Grunsfeld saw Curt’s and Joan’s AO slide only as he was standing to leave for another meeting. He was running late, but he stopped, stared at it for five seconds or so, and said, finally: Leave it in.
He also allowed another line to survive his edits: one designed with surgical precision to solve the agency leadership’s inability to make decisions on this thing. Curt called it the Joan Bullet. “Decision on class of mission needed by Fall 2014 to feed Budget submission for FY16 overguide for new initiative,” it read.
The way she worded it, and the way she brought it up with Grunsfeld, explained it (Lord, was she smooth about it), and, most important, got him to support it—well, Curt was in awe. The Joan Bullet put a countdown on the thing, entered headquarters leadership into a tacit agreement: NASA would explore smaller missions, but if it could be proven to the ninth floor that a small mission was not worth doing, then agency leaders absolutely had to make a decision by the fall. No more delays. No more bouncing from one billion to four billion to three billion to two billion to—Pick one. Because once NASA committed to the size of a Europa mission, everything would fall into place. The agency would stop looking at other options when the best one was staring them in the face.
Everyone had been scared to force the issue. But Joan didn’t scare so easily.
BEFORE THE SIP telecon, Curt ran to the local liquor store to buy a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, in the event things went their way. Not only were he and Joan not invited to the meeting, but they weren’t even invited to the teleconference! The thing had been reserved for center director-level leadership and above. Still, if you read the email just so, there was nothing in there that expressly forbade them from joining. So they got their hands on the dial-in information and website feed, and Joan and Curt met in her office, huddled over the telephone, made the call, hit Mute, and waited.
As was procedure, the start of the meeting involved a roll call of persons who had dialed in. Each one sounded off until all were accounted for. Curt and Joan looked at each other and Curt felt his panic rising. The system knew how many people were there. What do we—
Joan unmuted the phone.
Joan and Curt are here, she said.
Seconds that could be measured in hours elapsed as they waited for someone to call them out and forcibly kick them from the meeting. Before anyone had an opportunity to send them on their merry, however, the director of Goddard Space Flight Center pressed on, said, “Chris Scolese here,” and the roll call continued, and . . . they were in!
At the start of the meeting, Bolden announced that he wanted to approve a Europa mission before the end of his tenure at NASA. It had previously been word of mouth, but to hear it from the man himself made it feel suddenly legitimate—a solid fact.
John Grunsfeld gave cursory opening remarks about a Europa mission, about the urgency to choose a mission class, about the instrument announcement of opportunity, and he set things up for Jim Green, who presented Curt’s slides. It didn’t escape Jim that in all these years, this was the first time he had ever been allowed to go beyond a white paper and present Europa on the ninth floor.
And so after decades of false starts and millions of words across thousands of pages and hundreds of meetings and scientists growing older and engineers growing despondent and uncomfortable hours spent looking at data and budgets and with the help of a Tea Party guy in the Houston suburbs who had seen the light and was ready to harvest alien lobsters from the Ocean of Eden, Jim began.
He opened by speaking briefly about the landmark discovery of Europa’s plumes and the NASA press conference to come out of that. Next slide. He went back to the basics. He presented the Galilean moons and how to make an ocean. Io: This one’s too hot. Ganymede: This one’s too cold. Europa: This one’s just right. Next slide. He described Europa: the ice shell and its terrain; the ocean; the ocean floor and its hydrothermal vents blasting out hot water where—if its ocean was anything like that of Earth—life would be teeming, and if there was life there [points to ocean floor], there would be evidence of it up here [points at surface]. Next slide. What are we talking about when we talk about life on another world? He explained the habitability triad: water, energy, and chemistry, one at each corner, and how only with all three could you get Life as We Know It, and, by the way: Europa has all three. Next slide. All of this is directed by the Decadal Survey—the most recent and the one ten years ago. Scientists were desperate for this mission. Next slide. The Decadal wanted a less expensive mission, and we listened. The post-Decadal mission concepts that have been under intense development by Jet Propulsion Laboratory: an orbiter, a lander, and a multiple flyby mission. We did the studies. The lander was too expensive. We did more studies. We looked at the orbiter that would circle Europa, and the multiple flyby—Clipper—that would orbit Jupiter. We did more studies and found a way to enhance Clipper to do the job of both.
The reason why this [points at Clipper] is better than this [points at orbiter] is because we took a page out of Cassini’s book! Next slide.
Planetary science has been very methodical in how it explores the solar system. I bet you didn’t know that! [laughter] It’s sometimes hard to see. Why will we fly by Pluto next year? Why don’t we land on it? Why don’t we bring back a sample? Because we are methodical. When studying another world, we fly by, we orbit, we land, we rove. Flyby is for reconnaissance. If we like what we see, we come back and orbit. And when we orbit, we are looking for an overall view of the body, and we find a place to land. Once we get ground truth, we send a spacecraft to bring back a sample. It’s what we did at the moon. It’s what we are doing at Mars. And we will do that with every object in the solar system that is important to us. Next slide.
