The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Ed had been three years on Princeton’s payroll when one day someone knocked on his office door, and there stood Nancy Roman, the chief of astronomy at NASA headquarters. Ed didn’t know her—I mean he knew of her, but Ed didn’t exactly warrant the chief of astronomy’s time—and he invited her into his phone-booth-sized “Princeton office” at Goddard. In addition to running NASA astronomy, Roman was chief scientist of the space telescope that Lyman Spitzer had championed for so long. (It was still a study at the time.) She made Ed an offer: How would you like to leave Princeton and come work for the government? You would be a staff astronomer and my assistant on the space telescope we want to build.

  Ed said yes. Maybe it was a subconscious concern about the longevity of Copernicus. Maybe it was those years of animated discussion with Spitzer about this space telescope and how it would revolutionize astronomy. Maybe—and this one required a deep look inward—it was that he worked for Lyman Spitzer, universally recognized as one of the greatest astronomers to ever live. Spitzer had literally written the book on interstellar mediums—the same book Ed had used in graduate school. You work for a guy like that and you’re offered a job at NASA headquarters, you ask yourself: If I stay in academia, will I ever be as good an astronomer as a guy like Spitzer? Or could I affect the field of astronomy in other ways, enabling new space missions—things like this orbital telescope—for the rest of the community, for the future Spitzers out there? It took some humility, but he knew the answer. He could best help space science advance by going to NASA, and that’s what he did.

  One year later, Nancy Roman retired and Weiler was hired for her position. Thus, in 1979—three years after finishing school—he became NASA’s chief of astronomy and the chief scientist on what would be called the Hubble Space Telescope. In the early days of the project, his job was to advocate for its science and protect it from engineers and project managers who might make Hubble less than it could be. He considered it his moral responsibility to defend the science, to build the community around it. He saw Hubble through to the launch pad in 1990, and when it reached space—over budget by a stunning order of magnitude, but surely capable of miracles—he and astronomers the world over awaited eagerly its very first image, and it came down, and something was TERRIBLY WRONG. The images were . . . blurry.131 Astronomers realized eventually that there was a defect in Hubble’s mirror; its perimeter was too flat by one-fiftieth the thickness of a single human hair, but in a precision instrument, that was enough.132

  And how the world laughed. If you were a stand-up comic, the Hubble Space Telescope provided an endless supply of easy jokes at NASA’s expense. Had Mr. Magoo designed the thing? Jay Leno: “What sound does a space turkey make? Hubble, Hubble, Hubble.”133 Bumper stickers appeared on cars: IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE NOT THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE. And so on. The good news, scientists soon realized, was that shoddy craftsmanship was not to blame; the mirror was made absolutely flawlessly. It was just flawless to the wrong specification, which meant that you could correct the problem simply by crafting “eyeglasses” for it. That’s exactly what happened. In 1993, after three years of ridicule, astronauts on the shuttle Endeavour went up, installed the fix, and the problem vanished. (Finally, the shuttle had a purpose!) Hubble went on to become as transformative to the field of astronomy as Galileo’s telescope.

  Five years later, Wes Huntress was ready to leave his position as head of NASA science and recommended Ed for the job. Dan Goldin made the offer:

  DAN: Ed, do you want the job?134

  ED: No thanks!

  He was happy running the Origins program, which concerned itself with the very beginnings of life, the universe, and everything. He loved working on Hubble. And, I don’t know, he didn’t feel qualified for the job. He’d never felt qualified for any job he had ever held, and this one, it didn’t seem like a burden, exactly, but who was he to do things like meet regularly with Congress? Did he even want to do something like that? He recognized the opportunity there, but just—I don’t know.

  DAN: Well can you at least help me recruit somebody to do it?

  Ed agreed to do that much. After two months of searching, though, he had changed his mind. He saw the experience level of the candidates who had lined up for the job, and one night he sat down, dug deep, and made some decisions: I’m one of the most senior people in the science program. If Dan brings in one of these rookies who’s never worked at headquarters, they’re going to ask me to be a mentor, to hold his or her hand. Do I really want to spend months of my life holding the hand of some academic who’s never been in the government?

  No, he decided. He may as well do it himself.

  So Ed called the ninth floor of NASA headquarters, but Dan was on a NASA jet to California. Turned out that Dan had a phone on the plane, though, so Ed called it.

  ED: Dan, I changed my mind. You still interested?

  DAN: Let me think about it.

  [Click]

  When the plane landed, Ed received a call.

  DAN: You’ve got the job.

