The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Alan was one of the highest-profile planetary scientists in the field, tenacious and proven. He started his presentation with a slide of a postage stamp that had been issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1991 as part of a series celebrating space science. The United States had been the first country to reach each planet in the solar system, and the only country to reach every planet—except one. PLUTO, the stamp read. NOT YET EXPLORED.207 Oh, how that incensed Stern! This was more than a twenty-nine-cent collector’s curio or postage payment for the water bill; it was a philatelic swipe at science itself! That stamp was unacceptable, and if Alan was driven before as an American explorer in the New Age of Discovery, he was implacable now and would hoist a Jolly Roger up the mast if that’s what it took. An entire planet in our solar system unexplored? That would not do at all.

  Todd sat quietly in the presentation, taking notes, taking in the New Horizons team, assessing Alan’s boldness, the mission leader’s brains and heedless devotion to this singular task. It infected Todd, too, right there, on the spot, because when you listened to Alan, you realized that this project was more than about flinging a probe three billion miles. This was a khaki-clad-tiger-tooth-necklace-binocular-at-the-ready-pistol-and-bullwhip-machete-jungle-slashing adventure. The wilderness must be explored!208

  By the end of the project review, Todd became convinced that Stern would launch this thing even if he had to fire it from a cannon, Jules Verne style. This wasn’t business—it was a crusade. Stern had been planning one Pluto mission or another since the eighties, fighting fervidly and sometimes bitterly with NASA along the way. He and his team would dig in and draft a detailed proposal hundreds of pages long, and it would be declined, postponed, or offered only tepid support before cancelation. Again they would dig in, draft a detailed proposal hundreds of pages long, and it would be declined, postponed, or offered only tepid support before cancelation. And again they’d dust themselves off, and draft, again, yet another proposal, but there was always some better place to go than Pluto, some excuse to ferry funds elsewhere. It happened five separate times. New Horizons was number six, and though Stern could do this for the rest of his life—what is a bureaucratic behemoth next to a steadfast scientist?—celestial mechanics made this the last serious shot at getting a mission on the pad. If the New Horizons spacecraft didn’t make its launch window of January 2006, Jupiter would be out of alignment for a gravity assist. The farther Pluto proceeded in its orbit, meanwhile, the greater the likelihood that its atmosphere would collapse—would freeze away as it eased outward from the sun—not to return for another two hundred years.209 New Horizons simply had to launch.

  After the review, Todd was convinced of something else, too: New Horizons was not going to launch on time . . . if it launched at all. Alan’s team had a lot of problems, not all of which were within their control. The internal ones could be managed and corrected quickly, but as for the external ones, well, Stern and Co. were having trouble getting the attention they needed from NASA headquarters, who they sometimes tended to alienate. So Todd called Mike Griffin, who ran the space department at the Applied Physics Laboratory. Griffin was a smart guy, an important guy, held an undergraduate degree in physics; five master’s degrees, in aerospace science, electrical engineering, applied physics, business administration, and civil engineering; and a doctorate in aerospace engineering. New Horizons fell under Griffin’s aegis, and he needed to know what was going on.

  The call did not go well.

  TODD: Look, you’ve got some trouble, Mike. This thing is not on a path to success—

  MIKE: I can’t talk right now, Todd. I’ve got some congressionals in here. I’ll call you back.

  TODD: OK.

  [Click]210

  Todd placed the receiver in its cradle, sat back in his chair, and turned to Paul Gilbert, a colleague and program integration manager.

  “He’s not going to call back,” said Todd.

  Griffin didn’t want to hear this news, Todd surmised, because it was bad and would be embarrassing for a lot of people, and he (i.e., Griffin) didn’t want to be one of them. And he was big-dogging Todd! Congressionals in there. Right.

