The Mission

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The Mission Page 21

by David W. Brown


  Karla started each day returning letters to scientists and engineers who punched in at different hours. The scientists would roll up a little later in the morning and work, sometimes, until eight or nine in the evening. Her overnight inbox could thus be considerable. Next was a team meeting with key engineers, and they’d go over the plan for the day and then separate, because much of the team worked only part-time on the study; you came on to something like Europa because it was a passion, but your travaux alimentaires might be Mars or management or whatever. For Karla, Europa was both. Then there were lots of meetings with lab higher-ups to discuss workforce issues or technical findings, and one-on-ones to walk through problems and find solutions, or figure out who had enough experience at the lab to know said solution. (Here, Mars Science Laboratory could especially impede progress; the singular expert on some abstruse subsystem might be tied up for weeks working through Red Planet problems, and Karla had to get in line.) Later in the day, she would interact with Bob Pappalardo to keep science and engineering happily married. It was all about keeping the Europa story moving forward, turning PowerPoint into hardware.

  Ed Weiler’s reinstallation as head of science was bad news for Europa compared to Alan Stern, who’d wanted to fly an outer planets flagship. Ed, Karla knew firsthand, had once shot Europa Orbiter dead and would have killed JIMO had he been around post–Sean O’Keefe. Overall, he had a frosty relationship with Jet Propulsion Laboratory—didn’t trust it, didn’t trust its cost estimates (which, to be fair, were routinely, absurdly low). And with the mess he now had to clean up from Mars Science Laboratory’s latest overruns—look: Ed was in no mood for more fictional flagship funding figures.

  But while Ed’s return brought storm clouds for the outer planets with his rumblings for another Mars mission beyond MSL, his return also brought, almost perversely, some very good news for Europa, because he immediately eliminated Alan’s mission cost cap. Changed the rules, just like that! He didn’t want to hear about two-point-one-billion-dollar flagships because he didn’t have two-point-one billion dollars. We weren’t switching off a Martian rover. We weren’t deferring, killing, or carving into Mars Science Laboratory. Regardless of who won the shootout, Europa or Titan, the mission would require a New Start. And if we were going to go through that—getting the administrator, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Management and Budget, the science community, and Congress on board at the same time for the same mission—then we may as well do more than present a bare-bones spacecraft with a marginal science return. No, he said, he wanted each team to find its respective mission’s sweet spot. We weren’t going cheap. We weren’t building a battlestar. We were going for some elegant in-between.

  “Sweet spot” didn’t exist in the literature—certainly not in the volumes of spacecraft guidelines filling libraries at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Applied Physics Laboratory, or NASA headquarters—but what Ed meant was this: on a graph charting the increase of a mission’s cost relative to its science return, the more science investigations you added to a spacecraft, the more money you needed for the mission. Even the smallest change to the spacecraft could require more mass or more power or more shielding or a bigger rocket or more ground support, and thus more money. Such a graph should reveal a serenely straight slope, increasing gradually as instruments were added. But at some point, there would be a tipping point, and the cost curve would kick upward exponentially: the science return would inch while the price point suddenly yarded. Just before the moment of a massive price spike, that was the sweet spot. The entire phase two Europa study would thus be devoted to finding the sweet spot and building a mission around it, from spacecraft to orbital trajectories. All of this was true for the Titan study as well.

  There was a twist, however. Before he had left, Alan put in place a contingency plan that would keep a Europa or Titan mission alive, he hoped, no matter what. After completion of the Quad Studies, Alan moved both missions to JPL and asked the European Space Agency to partner with the lab for the shootout. Two European teams would each develop a spacecraft contribution to the Titan and Europa missions.

  As a matter of science, the Europeans had a keen interest in the Jovian system and were developing a mission there called Laplace.268 They were similarly developing a Titan and Enceladus mission called TandEM.269 If NASA and the European Space Agency could each have a spacecraft in the Jovian or Saturnian system at the same time, the orbiters would work together, talk to each other, correlate data. Rather than double the science return, you’d get maybe double and a half—for free!

