But coverage was one thing. The Cassini project team seemed . . . disorderly to Bob. No question: the spacecraft was getting things done, but in its own way. Cassini’s culture was a bit insular, and Bob, everyone knew, was an outsider. He hadn’t fought the battles, wore none of the scars of the mission’s tortured development. What happened was this. From the Saturn orbiter’s inception, Congress and the White House and sometimes NASA headquarters had repeatedly carved into Cassini’s budget, making pitiless demands for fewer features, greater simplification. And with each request, Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to streamline the spacecraft, more, more, keep going—where else can you cut costs?—and eventually, the lab solved a big part of its fiscal tribulation by bolting the scientific instruments directly onto the orbiter, thus removing any moving parts. Articulated arms, gimbals, servos: all were eliminated, which cost cuts and complexity, but at a different sort of price. With this final, fixed design, if you wanted to point an instrument at something, you had to point the entire spacecraft at it, along axes x, y, and z.311 Consequently, during flybys, you couldn’t use every instrument at once. For Titan’s flybys, for example, if you wanted images, you couldn’t use the radar. If you wanted to use the radar, you couldn’t use the mass spectrometer. You wanted composition, you couldn’t use the camera. And so on. During the six-year-plus cruise to Saturn, the rancor manifested. Recognizing that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish all the science they had proposed, instrument teams fought for flybys among themselves, and not in the staid, genteel manner you imagine of scientists arguing for more mass spectrometry, but rather, with pointed fingers and that breaking-a-stick gesture. It was fear driven. But even after Cassini’s prime mission was completed, everyone’s chief science goals achieved, that tension never evaporated.
Bob took over as project scientist just as the Cassini mission entered its “extended” phase, when stretch goals could begin to be addressed. His first order of business was to choose a new orbital path around Saturn that would do the most and highest-quality science. What should we encounter and when—which instruments should be used—what would do the best measurements for the most disciplines—and so on. With limited time, instrument constraints, and a finite number of orbits, you couldn’t do everything; Saturn had at least fifty moons, plus its rings, plus the planet itself, which defied explanation. In any mission plan, someone was going to lose. So the various working groups—icy satellites, Titan, rings, magnetospheres, &c.—submitted their preferred science, and project management plotted each on a chart to find that harmonious middle, the path that did the most science for the most people.
Bob felt sick when he saw the results.
Although there were many good ways forward, for the broadest spectrum of science to win, Titan had to lose. Other aspects of the Saturnian system, the results revealed, had higher scientific priority.
The shootout made a bad situation so much worse. The Titan and Europa missions were both good, doable, could fly tomorrow—and one was definitely going to fly—and you wanted it to be yours. But the stressful studies spawned mistrust, and already, the Cassini old guard were experienced knife fighters, and here was Bob the Europa guy put in charge of Cassini science having to tell Titan that, oh, by the way, I’m about to kill some of your hopes and dreams. He could practically hear the cries of conflict of interest.
Bob called Jonathan Lunine and explained the situation. Jonathan understood, acknowledging that the settled-upon plan was not as good for Titan but was the right answer overall. Bob asked whether he would be willing to get on the speakerphone and say that during the discussion. You’re a Titan person. The Titan people will trust you.
Despite the open hostilities that now defined the outer planets community, Jonathan never thought of Bob as anti-Titan. And he came quickly to see that Bob’s demeanor was right for the project at a pivotal time. So Jonathan said yes, and when Bob broke the news to the Cassini discipline working groups, knowing full well that his word would not be enough, Jonathan jumped in and explained the situation on behalf of the project scientist.
The shootout had placed Bob in an unbelievably bad spot as a matter of management and leadership, and despite Jonathan’s interceding on his behalf, some Titan scientists complained formally, and others just to themselves while stabbing forks into Tupperware lunches. The well hadn’t been poisoned intentionally, but you still needed to boil the water before drinking it, now.
