The Mission

by David W. Brown

  Rack Two was the emotional favorite. It was the more Ares V–like of the proposals, huge—thirty-three feet in diameter (almost six feet larger than Rack One) and towering two hundred seventy feet in the air.409 But what won the hearts of all who heard about it was the rocket engine they planned to use: four Rocketdyne F-1 engines, the very same engine that powered the Saturn V. On PowerPoint presentations, when listing the points in favor of the rocket, it just said “von Braun,” no explanation needed. And when you looked at its design—well, there was just no doubt about it, the thing was like the love child of Saturn V and Ares V. How the engineers longed to hear the F-1 roar once again! Roar it would: a single F-1 engine was as powerful as three space shuttle main engines, and the Saturn V used five F-1 engines per launch. The power output of the first stage of a single Saturn V launch could have powered all of the United Kingdom.410

  Indeed, if the schedule and dollars had not been constrained—if all that mattered was elegance and engineering—Todd would have just rebuilt von Braun’s Saturn V. It was a technically perfect rocket. In the Apollo years, it had all the money in the world. There was never a request for funds that was denied; NASA spent whatever it took to take that hill. But those days were over.

  There was another problem: there was no one left alive who really knew how the F-1 worked. Engineers would have to find an engine, disassemble it, and figure out what Wernher knew that they did not.411 Even for rocket scientists, the Apollo program was like magic. So Rack Two carried a learning curve as steep as El Capitan.

  The third team worked off the shelf. It set no one’s heart aflutter but was a pragmatist’s dream. We have Atlas V rockets. We have Delta Heavy rockets. What can we do to package them? Just keep tying ’em together until you met the power mandate. From a scheduling standpoint, it was the best option: just go to a contractor, buy the rockets, and piece them together like Lego bricks—I mean, problem solved. But the more the Rack Three team worked the rockets to achieve the desired performance, the uglier things got. You needed a cluster of boosters around a core rocket, and you just didn’t have enough room for all of them. How did you feed the different engines? Impinged flumes of fire from each of the boosters would melt the bottom of a rocket. And, oh, by the way, with all this stuff sticking out of your rocket, how are you going to assemble it with existing infrastructure at Cape Canaveral? In the end, you just couldn’t get from existing assets the performance necessary to reach the desired targets. Getting astronauts halfway to the moon would not be ideal.

  By far, the hardest problem was cost. The SLS budget was flat. Todd was told to expect about one-point-six billion a year for the first three years.412 Marshall’s original estimates, however, called for more each year: one-point-eight, two-point-six, and two-point-six.413 But then it got worse: the actual budgets ended up much, much less: around one-point-three, one-point-four-ish, and one-point-four-ish.414, 415, 416

  The eventually chosen design of SLS—Rack One—used the same engines pulled from the now-mothballed space shuttle fleet. There were sixteen of them, pristine, powerful (if rocket engines were cars, they would be Ferraris), just waiting in a warehouse in Hancock County, Mississippi. They were already rated for human spaceflight. They were reliable; they hadn’t been the cause of the two shuttle disasters, and had gone up one hundred thirty-five times total.417 They were also made for reusability, though SLS as eventually designed would make use of each engine only once. And since you didn’t have to worry about reuse, you could crank them way, way up in terms of throughput, just give them the business.

  Like the space shuttle, SLS would use two five-segment solid boosters, one on each side of the core stage. Those boosters had completed most of their development work as part of Ares and had thirty years of shuttle heritage, making them practically free. Though the core had the same diameter as the shuttle external tank, it was a new design overall: taller, for one thing, and where the shuttle external tank fueled three engines, this one, as designed eventually, would feed four. It would still be expensive to build, but you had enough engines for four launches.

  To further reduce costs, management eliminated a lot of oversight procedures and documentation requirements. May simplified the government interface with contractors who were building things: stop with the thirty checkboxes and multiple levels of approval, everyone; when you find an issue, talk directly with the contractors responsible. Do what you say you’re going to do and focus on results. This was a lithe, sinewy rocket program, and a cultural change for Marshall. To help, May ordered the creation of a series of project management courses for the thirteen hundred engineers working on SLS. The rocket would fly, but it would also leave an institution transformed.

