The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Todd joined the space program by way of Grumman, an aerospace outfit under NASA contract to build the ever-embattled Space Station Freedom (at the time little more than blueprints and moving speeches). Grumman paid a lot less than Atlanta Gas Light, but he had to contend also with fewer larvae. Once at Marshall, he worked in its Materials and Processes Laboratory, and he was in heaven. Materials: anything that has mass and occupies space. Processes: anything you do to it. From that lab, you could go wherever you wanted to go at NASA, work on whatever project you wanted to work on. It was right there in the name!

  They didn’t give Todd the keys to Freedom on his first day. His first project was to develop a new database organizing the extreme temperature properties of all the metals in NASA’s materials archive. MAPTIS, it was called, an acronym for Materials and Processes Technical Information System, and, really, it was grunt work—the sort of thing you give the FNGs, but he loved it, too. The idea was . . . so everything has room-temperature properties. And different materials behave differently at high temperatures. Yield strength goes down (i.e., it might deform sooner), or it might get more ductile (i.e., it might stretch easier before breaking), or its actual tensile strength might lower (i.e., it might withstand lighter loads). Conversely, when some materials reach low temperatures, their crystalline structures shift, and they become brittle. Every metal has a ductile-brittle transition temperature. Drop below it, and trouble ensues. This means an aerospace engineer might design an aircraft in the steamy South and then fly it to Alaska and, oh, the landing gear snaps off—shatters like a rose dipped in liquid nitrogen. A materials engineer makes sure that doesn’t happen.

  May spent six months on the database, found every possible reference on every material Marshall ever used, added them to a file, and documented the source. It had to be thorough, and it had to be accurate. Launch, space operations, reentry—extreme temperatures were sort of NASA’s thing. When he was hired into the agency full-time, he presented his magno opere materiae to the deputy director of the laboratory. Todd was proud, and his superior was impressed. It wasn’t a huge thing in the context of moonshots and space stations, but it got their attention, would make a lot of jobs for a lot of engineers a lot easier going forward, and proved, if nothing else, that this man May could work.

  IN 1992 SPACE station Freedom was reformulated. The program had been managed previously from facilities in Reston, Virginia, with development work divided among NASA centers various and sundry. The station design was expensive but credible—an expandable orbital platform for science, medicine, and manufacturing. In the near term, it would be a space laboratory, but it would eventually serve as a layover for astronauts on their way to the moon.194 You could assemble, service, and support lunar rovers and spacecraft from there, and in the very long term, do the same for Mars-bound crews and cargo—a literal station, as for trains and busses. It would be pricey, yes, but not wildly out of line with what NASA did every day. When it was first formally proposed by Ronald Reagan, the agency estimated that the station would cost eight billion dollars.195 That kind of cash request was not well met, but Congress appropriated sufficiently to stand up the program and see what might come out of it. Funding continued into the Bush administration. This wasn’t driven entirely by a love for NASA or a whirlwind congressional crush on a flying bus stop. Between defense cuts and two landmark US-USSR nuclear accords—the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—we just weren’t building nukes like we used to, which was fine from an everyone-not-dying-of-strontium-90-in-the-black-rain point of view, but, look, if the Commies somehow pulled themselves together, broke a beer bottle, and wanted to dance, we needed to be ready.196 Defense contractors would have to stay warm. So a space station was win-win. It would employ tens of thousands from countless congressional districts across the country, and it would prevent the defense-industrial base from withering away. That NASA would get something it had been asking for since the days of von Braun was a bonus.

  But by 1990, the Berlin Wall was sledgehammered and détente the new norm for foreign policy. The United States slouched into an economic recession, and deficits and the national debt were rising. As the plan for Freedom matured, meanwhile, the cost increased. Inflation didn’t help, and NASA was now finally factoring in the cost of the space shuttle as well, which was, itself, pricier per pound to launch than anyone liked. In all, Freedom would cost thirty billion dollars more than previously planned,197 and was now gnawing mightily into the planned Cassini mission to Saturn.198 Cassini’s twin, CRAF (the Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby mission), had already lost its race with the reaper. But Ivan was out there, waiting—what if? So station survived.

  The Soviet Union did not, however, and suddenly, and for the opposite reason, the United States really needed a space station now, because the only thing worse than a Russian rocket scientist making missiles is a Russian rocket scientist out of work and weighing options.199 Why not freelance? A man without a country could make a nice living abroad, with American antitheticals paying princely to learn long-range rocketry.200 It had happened before. It’s how we had a rocket program! After World War II, Germany’s best rocket scientists absconded to America and the Soviet Union. Wernher von Braun was one of them and basically built our program from nothing. So the United States government decided to put those Russian rocket scientists to work helping build the space station. Bonus: the secrets of the Soviet aerospace sector were among the most coveted intelligence during the Cold War. That sort of information didn’t come easily and it didn’t come quickly and it certainly didn’t come cheap. But now for a pittance—whether sixty million or six hundred million—pocket change either way—we could just . . . buy their scientists!201 And NASA could cut shuttle launches, too. The Russians could use their bargain-bin (but really reliable) rockets to help launch the space station Freedom. Well, there was no sense in being a sore winner. They’d help launch the International Space Station.