THE TWO TEAMS, Titan and Europa, descended upon Jet Propulsion Laboratory and presented their respective cases to the evaluation teams in December 2008. They gave the context for their studies, mission overviews from the American side and the European side, and presented a concept for what a joint effort would look like. They discussed technicals, mission designs, operations scenarios, flight systems, programmatics—everything you could ask for—and held long question-and-answer sessions where panelists could ask for more details yet. Everyone involved had given so many talks, so many briefings, so many Q&As and PowerPoints, that, if they were being honest, the presentations felt almost anticlimactic. And then they waited.
Two months later, NASA and the European Space Agency announced their decision.
NASA chose . . . both missions!312
That’s how it was worded in the press release, that “officials decided to continue pursuing studies of a mission to Jupiter and its four largest moons, and to plan for another potential mission to visit Saturn’s largest moon Titan and Enceladus.” But below, the details clarified. The first to fly would be the Europa Jupiter System Mission. Meanwhile, technology development for the Titan Saturn System Mission would continue apace, and that flagship would launch a little later.
There was a sun-sized asterisk: the next Decadal Survey process had begun. A steering committee was working even then to assemble panels to make recommendations, and the whole thing would take about two years through to its announcement. Nothing would move into mission phase until the Decadal dropped. Which meant that for a Europa mission to go forward, shootout victor or no, it would again have to come out on top. But Europa came out on top in the last Decadal, and nothing had changed in ten years, so there was no reason to think the next one would be any different. Europa was well on its way.
When Jonathan read the decision, he felt for a moment elated—both missions were selected!—but after pacing around his living room for about an hour and thinking this through, it hit him: Europa had won and Titan had lost. Headquarters, when he called, was so noncommittal as to what came next for Titan development that they might as well have not even answered the phone, and he soon realized that he and his team had been given a form of the “Hollywood no,” which was worse in a way because there would be no closure, no putting this behind them. They had been so close, come so far, left prints on the brass ring where their fingertips had grazed it, and now it was over. He would never likely see the surface of Titan again, would never see the cryogenic seas he had hypothesized. His fears were later confirmed. Though Cassini continued, the Titan Saturn System Mission had essentially been indefinitely deferred, JIMO style, the team handed a cardboard box and told to clean out its desks before leaving for the day, but nobody even bothered with the pink slip.
Jonathan was embarrassed. There was no other word. He had stuck out his neck during the Masursky Lecture and courted animosity in the community with his perceived insolence and aggressive evangelism of Titan, his love—so thrilling a target . . . how could we lose? They had this exciting and compelling mission. And he just felt like a fool. Maybe, he rationalized to himself, it was for the best. If a Titan flagship had gone forward, headquarters would almost certainly have killed Cassini to foot the bill. And Cassini was a great mission. But, wow, so was the Titan flagship. And now it was over. We were going to Europa.
Chapter 9
Grand Theft Orbiter
AND JUST LIKE THAT, KARLA CLARK WAS OUT.
The decade she had spent on the Europa problem—her management of a dozen Europa mission studi
es—more than anyone else on Earth—her fathomless insights on the Jovian radiation belt and survival therein—none of that mattered in the end.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory wanted a mission that NASA would buy, and Karla had delivered. Most of the Europa team thought she would be made project manager once the thing went forward. Karla knew better. The reality at JPL was that she did not yet have the experience on paper necessary to be made manager of a project that size. For a multibillion-dollar mission, lab leadership would typically put in place someone who had delivered a spacecraft in at least the Discovery or New Frontiers class, or their Mars equivalents. But it was the same problem planetary scientists faced when the four-year-leadership mandate came down from headquarters. The dearth of missions overall and the mostly male makeup of the lab meant that Karla never had hope—not really—of ever managing such missions.313 So it was unclear even to her what would happen—what her role would be—once the study became a “pre-project,” and later, once it reached the developmental milestone called Key Decision Point A, a formal project.
It was the outright hostility by management that took her aback, however.