  TOM GAVIN CHAIRED the mission concept review board that examined the three Rack Studies. Tom and Todd had worked together previously. Not long after Tom had helped spearhead the successful Flight Project Practices and Design Principles initiatives at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the chief engineer at NASA headquarters contacted him. The agency already possessed its own guide for management and design called NASA Procedural Requirements 7120.5, but it was getting long in the tooth. Tom, I’d like you to help review and revise the policies of the entire agency—including human spaceflight—to reflect how projects might be managed going forward. We’ll give you a cross-agency team and eighteen months to do it.

  Tom agreed, and asked Todd May to be his deputy.

  From the start, Todd marveled at Tom’s ability to lead. There was never any doubt in any meeting who was going to sit at the head of the table, who was in charge. Tom, meanwhile, knew that Todd, too, had a strong personality and was an effective leader, and drew him close. Better to have him a trusted deputy than the guy on the other end of the table fighting back. They kept each other honest and became close friends.

  Ultimately, the 7120.5 review worked out smashingly. When the revision was released in 2007, project managers across the agency were suddenly talking incessantly about which Key Decision Point they were at—and understood what each other meant. But, more important, it was absolutely embraced by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and by Congress. All of this made Tom the ideal choice to lead the SLS mission concept review, and would help Todd demonstrate to human spaceflight the broad strokes of how mission concept reviews—a big part of the work he and Tom had done on 7120.5—actually worked.

  After the SLS review was completed, the decision made, Tom and Todd met at Tom’s beach condo. The two of them sat in the courtyard, beers in hand, and Tom talked about the Europa study. Because of the SLS mission concept review, Tom was fully immersed in the capabilities of the rocket. He turned to Todd and asked: Have you ever thought about flying an outer planets mission on SLS?418

  Todd hadn’t, why?

  You ought to look at it, said Tom. I think you can get us to Europa a lot faster. On a conventional rocket, it’ll take us six or seven years because we’ll have to do orbital assists.

  May later had his team run the numbers. He called Tom, and asked: How much do you spend on the operations phase while you’re cruising out to Jupiter?

  Forty million to sixty million dollars a year.

  Well, instead of spending that for seven years, we can get you there in two and a half.

  So the two men formed a quiet alliance, and the Europa team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a contingent at Marshall opened an unprecedented dialogue. No science mission had ever directly influenced the design of a new launch vehicle—that had previously been the exclusive domain of human spaceflight.419 They couldn’t lock in anything, of course. Europa wasn’t an actual mission, and they were years from committing to a launch vehicle. But Gavin and May, Europa and SLS, could certainly talk design, refine and harden their engineering, keep each other in mind, continue having the conversation. And from the start, it was clear the two needed each other. Moreover, if the Europa mission didn’t have to foot the bill on the rocket—if launch were funded separately—and if they could trim three
hundred million dollars from cruise phase operational expenses, Europa would have a stronger case at NASA headquarters and in Congress.

  The Obama administration, meanwhile, had yet to commit to a target in deep space. The agency talked humans on Mars, but that was an aspirational goal—not misdirection exactly, but not a real plan. There were no crewed Mars missions on the books, or formal funding to make that happen, and even if there were, Mars would be twenty years away at best. There was a lot of infrastructure yet to build to get there, and no money to do it. Once built, SLS would be a rocket with nowhere to fly.

  Europa was a somewhere.

  Chapter 13

  Clipper

  DESPITE THE DELETERIOUS DECADAL DECISION, IT never even occurred to Bob Pappalardo that a Europa mission wouldn’t fly until he was having lunch with Ron Greeley a few months before completing the split-mission report. The two scientists broke bread in 167, the main cafeteria at JPL, called the Red Planet Cafe.

  RON: So what are you going to do now?420

  BOB: What do you mean?