  Canceling the Mars program was one of Ed’s first major acts as agency science mission lead, and over the next year, he helped put a new plan in place. Scott Hubbard—he of Pathfinder—was brought to headquarters as the first director of a new formalized NASA Mars program. NASA, the Mars science community, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory then put their heads together to come up with a reasonable program of missions, starting with a water-divining orbiter, followed by twin rovers in the vein of Viking and a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite. Two missions would next be submitted for competitive review in a program called Mars Scouts. Afterward, a rolling science laboratory would be sent to seek signs of organic material. All of this would culminate in a sample return mission, the details of which were still fuzzy, but they had decades to figure them out. These new missions wouldn’t have quite the constraints of Faster-Better-Cheaper, though the goal remained to hit every launch window, so “faster” was a perpetual demand. (Variants of each of these missions had been studied extensively and developed internally at Jet Propulsion Laboratory for years; they weren’t simply being dreamed up and launched in twenty-six-month boxes.)

  What followed was perhaps the greatest unbroken string of successes in NASA’s history, and considering the challenge of Mars, certainly the greatest at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2001 the agency launched the orbiter Mars Odyssey, a water finder. In 2003 the rovers Spirit and Opportunity launched to get good looks at Martian soil and rocks in order to better understand the water processes at work. By now, Ed had managed to double the space science budget on such achievements before taking a job as director of Goddard Space Flight Center, a lateral move that placed him closer to his beloved Hubble and its successor in development: the James Webb Space Telescope.135

  The Mars milestones, meanwhile, didn’t stop. In 2005 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched from Cape Canaveral with a mandate to map Mars in greater detail than ever before and to give planetary scientists a global view of Martian weather conditions.136 Each mission arrived successfully at the Red Planet. The two rovers landed without a scratch. Mars was everywhere, and the data coming back painted not an abstract world, cold in the mind’s eye, but a place as real as Earth, with every little detail being teased from rovers, landers, and orbiters alike. The next NASA lander, Phoenix, was in development, set finally to right the scientific loss of the Mars Polar Lander.137 Never before had a planet other than Earth been such a hive of activity.

  The price tags for such successes grew by hundreds of millions of dollars with each successive mission. Which was great if you studied Mars, but across the planetary science community, the number of unhappy faces proliferated. The Martian momentum was nice, but were we not neglecting the wider solar system?

  Still, these cries found few allies, especially as the George W. Bush administration went all in on human exploration. The space shuttle program was at last drawing to a close, giving urgency to NASA’s need for a new grand plan
. A space station now orbited Earth, as God and Wernher von Braun intended,138 and the next move in the late von Braun’s playbook called for lunar development as a stepping-stone to Mars. As author of the agency’s genetic code, one way or another, von Braun was going to have his way.

  They called it the Constellation Program. NASA would build gargantuan “heavy-lift” rockets, moon landers, habitats—all of it. We’d go to the moon and take the lessons learned there to the Red Planet. It was finally happening: a true successor to Apollo. And with all this Mars mania, robotic exploration was placed on a pedestal, Mars robots as human precursor missions. Since every dollar spent learning more about Mars meant mitigating risk to astronauts down the road, these missions were worth every dime to the astronaut-centric agency. This gave Jet Propulsion Laboratory greater latitude in planning its most ambitious Mars rover yet: the Mars Science Laboratory.

  The vehicle was about the size of a Jeep, weighed just shy of a ton, was a six-wheeled beast relative to the three previous rovers, and was born to amass data and mint new Ph.D.s. It would go farther than any vehicle ever landed on another world, would do more, had lasers, cameras, a full soil-analysis suite, and a mandate: figure out if Mars was once habitable. It was the final rover in the pipeline before the Mars people reached for the brass ring: sample return.

  PLANETARY SCIENCE RUNS on ten-year timelines. The community’s driving document is called the Decadal Survey. You don’t even have to specify in casual conversation, just, the Decadal, and everybody knows what you mean. The very first planetary Decadal was commissioned in 2001 at the behest of Weiler, who took the concept from the astrophysics community, which had, for fifty years, organized itself around a similar concept.139 With each survey, the top minds in the field would come together and decide: What do we know? What have we yet to learn? How do we learn it? Where should we focus our energies, and in what order? Astronomy is expensive, and their decadal reports were a way for the field to focus on big questions and the big things necessary to answer them. It’s how astronomers came to support so effectively the great telescopes of the twentieth century—the Very Large Array, Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra—and the cornerstone of the twenty-first, the James Webb Space Telescope, which, in addition to luring Ed Weiler to Goddard Space Flight Center, had by 2006 nonupled in price, five hundred million to four-point-five billion, threatening to engulf the agency’s entire space science budget.140 When spreadsheet cells stretched ever rightward like that, the Decadals were how you kept White Houses and Congresses from losing their nerve.141

  The planetary science community had no such document, and its unceasing political problems reflected this. NASA’s science office built its exploration road map from a jumble of reports from scholarly bodies both internal and ex. Accordingly, there was no unity, no clear community consensus. Weiler wanted to change that, and he asked the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council of the National Academies of the United States—itself an independent, nonprofit, nongovernmental scientific body—to appoint a committee to steer what would be called, formally, a Solar System Exploration Survey. Its goals: to paint a nuanced portrait of where the field was and why it existed; describe where it needed to go in terms of exploration and technology development; prescribe the care and feeding of the community regarding things such as research funding and retention; and present priorities for the next ten years that might enable it to achieve those goals. The “survey” side of the name, in other words, referred not to some sort of ballot box vote, or group of graduate students holding clipboards and asking anyone to rate Venus-as-Object-of-Exploration on a scale of one to ten, but rather, “survey” in the way Shackleton, far inland at Antarctica, took measure of what he faced, pointed a finger and said, “That way.”