  As a matter of politics, Karla considered Alan’s plot a masterstroke. The Europeans didn’t do things like the Americans. Their deep space missions were meticulously orchestrated by necessity because, unlike NASA, they didn’t have to get the White House on board; they had to get more than twenty White House equivalents on board from each of the European Space Agency member states. And they had to parcel out the work just so, making sure France got a piece, and Italy got a piece, and Denmark got a piece, and Germany, and . . . which took a lot of work, so when they committed to a project, they committed firmly and for the extreme long term.270 NASA, in comparison, seemed sometimes to the Europeans like a junkie genius lab partner: when the Americans were good, they were very good, but when they were bad . . .

  As a matter of engineering, a lot of Europa team members at JPL wondered what, exactly, did anyone think the Europeans could bring to the project? But Karla had seen the greater power of a European partnership while working on Cassini. That spacecraft was bedeviled from the start, so very, very (and eventually) VERY expensive, with Congress, the White House, or both ever ready to zero it out. But the Europeans had invested a half billion dollars in Huygens, which required Cassini to, first, carry it to the Saturnian system and then, once separated, act as a communications relay during its (i.e., Huygens’s) descent to the Titanian surface.271 Cancel Cassini, and you would effectively cancel Huygens. Every time the U.S. government gripped firmly its red pen to strike Cassini out of existence, the prospective fallout from Europe stayed its hand.272 With respect to Cassini, the European Space Agency was Amalthea to NASA’s Zeus.

  As a matter of international diplomacy, a broken commitment by NASA to ESA wouldn’t offend one obscure office in Paris; it would offend half the European continent. It would be an international incident. The United States could scarcely afford to do so now, in 2008, with free trade treaties under negotiation and active military alliances overt and covert in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Ed Weiler might be quick to kill a Titan or Europa proposal he hated. Congress or the White House as well might decide we had more pressing priorities (Mars), but with national prestige on the line and the urgency of averting a transatlantic dustup, hostile hands would be stayed.

  As an added insurance policy, Jet Propulsion Laboratory agreed to a strategic partnership with the Applied Physics Laboratory to develop both missions in concert.273 APL would get about a quarter of the workload in exchange for Pasadena taking the lead. (APL didn’t have the resources to tackle an entire flagship, though its U.S. Defense Department contracts gave it greater experience in dealing with radiation.) Given the history of competitiveness and bad blood between the two laboratories, NASA headquarters was shocked to receive their signed memorandum of agreement. The Capulets and Montagues had friendlier relations. Neither laboratory had ever partnered with another in this way for such a project, so to prevent any bar fights, APL hired veteran engineer-slash-manager Tom Magner to be Karla’s APL counterpart.274 He had worked for Weiler at Goddard and had a good working relationship with JPL. Magner could fill a lot of cracks in the foundation.

  The new joint Jupiter expedition would be called the Europa Jupiter System Mission, or EJSM. The joint exploration of Saturn would be the Titan Saturn System Mission, or TSSM. Privately, the engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory lamented the very idea of working with their East Coast colleagues. It’s not that the
y considered the Applied Physics Laboratory to be junior varsity; it’s that they considered APL to be even less than that. APL was the little brother who kept hanging around, begging for attention. The only outer planets mission launched by the Laurel lab was New Horizons to Pluto, and that was practically a tinker toy next to the mighty starcraft unleashed on the cosmos by JPL. It was cute that the Applied Physics Laboratory wanted to play, but this was fourth-and-goal. It was no time for handholding and mollycoddling, I mean, first Europe, and now this? It was all politics! lamented the engineers, not entirely inaccurately. In fact, the whole of the space program limped along on such arrangements; they were why single rockets were built across several states. More stakeholders meant more protection. Leaders of both labs knew that Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, the powerful ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, represented APL. She shielded the projects in her state once they were green-lit by NASA. Of course, the scientists and engineers at the Applied Physics Laboratory had their own long list of criticisms of the profligate JPL, which was a vortex of waste relative to the tight ship they ran; which had an impressive record of success—if, that is, you ignored all the failures; to say nothing of the Pasadena lab’s perennial shortage of key personnel and its perpetual surplus of delayed missions.

