The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Cancelation, though, didn’t come easy. The White House was ready to delete it, and Lori doubly so. Private sector rocket companies such as Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) and Blue Origin were promising to deliver the holy grail of exploration: cheap access to space, with costs falling by tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per launch. This was so clearly the future, so obviously the way to go. What were we even doing building big government rockets? Why not do what Dan Goldin had wanted to do all those years ago? Hand over the keys!

  NASA, though, was not ready to change. Down at Marshall Space Flight Center, engineers wanted to build giant rockets. That is what they did, what they had always done. Change was not so much anathema as antithetical; why wouldn’t you build giant rockets? I mean, what else was there? After the Augustine Commission nuked Constellation from orbit, Lori was part of one meeting where a NASA official said, in solution to the problem, Maybe we could just . . . change the name? That was his proposal!

  That official, knowingly or not, called exactly what would happen. In 2010 Bolden reluctantly (he was a former astronaut, after all) followed through with the wishes of the White House and announced the cancelation of Constellation.396 And for a brief time, the White House stood by his side. But meanwhile, the administration was waging trench warfare to reform the American health care system and needed all the allies it could gather. When faced with a Senate that wanted Constellation, a NASA administrator who deep down wanted Constellation, aerospace contractors who wanted Constellation, and NASA center directors who wanted Constellation, the White House simply lacked the stomach for fighting on all fronts, and especially on something as peripheral as space. The president would burn no capital on a rocket program, no matter how wasteful it was. It was, after all, just a rocket. Health care was at stake.

  Lori was in a car with Charlie when the president’s deputy chief of staff called to let them know that the president had decided to cave on Constellation. Lori, he said, make the most of it. Make it a win.

  Thus began for Lori Garver the sort of headache that left even the most excessively strengthened aspirin cowering in a corner. Under protest, she made what she knew was just a terrible deal, but the best that she would ever likely get: She would give Congress the Orion crew vehicle and the Ares V heavy-lift rocket.397 In exchange, the administration would get money for general technology development, the James Webb Space Telescope, and a robust “commercial crew” program—that is: the private sector would one day take over all launches to low Earth orbit. The smaller Ares I rocket was dead, and we were not going back to the moon. (We couldn’t afford a lander!)

  The White House and Congress were thus agreed. And then the Senate went to Crazytown, dictating in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 a litany of rocket requirements so specific that you’d think the entire chamber had completed coursework on propulsion engineering.398 They wanted a rocket capable of lifting seventy to one hundred tons of mass into low Earth orbit, and one hundred thirty tons when married to an integrated upper stage. They wanted liquid fuel engines and solid rocket motor engines. They wanted Ares I and space shuttle technology reused wherever possible. And they wanted it flying by December 31, 2016. It was like an aerospace industry wish list—because it was.399 Prime contractors pushed hard for the legislation so that existing partnerships might be preserved. Consequently, not only did the Senate want NASA to Frankenstein a rocket, but they weren’t even going to allow engineers flexibility to build the best one possible.400

  From Lori’s perspective, it was still Constellation. All they did was . . . change the name! And worse, with the terms dictated to NASA, they had passed an impossibility into legislation. There was no way that rocket would launch on time, and the rocket scientists said so, but the Senate said: No, you have to. It’s right there in the law!401, 402 Well, said Lori, you could pass a law that says the sky is purple, but that would not make it so.

  In August 2011 the space shuttle program officially ended. It was time. Two out of the five had been destroyed during operations, killing all aboard in each instance. They were too slow to launch. Too expensive. There were no emergency egress systems: the light came on that said WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE and . . . you died. And the things were not getting any safer with age. Yet when the shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time, an odd, resonant sadness seemed to sweep the nation. It was like the government had decided to dismantle the Statue of Liberty. Despite its costs and setbacks, the shuttle program—formally called the Space Transportation System, or STS—was persistently and now perniciously popular.403 And with the grounding of the fleet, NASA found itself for the first time in fifty years unable to launch astronauts into space—a significant problem for an agency whose chief purpose was launching astronauts into space. And so—oh, this one hurt—the only way Americans could get to the International Space Station would be to fly from Russia, on Russian-made rockets, in Russian-made capsules.

  A happy ending, said Orson Welles, depends on where you stop your story.404 Because of unrelenting solar radiation, the American flags on the moon had long faded to solid white. The Americans won the space race, it seemed, only if you stopped telling the story in 2010.

  IN HIS TWENTY-ONE years since joining the agency, Todd May had learned a lot. He had learned that management and leadership are two completely different things; in some ways, opposites. If you’re a manager, you have formal responsibilities, formal accountability, and formal authority. You have a set of resources within which to work. You have constraints and processes. Leadership, though, is the art of gaining willing followers. Your sense of constraints can be less about strict adherence than supporting irregular ingenuity; in some ways, you’re trying to take people outside of the box, you’re taking them to places they didn’t know existed. Management is saying we’ve got only this much money—how do we work with that amount? Leadership might ask how we spend money differently so that we still achieve what we’re trying to do.