  This was, in all, a yearlong effort:142 July–July, 2001–2002, with the solar system split into general areas of inquiry: the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, the moon, and Mars); the giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune); the primitive bodies (asteroids, comets, and Pluto); and “large satellites” (the massive, mind-blowing moons of the solar system such as Europa and Titan). The steering committee later added an astrobiology panel to the mix. For each of these areas, it commissioned a subpanel of subject matter experts who would meet multiple times to determine the state of knowledge of its subfield and how best to improve it given possible spacecraft on the drawing board. Panels sorted prospective projects by mission size and prioritized them: the small Discovery-class missions to launch every two years; medium-sized missions called New Frontiers to launch at least every three; and multibillion-dollar missions called flagships, one per decade. The steering committee would then take each panel’s endorsement and come to consensus on an integrated list of mission priorities. (The giant planets group might recommend a Neptune flagship, and the inner planets team might push for a flagship Venus lander. The steering committee would decide which of those had higher priority this decade.)

  Mars, as ever, was the exception to all this. At the time, the National Research Council was already actively doing something similar to the Decadal Survey, but specific to the Red Planet. Rather than double the effort or present conflicting recommendations, the Decadal steering committee essentially absorbed that working group as a stand-alone panel—Mars—and instructed the inner planets panel to ignore Mars entirely. The upshot is that everyone competed, but Mars competed with no one, and when it came to mission recommendations, Mars was essentially treated as its own space program with its own funding and its own small, medium, and large mission classes, none of which were integrated into the report’s recommendations. Mars would do whatever Mars wanted.

  The first planetary science Decadal was published in July 2002 and rounded out at two hundred fifty pages. NASA’s planetary science division, though not legally obliged to follow its recommendations, moved to adopt them all the same and came quickly to expect that any agency mission proposal give Decadal justifications for its science goals in the way that a judge might expect specific case citations in litigation. In the final analysis, the Solar System Exploration Survey endorsed as its top flagship a Europa Geophysical Explorer. This recommendation was unambiguous: “One Flagship mission is recommended for this decade—the Europa Geophysical Explorer.”143

  In 2003 it fell to Curt Niebur, a green, almost entirely anonymous agency functionary at NASA headquarters, to make the recommendation a reality. Three weeks after he had been hired by the agency, Curt’s boss asked him if he would like to be program scientist of the Europa flagship, called JIMO—short for Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Program scientists were something like intermediaries: they represented NASA headquarters to mission science teams, and represented the mission science teams to NASA headquarters. It involved a very careful give-and-take, and there was always a good chance of annoying everyone on every side. JIMO, an agencywide initiative supported by the administrator himself, had a big audience. Curt was too young and naive to know that he should have been terrified by the very notion of the project, let alone the project itself.

  When JIMO died (officially, it was “indefinitely deferred”144) in 2005, Curt couldn’t let Europa go. He had been given this moon—the moon the community wanted—the moon deemed the field’s supreme scientific concern—and in meeting after meeting, he continued clutching a copy of the Decadal and jabbing a finger at its flagship endorsement, asking how headquarters planned to proceed.

  But it was like shouting at the ocean. After JIMO, headquarters leadership cheerfully consigned Europa to oblivion. With Mars hysteria moving the agency’s needle in the press and on Capitol Hill, there was effectively zero support for flying further flagships to any of the outer planets, but Europa in particular was luna non grata. That moon was hard—marinated in a spacecraft-killing radioactive morass—and the shielding and power requirements necessary for survival were too great to overcome in a time of austerity. We had spent tens of millions of dollars failing to get a mission going and had given the Decadal its due.
It was time to move on, Curt, and your continued heretical braying about that Jovian ice ball wasn’t doing you any favors here.

  But Curt would not relent. Practically and professionally, surrender would have been easier, and certainly smarter. He could have just opened his agenda and drawn a line clean through the icy moon and moved on to the next thing, because in his portfolio of missions, he now also held the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. He was on the winning team! But the solar system stretched beyond the Red Planet. The Mars community framed its exploration as the search for water and thus life, but Europa was by far the wetter and more hospitable of the two. Mars might have had microbes eons ago, but Europa might have fish today. What more reason did you need? Without even getting into the Decadal endorsement—which it did, right on page 195—this sort of frontier science was the whole reason he had come to headquarters, and he wasn’t ready to yield. So from his tiny, glass-walled interior office at NASA headquarters, Curt closed the blinds and hatched a plan. Leadership didn’t want to go to Europa? Fine. He would give them what they wanted: Not Europa.