  And so, with a new “sweet spot” set of rules and a new pair of partners, Europa and Titan stepped into the O.K. Corral.

  ON FEBRUARY 6, 2006, the new NASA budget was announced. For planetary scientists, it seemed as though the End of Days was again upon them. Agency science was set to lose in 2007 over three billion dollars from its long-term road map—a severe blow to a directorate whose entire annual budget was just over five.275, 276 Solar system exploration alone absorbed two-point-nine-nine billion dollars of that cut.277

  Bush administration officials, driven by desperation, were funneling funds instead to pay for a vehicle—any vehicle—that could carry humans into space as part of the Constellation program, its station-moon-Mars mission sequence. After the heartbreaking disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia on the first of February 2003, the fleet spent thirty months on the ground for inspection, and it was fast clicking with everyone that age and employment had rendered every shuttle a potential tragedy with wings. It wasn’t reckless (yet) to keep them operational, but America’s space trucks were definitely flying on borrowed time. Human spaceflight being NASA’s raison d’être, this was a shaky foundation for ongoing operations. Unless astronauts acquired a new set of wings and boosters and soon, Americans would be forced to ride in Russian capsules on Russian rockets, the ignominy inconceivable. We won the space race for this? Can it be said even that we won if we were trapped on Earth while the losing team could just come and go as they pleased?

  From his office in Houston’s Seventh Congressional District, just off the newly expanded Katy Freeway—smooth, black-topped, and twenty-six lanes of Lone Star freedom—there was the honorable John Culberson of the U.S. House of Representatives, member of the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA, who knew where he wanted the agency to be one hundred years from now and how he wanted to get it there. It was just self-evident to him: all roads ran through Europa, and he personally, repeatedly wrote missions there into the reports accompanying the federal budget, including the most recent.278 If there were things swimming in Europa’s ocean and NASA found them, the agency would also find the sort of support not seen since Apollo, and, well, cue the gospel choir. But as it had done with JIMO, headquarters said thanks for the funds, and yeah, great advice, Mr. Culberson, but we’ll take it from here. And once again, Europa saw nary a nickel.

  THIS DID NOT GO OVER WELL WITH THE HONORABLE JOHN CULBERSON OF THE SEVENTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT OF TEXAS, MEMBER OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES APPROPRIATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, JUSTICE, SCIENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES. That tremendous freeway near his office? Well, it was he who built it, fulfilling a campaign pledge to do something about the traffic. John Culberson—he was a guy who got things done. No money for Europa? Well, that aggression would not stand.

  Lacking the chairman’s gavel, however, there was only so much he could do. The latest budget brutalized the agency, and he sent an open letter to scientists and engineers urging them to call their members of Congress.279 He threw rocks at NASA headquarters for ignoring his specific congressional directive to go to Europa. He had cultivated a real contempt for NASA’s astigmatic leadership, whose fecklessness and apprehension knew no bounds, and also for the White House Office of Management and Budget, which somehow made NASA leadership look audacious in comparison. Why were we allowing accountants to run an agency of science and exploration? Why were we wasting the greatest space program in the world?

  Amid these cuts to planetary science, the thing that Europa had going for it was unity. Sure, the outer planets community argued internally about science and exploration prospects and priorities, but it kept those things in the family now. The Outer Planets Assessment Group was working as intended, and public pronouncements were issued routinely now with one voice. OPAG listed Europa as the “consensus priority target” for the community, and that was that.280 Moreover, the planetary Decadal had declared Europa the top target for space exploration, and we were still in that decade. It was an unambiguous, unimpeachable affirmation from the entire community—even those who would not benefit personally from a Europa mission. There could be no higher recommendations than these. Planetary scientists the field over were in lockstep. Europa: DO IT! And NASA, while not legally obliged to DO ANYTHING AT ALL, was at least morally compelled to follow the consensus of the field, and, short of that, give some defensible reason it was rejecting the informed, unified, and harmonious opinion of the community it served.