  RON: Well, what are your plans now that Europa isn’t happening? Are you going to go back to academia?

  Bob didn’t know what to say. He—I mean—what? His thoughts collided and folded inward like a derailed train. We’re going to do Europa—we’ve got these two great studies we are doing—what are you talking about?—come on, Ron, this isn’t over—you can’t stop now!

  Bob said aloud, however: I don’t know—maybe I’ll go back to academia.

  And he felt suddenly exhausted. Ron Greeley had given up. The maestro who had taken this thing so far, who had first revealed enigmatic Europa on Galileo. Ron, who co-led the science definition team for the battlestar JIMO! Ron, who was on the inside. Who was chair of the Planetary Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council. Who knew everything, could do anything, going back to the Apollo program. If Ron had resigned to the inevitable . . . then that meant it was inevitable. That maybe it was over—and if it was, then what was I doing here? It was their last long visit together, their last long good talk, mentor and protégé, master and apprentice.

  Not long after, on October 27, 2011, Bob received what was obviously a hastily dashed message from Ron’s assistant, Stephanie Holaday. “Bob,” it said. “When you are available to, will you plesase call me . . . I need to talk to you about Ron.”421 Bob went to his office. It felt wrong, the cadence, the typo. He closed the door. He called. Stephanie answered. Earlier in the morning, he was told, there was a teleconference scheduled for the Planetary Science Subcommittee. Ron didn’t dial in. Ron, Bob knew, always dialed in, was never late—ever. He was too organized, too gentlemanly, to just skip a call. And he ran the subcommittee, so it was especially unusual.

  Ron’s wife, Cindy, was out of town. He and Cindy always traveled together, had seen the world, mountains, valleys, and cities with buildings that scraped the sky, met armed riflemen in the Arctic whose job it was to protect them from polar bears, and met by happenstance the pope in a private audience at the Vatican Observatory. But on this trip, Cindy had traveled alone. Her mother, who still lived in Gulfport, had fallen and broken her hip. Ron and Cindy had just returned after three weeks in France, and Ron wanted to join her but he first had to play catch-up at the office and had a mandatory meeting in Flagstaff.

  Cindy tried calling their house. There was no answer. She telephoned her neighbors across the street. They had a key to the house, just in case, and Cindy asked if Ron’s truck was in the driveway.422 Yes it was. OK, said Cindy, something is not right, and she asked them to take the key and go inside, and they did. They found him on the floor in the bedroom. Ron Greeley was dead.

  Everything moved so fast. It was a heart attack. Fragments and flashes connected that call and the funeral. The response by the science community—it moved Cindy. It was touching. All the senior officials at Jet Propulsion Laboratory attended the memorial service. She was so surprised by that. She found out that there was a memorial service held for Ron in China! In Wuhan, at the China University of Geoscience, Ron had worked with a professor there and had made an impression.423 She received a letter of condolences from Sir David Wallace, the master of Churchill College of the University of Cambridge, where her husband had once been a visiting professor.424 She learned later that a plaque was hung in Ron’s honor at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Ron had always taken his job as a mentor so seriously. He wanted his students to know how to do things correctly. And his postdoctoral and graduate students went on to become the leaders in the field. Ron Greeley had changed the world. And not just this one. He had changed the solar system. The Regional Planetary Image Facility at Arizona State University—one of seventeen such NASA data centers around the world—was renamed the Ronald Greeley Center for Planetary Studies. Ron had been a key scientist on most missions the agency flew, and on every Mars rover to have pressed tracks into rusty Martian soil. Just after he passed away, the rover Opportunity settled in for the winter on the rim of Endeavour Crater—a sweeping, stunning Martian vista—and NASA and the Mars team named it Greeley Haven.425

  Shortly before he died, Ron had completed the manuscript for his seventeenth book, Introduction to Planetary Geomorphology.426 It was to be the definitive text on the subfield, and the publishers called Bob and asked if he would do the revisions, and—well, of course Bob would.