  In 1993 NASA closed the Reston facility and relocated management of the station to Johnson Space Center in Houston. By then, eleven billion dollars had been spent, and the station existed mostly in a filing cabinet.202 Todd joined its program office to take over as space station materials lead. He was the government pay grade equivalent of “just some guy,” yet given a position of leadership in a high-stakes, high-profile project that absolutely needed to fly, and that kind of thing just didn’t happen at NASA, but have you ever been to Houston in July? Have you ever sat in its traffic? None of the agency’s senior executives wanted to move there, so they took a chance on Todd and other youngsters. Relative to the ever-graying agency, the program office at Johnson ended up teeming with indomitable twenty- and thirty-somethings. No one really had any experience with failure, and no one had limits—or at least, no one knew what his or her limits were.

  The space station was modular. You built it one room at a time and launched each into space to connect like Legos, an ever-expanding orbital facility. Propulsion, airlock, docking port, laboratories, habitat, solar panel segments—it would be the most complex construction project since the pyramids, the modules divided between former mortal combatants with very different ways of doing things, and the first time the completed components could come together would be two hundred miles above the Earth and orbiting at eighteen thousand miles per hour. And it all had to work the first time.

  That part was on Todd. To ensure that Russian modules worked with American ones, and that everyone remained on the same timetable, NASA established management elements devoted to each country’s components. The idea was to stay au fait with what the Russians were doing so that there would be no surprises during development. In 1994 Todd transferred to the Russian integration office, and they later made him deputy program manager. He helped sustain synchronicity among engineers foreign and domestic, unifying structural models, thermal models, delivery dates, data exchange methods between modules, and hardware compatibility. They never s
topped. When flying halfway around the world to Russia or back, the engineers would land on a Sunday and start on Monday morning. Smoking was still allowed on those international flights, and you would touch down with bloodshot eyes from hazy cabins. You’d work with the Russians for nine hours, drive back to the hotel, and muster for a ninety-minute daily debrief. Then you’d start thinking about dinner. Repeat. And the flight home, they called it the “baby flight” because American couples were ever keen to adopt Russian babies, and the whole way back, those babies would cry. You’d fly straight to Houston, not a REM among Todd and his crew, be up at six in the morning, have breakfast, and be at Johnson by seven for meetings at eight.

  It was a hard haul. The Russians were way ahead of NASA in the space station business, having already built and flown Mir, their own modular station, for a full decade, beginning in 1986. Nobody spoke the same language, the cultures were alien, and everything had to go through interpreters. There was friction, fatigue, diplomatic formalities—but also great fun. These engineers, Russia’s and America’s, everyone was so young, and they just plowed through. And what engineers the Russians were! Classically trained, innovative, and you’re bleeding together in the trenches, and part of this huge thing, and NASA, not necessarily fairly (but not necessarily inaccurately) described sometimes as ossified or entrenched, is somehow being changed by all this. You could just sense it. In Washington, the station was beset on all sides—too hard, too expensive, “welfare for engineers,” a swindle, really, a boondoggle!203 It would never launch!—but in Houston, there was never any doubt that it would reach the launch pad, that it would work. No one was halfway. You were there and you were all in.

  In 1998 the first module launched. CNN covered it live, all the operations, the countdown from Russia, everything. It was the first piece of the International Space Station, and others would follow. Todd returned to Marshall that year and took over as project manager of the Quest airlock module—the thing astronauts would use to exit the station for spacewalks. If he never did anything else in his career except work on that airlock until it flew, he would sit around and tell his grandchildren about it—that a part of him was up there.

  In 2001 the airlock launched from U.S. soil on the space shuttle Atlantis. CNN made brief mention of it and went on with the day’s news. For his part, Todd, riding high from his airlock achievement, was set to take over the habitat module, where astronauts and cosmonauts would dwell in their orbital manor, but before he could lay hands on it, budgets proved unfriendly, and NASA figured out as an agency that it just couldn’t afford to build it. Right now the space station wasn’t as important to the nation as Todd thought it was. He took it personally.

  When a project flies, a project manager’s work is done. May considered returning to Auburn to work on his dissertation, but was enticed instead to take a job working on a spacecraft to test Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was called Gravity Probe B, and no mission in NASA’s history had been so long in development—forty years, by that point.204 The probe had gained a reputation as a star-crossed spacecraft sentenced never to launch and had been canceled in 1989, 1993, and 1995.205 Todd would become its program integration manager. Clearly, he was the guy for the job, having served the role previously on a project where ordering lunch required an interpreter, and also having launched a module of a space station that most thought would absolutely never see space and was constantly under threat of congressional cancelation. For the next three years, May spent his time protecting and pushing along the development of the gravity probe, laying the rails on which it would glide to the launch pad. When it lifted off in 2004, Todd had another win under his belt—and, again, had to figure out what to do next.

