The Mission

by David W. Brown

  As if it mattered, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter was announced as the second-highest priority mission.

  The Mars Sample Return mission had been studied only since April 2009. Less than two years. It relied on the landing system of the Mars Science Laboratory (now named Curiosity) to keep its cost low, and Curiosity had not yet launched, let alone landed! Europa, meanwhile, had been studied and reviewed twice now by independent boards going back to 2007 and had been in development in one form or another since 1996! But what really baffled Louise—well, one of the things—was the absurd price tag assigned to the Europa mission by Aerospace Corporation, the private firm handling the independent cost analysis: four-point-seven billion dollars. Where did that number come from? What assumptions did they make to get such an unfathomable figure, and why didn’t they ask anyone on the Europa team for a little guidance? I mean, the Europa mission could have cost just over two-point-one billion, but NASA wanted something bigger—the sweet spot!—and so the Europa team made a mission that did more science at Europa—and at Ganymede and Callisto and Io and Jupiter. That raised the cost to three-point-five billion. So where did that extra billion come from? And while Europa had been instructed to think big, Mars Sample Return—which, again, didn’t actually return a sample—sliced itself into thirds and still came in at three-point-five billion, not counting parts two and three and the thirty years the endeavor would entail. The Decadal, for what it was worth, ordered the Mars team to cut another billion from the price, but what did any of it matter? Europa was over.

  Bob, Dave, and Louise slipped silently from the ballroom, rode down a crowded escalator that seemed endless and laggard, and walked out of the Marriott and into a fraudulent Woodlands evening. The string lights along the fake waterfront were in full incandescence, and the three just absolutely could not stomach any of it, could not be around any of them—just needed to be away from . . . everyone, everything—and so they picked a direction decisively opposite the perfect palm trees (in Texas) and the specious flowers and frivolity, and walked until freshly painted lampposts no longer lined pressure-washed sidewalks, and still they walked, until they were submerged in the balm of a cool darkness. With every step they proceeded through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. Anger. Denial. Bargaining. And still they walked, leaving sidewalks and stepping now across manicured fields (for even in the wilderness areas of the Woodlands, the grounds were well maintained), and it was so dark that when they came to a culvert, before crossing they first discussed whether there might be alligators in there, and were there alligators in Texas, but crossed anyway, and found finally a Thai restaurant, because Bob and Louise were vegetarians and its menu offered the most promise, and there was no way anyone else from the conference would be there, and they sat down and ordered from the menu, and but for brief interactions with the server, occasional murmurs about what are we going to do now, they ate almost in perfect silence.

  Louise tried to be stoic. I mean, she was still English, after all. She had MESSENGER. In a few days, it would finally enter orbit around Mercury. She had been promoted to deputy project scientist, which, well. It was huge. She was like the vice president of planet Mercury. And she was the group supervisor of the planetary exploration at APL. Dozens reported to her. She had . . . meaning? Purpose? She would survive this. She had been through so much, I mean. Come so far. And Dave—among other worlds in the solar system, he was also a Mars guy, was even the deputy project scientist for Mars Odyssey, still circling the Red Planet, returning spectra and thermal images. And he was manager of Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Office of Science Research and Analysis in the Solar System Directorate. He would be fine.

  But Bob. He had Europa. And now he didn’t.

  Chapter 11

  E Pur Si Muove

  JUST BEFORE THE DECADAL TURNED EUROPA TO crushed ice, the core Jupiter Europa Orbiter team at JPL had relocated from a handful of buildings spread across Saint Gabe to Building 321 (Flight Projects), fifth floor. In the aftermath of the Martian triumph, its members should have packed up and limped back across campus to their previous haunts because Europa was no longer a flight project, but rather, yet again, a lowly study.