  So during his lunch break, Todd decided to cross something else off his to-do list, and it wasn’t quite as thrilling as exploring the cosmos, but he asked Paul to take him to NAPA Auto Parts. Todd needed to pick up a radiator hose for his 1998 Range Rover. The car was seven years old now and wasn’t starting right, and Paul had figured out that the hose was leaking fluid onto a spark plug. Off they went, and while on the road, Todd’s phone rang. It was a 240 area code. Maryland.

  TODD: Hey, pull over so I can take this.

  [Answers phone.]

  TODD: Hel—

  MIKE: You’re saying to people we aren’t on a path to success? Are you trying to get this mission canceled? Are you trying to get me fired?211

  After Todd talked Griffin into putting down the gun, he spent forty-five minutes describing the things he had seen in and around New Horizons. Not that it can’t be successful, Mike, but it’s not going to be without an intervention. And Mike listened carefully and at the end said: OK, then. Intervene.

  Click.

  Todd ordered an independent ninety-day analysis of New Horizons, stem to stern, spacecraft subsystems to plutonium production. The review revealed six showstoppers, each of which made the others more menacing. It was like a kung fu flick, only this time the bad guys weren’t taking turns. Results in hand, Todd went to Alan and gave it to him straight: You’re not going to make it. And not long after that, Todd was back at Marshall, when Paul caught him in the hallway.

  PAUL: Hey, our buddy has just been announced NASA administrator.

  TODD: Who?

  PAUL: Mike Griffin.

  TODD [confused]: No, no, no, no. That’s this other guy—

  PAUL: No, no, Todd. Our Mike Griffin.212

  They found a computer and googled it. It was their Mike Griffin. So the congressionals . . .

  When you’re the new administrator of NASA, you visit Marshall Space Flight Center, the heart of American rocketry. And the center director of Marshall had known that Todd—who certainly didn’t merit the attention of the administrator on his own accord—had worked with Mike previously. Personal connections going a long way, he told Todd to put together a presentation on what they were doing at the center and how they were handling the Discovery and New Frontiers program.

  When came time for the meeting, there were no empty conference room chairs on the ninth floor of the Marshall headquarters building. With NASA administrator Michael Griffin sitting at the head of the table, Todd began his brief presentation.

  TODD (basically): Good morning, sir! We’ve got this new Discovery and New Frontiers program office. We’re using risk-based insight methodologies and lean management principles and—

  MIKE (basically): I don’t want to hear any of that. I want to know what it’s going to take to get New Horizons off the ground and launch in its window, and I need you to tell me anything I need to do. Who do I need to shoot to make it successful?213

  This left Todd quaking, because Griffin’s words were stronger and more colorful than that. But it was also encouraging, because Todd knew that Mike meant it.

  So that weekend he wrote a letter to the administrator of NASA explaining everything that needed to happen. And Griffin, as it turned out, forwarded the letter to basically everybody. He tasked the agency’s chief engineer, Rex Geveden (a Marshall man), to help Todd help Alan get this thing off the Earth.

  They ate the elephant one bite at a time, broke the Pluto problem into its constituents and built teams to take on each of them. Like any bureaucracy, NASA was slow to move, but when it did, it had the mass and might of a freight train, and woe to anyone who dared stand in the way. When contractors caused trouble, Todd had the agency squeeze them into submission. Nuclear launch approval was particularly thorny. The spacecraft New Horizons used a radioactive power source, solar panels being useless three
and a half billion miles from the sun. It wasn’t a reactor—that dream died with Prometheus—but rather was driven by radioactive decay; the plutonium produced heat, which the generator converted into power. But any time you launched something radioactive, an independent panel had to be formed from members from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and interested parties, and they would write a safety assessment report. Somewhere along the way, the panel and the New Horizons team had locked horns and egos, and the panel affirmed its authority by insisting upon a malicious compliance with regulations—and when it came to nuclear, there were an awful lot of regulations with which to comply. Suddenly they were asking for things like obscure thirty-year-old Russian reports on plutonium reactions in certain environments. Well, two could play that mulish game, and the project team procrastinated. Which was fine, except the nuclear panel wasn’t trying to meet a launch date. So Todd set the agency on finding someone to manage the process, and he focused on other things.