  Every morning when he opened his medicine cabinet, he saw a clipping he’d taped there of the Auburn Creed. It was written in 1943 by George Petrie, Auburn’s first football coach. Petrie was a linguist and history professor—spoke five languages—and had seen his very first college football game in the 1880s while a student at the University of Virginia. He taught modern language and history at Auburn from 1887 to 1889, when the school was known as the Agricultural and Mechanical Institute of Alabama, then decided to go off to Maryland to earn a doctorate in history at Johns Hopkins University.

  That is where Petrie really fell in love with football. He also became enamored of “scientific history,” which emphasized fieldwork as much as bookwork. You want to tell a story, you dig deep, drill into the research, go to the places where events occurred and get local dirt under your fingernails. You sit across from the experts and break bread with the people who were there. There was nothing easy about that kind of work, that kind of history, but there was an honesty to it, an almost magic to it, a prestidigitation, a conjuring of the past as it was lived so that the future might know: this is what happened. Beyond secondary sources and thirdhand accounts. This is what happened.

  Petrie returned to Auburn in 1891, determined to introduce both football and scientific history to the school, and he did. He coached for a single season. The Tigers won the first game they ever played, 10–0 over the University of Georgia, and finished the season 2-2. Not bad. He promptly handed over the whistle to focus on his professorial work for the next fifty years, not retiring until 1942 at the age of seventy-six. The following year, Petrie wrote the Auburn Creed. He wanted to craft something that reflected the qualities of the school he’d spent fifty years with, and something, perhaps, to serve as its lodestar.

  The Auburn Creed begins: “I believe that this is a practical world and that I can count only on what I earn. Therefore, I believe in work, hard work.” It continues, a quiet reflection on the values of education, honesty, truthfulness, God, and country—even the human touch, “which cultivates sympathy with my fellow men and mutual helpfulness and brings happiness for all.” It ends: “And because Auburn men and women believe in these things, I believe in Auburn and love it.”206

  Todd—systematic, disciplined—still had every single test he had ever taken at the university, every sheet of green engineering paper, his notes, his derivations for engineering problems sometimes going on for three, four pages. It was Auburn that taught him the love of solving very difficult problems—problems that, at first glance, objectively could not be solved. The love of systematically breaking down a problem and managing one piece at a time until the job was completed. It was what he’d done, what he still did every day, with problems that were life or death for astronauts and cosmonauts, and for robotic spacecraft that did serious and pressing science. But he had unfinished business in academia. And just when he decided to go back to Auburn and complete his doctorate—he couldn’t think of anything more interesting than being called Dr. May—his phone rang.

  NASA wanted to move the newly combined Discovery and New Frontiers program office to Marshall, and Todd . . . we want you to be program manager.

  This was—well, it was a decision to make. It was an honor. Planetary science missions funded by NASA were organized generally by expense and science return. A flagship-class mission such as Galileo or Cassini could be built and launched only once per decade—optimistically, because they plowed boldly beyond budget caps but did commensurate science. At the other end were the Discovery-class missions, their price capped around five hundred million per. They were the haiku to the Homeric epics that were flagships. Each solved precise problems, settled some specific celestial quandary, uncovered some unknown unknown.

  The Discovery line allowed NASA to cast its net wide across the solar system with minimum investment. Each spacecraft opened doors. At the dwarf planet Ceres, for example, the Dawn spacecraft found hydrated minerals consistent with an ancient ocean sitting on its surface. Where did that ocean go? Was liquid still there today? It was anybody’s guess, but because of Dawn, some future mission now knew what experiments to carry to figure things out. The Discovery program could launch a mission every two years, and maybe two missions every two years, to the moon, Mars, asteroids, comets,
and who could say where else. Engineering pluck was the only limit.

  And with that, Todd decided, the doctorate could wait a little longer. He was an Auburn man, and he was needed.

  As far as NASA programs went, you couldn’t do better than Discovery. Every three or four months, a mission was launching, or an existing one was encountering some strange new world, or another was being selected for further development or receiving science data from deep space. In exchange for his mission and management experience, May had been given the portfolio equivalent of a theme park: all roller coasters and cotton candy. Discovery had a superb success rate, and its missions just couldn’t stop delivering these fantastic firsts.

  The same could not be said for the fledgling New Frontiers, a new, middle mission class between Discovery and flagship, still finding its legs and with only a single project yet approved by 2004: a Pluto flyby called New Horizons being led by a scientist named Alan Stern.

  Todd had heard the Pluto mission was having problems, and to get a grip on the state of things, he took time to visit the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, which managed the mission’s science. While in town, he went to Ball Aerospace, which was building one of the Pluto spacecraft’s key science instruments. He went to Southwest Research’s San Antonio office, where the New Horizons payload was being managed. And he went to APL in Maryland, which handled the overall project and spacecraft operations. There Stern and the New Horizons team gave Todd a full project review.