The Mission

by David W. Brown

  The gusto with which the engineers embraced the solar option alienated members of the science team, and Bob in particular.496 They had been left out of the discussion of the trade to solar. The project scientist had authority in all matters affecting science, and here, Bob argued, was an element of the spacecraft that was inarguably affecting the science—degraded radar, defiled plasma instrument, diminished magnetometer—deteriorated data would obviate the point of going. Look, Bob understood the advantages of solar: it cost less and simplified an awful lot. He wanted solar to work. But the decision in his view wasn’t ready to be made, and certainly not unilaterally. Until the trade studies were done, Bob didn’t want to sign on.

  It was a power play—literally—and power being king in space exploration, it pitted Bob against Barry in conversations you could hear down the hall, and not for the last time.

  Chapter 17

  Step Forward, Tin Man

  BOB STOOD ON THE ELEVATOR AT NASA HEADQUARTERS, the 9 button lit. He was wearing a suit and tie, so everyone knew: it was serious. January 24, 2014, and he was here at last, in the Lanyard City. He was off to see the administrator.

  NASA headquarters could be any municipal building or corporate office in America: a little dingy, well worn, too many cubicles, too little space, posters pasted on surfaces, flower bouquets and bobblehead dolls on desks, stickers and tchotchkes and tall stacks of paperwork teetering, tottering, threatening to spill into walkways. The carpet . . . adhering to the five-second rule would have been at great personal risk. No one built spaceships at headquarters, and there were no marble columns out front. Unless you knew exactly what you were standing in front of, it was just some place in DC, and you would walk by it and never bother looking up. Architecturally, the Residence Inn across the street was about as impressive. Certainly no one would confuse HQ’s ground floor with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. There were a few space artifacts (or at least replicas of space artifacts) in display cases in the lobby, and off to the side there was a little gift shop where you could get your official NASA gear, t-shirts and ball caps, and postcards of Mars. On the floors above: Things getting done. Employees in business casual racing to meetings; half-eaten birthday cakes on breakroom tables; coffee mugs in sinks; fridges filled with Tupperware lunches; people talking in hallways; ten thousand chimes from ten thousand simultaneously open copies of Outlook for every agencywide memo; the clacking of keyboards, the clicking of mice.

  You didn’t brief the NASA administrator every day. Most, even at headquarters, would never brief the administrator in their entire careers. The JPL delegation to headquarters (of which Bob was a part) left nothing to chance, wanted things just so, because this might be their one shot, and they didn’t want to throw it away. And so for this Europa presentation, every slide title and bullet point was iterated by committee until every word had been drained of meaning, sentences stripped clean to the bone, so simple in structure that Cormac McCarthy might have suggested sprinkling some semicolons in there. Pictures were used in lieu of words whenever possible. It’s not that anyone thought the administrator was an idiot; rather, everyone recognized that he was neither a scientist nor an engineer, and furthermore, the man attended briefings eight hours a day, five days a week, for years now. When he left the Europa briefing, you didn’t need him reflecting later about Europa’s surface albedo of zero-point-six-four. You wanted him to remember from the slides: “Very high science merit” and that Hubble “Indicates water plumes!” And, of course, a great big image of Europa Clipper astride the SLS rocket in its Apollo color scheme.

  A few days before giving the talk—far too late in the process for the customary eighty edits and heated discussions over whether an image’s border should be thickened by two pixels or one—Bob surreptitiously slipped in a slide. It was a shot of Europa’s chaotic terrain taken by the spacecraft Galileo, with the caption WHAT IS THE ROLE OF LIQUID WATER IN SHAPING EUROPA’S BIZARRE SURFACE?497 After weeks of discussion and rehearsal, Bob’s role in the presentation had come down to explaining what excited him about Europa. He realized that the NASA administrator probably didn’t even know what Europa’s face looked like—why would he? So maybe this picture of the chaos region, rugged and crystalline, so alien from anything else in the solar system, might get his attention. Why do we need to go to Europa? To figure out things like this.

  Bob didn’t know if Administrator Bolden (or Mr. Administrator, but never, it was drilled into him, Charlie, or Mr. Bolden, or General Bolden) would be a friendly audience. One month earlier, during a break in a separate meeting, the administrator had popped into a gathering of the NASA Advisory Council to make a few brief remarks.