  On January 19, 2006, New Horizons launched.

  It made sense that Mike Griffin would hire Alan Stern away from Southwest Research Institute and have him run the agency’s science missions. Like Griffin, Stern was a member of the diploma wallpaper club—held five degrees that covered every aspect of spaceflight: physics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, planetary atmospheres, and planetary science. And if Alan was breathing, Alan was working, which was good because at the Science Mission Directorate at headquarters, there was a lot of work to do. There were ninety-three flight missions in the science portfolio, about half in development. Alan would oversee all of it.

  And he had an agenda. Mars, Alan believed, was overwhelming the program at the expense of the entire solar system.214 There were the satellites: Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution; the rovers: Opportunity and Spirit, and the behemoth under construction, Mars Science Laboratory; and a soon-set-to-launch lander, Phoenix. You were looking at more spacecraft at Mars than at every other planet beyond Earth combined.215 But as wide as that footprint was, it was the endless thirst for dollars required by Mars Science Laboratory that was throttling the planetary science program. This was a zero-sum game: MSL’s cost overruns meant that Discovery missions—prolific and profitable scientifically—would be delayed or canceled outright. Mars had killed at least one Pluto proposal previously and contributed to Europa’s inability to get out of the gates.

  Mars needed a reality check, and Alan had no qualms about adjusting its attitude. He didn’t mind being viewed as the villain if that’s what it took to bring balance to the planetary program and get costs under control. And viewed as the villain he was.

  Chapter 6

  Maestro

  KARLA CLARK HAD SPENT THE LAST DECADE WARGAMING Europa invasions—developing mission concepts—brooding over notional spacecraft designs—science payloads—power sources—trajectories—communications—mission operations—with each effort attacking the problem from some previously untried vector, and when the Quad Studies started in 2007, she was the natural lead at JPL.216 When NASA wasn’t writing checks for such studies, the lab covered costs, and the mountain people of Saint Gabe had cultivated over the years all the engineering expertise and insights necessary to do this thing, were ready to go, wanting only a nod from on high. But Curt Niebur had made it clear that this time in particular Europa had better bring its A game because no nod was assured. Yes, the Decadal Survey said DO EUROPA, but NASA had already tried; success or not, that box was checked. Cassini’s electrifying Titan discoveries weren’t to be dismissed lightly, and that moon’s team was hungry and motivated, wanted to know more. The Saturnian system had momentum, without even mentioning Enceladus blasting its ocean into space. Europa has a subsurface ocean, sure, but good luck getting through that thirty-kilometer ice shell. At Enceladus we could basically fly through the fountains, fill a bag, and ferry it home.

  The point is, said Curt: Europa, do not underestimate those teams.217 Karla got the message.

  In the fifties and sixties, the United Kingdom experienced what the Royal Society in London called exquisitely and with uncharacteristic alarm a “brain drain.”218 Statistics seemed to suggest that science scholars were slipping across the Atlantic for more favorable funding and better research billets.219 And why wouldn’t they? If America’s anticipated atomic-age Shangri-la of side-finned, fusion-fueled flying Cadillacs didn’t materialize, then the post-Sputnik space age assured spots for scientists on every NASA moon base and Mars colony soon to see construction. The U.S. National Science Foundation, meanwhile, reported with zero modesty that the “American scientific community could continue to absorb foreign scientists at approximately their present rate of entry for some time.”220 The British government was spending more annually to subsidize chicken food than serious scientific research.221 NASA, meanwhile, had a blank check and Wernher von Braun.