  Enter Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona.

  Each year, the crushing majority of the planetary science community gathered in Texas for a weeklong, field-strong confabulation called the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. In March 2006—a year before the Quad Studies started—fifteen hundred scholars from across the country and around the world gathered to present papers, network, give talks, and organize working groups.281 Even NASA’s science leadership at headquarters attended annually to face the community in a town hall session. On the first day of the conference, as was tradition, an influential scientist would give a keynote address called the Masursky Lecture—a sort of master class on some science, celestial event, or pressing planetary issue. Topics tended to trend along the lines of “Kuiper Belt Binaries: A New Window on Runaway Accretion” or “Mercury as an Object Lesson on Approaches to Planetary Exploration.”282 In 2006 the Lunar and Planetary Institute, which sponsored the conference, asked Professor Lunine to deliver the keynote. Jonathan’s talk was titled “Beyond the Asteroid Belt: Where to Go Next in the Outer Solar System, and Why.”283

  He did not intend for his talk to be controversial. Provocative? Well, sure, but only in the way that stating an unspoken fact can sometimes provoke discussion. After a kind introduction and warm applause, Lunine opened by running through the spacecraft to explore the outer planets of the solar system, Pioneer 10 in 1972 through Cassini today, which was studying Saturn even as he spoke. He listed the fundamental questions that could be answered only by reaching beyond the asteroid belt: How did the solar system get this way? Next slide. How did the giant planets and their moons form? Next slide. Are any of them habitable? Next slide. And yet, he noted, there had been a literal failure to launch since 1997.

  Jonathan was an instrument lead on the first real Europa study likely to leave Earth (it didn’t), so it was nothing personal, what he was about to say, but maybe because of that Europa association, what he said had a particular sting. While we’ve been wrestling vainly with Europa and its impenetrable ice shell and its ferocious radiation environment, there have been new and exciting developments elsewhere in the solar system, and specifically at Saturn, he said. Ladies and gentlemen, since we haven’t launched a spacecraft
anyway—since we have not settled, even, on a spacecraft concept—maybe we need to rethink where we are going.

  “All plans for exploring the outer solar system are in complete ruins at the moment,” he said.284 Next slide. If microbes, merpeople, or sea monsters swam in the ocean of Europa, how, exactly, were we going to get through an ice shell fifteen—or maybe sixty!—miles thick to study it? We didn’t know where to land because we lacked adequate surface resolution. We didn’t know how to drill through the ice, and if we figured that out, we didn’t have space submarines to swim the subsurface seas. And anyway, how long, exactly, would all this take? “Maybe it’s the right target to go to first in the outer solar system,” he said, “but we’ve tried.” Next slide.

  HOW ABOUT ENCELADUS, read the slide, and across the audience, jaws either dropped or clenched and eyes on pensive faces darted left and right—what the—what was this guy doing up there? We’d already endorsed—as a community—Europa! Somebody shut off his microphone! Jonathan explained that unlike Europa, Saturn’s moon Enceladus was expelling its ocean into space. You didn’t need a spacecraft to penetrate an ice shell to get to the ocean. The ocean was penetrating the ice shell to get to the spacecraft. Next slide.

  But there was an even better choice, he said. The best choice. The most obvious choice. Why not Titan? The Saturnian moon had dunes, lava domes, a liquid-carved crust, not placid weather but veritable tempests that carved the soil! There were standing lakes of liquid methane on its surface. Organics, he explained, were everywhere on Titan. Next slide.

  Titan wants us! he said, and put it right up there on the screen, projected in PowerPoint in large letters sans serif. TITAN WANTS US! It’s easy to get there. We know the surface conditions. And it promised “the archetypical motivator of space travel: to explore a strange new world.” Next slide.

 

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