  Todd had done over decades the sort of tough, tedious grunt work materials engineering that, it seemed now to him, young engineers didn’t do anymore. Everybody wanted to launch something, and when Todd first set foot on Marshall—not even a badged employee of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration but a bright-eyed contractor—they weren’t asking him to launch anything and would have laughed if he’d suggested that he be put on flight hardware. First, he had to make his bones, and he did. He learned later to be a junior manager, and would learn to lead particular parts of projects, and then projects themselves, and then entire programs, and in his years, his hard-earned experience had helped separate a good number of NASA’s greatest achievements from the Earth. But there were tradeoffs. It oftentimes left him removed from his family by thousands of miles for months at a time and bleary-eyed because of this emergency or that, solving problems with Russian engineers who spoke fragments of English at best and who only months prior had been part of a program to erase the United States from the map in a total, terrible light show. He had setbacks, his projects were sometimes canceled before he started—good projects, worthy projects, like the habitation module on the International Space Station. Yet he persevered. And he was really good at what he did, but—and this thinking infected half of the space program—you build spaceships for a living, and you sometimes wake up in the morning and think: you’ve been lucky so far, but one day the meeting will come when everyone asks: What are you doing here? Why are you in this room?

  By 2011, and despite the insidious doubts that plagued him, May had done a few things, but with every major role, every promotion, every ambitious endeavor of which he had ever been part, he had been asked by someone higher up to give it a go. Todd, we’d like you to lead this space station module. Todd, we’d like you to lead the Discovery and New Frontiers program at Marshall. Todd, I’d like you to come with me to NASA headquarters. And now there was his boss—everybody’s boss—Robert Lightfoot, the director of Marshall Space Flight Center, sitting across f
rom him and asking him to lead what would be the most critical program in the center’s portfolio: a program upon which the very survival of Marshall might depend.

  At the time of Constellation’s cancelation, Todd was associate director of technical on the ninth floor at Marshall. Constellation employed thousands, both directly and through contractors, and Todd worried first about morale. The contractor workforce was about to be gutted. These men and women had been working really hard on this thing, and its eighty-sixing wasn’t their fault. And though Marshall wouldn’t be chaining the front gates, how could you keep the team primed for whatever came next?

  Todd immediately tried to figure out how he might leverage his Discovery–New Frontiers background and started digging into robotic precursor missions—“precursor” as in “precursor to astronauts”: i.e., just about every science mission that went to the moon or Mars. A lander, in his mind, was just a launcher in reverse, and launchers were Marshall’s thing. And though Constellation was deemed unsustainable in the Augustine Commission report, the document was categorical in stating that the United States still needed a heavy-lift rocket.

  Sometime between the teleconferences, the technical meetings, and the flurry of fact-finding trips to Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland; Langley Research Center and Wallops Flight Facility, both in Virginia; and NASA headquarters—Lightfoot pulled Todd into a one-on-one and offered him the project manager position for NASA’s next big rocket program and the centerpiece of any mission to the moon or Mars. They called it the Space Launch System, or SLS.

  Todd declined the offer. He said—it was selfish, he knew—I will do this only if it is real. I do not like paperwork exercises. And, May reflected, there were a lot of reasons he was not the person for the job, chief among them: he was not a rocket guy. There was no institution on Earth with a rocket culture so strong as that at Marshall. Huntsville even called itself Rocket City. How would the rocket folks take the news that an outsider, even if hailing from within, was now the boss?

  Lightfoot dealt with that question head-on, holding an off-site with his direct reports, the executive leadership of Marshall (minus Todd), where he explained that this guy, May, everything he touched went to space. He was Marshall’s best shot at getting Marshall flying rockets again. Lightfoot asked for one hundred percent of his people to be on board with this. They were.

  Todd was not a propulsion engineer, but he was an Auburn engineer. To quote the creed, he “believed in work, hard work.” He knew how to take intractable problems and tract them. Puzzles interested him, and especially challenging ones. You’re a NASA engineer, and you solve hard problems for a living. It’s what made the job fun, exciting; the harder the problem, the greater the thrill. And suddenly Todd was a child again, on his bicycle without handlebars, hands in the air, centrifugal force and his guardian angel keeping everything lined up like a gyroscope. So Todd said yes. And right away, he got to work.

  MAY AND THE CORE SLS leadership met first at a lake house owned by Jody Singer, his deputy, and came up with the broad strokes of what they wanted to do. The organization of the program, its management philosophy, the short-term and long-term goals, and one-page plans to get to the next step. The first major milestone on the deep horizon was a mission concept review in which an independent panel would evaluate the plans for SLS and offer an assessment of risk. But to get that far, there would need to be trade studies both internally and with contractors.