Managers in the Solar System Exploration Directorate, where she worked, came and went as if by custom, and once the shootout ended, Jupiter Europa Orbiter the last spacecraft standing, the management merry-go-round happened to stop with an aerospace engineer named Keyur Patel, who was previously project manager on the Discovery-class Dawn mission to the dwarf planet Ceres. He had been with the lab for twenty-three years by then—about as long as Karla—and the two had history. Karla didn’t respect him as a manager or engineer, and she was pretty sure he didn’t respect her, either. It was obvious right away to Karla—and just about everyone else, if the rumor mill was to be believed—that Keyur wanted to be the project manager for this mission. And who didn’t? The first spacecraft ever to orbit a moon other than that of Earth? The first spacecraft to orbit so deeply and for so long and lavishly in the Jovian radiation belt, second only to the interior of the sun as the most dangerous place a spacecraft could travel? The spacecraft likely to determine the habitability of an ocean world?
Keyur didn’t just take the job, though; it was so much more insulting than that, Karla felt. As the study pivoted to a pre-project posture, he started staffing the team without consulting Karla, who, as study lead, was still in charge. Worse yet, if such a thing were possible, she didn’t even know many members now under her aegis, and after reviewing their credentials was unconvinced that they were a good fit for the team. Karla had learned project management from John Casani himself. She knew how to build a team, and this was not it. Some appointees, she felt, were outright unqualified for the jobs they were being given. They were, however, part of the lab’s thriving good ol’ boys network, which, she knew, she was not.
Her project—her life’s work—suddenly under threat by those she saw as unfit, she confronted Keyur about this, and his response, as she took it, was that this was not her project at all and that he was not interested in her opinion on the matter.314
Karla almost unclipped her official Jet Propulsion Laboratory access badge and dropped it on the table right there, but she didn’t. She would see what happened next. She started, however, looking for a new job that very day.
There was a sign of hope when the lab assigned Tom Gavin—one of the lab’s four pillars—to the Europa team as an advisor. He and Clark, too, had a history, but a good one. He was Karla’s mentor during the development of Cassini when she led its power subsystems. Gavin was seventy years old and had come out of retirement to take this job. He was not a long-term project manager, and he never pretended to be. The Europa Orbiter still had a good ten years of development work ahead of it before leaving the launch pad. She hoped in that time to be made the deputy project manager and prove herself to laboratory management and NASA headquarters. Sometime around the final design and fabrication phase of the spacecraft, she imagined, she could take the wheel. Tom would be in his eighties by then, and though he was indefatigable, the man had to stop eventually—it gave Karla hope.
But, of course, hope is not a plan.
BEFORE BECOMING A JPL legend, Tom Gavin lived in a little house in a little town called Upper Darby that was near Philadelphia and known for absolutely nothing at all. He was born in December 1939, the last month of the last year of the Great Depression, and it was Tom, his mom and dad, three brothers, and a sister, with one sibling lost in childbirth. His home was full, his father drove a subway train, and they were poor.
In those days, the archdiocese of Philadelphia provided free education for grades kindergarten through twelve, including free books, and the family took advantage of that opportunity. When his older brother went to nearby Villanova University, Tom decided that he, too, wanted to go to Villanova, and when he was old enough, he applied and was accepted. He studied chemistry and math. He couldn’t live at school because the Gavins just didn’t have that kind of money, so he was what they called a “day hopper,” and missed a lot of the college experience. During semesters, Tom worked twenty-five-hour weeks as a supermarket checker. During summers, he worked for a Titleist distributor, unloading eighteen-thousand-pound shipments of golf balls from eighteen-wheelers. It was hard, all of it—the relentless pace of sweat and study that only the working class ever experienced—and it didn’t help his grades, but that’s just the way it was at a private university when your collar was blue. Four years later, he had earned his degree and was ready to achieve his life’s ambition.