  We have to stop thinking about flagships, Bolden told the council. “The budget doesn’t support that.”498 The agency wanted “more, less-expensive types of missions,” and even attempting to fly a flagship would mean “eternal battles” with the White House. In the eyes of many at headquarters, Bolden apparently among them, after the punishing experiences launching Galileo, Cassini, and the rover Curiosity—each in the course of its development a lightning rod for criticism by presidents and Congresses alike, all over budget and each ever at risk of cancelation, hundreds of millions of dollars therefore wasted—flagship was the literal f-word. You didn’t say it in polite company.

  Bolden’s declaration was seen generally as a preemptive strike against congressional micromanagement. Scuttlebutt had it that Frank Wolf, chair of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, was set to announce his retirement at the end of the next session.499 Which meant twelve months separated Charlie Bolden from Chairman John Culberson. If this Texan interloper was dictating terms now, what would he do when handed almost unlimited power over the NASA budget?

  Bolden got his answer two weeks later, when the congressman stated his plans outright to the Houston Chronicle: “I’m certain that there’s life elsewhere in the universe. And I’m also certain that the first place we will discover life on another world is Europa,” he said.500 “If I’m successful in becoming chairman of the subcommittee, that’s going to be right when the Europa mission will need its maximum funding. It needs to be a flagship mission. The biggest and best we’ve ever flown.” Culberson raised the stakes weeks later in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014, again inserting into law: “Provided further, That $80,000,000 shall be for pre-formulation and/or formulation activities for a mission that meets the science goals outlined for the Jupiter Europa mission in the most recent planetary decadal survey.”501 If you were Joan Salute at NASA headquarters or Barry Goldstein at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you were doing the math, carrying the one, and smiling. The Europa Clipper still had a surplus of cash from the seventy-five-million-dollar infusion in 2013. Plus the eighty million, it literally could not spend money fast enough.

  Though Europa now had in the bank twenty times what had been spent on the studies Quad and shootout combined, Bolden still held the trump card for any prospective mission.502 Until Europa appeared in the NASA budget request—until the agency made it Facebook official, asked for the money, committed in word and deed to Doing This Thing—it was virtually impossible for the lab to do any long-term planning, or, more urgently, to sign any long-term contracts to turn hopes into hardware. The money might be in the bank, but the Europa team would have no withdrawal slips, no ATM card. Without Bolden’s signature, John Culberson was paying for the most elaborate paperwork exercise in the history of space science. Without a formal agency buy-in, Europa was completely Culberson contingent and one heart attack or falling piano away from vanishing entirely from NASA’s radar.

  And so, yeah, when Bob pushed 9—goin’ up!—he was a little bit terrified. The elevator carried him from floor three, where he had met with Joan and Curt for a pregame conference. The two were not invited to the meeting and wanted to brief Bob on any last-minute business and the leadership disposition. Of the twenty-eight slides today, Bob would
speak for only a few of them. He knew what to say—had given ten thousand talks on Europa—but this ten thousand and first was the one that mattered most. Charles Elachi, Jim Green, and John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator for science, would be there, maybe a few others Bob knew. But they would be background. He would focus on the administrator.

  Bob had been on the ninth floor before, but still, it caught him off guard. The elevator doors slid apart, and Whoa—this place is a little nicer than the others. Am I supposed to be greeted by someone? Am I allowed to walk down this hall? There were fancy photos on the wall: from Apollo, the shuttle, the space station, Hubble. It was eerily quiet, clean, bright, and unnerving.

  Conference room ACR2 was smaller than he expected, and darker.503 It was an interior room, no windows, and there was a small conference table around which only a handful of VIPs sat. It was positively intimate, and practically one-on-one when you zeroed in on Administrator Bolden—much less formal than Bob expected. It was not a presentation setting with big screens or a podium. You didn’t have to project or wear a microphone to reach the audience in the back of the room. (You could lean forward and touch them with your fingertips.) Bolden was known for his breezy bonhomie and approachability (rank-and-file NASA adored him), which was both welcoming and, for those used to more . . . clinical . . . feedback, disorienting.