  Two things kept Team Europa in its new digs. First, the senior leadership at Jet Propulsion Laboratory was thrilled with the results of the Decadal. The two top priorities in planetary science were thirty years of Mars sample return missions (so many spacecraft, so much to do) and a Europa orbiter, both of which belonged to the lab. Something would fly to Europa eventually, regardless of how many decades it might take. Second, the now-ensconced lead of the Europa effort, Tom Gavin, was the one who built the building in the first place, and so he had a smidge more say in who would stay and who would go, and, oh, by the way, we are staying.

  The Flight Projects office space was raised fourteen years earlier, in the aftermath of the Cassini launch. The lab, which had previously mounted only a handful of projects simultaneously, soon saw a serious business boom with the onset of Faster-Better-Cheaper and attendant missions to Mars and “small bodies” (comet, asteroid). Because of this, Gavin, then a mere thirty-five-year veteran of the lab and newly minted deputy director of space and earth science programs, saw a problem. Historically, new projects came into the lab, and you found space for them just, you know, wherever. There weren’t that many, so it didn’t really matter. But now there were teeming teams planted willy-nilly along the San Gabriels. So he called the deputy associate administrator for science at NASA headquarters and catalyzed a revamp and expansion of the JPL campus.

  In the new regime, there needed to be flow, logic, and clear lines of communication. Henceforth, key personnel on projects (e.g., the project manager, financial manager, instrument manager, spacecraft manager, mission assurance manager, science leads, &c.—thirty-five people or so in total) would now be kept together by their project’s pipeline position: Building 301 (Mission Formulation), where the mission would be conceived; a new Flight Projects building, where an approved project would be developed; and then Building 264 (Space Flight Support), where missions were flown.

  Tom wanted the Flight Projects building to be utilitarian, something able to hold about six hundred fifty people and just brimming with meeting space: three major conference rooms per floor, at least, and he wanted each floor to be identical, with no corner offices and thus no fighting over said prestige. He wanted a dedicated floor for design reviews (they chose the basement), because reviews were conducted, presently, at local hotel conference rooms, and the packing of people, possessions, and paperwork to and fro was not worth the lost time. Tom’s boss, Charles Elachi, meanwhile, wanted a proper auditorium—the podium, the big screens, the stadium seating with lap desks that unfolded from armrests—just the whole thing—for team-wide all-hands-on-decks. There was also a small gym in the basement for team members (though where the gym came from was a mystery—it wasn’t in the plans, but, Tom had to admit, it also wasn’t a bad idea). The sixth floor of six total would be saved for the program offices of the Mars and Solar System Exploration Directorates, and also up there would be a patio overlooking all of the laboratory and parts of the cities of Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, both of which claimed the lab as their own, the latter pointing to the land on which the lab was built, and the former, the lab’s zip code.

  The Flight Projects building took just under a decade to move from cocktail napkin to ribbon cutting, opening in October 2009, just after Tom retired. Some called it, informally, Gavin Tower, but because it was a mission’s last home until the spacecraft launched, it was better known by its building number: 321—as in: 3-2-1 liftoff.

  Now, on the fifth floor of 321, the Europa team had to regroup. Things post-Decadal moved quickly and not. Tom had already set in motion a series of internal studies of alternate mission concepts, and from headquarters, Curt Niebur encouraged the lab to reach consensus with Aerospace Corporation, which had done the bonkers cost analyses for the Decadal. Regardless of which institution had hit the targ
et more cleanly, JPL or Aerospace, it was clear that the Decadal steering committee wanted a Europa mission that was simpler and cheaper, so do that.

  The Decadal.

  Bob Pappalardo was OK with the Decadal. The committee had, he felt, acted in good faith, and Steve Squyres, who led it, was the reason Bob was a Europa scientist in the first place. It was Squyres, all those years ago, when Bob was an undergrad in Carl Sagan’s course, who gave the guest lecture on Europa that so ensnared, enthralled, enraptured Bob. How ironic that Squyres would be the one to announce the end of Bob’s life’s work.

  In fact, Bob had had time to get his spleen in check, because he knew the Decadal recommendations before the unveiling. Not far in advance, but enough that it softened the blow psychologically when the results were announced at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It still hurt badly, though, like knowing in advance that he was going to be punched in the face.