  THE EUROPA HABITABILITY Mission report arrived at NASA headquarters on May 1, 2012, a single seven-hundred-page volume describing the potential missions to Europa in Caro-esque detail.427 The Europa science definition team had spent one year developing it: a split-mission concept composed of a Europa orbiter and a Jupiter orbiter, two relatively simple spacecraft, each built to suit its strengths and not a single atom more. JPL took the lead studying the Europa orbiter, while APL handled the Jupiter “multiple flyby” option. For the concept to work, you would fly one and eventually the other, or both simultaneously, but the point was, you needed both for a full and accurate accounting of the ocean moon. The Europa orbiter would live hard and die young inside of the Jovian radiation belt, which would poison it fatally in thirty days.428 The Jupiter orbiter would encounter Europa repeatedly over two years, each time taking some specific, sui generis slice of the icy moon, meticulously mapping it in patchwork. The orbiter would be better for the ocean science; the multiple flyby mission would be better for the ice shell science. Geology was a split decision.429

  Bob Pappalardo celebrated the delivery of the science definition team’s report by getting the hell out of Pasadena.430

  When he was first hired by the lab, Bob was told that research sabbaticals were a Thing That Existed, but that no one ever actually took them because no one had the time. Well, Bob did, now, and he filled his forms and bid them good day. He needed some space between himself and these papercraft robots. He needed to figure out if it was worth it anymore—the work at the lab, the whole messy business, this Sisyphean effort to get something going. Every day, he sat in his office, at his desk, in his chair, surrounded by Star Trek figurines and awards and plaques and textbooks, a globe of Europa and a view from his window of Saint Gabe’s geology and flora and sometimes fauna, a few lab facilities here and there dotting the distance. He worked at the world’s preeminent institution for building spaceships—and he’s in his chair, and every few moments, a gentle chime from Microsoft Outlook, another note for another meeting, another request for information, another mission study, another consult, another talk, another news article speeding across the wire, the decaying budgets of planetary science, Mars rovers and the James Webb Space Telescope gobbling everything green, AND WHERE WAS BOB’S SPACESHIP? He kept taking these leaps, and it was—what if he landed and just . . . kept landing! Kept writing report after report, and PowerPoint presentation ad infinitum. He had given a talk years earlier on Europa and the mission that could be, and after finishing, a radio astronomer in attendance announced: You know, someone could really make a career doing this!431 Bob could see it
in his face. This wasn’t some joke that just didn’t land. It was a rebuke! And Bob brushed it off—what a jerk—but even all these years later, the comment really gnawed at him. He heard, long after the radio astronomer called him out in person, that someone had called him a salesman behind his back. A salesman! Robert Pappalardo! If only he were! There was this New Yorker cartoon he had once clipped and taped to his office door. There were two hamsters, one sprinting on his wheel, the other sitting stunned on the edge of hers. There’s this look of total clarity on her face. And she says: “I had an epiphany.”432

  Walking out the door, reflecting on the latest report, he was spacecraft agnostic, if not entirely indifferent, about which probe should be approved, if any. These studies. Seven hundred pages for this one. Four hundred ninety-eight for the Jupiter Europa Orbiter.433 Two hundred eighty-two pages for Europa Explorer.434 In aggregate, one thousand five hundred pages since he had come to the lab, not counting internal studies he had led or helped write, and not counting JIMO. Fifteen hundred pages! The Lord of the Rings was shorter!435 Frodo and Sam walking from Bag End to Mount Doom, ducking Nazgûl and dodging Balrogs, was now officially easier by page count than a journey to Europa. And Europa’s fellowship hadn’t yet moved a single inch.

  This one, this report, landed nicely. It was a good report. As had been the last. And the one before that. And Bob wondered: Would this have any greater effect than its forerunners? He had come to the lab with a three-year personal deadline: get something funded, fabricated, fit for flight, or go back to teaching. Well, he had lapped that limit and then some, and he was tired. He had no spacecraft to show for his endeavors. Not even formal “project” status. They were the imposter tenants of 321.