We know that the radiation belt at Europa is so crippling that no spacecraft in orbit can survive there for very long. We’ve been studying orbiter concepts for fifteen years. We found that the most recent, cost-effective orbiter would last ninety days there, tops. Mr. Administrator, that thing was going to have a heck of a time. See, we need an ice-penetrating radar, but the problem is that radars produce an enormous amount of data, and with an orbiter, we can’t send all that data back; there’s just not enough time. So the spacecraft computer would have to do onboard processing to figure out the important things in the radar data, and send home only the important stuff. And to execute it in ninety days? That’s tough to do. Next slide.
Orbiters are all about getting a global view. Here is where Cassini comes in. Each time it orbits Saturn, Cassini swings by Titan to change its orbital plane—its angle of travel. Titan is an enormous moon and has the perfect gravity for that. So Titan lets Cassini fly higher or lower over Saturn and see different parts of its rings. And every time Cassini flies by Titan, it keeps its science instruments switched on and gets some new slice of the mysterious moon. By orbiting Saturn, we have been able to capture eighty-five percent of Titan . . . because of all those flybys. So if we want a global view to understand Europa at Jupiter, we can do it just like Cassini: with multiple flybys. Next slide.
We orbit Jupiter, fly by Europa, collect data, zip out of the radiation belts and away from Jupiter, and send all that data home. Once that’s done, we come back in and go back out. Send the data home. Right back in and right back out. Send the data home. We won’t have to survive for months in the radiation belts, won’t need all those chips for onboard data processing or all that radiation hardening. The price plummets and satisfies the demands of the Decadal Survey—both in terms of cost and science. Next slide.
And now, here comes the SLS. Because instead of spending eight years flying to Europa, we can get there in two and a half. Instead of spending a fortune building a spacecraft capable of surviving both the intense heat of a Venus gravity assist and the cryogenic cold found at the far side of Jupiter, we can just go there in a straight shot. Only the SLS can do that. Only the SLS can open up the outer planets, make them as accessible as a trip to Mars.
The final slide was a list of the big
bullet points. Grunsfeld had told Curt and Joan to include everything here—even the mission class decision—but changed his mind about the announcement of opportunity. After the bullets were covered and everyone had a chance to soak them up, the screen switched from PowerPoint to Word, with the full text of a memo stating the meeting’s outcomes and decisions. It was already written, the goal being to print the thing and have it signed by all those present before they left, lest it never get signed.
After summarizing things, someone asked: Does the memo cover everything we discussed?
Curt and Joan inhaled sharply, held their breaths, leaned into the phone.
Wait, said another. There’s nothing about the announcement of opportunity in the memo.
Here is where everything would fall apart. Curt felt—
Well, let’s just add that in there, said someone else. And someone started typing words about the AO—right there, right on the call—into the shared decision memo on the screen. David Schurr helped guide the wording based on his previous conversation with Curt on the subject.
And just like that, fifteen years after the agency made its tentative first steps toward Europa, and for Curt Niebur, after a full decade of trying to get a mission going and an instrument announcement out the door . . . it was done.
When the meeting ended, Curt realized that no one had uttered a single negative word throughout. All his years of arguing with Ed Weiler, of funding studies from coins found on sidewalks, of begging, persuading, challenging, driving fists into tables, and meetings coming just short of name-calling—after years of feeling as though he were hammering his head into a brick wall, unsure if anyone ever heard a syllable he had ever uttered . . . they had. They had heard it all, understood what he had been saying, what the mission needed, why Europa mattered. And no longer was he or Joan or Jim alone in carrying the flag for Europa at headquarters. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was carrying it now. There were still decisions to be made—mission class, mission concept, price—but as preposterous as it sounded, the decision had been made to make those decisions. All else would follow.
Curt and Joan popped the champagne.
