133.J. Hester, “Repairing the Hubble Space Telescope,” Jeff Hester, last modified December 14, 2015, http://www.jeff-hester.com/reality-straight-up/repairing-the-hubble-space-telescope.
134.E. Weiler, interview by author, September 4, 2017.
135.E. J. Weiler, interview by R. Wright, October 31, 2007, oral history transcript, NASA at 50 Oral History Project, NASA, Johnson Space Center, https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/NAF/WeilerEJ/WeilerEJ_10-31-07.pdf.
136.NASA, “Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Arrival,” press kit, March 2006, https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/files/mro/mro-arrival.pdf.
137.NASA, “Phoenix Landing: Mission to the Martian Polar North,” press kit, May 2008, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/phoenix-landing.pdf.
138.With apologies to Jerry Pournelle.
139.National Research Council, New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration Strategy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2003), 318, https://doi.org/10.17226/10432.
140.The Next Great Observatory: Assessing the James Webb Space Telescope—Full Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Space, December 6, 2011, video, 1:43.57, https://science.house.gov/news/videos/watch/the-next-great-observatory-assessing-the-james-webb-space-telescope-full-committee.
141.J. K. Alexander, Science Advice to NASA: Conflict, Consensus, Partnership, Leadership (Washington, DC: NASA, Office of Communications, NASA History Division, 2017), 89, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/275710-science_advice_book_tagged.pdf.
142.National Research Council, New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration Strategy.
143.Ibid., 196.
144.Major Savings and Reforms in the President’s 2006 Budget (Washington, DC: Office of Management and Budget, 2006), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2006-SAVINGS/pdf/BUDGET-2006-SAVINGS.pdf.
145.“Huygens Descent Timeline,” European Space Agency, last modified January 14, 2005, https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens/Huygens_descent_timeline.
146.In 1680 in the gardens of Versailles, Gaspard Marsy began work on a fountain depicting the agony of the giant Enceladus. He had quite a bit of material to work with.
Enceladus was born of Gaia and Uranus.
Gaia first begot Uranus through parthenogenesis, and son sired with mother the Titans, the Hecatonchires, and the Cyclopes. But Uranus hated each brood, burying all but the first back inside of their mother, and she hated that. So she created a jagged adamantium sickle and gave it to her son, the Titan Cronus, and asked him to lie in wait inside of her and, at the right time, to strike vengeance. And did he ever. When descended the god of the sky to bed the goddess of the world, Titans gripped Uranus at the Earth’s four corners, and Cronus emerged, raised his blade, and castrated his terrible father. But it gets so much worse, really. The blood shed from the gelded god impregnated Gaia, the splatter-house union yielding the Giants, the Furies, and the Meliae. (The goolies of Uranus, cast into the sea, made Aphrodite, the goddess of love.)
Thus Cronus assumed the throne of the universe, proving meanwhile as loving a father as his own. He reburied the Hecatonchires and Cyclopes, married his sister, the Titaness Rhea, and together they had six kids of their own. Cronos ate the first five, fearing they would overthrow him as he had Uranus. Rhea, expectant with no. 6, did not like her husband eating their children and asked Gaia how she should handle the problem. The two settled on the old wrap-a-rock switcheroo. Cronos mistakenly swallowed a swaddled stone, and the spared child Zeus was stolen away and raised in a cave by the goat Amalthea. He grew and eventually freed from his father’s belly his swallowed siblings, and from the Earth liberated the Hecatonchires and Cyclopes, the latter of whom gave him the gift of lightning. So began the Titanomachy, during which Zeus and siblings—as Uranus feared—waged war against Titans for universal primacy, and they would win, Zeus taking his throne on the mountain Olympus. Later, a cattle dispute (really) ignited the Gigantomachy, an epic war between the gods and the Giants (again, for control of the cosmos). One by one, Zeus and his children vanquished the Giants, Zeus hurling thunderbolts and progeny locking swords. Accounts of the war vary, names and numbers, but famous of the fighters is the goddess Athena, daughter of Zeus, who grappled the giant Enceladus on the Phlegraean plain, interring him at last inside of a mountain. (During that war, Athena was very clearly all out of bubble gum. She dispatched the giant Pallas, flayed him with his own claws, and fashioned a shield from his sloughed skin.) By Gigantomachy’s end, the Giants were routed and buried, and the gods secure as rulers of heaven and the Earth, those threats staved off until other gods from other cultures would make mythology of Western polytheism, arcana of orthodoxy, and Renaissance art of religious canon.