  His first hint had come about three months earlier. Bob was at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union Conference when his phone rang. He stepped outside to answer. The comings and goings of taxicabs—their double-tapped horns, those slamming doors, the internal combustion, and persistent exhaust—were nothing next to the cacophony of scientists between sessions, bottlenecked in hallways. You get geologists talking about rocks and they just won’t shut up about it. California traffic was quieter.

  It was Fran Bagenal on the phone. She was an official reviewer of the Decadal Survey, had scrutinized the flagship mission recommendations, and was miffed straightaway that the steering committee had not pushed the proposal teams to come up with viable, variable price points.345 Here is the small option for a Europa mission (or a Neptune mission, or whatever). Here is a battlestar. Here is the sweet spot. We can do any of them. There were options, and the steering committee could have requested them, if not insisted upon them. Mount the orbiter to a Delta IV Heavy rocket, and you could shorten travel time and add more dumb radiation shielding, the first cutting personnel costs, the latter mitigating the need for custom, radiation-hardened components—it would get rid of the million-dollar computer chips, in other words.346 Those sorts of simple changes would have chopped a bundle from the bottom line, and the Europa people knew that. But they submitted a flagship in the vein of Cassini and Galileo, a flagship proper, designed to deliver mind-bending science that would keep a generation of researchers busy—not just in the Europa community but also in the wider giant planets community. Given the evisceration of the NASA planetary science budget, Fran felt the Europa team should have been sent back to the clubhouse straightaway to pare down this thing before final submission. And don’t get her started on the preposterous sample return sequence proposed by the Mars community.

  Of course she couldn’t come out and explain any of this to Bob. The Decadal Survey was conducted in secrecy and embargoed until its unveiling at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. What she said to Bob was that the community was not likely to come out in support of an overly expensive outer planets flagship mission, and that it was imperative he understand that. Think about how a smaller mission might be designed—a New Frontiers–class mission, for example—and how ruthless their principal investigators—their mission leads—were in cutting away spacecraft elements in order to control costs. So it was a work call, but she was calling also as a friend. She all but scrawled for Bob the word REDRUM in crayon.

  But Bob stood behind the mission. It was the best mission, he said, the best developed and certainly the one with the best science, and we intend to fly it.

  I think you need to prepare yourself for a range of outcomes, she said.347

  When Bob learned at last where in that range Europa fell, there were two lines in the four-hundred-page final report that he grabbed hold of as though they were floating fragments of debris from a sinking ship. First, “Mars Sample Return was thus prioritized above [Jupiter Europa Orbiter] not primarily because of its science merit, but for pragmatic reasons associated with the required spending profiles.”348 You take dollars out of the equation, in other words, and the Decadal steering committee was basically suggesting that the science was equal. Bob could work with that! And though Mars emerged as the highest priority overall, in the same section as the Decadal committee endorsement came a caveat: despite being broken into multiple Mars missions, the caching component of the sample return campaign (i.e., the Mars lander that would scoop up dirt) was still a billion dollars too expensive to fly as proposed. It would need to be reformulated to square with budgetary realities (i.e., there is no money). The Jupiter Europa Orbiter, too expensive as well, would similarly require a descope. And if the budget improved—if NASA somehow found a chest filled with rare gems and gold doubloons—then, sure, Europa: Knock yourself out. Build your ship and separate it from the Earth. To lay the groundwork for such an opportunity, said the Decadal, “NASA should immediately undertake an effort to find major cost reductions for JEO, with the goal of minimizing the size of the budget increase necessary to enable the mission.”349

  Well, there you had it! The science was equal, and the Decadal wanted NASA to keep plugging away at Europa.

  Look, Bob was not unflappable. He was fully capable of being flapped, and flap he did. He found himself sleepy all the time, for some reason, just swallowed by this incessant fog of fatigue. But this was his life’s work—what was he supposed to do except keep going? So going he kept.

