific, or even conceptual—but psychological. That night, there was a clear severing of the past, and the next day, back astride Saint Gabe, the science definition team of this Europa habitability mission started parceling the thing out. Bob literally drew a line on a whiteboard, and on one side scrawled ORBITER and on the other, MULTIPLE FLYBY, and they worked it through, wrote which instrument fit better on each side. The payload practically split itself in half. Each scientific instrument just swooned naturally to the left or right, and with the division, Bob ballparked prices in his head. Billions of dollars had tumbled away from the price tag overnight.

  The next day, he emailed Ron Greeley with breathless delight:

  The Europa SDT just had its first meeting, which resulted in a radically new approach toward achieving the Europa science objectives and goal. Even the floor (“core”) Europa payload that we have discussed in the past cannot be done cheaply. But after several presentations and much discussion on what can and cannot be done from flybys, it became clear that the floor payload s
plits itself based on what needs to be in orbit, and what could be done via flybys. By splitting the payload into 2 different mission elements, flyby and orbiter, we are now optimistic that each might be done for ~1.5 to 2 B$. We would recommend that the less expensive option go first. It seems probable that this would be the orbital element, which we hope will fit into a $1.5B cost.363

  He went on to detail what would do what, and where, and who would be doing it, and ended the note by saying, “Let’s stay in touch as this idea develops.”

  The Jupiter Europa Orbiter—indeed, the very notion of any outer planets flagship mission—was dead. But the possibility of actually going to Europa? It suddenly seemed as alive as any mission in NASA’s portfolio.

  Chapter 12

  The Baltimore Gun Club

  THREE DAYS BEFORE JOHN F. KENNEDY COMMITTED NASA to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth,” Lori Beth Garver was born in the city of Lansing in the state of Michigan. She grew up in nearby Haslett, a quiet, unincorporated community a few miles from East Lansing (not the same as Big Time Lansing, the state capital), and like every green-and-white-blooded East Lansingite–adjacent was fiercely proud of Michigan State University, and when you pedaled your bicycle into town, the city limits sign reminded you just how proud you should be: EAST LANSING, it said, THE HOME OF MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.364 Everyone in her family going back generations went to MSU—parents, grandparents—it was just the cat’s meow in the family Garver.

  Lori hailed from a family of public servants. Her parents both grew up on Depression-era farms. Her dad did a stint in the Marine Corps. He and her mother first met at Michigan State (of course), and when the two graduated, both became teachers. While expecting their first child, her dad realized that the family would need a little more money, so he took the brokerage exam, passed it, and was hired as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. He would remain there for the rest of his career, helping people invest successfully in one company or another. Her mom’s degree was in home economics, a field that meant a lot to her, and after a couple years of teaching it, she was thrilled to live it, to manage the household. It was a modest lifestyle, but a good one, and Lori and her sisters knew they could one day do anything they wanted, which was not a guarantee for everyone in her community.

  Lori got a job at sixteen at McDonald’s, and it was just a dream—a thrill—exhilarating to work there, two dollars and thirty cents an hour, and she worked hard, got a five-cent raise right away, and that was a pretty big deal, I mean, and she got a car—a VW Jetta (a scandalous purchase in Michigan)—and she toiled under the Golden Arches all through high school, which she loved—school, was successful at it, was small-town super popular, did everything extracurricular: performed in plays, ran track, was on the basketball team, played tennis, was in the band (flute, oboe), did a decade of ballet, was a cheerleader. She was voted Most Versatile her senior year, and that’s exactly what she wanted because it’s exactly what she was.

  Her family on her mom’s side was political. The farm had been in the family for one hundred seventy years, and her grandfather was in the state legislature in the fifties and sixties.365 He was a good Republican and remained a full-time farmer because the legislature met only three months out of the year, and you still had to cudgel out a living when the sessions ended. Later, her uncle was elected to the same seat, and served in the state house and senate in the seventies and eighties.366 Before Lori could crawl, she appeared in campaign brochures and parades, and once she had mastered standing and walking, the little girl went door-to-door in support of the family. Her uncle ran for Congress in 1980 and then again a decade later, seeking to be the Republican representative of the tenth district of Michigan, and she was absolutely devastated when he lost that first time.367 But she learned in the process that she loved politics; that if you wanted to make a positive, meaningful difference in people’s lives, public service was the way to go.

  When Lori told her high school guidance counselor that she wanted to take the SATs, the adult was stunned and bewildered: But why would you want to do such a thing, Lori? Michigan schools used ACT scores! But Michigan State had so suffused young Lori’s life that it seemed natural to go elsewhere for college; she had, it felt, already gone to Michigan State from grades one through twelve. She went to Colorado College for her undergrad. She studied political science and economics, and while there, did Semester at Sea spending time in developing countries, seeing with her own eyes levels of poverty previously unimaginable, and it was there that Lori Garver, clinically raised Republican stock—she’s seeing this and learning that Ronald Reagan was cutting foreign aid to these people, who had nothing, who were harming no one, and she was aghast and she came home and sought out the person most likely to defeat Reagan, and she asked for a job on his campaign, and got it.