When he was ten, Gavin saw a movie called Destination Moon. The film’s plot involved a convocation of aerospace executives, engineers, and investors planning a private expedition to outer space. America had the rocket talent, but the American government lacked the vim, and rather than waste time slinging satellites into Earth’s orbit, the expedition decided to just get on with it and plan a piloted moon mission, in flagrante Buck Rogers. One of the first serious works of speculative fiction to be committed to film, Destination Moon was based on a book by Robert Heinlein, who also cowrote the screenplay, which probably didn’t hurt. And there it was, right there in theaters, in towns big and small, for the young and old, and especially for a boy from Upper Darby, how it was going to happen. What it would take to get us there—my God, the moon!—and what we would find once we landed. It depicted with realism the stresses of launch, the equivalent of astronauts (the word didn’t yet exist) floating in microgravity, a spacewalk gone awry, and a lunar landing. The first words by the first man to press prints into lunar soil: “By the grace of God in the name of the United States of America, I take possession of this planet on behalf of and for the benefit of all mankind.”315 The film’s foresight bordered on clairvoyant. This was 1950—three years before Wernher von Braun’s Das Marsprojekt was published in the English language in the United States and seven years before Sputnik. Though the film was an exercise in educated guesses, in Heinleinian fashion, the script nailed it, anticipating artificial satellites, reusable rockets, the reentry methods of the space shuttle—even the motivations of the space race itself and that it would be considered a race. (“We are not the only ones who know the moon can be reached. We are not the only ones who are planning to go there. The race is on, and we had better win it . . . there is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer space.”)316 It foresaw the woes that the spacecraft Cassini would encounter forty-seven years later (the same Cassini on which the ten-year-old from Upper Darby would one day serve as spacecraft manager): the launch of the (atomic-powered) Destination Moon spacecraft, Luna, is initially scrubbed because of alleged safety and environmental concerns. (“While it is admitted that no real danger of atomic explosion exists, a belief in such danger does exist in the public mind . . .”)317 Stretches of the film involve contractors and administrators sitting in rooms and having meeting after meeting, while engineers work their slide rules and bend metal on a spacecraft (another word that did not exist in this context). The U.S. government wouldn�
��t foot the bill for the moon expedition; yes, even in science fiction, the space program couldn’t get the money it needed! (“It’s peacetime, Jim,” says an ex-army rocket man to an aerospace contractor, “the government isn’t making that kind of appropriations!”)318 And while Neil Armstrong’s first words after taking one small step were loftier, globally inclusive, and laced with greater poetry, a phrase from our cinematic star voyagers—“benefit of all mankind”—would be the wording in the law establishing NASA eight years later, and would even appear in the agency’s mission statement, updated to reflect the evolving English language: “benefit all humankind.”
After seeing that film and glimpsing the wonderland of humanity’s space-faring future, Tom Gavin read every work of science fiction he could get his hands on, every book about space in the library stacks, wanted desperately to be a part of the human enterprise that would one day take us there. And as far as timing went, his could not have been better. The year he graduated from Villanova, NASA’s Mercury program had just put Alan Shepard in space, and President Kennedy would throw his hat over the wall and declare that “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”319 And with that, it was policy, destination: moon, and the American space program needed engineers—now. To staff quickly, battalions of aerospace companies from California canvassed the country, putting on career expositions in major cities. Tom, whose first postcollege job had him working as a chemist for Electric Storage Battery Company in Philadelphia, was rescued from the terrestrial trade by an advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer for one of these job fairs.320 He attended, copies of his résumé in hand, and the Lockheed Corporation expressed immediate interest. Before he made any sort of commitment, however, Tom met a man at the fair named Bill Shipley, who worked at a place called Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a California town called Pasadena. Shipley was no simple starched shirt sent to collect résumés for the real engineers to later examine. He was, it turned out, a respected research engineer rising quickly in the ranks of lab leadership—having just been named chair of the NASA subcommittee defining how robotic space exploration could support the nascent Apollo program.
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