But alas, poor Enceladus. When artists conjure the Gigantomachy, it is his defeat above others that meets canvas and chisel. Weary Enceladus, struck down by Athena, patron of Athens, pushed once into rock but interred ever anew in oil, stone, ingot, and ink. Enceladus, who yearned for more, for the freedom of godliness, to summit that mountain! And then in vanquishment, his shameful burial beneath another, his yearning now for freedom from rock, the continents ever pressing down on him, the giant ever writhing: “not yet dead indeed but always dying,” imagined the sophist Philostratus the Elder. Enceladus the cypher! What motivated the Athena-slain son of Uranus? In words written through Pierre’s eyes, Melville saw a creature in torment, vexed by an incestuous birth and saddled with “that reckless, sky-assaulting mood of his.” With metal and masonry for Louis XIV, the sculptor Gaspard Marsy carved for the proto-palace Versailles a fountain in gilded bronze, the giant captured in cruel consequent convulsions. It resides now in a small copse in the lower gardens: Bassin d’Encelade, a bowered wooden trellis surrounding a wide round pool. At water’s center, an enormous golden man of muscle and anguish writhes and thrashes, buried in severe black stones, a rock clutched and raised in a liberated hand as if removing it—a futile effort to free himself, the rock just one of infinite raining upon him. His struggle is doomed, his burial imminent, and his eyes and arms and mouth are wide and he is screaming. From the ghastly green water around him, meager fountains splash upward where the rocks rain down, and from open jaws of the giant himself, a focused jet of water blasts eighty feet into the air, dissolving distantly into plumes and raining back down upon him. Such is the fate of Enceladus, inhumed, recumbent and baying an eternal cry.
In all the groves grown and groomed for visitors of Versailles, only Marsy’s masterpiece would prove prophetic of a discovery millions of miles and three hundred thirty years away. In the orbit of Saturn, nature would imitate art imitating mythology. Marsy of Cambrais, born in 1624 and adjunct rector of the Academy of Sculpture and Painting in Paris, was right about Enceladus, about the perpetual pressure of uncompromising geology, and the resultant plume gushing from a god aspirant.
147.“Enceladus: Ocean Moon,” NASA Solar System Exploration, last modified September 25, 2018, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/science/enceladus.
148.R. Cowen, “Saturn’s Moon Has Never-Ending Winter,” Nature, last modified October 3, 2011, https://www.nature.com/news/2011/111003/full/news.2011.569.html.
149.L. Dajose, M. Wong, and C. Dreier, “NASA’s Planetary Science Division Funding and Number of Missions, 2004–2020,” Planetary Society, last modified February 9, 2015, https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-images/charts/historical-levels-of-planetary-exploration-funding-fy2003-fy2019.html.
150.C. Niebur, Investments in Europa Mission Concept Studies, 2010.
151.The Farthest: Voyager in Space, dir. E. Reynolds (PBS, 2017), DVD.
152.P. E. Mack, From Engineering Science to Big Science (Washington, DC: NASA, 2007), https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4219/Chapter11.html.
For a description of the “grand tour” generally.
153.C. Niebur, email message to author regarding 2007 competed flagship, J
anuary 11, 2018.
See also C. Niebur, telephone interview by author, February 20, 2018.
See also F. Bagenal, interview by author, August 23, 2016.
154.F. Bagenal, interview by author, August 23, 2016.
155.S. Niebur, “Children’s Museums,” Toddler Planet (blog), March 10, 2010, https://toddlerplanet.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/childrens-museums.
156.NASA, “Susan Niebur (1973–2012),” NASA Solar System Exploration, accessed October 24, 2019, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/1700/susan-niebur-1973-2012.
157.C. Niebur, interview by author, August 4, 2016.
158.J. N. Wilford, “Pioneer Nearing Asteroid Region,” New York Times, July 14, 1972, 64.
159.President’s Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Request (Washington, DC: NASA, 2005), available at https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/107486main_FY06_high.pdf.
160.Ibid., 130.
161.C. Young, Consolidated Appropriations Resolution FY2003 Report 108-10 (Pub. L. 108–7), February 20, 2003.