  OK, thought Bob, now I am going to talk to the administrator of NASA.

  And when came his slides, he did. He made the science case for Europa. He described the whys and wherefores of the ocean and ice shell, the rocky interior touching water, the plausibility of habitability, presented the chaos terrain, and—

  Sometimes you gave these talks to agency brass, whether at the center- or headquarters-level, and you wondered if your audience artificially amped up their interest—Oh, wow! Wonderful! Unbelievable! Amazing!—but meanwhile were wondering in the backs of their minds what they might have for lunch later that day, or whether they had left the stove on, or whether the sitter knew to pick up their kid from school today at one thirty rather than three, because it was early dismissal—but Bolden seemed blown away by it. He leaned forward, narrowed and then widened his eyes, really, really absorbed what he was seeing, and seemed truly transfixed by that parting view of Europa, the blocks and the crazed etchings in chaotic terrain. Bob didn’t push forward. He let the slide linger, let the man at the head of the table take it all in, offered a cursory description of what the administrator was studying, but mostly let the image speak for itself. Next slide.

  When his few slides were up, Bob handed off the presentation to Barry Goldstein. His relationship with Barry remained less than ideal and on an errant trajectory, but they gave great talks together, a perfect doubles tennis team. Barry really, seriously knew his stuff, and Bob admired Barry’s brain, a vault of mission minutiae and spacecraft specifics. Barry, joined by Firouz Naderi, head of Solar System Exploration at JPL, explained the business case for Europa: why the Clipper concept enabled the lab to fly a successful mission for less money (“Ninety percent of the science for fifty percent of the cost,” Curt had drilled relentlessly into them to tell anyone who asked, ever) and precisely why Europa Clipper was the unexpected dream payload of the centerpiece of human spaceflight, the SLS rocket. Charlie Bolden, a human who had experienced spaceflight, remained mesmerized.

  The meeting lasted an hour. It was conversational in tone, and Bolden interjected when he had questions or just wanted to make general comments. Charles Elachi, afterward, congratulated his team from the lab, and Bob left feeling very good about it.

  As he should have: the talk worked. But being Europa, there was a catch.

  Curt and Joan learned later that Bolden, though supportive of a mission, wanted it done for a billion dollars.504 Someone had told him that it could be done for a billion dollars, see, and he wanted everyone to get on that. Europa. One billion dollars. Everybody got that?

  EUROPA COULD NOT BE DONE FOR A BILLION DOLLARS. Curt had literally spent the last ten years proving that Europa at one billion was an absolute metaphysical impossibility. It didn’t matter if you were talking about orbiter, lander, or multiple flyby—no way, no how. But some bureaucrat at the White House Office of Management and Budget had heard from someone at some university that, Oh, fellas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory just isn’t trying hard enough—we have a miracle cure for the billion-dollar barrier—tiny spacecraft called “cube sats”—and give us the chance (and money!) and we will prove it to you. And thus, Europa at one billion: do it.

  Thankfully, David Schurr, the deputy division director for the Science Mission Directorate, stepped in. He had been briefed by Curt a thousand times on the state of Europa and what could be done for how much, and convinced the White House budget examiner that rather than simply direct a billion-dollar mission, it would be prudent to request a white paper on how Europa was costed, and why the only way to achieve Decadal-compatible science was to fund a mission at the magic number of two-point-five billion, which, if that congressman from Texas was to be believed, Congress was willing to do.505

  It fell to Curt to write said paper. It was due in six weeks.

  Ten days later, February 3, 2014, Curt left headquarters for the airport on an itinerary taking him from National to LAX, and then by car to JPL. The lab was hosting a Europa science team meeting and a workshop on icy world habitability. But when he got to the airport—and, look, he had checked on this, confirmed this, had been assured that, yes, Curt, it was done—his training request had slipped through the cracks, leaving his plane ticket unpurchased. Unlike most of his colleagues in the Europa effort, Curt was not a million-miler with United or American Airlines—he had a family who needed him and better ways to spend the taxpayers’ money, and, at most, he took eight flights a year on business. So these things happened. He rolled his carry-on back to headquarters to get the paperwork straightened out and to catch a later flight.