Chapter 18
One Inch from Earth
BACK TO 2001 AND 2010. THOSE WORKS OF KUBRICK AND Clarke, jointly and respectively, are about humanity’s place in the universe. They explore our origins, the workings of the cosmos, God, the discovery of the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, what we do with that knowledge, and how it leaves us transformed. This is what science fiction does best, and it is entirely fitting that a thoughtful collaboration between geniuses would be the first to ask serious questions about Europa specifically. As Philip K. Dick wrote, “It’s not just ‘What if . . .’ It’s ‘My God; what if . . .’”508
A sequence of missions beginning with a spacecraft Europa Clipper might provide an answer. What if there is life elsewhere? How would the human psyche handle its discovery? And if we find it, what do we do with it? Thus far, the whole history of space exploration has been one of disappointment as it relates to the life question. Probes stole from the human imagination brontosaurs wading through Venusian swamps, civilizations of Martians with their great carved canals, and, with each successive spacecraft, even lower forms of life. The whole of planet Mars couldn’t even give us a shrub. But German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote prolifically about life on other worlds, observed in Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens that barren planets, like barren stretches on Earth, are in fact necessary, for “would it not be a sign of nature’s poverty rather than an evidence of her abundance, if she were to display with diligence all her richness at every point in space?”509 It remained in his lifetime, of course, a problem of technology, and he noted in Critique of Practical Reason that “if we could get nearer the planets, which is intrinsically possible, experience would decide whether such inhabitants are there or not; but as we never shall get so near to them, the matter remains one of opinion.”510
And in opinion, as the popular contemporary response to planetary science has suggested, there is great comfort. Though Kant seemed certain that life existed on other worlds—that he “might well bet everything that I have on it”511—were Europa Clipper to fly through a plume and directly image some saucer-eyed celestial sea bass blasted into space, the same people who deny the moon landings (despite video footage from the moon, the laboratory of lunar samples at Johnson Space Center, and the ability of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to image the Apollo landing sites down to their footprints) and who declare Earth’s changing climate to be an opinion (despite personally experiencing its catastrophic effects) would certainly do the same for life on Europa. It’s just easier. Opinion is easier.
A house cat might go her entire life believing she is the only house cat in the entire world. She has her caretakers—her metaphorical gods (though cats might think this the other way around)—and if she is kind, shows love and devotion, there will be food and water and comfort when there is hunger, illness, or injury. The metaphysics of felis catus allow it to stretch on the back of a sofa or lie on a stack of papers because it is at the center of the universe. What more peaceful place could there be? Otherwise, as Kant continues, when describing the awe-inspiring starry heavens, “a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a little time provided with vital force, we know not how.”512
Humankind has had a good run as the only house cat in the world. But once we learn of others, how would things change? Religion is surprisingly well equipped for the eventuality. At first glance, God’s only apparent purpose in the Abrahamic religions is to keep creating until arriving at human beings, at which point the purpose is to tend to our garden. We are the whole point of the universe, the purpose for creating the heavens and the Earth, for giving us light, water, sky, land, plants, and animals. We are even created in God’s own image, says the Bible. We are the beginning and the end.
And yet these religions have no problem per se with alien life. One might read the ancient texts as guidebooks for how to deal with extraterrestrials—and not peers in appearance or general ability, but the real scary stuff: completely uncommon, perhaps with ill intent. Angels are not of this Earth. They are, in fact, very clearly creatures of some order higher and more terrible than humanity, and they have dreadful powers. In 2 Kings, a single angel defended Jerusalem by slaughtering an army of one hundred eighty-five thousand: “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”513 Moreover, when they are not disguised as humans, angels sound, frankly, terrifying. The book of Daniel gives a pretty good idea of this: “His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.”514 In Luke, an angel appears and scares the bejeezus out of the father of John the Baptist: “And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.”515
These are literal extraterrestrials—from the Latin: outside of Earth.
Despite the biblical proclivity for people to worship false idols every instance God looks the other way (see: the Israelites and golden calves), angels, even with their horror-show fire-eyes and splatterhouse reputation, are never worshipped. And when someone looks like they’re about to start praying to their sudden lightning-faced new lord, the ancient texts go out of their way to put a stop to this angel-worshipping business, every single time. “I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things,” wrote John, mysterious author of the Book of Revelation. “Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which k
eep the sayings of this book: worship God.”516
It is not just Christianity and Judaism, of course. Whether talking about the Jinn in the Islamic faith, the Brahmā in Buddhism, or the Asura in Hinduism, things above humans and otherworldly are not outliers to be explained away or otherwise apologized for. They are foundational elements of religion itself, and thus, if the books are to be believed, of human existence.
“Be fruitful,” said God, “and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”517
Still, God here raises a question worth considering: What of the animals not of the Earth?
Higher creatures would arrive on Earth from a position of strength, however benevolent they might be. Like Zacharias, trouble and fear would fall upon us for that reason alone. They know a lot that we do not. But if religion prepared us for the extraterrestrials who arrive in flying saucers, it falls short in preparing us for those aliens arriving in canisters bearing JPL branding. Catholic theologians have wrestled for centuries with the question of whether sentient alien life not descended of Adam and Eve would have been born with original sin—not their garden, not their apples, after all—and thus, would baptism be necessary?518 But where would we fit in a solar system whose lower orders of life had no relation to our own? Who share none of our DNA? Who were grown in their own Gardens and Oceans of Eden unrelated to that of Earth? A microbe, mackerel, mermaid, or monster in the Europan depths doesn’t likely share an ancestry with humankind. Would a Europan creature even be considered an animal?
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