  Those were the conditions that in 1960 brought Karla Benjamin’s father, a Welsh research chemist, and her mother, who managed the household, to the city of Cincinnati, where Karla was born and raised. Dad did research for Procter & Gamble, hopped the globe on behalf of the conglomerate, and when foreign scientists came to town, standing dinner invitations kept the Benjamin household lively. Via these kitchen table cultural exchanges, these spontaneous scholarly symposia, Karla came into her own.

  She attended Rice University for her undergrad, double-majoring in chemistry and chemical engineering, the first because she loved the science—and especially the quantum chemistry subfield—and the second because she loved the idea of gainful, meaningful employment, which the quantum chemistry subfield provided sparingly outside of academia’s grind. After graduation, Hughes Aircraft Company in Glendale, California, made her a solid offer, and she accepted, working on flight batteries for communications satellites. Thus Karla Clark (née Benjamin) joined the American space program. And while working during the day on flight projects (i.e., things launched or launching to space)—no small task, spacecraft batteries, power being king in space exploration—at night she attended classes at University of Southern California, which had a great graduate program for working professionals. This time she studied and earned master’s degrees in both engineering management and mechanical engineering with a focus on the thermal subfield.

  In 1987 Karla jumped ship to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just down the road from USC and Hughes. She was hired as a battery engineer for the lab’s flight missions, including the prospective Cassini project, though it wasn’t called Cassini at the time. The job overall entailed designing, procuring, and delivering spacecraft batteries. Since Hughes launched communications satellites all the time, she was one of a handful of such engineers in the entire lab with any previous flight experience. JPL projects were big but launched only rarely, and the battery group became closely knit, supporting the lab entire and representing it at other NASA centers across the country, as well as at agency headquarters and in various prestigious working groups that kept America at the forefront of space science. It was just an unbelievably good deal if you had ambition and knew what you were doing, and within three years, Clark had been to just about every NASA center and learned from peers working not only in batteries but also in complete power systems. In addition, she had joined the review panel for the Hubble Space Telescope and been thoroughly educated in how flight projects worked from a systems perspective. She was on her way in the world, and others.

  Eventually the Cassini team did away with the batteries in its design, but a position for power subsystem engineer opened, and Karla asked the project management to take a chance on her, and they did. It was a pretty important job, and she held it for most of the spacecraft’s development, eventually becoming assistant technical manager and then technical manager, responsible for a team of twenty.222 By the time Cassini launched, she was responsible for its power subsystem, having seen it through assembly, test, and launch operations (or ATLO, and pronounced tha
t way), the final, critical phase of the project.

  In 1997 lab leadership asked her to become project system engineer for the nascent Ice and Fire program to develop low-cost missions to three difficult destinations: Pluto, which required a spacecraft to fly twenty-three times faster than a bullet for a full decade, culminating in a precision flyby lasting three minutes at most; the sun—specifically, the twenty-five-hundred-degree deep interior of its atmosphere, which randomly reaches outward explosively in every direction; and Europa, which was considered the hard one.223

  Clark was responsible for everything from the look of the spacecraft to their essential needs—computer systems, power systems, structural design, deep space communications, launch vehicle, science instruments—and she drew on trade studies of each to pull together basic mission concepts. It was Karla’s first detailed introduction to Europa, and from the start, the radioactive badlands surrounding the Jovian world—there was more radiation there than would be found immediately after total thermonuclear war—vexed and confounded the Ice and Fire team.224 Any spacecraft’s computer and delicate scientific instruments would need heavy shielding, which was doable but for a thorny mandate from NASA headquarters: the Europa orbiter was to fly directly to Jupiter; there could be no gravity assists along the way.

  Few impediments could have been more severe. For a spacecraft to reach the Jovian system with enough speed to eventually achieve orbit around Europa, it had to either launch from a powerful rocket (which NASA lacked, limiting spacecraft to a space shuttle deployment) or be absurdly light (which the required radiation armor rendered impossible). JPL engineers dashed out hastily written equations in chalk before driving fists against blackboards in fits of despair.