  Concurrently: in 1983 Sally Ride was selected for flight on the seventh space shuttle mission, and with the launch of Challenger became the first American woman in space.368 (Challenger disintegrated shortly after launch three years and eight missions later.369) Until then, Lori was cognizant of the space program—I mean, she knew we had one. She was an eight-year-old when the Eagle landed, and it was exciting as far as Big Moments in an Eight-Year-Old’s Life went, but right away she just took it for granted that she would one day walk on the moon, too, so in a way it was like watching the ribbon cutting for a supermarket or stadium: it’s new and neat, but you know you’re going to go there one day, and that’ll be even better, and you file away the memory and go about your life. Space was a thing the United States did, but she didn’t pay that much attention—until Sally Ride circled Earth. And, sure, it was extraordinary, but it was also ridiculous. This wasn’t the fifties. Russia had flown a woman twenty years earlier!370 What took NASA so long? But after that, she was locked in.

  The person most likely to dethrone Reagan in 1984 was Senator John Glenn of Ohio, who demonstrated his righteous stuff in 1962 when he became the first American to orbit Earth.371 Lori got a job on the Glenn campaign as a receptionist and later moved into scheduling. It was an entry-level job out of college, and it was interesting and engaging, and she’d been doing politics her entire life so she knew a thing or two about it, and her higher-ups noticed. Senator Glenn did not defeat Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election. He did not, in fact, even win the Democratic nomination. When he fared poorly in the Super Tuesday primaries, that was that.372 But Glenn and his team looked out for the young go-getters on the campaign, and when it came time for everyone to go forth and find work elsewhere, the head of personnel told Lori that there was an opening at the National Space Institute, a space advocacy group founded in 1974 by Wernher von Braun. Apply for it, Lori, she was told, and Lori did, and was hired.

  It was just a great time in her life. She worked full-time at the institute by day, and at night attended classes studying space policy at George Washington University. Between the day job and night classes, she came to know everyone in the relevant circles. Her professor was John Logsdon, the noted historian, prolific author, and grandmaster of space policy, and over the course of a semester, he would have everyone in the business drop in to give guest lectures. It was a fine advantage if you were willing to work harder than nearly everyone else, and in 1987 the National Space Institute and the L5 Society, a fellow advocacy group, merged to form the National Space Society, and the new organization hired Lori to be its executive director.373 She was twenty-six and on her way.

  The National Space Society was a small outfit relative to the steamroller lobby firms in DC, but they were doing important work at a time when space exploration had reached a nadir. There just weren’t that many space advocacy and policy analysis groups, except for maybe the Planetary Society, but it was a relative newcomer, founded only in 1980 by Carl Sagan and two California mountain people: Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman. So here was Lori Garver sitting at von Braun’s actual desk, sleek and huge. (He died in 1977, so it was available.374) When the spacecraft Galil
eo and Ulysses launched in 1989 and 1990, respectively, the National Space Society fought the good fight, making sure those missions got their licenses to launch. When you’ve got screwball activists chaining themselves to fences, you need to deploy rational minds to balance things out, and there she was, Lori Garver of Haslett, locked in debates on the steps of the DC courthouse and testifying on the Hill—executive director of the National Space Society—it certainly sounded official, anyway, and she was the only woman doing anything visible for space policy at the time (Sally Ride excluded, who did everything, already a walking, eternal echo in history), and the community embraced her.

  In 1996 Dan Goldin, the administrator of NASA, called Lori and offered her a job, and that was something. He made her the associate administrator for policy and plans—basically the head of policy at NASA—and from then on, she was a politico. It was never the plan, but there she was. And it was a risk, because once you stepped into the political arena, you would be considered a combatant evermore, but it was worth it, because working with Dan Goldin, my goodness: now there was a great American, and a true believer in what the space program could achieve. Faster-Better-Cheaper got a bad rap, but Goldin thought deeply about the problems facing the agency, and Lori’s job was to help him. Goldin started each day by picking up the newspaper, and there might be an article on how, say, the medical community made all sorts of mistakes during surgeries because of sleep deprivation, and he’d have Lori get on the phone and get those people in here, and let’s transfer to them all the knowledge we have about sleep cycles for astronauts. He also had ideas that were pretty radical at the time about where NASA needed to be, and Lori bought hard into them. Goldin was a visionary, wanted to turn the keys to the space shuttle over to the private sector and, once the International Space Station was space-borne, wanted to hand it off to industry.375 NASA had built the infrastructure of low Earth orbit. Its work was done. It was up to businesspeople to take it from here, because NASA’s mission was to go farther, always: to Mars and beyond. So Lori added commercial space to her portfolio, soon scoring a real coup when Fisk Johnson of S. C. Johnson & Son (the multinational conglomerate behind Drano, Ziploc, Raid, and Toilet Duck) sought to use a NASA-developed bioreactor to fight liver disease from space.376