162.M. Griffin, Statement of Hon. Michael D. Griffin, Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hearing Before the Committee on Science, House of Representatives, 109th Congress, First Session, November 3, 2005 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006), 28–31, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109hhrg24151/html/CHRG-109hhrg24151.htm.
163.J. Culberson, “Realizing the Promise of Prometheus,” Aerospace America 43, no. 7 (July 2005).
Many thanks to Duane Hyland of Aerospace America, who kindly provided a copy of this article.
See also J. Culberson, telephone interview by author, May 30, 2019.
164.“State Runoff Elections,” Del Rio (TX) News Herald, May 7, 1986, 3C.
165.G. Jones, “Runoff Candidates Back at Work for June 7,” Monitor (Mc-Allen, TX), May 5, 1986, 3A.
166.Xenophon, The Works of Xenophon, vol. 1, trans. H. G. Dakyns (New York: Macmillan, 1890), 149.
167.T. Fleck, “Wareing Thin,” Houston Press, last modified April 20, 2000, https://www.houstonpress.com/news/wareing-thin-6564910.
168.J. Transahl, Final Edition: List of Standing Committees and Select Committees and Their Subcommittees of the House of Representatives of the United States Together with Joint Committees of the Congress with an Alphabetical List of the Members and Their Committee Assignments (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, December 26, 2002).
169.Ibid.
170.J. Tollestrup, Appropriations Subcommittee Structure: History of Changes from 1920–2011 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2011).
You would not believe how boring this stuff is to research.
171.“Katy, a Great Place to Be!,” Katy Heritage Society, accessed October 24, 2019, https://www.katyheritagesociety.com/content.asp?secnum=9. Also, the author extends no thanks to the Katy Heritage Society for failing to return my calls and email messages requesting help here. Are you really that busy?
172.J. Thornock, “Katy: West Houston Wonder,” Houston History 13, no. 2 (March 2016): 25–29.
173.“Historical Population: 1900 to 2013, City of Houston,” City of Houston Planning & Development Department, accessed October 24, 2019, http://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Demographics/docs_pdfs/Cy/coh_hist_pop.pdf.
174.P. Brinckerhoff, Building a Legacy: The IH 10 West Katy Freeway Story, Katy Freeway: Building the Future, last modified December 2008, http://www.katyfreeway.org/GrandOpening/Katy_Video_Booklet.pdf.
175.“Interstate 10 West Construction: Historical Information,” West Houston Association, last modified April 12, 2004, https://www.westhouston.org/interstate-10-west-construction-historical-information.
176.Southwest Freeway / Transitway Project, US-59 (Southwest Freeway) Improvement and Widening, Transitway Project, Harris County: Environmental Impact Statement (Austin: Texas State Department of Highways and Public Transportation, 1985), FHWA-TX-EIS-85-01-F.
177.G. Goodin, telephone interview by author, October 10, 2017.
Ginger Goodin is director of the Transportation Policy Research Center and a senior research engineer at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
178.Brinckerhoff, Building a Legacy.
179.J. Culberson, interview by author, October 4, 2016.
180.B. Shuster, Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (Pub. L. 105-178), June 9, 1998.
181.Katy Freeway Public Information Office, “Governor Rick Perry, U.S. Congressman John Culberson, and Federal Highway Administrator Thomas J. Madison Join TxDOT in Celebrating Completion of the Katy Freeway Reconstruction Program,” press release, October 27, 2008, http://www.newsrouter.com/NewsRouter_Uploads/56/news_release.asp?intRelease_ID=4315&intAcc_ID=56.
182.D. Adams, “Mars Exploration Rover Airbag Landing Loads Testing and Analysis” (presentation, Forty-Fifth AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference, Palm Springs, CA, April 22, 2004), https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2004-1795.
See also B. Nelson, telephone interview by author, February 8, 2019. Bill Nelson was the engineering manager for the Mars Exploration Rover project, and he helped describe the landings generally.
See also NASA, “Mars Exploration Rover Launches,” press kit, June 2003, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/merlaunch.pdf.
183.NASA, “Mars Exploration Rover Launches.”
184.Adams, “Mars Exploration Rover Airbag Landing.”
185.J. Culberson, telephone interview by author, June 26, 2019.