  Which is what Curt Niebur wanted—and not only Bob, but also and equally Louise and Dave—the lot of them. He knew what was coming before any of them because headquarters had also been briefed of the results, and it was awkward keeping that secret from these absurdly smart, steadfast scientists—his friends, with whom he had been through so much for almost a decade now—but he had to keep quiet about their coming career catastrophes because it was his job. Headquarters had to remain an honest broker, and he believed strongly in that, in the process, and in the Decadal. When at last he could talk with them the day after the unveiling in the Woodlands, Curt had things he knew he could say and things he knew he could not say. COULD NOT SAY: He was disappointed in the large mission recommendations. The notion that Mars sample return was on firmer footing than Europa as a mission concept? That the Mars Sample Return study team had a better understanding of the cost and challenges? Well, it made his eyes twitch. Europa had been through the Quad Studies and the shootout—both costed and reviewed rigorously and independently—before the studies of the endorsed Mars mission had even begun.350 COULD SAY: Get the disappointment out of your systems because this is our Decadal, and we all need to get behind it. If you didn’t get the mission you wanted, in order to keep planetary science as a whole alive, we have to stick together. COULD NOT SAY: Ed Weiler at headquarters was ready to pull the plug on Europa studies. Zero it out. Shut it down. It’s done. The Decadal has spoken! And Ed was serious, and it was nothing personal, but space science as a whole, and planetary science in particular, had been kneecapped by President Barack Obama’s proposed budget, and look, how many times were we going to study this thing? How much money did you intend to give Jet Propulsion Laboratory to keep developing these losing ideas, Curt? Because, Curt, there was no money. COULD SAY: Keep going. Look, this is new. We’ve lived with the previous Decadal for a long time now, and that one was our friend, but that Decadal doesn’t matter anymore. We all need to digest this one. We’ve got to think about it. We’ve got to discuss it, and not just at headquarters, but here too, and at the Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting next week. COULD NOT SAY: He was going to make a concerted effort to sway Ed to, if not fully embrace Europa (wouldn’t happen), then at least let it stagger into the tree line, find a nice cave, and recover quietly.

  The thing that worried Curt most was that if Ed truly zeroed it out, all the momentum built during the last four years would be lost. That’s what happened with JIMO, and Europa was able to recover only because of the previous Decadal endorsement. There was also this
Texas congressman named Culberson who wouldn’t stop talking about Europa, and he sat on the House Appropriations Committee, and you ignored the guy writing the checks at your peril. But if development died on a Europa mission yet again—just halted entirely until Mars Sample Return started moving—in the six years or so eaten by Mars, Europa would essentially start from nothing: not only as a concept, not only at headquarters, but also in terms of wider support in the community. Science moved quickly, and Uranus and Neptune scientists had been pretty patient so far. That was unlikely to last. (Alas, poor Titan, which was so thoroughly atomized by Aerospace Corporation’s cost estimate that it merited not even a mention in mission recommendations large or small.)

  Deep down, Curt was convinced that given the maturity and scientific value of the Europa mission, things were not as dire as they seemed. There was a good chance that in the next two or three years, Mars Sample Return would suffer some setback, some overwhelming obstacle, and NASA would need a hot backup. If such an opportunity presented itself—if any chance at all existed for Europa to get into the queue—the outer planets community needed to be ready to slap a plan on Ed’s desk, unroll it Normandy invasion–style, jab a finger at the icy space eyeball, and say, “Have I got a deal for you.” But to be ready, you had to keep working on it.

  The message received by Bob, Dave, and Louise from Curt’s boss was less encouraging. Jim Green, an erstwhile Europa advocate, pulled the trio aside after the announcement and told them that it was over. It was a whole production. Green found an empty table in the back of the conference hall, sat them down, and spent a long time, what felt like admonishing them? Lecturing them? For Bob, it was like being in the principal’s office. And it was so not like Jim that Bob started to wonder about motives. How much of this was Jim and how much was it the direction of Jim’s boss, Ed Weiler?