  Back at the mother ship, he went through security, called the elevator, doors slid open, entered, lit 3, goin’ up, 2, third floor (ding!), the doors slid open, and he stepped into the nerve center of American space science, the cube farms, the posters, the birthday cakes, and there was David Schurr, who gave him a friendly hi, followed by: Europa is officially in NASA’s fiscal year 2015 budget.

  It was like a piano had fallen on Curt’s head, but in a good way. A good piano. How much? he might have asked, if he could speak at all.

  Culberson’s, ah, strong messaging did the trick, Schurr explained.506 That white paper for the Office of Management and Budget on why a billion dollars is impossible? Forget the six-week deadline; I need it by Friday.

  Curt canceled his trip, swept his desk clean of competing items, and set about drafting the best white paper in the history of paper, or of the color white.

  THEN HE WAITED. On February 20 he and Joan holed up in her office, picked up the phone, and dialed. Ten days earlier, Bolden had given word that he wanted to take ownership of Europa and, during the budget rollout on March 4, hoped to announce that the agency was officially pursuing a mission there. But no decisions had been made, and if the White House pushed back, Bolden would definitely take no for an answer. A strategic implementation planning meeting was called, and after frenzied email traffic, Curt and Joan were told to prepare slides for it. The slides were due in three days, and neither of them would be allowed to attend the meeting.507

  SIP meetings were, at best, an ambiguously defined concept. The American space program distilled to an endless gauntlet of meetings and telecons, with the occasional foray into space. At headquarters, the SIP was among the most baffling of those meetings, because nobody really knew what it meant or what it did. Some higher-ups weren’t even sure what the abbreviation stood for, exactly. So planning for a SIP was like packing for a mystery vacation. Maybe you were going to Tahiti. Maybe you were going to Denali. Good luck!

  Four days later, John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator, gave guidance to Jim Green, who gave guid
ance to Curt. The presentation to the administrator and whoever else would be at the meeting was to focus primarily on the science. Curt had a number of problems with this, not the least of which was that he would be preparing science slides for an unknown presenter with, quite possibly, far less knowledge than him, and, oh, the meeting would decide the fate of a project he had spent ten years working on. He spent the weekend immersed in the pending presentation, shaping slides, and the following Tuesday, he and Joan sat down with Grunsfeld and walked him through them. Grunsfeld had a few ideas for how this mission ought to go and wanted them included in the presentation. Specifically: NO SOLAR. He wanted this thing to fly for at least eight years, and nuclear power would allow that and then some. Curt explained the benefits of solar: that there was a plutonium shortage, which might lead to delays, and the headache of the Department of Energy and nuclear launch approval, the doomsday press coverage and the people chained to Cape Canaveral fences, and Grunsfeld’s response: That’s fine, Curt. I want nuclear.

  Nuclear it was!

  Curt included also in the draft presentation a slide discussing the release of an announcement of opportunity for instrument development, allowing organizations to develop detailed designs of the scientific payload the mission required. Hundreds might be submitted, and NASA would choose the best magnetometer, the best radar, the best camera, and so forth, and sign contracts with the winners to build the things. An actual payload of instruments real and true would allow project engineers to develop spacecraft subsystems at a granular level.

  For Curt’s purposes—as with the ill-fated AO (as they were called) for Jupiter Europa Orbiter—the very act of releasing a multiple flyby AO would commit NASA to a Europa mission in a way that a speech, Decadal endorsement, community insistence, congressional pressure, or a line item in the budget would not. Once NASA solicited proposals for a science payload, institutions would start pouring their own dollars into developing their instruments. And after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the best imaging instrument in the history of space exploration—an instrument made to order, designed to survive the Jovian radiation environment—NASA, at its peril, might cancel said mission. Though there were caveats in the announcement designed to protect the agency should this thing go south, those who had spent all that time and money would have just enough ground to sue the U.S. government to recoup the costs incurred to prepare their proposals. Still, NASA’s lawyers could handle that. What the agency could not handle were institutions crying foul—that NASA had pulled a fast one, a bait-and-switch, was a poor steward of taxpayer funds—anything, really, that the press could latch on to and make messy, and suddenly you have associate administrators called to testify before Congress and getting grilled on C-SPAN. It would be ugly, and NASA hated ugly more than anything else.