186.G. Webster, “Jupiter Radiation Belts Harsher Than Expected,” NASA Solar System Exploration, last modified March 28, 2001, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/12227/jupiter-radiation-belts-harsher-than-expected.
187.A. Dressler, HST and Beyond: Exploration and the Search for Origins: A Vision for Ultraviolet-Optical-Infrared Space Astronomy (Washington, DC: Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, 1996).
188.National Research Council, A Scientific Assessment of a New Technology Orbital Telescope (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1995), vii, https://doi.org/10.17226/9295.
189.U.S. Government Accountability Office, James Webb Space Telescope: Actions Needed to Improve Cost Estimate and Oversight of Test and Integration, Report to Congressional Committees (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, December 3, 2012), 3–4, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-4.
190.Space Studies Board, New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration Strategy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2003), 5.
191.NASA Office of Inspector General, Audit Report: NASA’s Management of the Mars Science Laboratory Project (Report IG-11-19) (Washington, DC: NASA Inspector General, June 8, 2011), https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-11-019.pdf.
192.NASA, “Mars Science Laboratory Launch,” press kit, November 2001, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/MSLLaunch.pdf.
See also NASA, “Mars Exploration Rover Launches.”
193.A. Stern, “NASA’s Black Hole Budgets,” New York Times, November 23, 2008, A23.
194.A. Cohen, Report of the 90-Day Study on Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars (Report TM-102999) (Washington, DC: NASA, November 1989), https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910017741.pdf.
195.Associated Press, “A Station in Space Predicted,” New York Times, July 19, 1983, C3.
196.W. J. Broad, “House Vote Sets Stage for Conflict Between Two Allies in Space Program,” New York Times, June 8, 1991, A7.
197.M. Smith, “NASA’s Space Station Program: Evolution and Current Status,” (presentation, House Science Committee, Washington, DC, April 4, 2001).
198.Broad, “House Vote Sets Stage for Conflict,” A7.
199.J. M. Logsdon and J. R. Millar, “US-Russian Cooperation in Human Spaceflight: Assessing the Impacts,” Space Policy 17, no. 3 (2001): 171–78, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0265-9646(01)00021-2.
200.J. Stromberg, “Why NASA Is Utterly Dependent on Russia,” Vox, last modified May 5, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/5/5/5674744/how-nasa-bec
ame-utterly-dependent-on-russia-for-space-travel.
201.W. E. Leary, “Outpost in Space; Space Station, Long a Dream, to Soar at Last,” New York Times, November 16, 1998, A1.
202.Ibid.
203.Broad, “House Vote Sets Stage for Conflict,” A7.
204.Ibid.
205.T. Reichhardt, “Unstoppable Force,” Nature 426, no. 6965 (2003): 380–81, https://doi.org/10.1038/426380a.
206.R. R. Sims and W. I. Sauser, eds., Experiences in Teaching Business Ethics: Contemporary Human Resource Management (Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2011), 262.
207.United States Postal Service, “NASA’s Breathtaking Planet Images Get Stamps of Approval,” news release, May 31, 2016, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:J5auoQVrXtoJ:https://blueearth.usps.gov/news/national-releases/2016/pr16_042.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us.
208.CAW-CAW! RAAAR!
209.K. Chang, “The Long, Strange Trip to Pluto, and How NASA Nearly Missed It,” New York Times, July 19, 2015, A1.
210.T. May, interview by author, August 11, 2016.
211.Ibid., April 3, 2018.
See also A. Stern and D. H. Grinspoon, Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, 1st ed. (New York: Picador, 2018), 124.
212.T. May, interview by author, August 11, 2016.
213.Ibid.
214.A. Stern, interview by author, August 24, 2016.
215.Ibid., August 26, 2016.
216.J. Langmaier and J. Elliott, Assessment of Alternative Europa Mission Architectures (JPL-08-1) (Pasadena, CA: NASA, JPL, January 2008), http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.541.8006&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
Of the studies listed in the text, Karla was involved with the 1998 internal all-solar Europa Orbiter study; led the 2001 Europa Orbiter study; led the Europa Orbiter Alternate Missions study in 2001; led the Europa Orbiter Competitive study in 2002; was technical lead for the nonfission option of the Jupiter Icy Moons Tour study in 2002; was spacecraft manager for JIMO in 2005; and led the Europa Explorer study in 2007.
217.C. Niebur, interview by author, August 4, 2016.
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