  A “broad area announcement” went out to industry: anyone who wanted to play—Old Space or New Space (businesses such as Boeing or Blue Origin, respectively)—was invited to contribute. More than a dozen reports came back from industry, and—surprise!—given the parameters, every industrial partner recommended a rocket that looked exactly like the thing they were already selling.405 Alliant Techsystems, a company that built solid-fueled rocket boosters (i.e., using a literal solid fuel, similar in principle to bottle rockets), proposed a rocket that used . . . solid-fueled rocket boosters! Aerojet Rocketdyne, which built rocket engines, proposed building a rocket with lots of engines! Boeing, which built enormous boosters and cores for its rockets, proposed using an enormous core. And so on. The ideas from industry sifted themselves into general categories, and the SLS management put together three Requirements Analysis Cycle teams—pronounced by their abbreviation, “rack teams”—each of which optimized the problem in some different way. Given the launch date (2016), the launch capability (seventy metric tons), the budget (flat), and the requirement to reuse as much of the space shuttle and Ares I “to the extent practicable” (a glorious term of art!), design the best rocket you can.406 It must be affordable. It must be safe.

  When you build a rocket from scratch, step one is to know your destination.407 Low Earth orbit versus, say, the moon, requires different rocket sizes entirely. Pickup truck versus big rig. Mars? Even bigger. SLS didn’t have a destination—the idea was flexibility. But the ambiguity didn’t help. The space shuttle taught NASA that . . . you didn’t want to build a shuttle. An in-line vehicle—that single spartan tower, with maybe some boosters on the side for extra get up and go—was just safer (von Braun figured this out in the sixties) and made more sense aerodynamically. So now you have the shape of your rocket. Then you’re thinking about trajectory: How do you want to fly the vehicle? What kind of loft do you need, what kind of Gs do you need to maintain, or to stay under: i.e., do you need a gentle ride, astronauts sipping from teacups as they clear the tower, or do you just want to throw something to space with everything you’ve got?

  The destination determines the amount of fuel you’ll need to carry. You have n number of engines, and they’re small relative to everything else. The main engine used by the space shuttle was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. The tank attached to it was the length of a football field. So you had to handle that fuel and design the tanks in such a way to feed your engines efficiently. And what are the best fuels, anyway? What gives you the best blast for your buck? What’s plentiful? What’s available? What has the impulse you need when you burn it?

  And now you have a broad vision of your rocket. The engines are on the bottom, those big bells pointed at the ground, the core feeder on top. If that doesn’t give you enough thrust, then you can up it with smaller boosters—“half stages”—on each side of your prospective launch vehicle. The space shuttle solid rocket boosters, the most famous of these, were the cat’s pajamas because they gave you incredible lift off the pad. Overcoming that first moment of gravity was everything; your rocket at that moment would never have more fuel or be heavier. Solids were the supreme and undisputed empresses of lift, intense, unbridled—you will separate from the Earth when they ignite—but they’re not controllable, you light that candle, and that’s it: up, up, and away. So to build a smart rocket with navigation and guidance, you want liquid-fueled rockets that you can control; you want to be able to throttle them this way or that and keep things oriented just so. A liquid/solid combo was a pretty good deal if you could get it.

  But where do you place your crew? You hang a vehicle from the side of your rocket and run the risk of, say, foam falling from said rocket and causing a space shuttle Columbia-type accident. So you put your people on top of the rocket. But how many people? The size and destination of the crew capsule—but more pressingly, the size and rock-solid reliability of the heat shield at the bottom of the capsule—also determined the rocket’s configuration. Astronauts didn’t go on one-way trips; you’d need that shield for reentry. When seated, the crew’s feet were only inches above the heat shield. So during reentry, the shield on one side might reach four thousand degrees.408 On the other, your astronauts’ feet would be cool and relaxed.

  The three rack teams had about six months—an unreasonably short amount of time when it came to engineering—to develop their rocket proposals. The teams were necessarily small, each member having an area or two of expertise, and the work was divvied up along those lines: You’re great on engines. You’re the pers
on for schedule. You’re the risk expert. Structures, vibroacoustics—they would come together and mutate the rocket design. There were thousands of variables and equations that, when explained, were the length of wedding toasts. It was hard. It was rocket science! Still, there was a carnival atmosphere at times. Beer and pizza were on the line for whichever team’s design came out on top.

  None of the Rack Study rockets, in the end, was the most perfect rocket ever; that title belonged to the Saturn V. But they found one that worked.

  Rack One was a shuttle-derived rocket. It was always their race to lose, and they were quite confident they wouldn’t lose it. They had access to the sixteen space shuttle engines for their design and were thus best able to take advantage of the existing supply chain and knowledge base. So—if you’re building a rocket with shuttle-derived technology, and you’ve got a guy down the hall who’s been working on, say, some valve on the shuttle for the last seventeen years, you had an easily checked box without the need for an arduous R&D process. Moreover, the design took advantage of the facilities at Marshall, Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, and Cape Canaveral in Florida.