by Roger Wiens
After many days of revising, cutting, pasting, adjusting, and readjusting, we were finally ready to print. It was 11 P.M. the day before the postmark deadline. I was looking forward to getting home earlier than on the previous nights, when we had retired around 2 A.M., but naturally, the printer began to have alignment problems, jamming pages and starting the text halfway down the page. After several attempts at fixing the paper tray, we gave up and ended up feeding the balky printer one page at a time. Late at night the clock seemed to pick up speed as drowsiness overtook us. Finally, the last pages were printed and we could go home. The cool, moist sea breeze, by now reaching far inland, refreshed us as we drove through the quiet neighborhood. It was 4 A.M., but the proposal was finished.
The next day twenty-five copies were mailed to Washington. It would be nearly six months before we would hear the results. In all, twenty-eight proposals were submitted, including the original eleven winners from the San Juan Capistrano beauty contest—in other words, we faced incredibly stiff competition. Life would go on; development of the mission would continue at a snail’s pace, in the meantime, with us uncertain whether Genesis would be realized or thrown into the junk heap of rejected ideas.
The Caltech Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences is a highly respected institution when it comes to participation in planetary science missions. The faculty has a long history of involvement in NASA, and at least one professor had served as director of JPL. Unsurprisingly, there were quite a number of professors with their hats in the ring for the first competed Discovery mission. Each participant, of course, hoped for the best.
But Don and I had one big handicap as far as the division was concerned. We were not in the “Planetary Sciences.” We were in the Geochemistry Department, one building over from where all the other mission hopefuls resided. And the professors in the Planetary Sciences section looked down their noses at our entry in the competition. After all, collecting material from the Sun was not really “planetary” science. Surely, they thought, it was luck that made ours the eleventh mission concept to be recognized the previous year by NASA. Surely one of their mission entries was going to win hands down over our ill-conceived attempt. While this was not stated outright, the opinion was evident as we passed each other in the halls.
After the proposals were submitted, the division announced that each proposal represented by Caltech would be presented, one each week, at the Planetary Science seminars. I noticed that the Genesis mission talk was scheduled dead last, well after the date NASA was to announce the finalists. That way, I mused, after the finalists had been announced, our Genesis talk could be easily replaced by something more “planetary.”
I was visiting Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in late February 1995, trying out a new experimental technique—resonance ionization mass spectrometry, or RIMS—which we hoped to use on Genesis solar-wind samples, when I got an excited call from Don. He was talking as fast as I had ever heard him: “We’re going to the next round! I’m not supposed to tell you yet, but I’m on my way to Washington for the press conference!” I was overjoyed. We had come a long way from just two years earlier, when I thought the project was dead and I was out of a job. I could think of little else that day as I went through the motions of carrying out my experiment.
In the spirit of turning to smaller missions, NASA had selected outright a proposal for a lunar orbiter (“Lunar Prospector”) that was well under $100 million; it came in at less than half the cost cap. NASA also selected three other missions as finalists: Genesis, a Venus orbiter, and a mission to return samples from the tail of a comet, called Stardust. These finalists would go through a six-month Phase A advanced feasibility study and then face off.
Don stopped in Chicago the next day on his way to the press conference so we would have a chance to talk strategy. The day was windy and bitterly cold. When I met him at his hotel, as snow drifted along the ground, he ran outside to meet me in shirtsleeves. In his excitement he had forgotten to pack a coat.
Back at Caltech, the inequality between the Planetary Sciences and us geochemists seemed to have leveled. Genesis was the only Caltech proposal to have made the final round. When the date of Don’s talk finally came, the lecture hall was standing-room only as people and reporters clamored to get in the door to hear about the winning concept. More than a little crow was eaten.
The heady feeling of being selected for the final round was quickly replaced with the weight of all that had to be done. Our concept was still immature. One of our instruments, the solar-wind concentrator, which was to focus ions onto a small target, was so ill-conceived that we knew the design described in the proposal would not work. The ion optics were too simple. We now had to do two things at once. We were already building a prototype to test a simplified version, and at the same time we needed to design a better concentrator to implement once the mission was approved. I ended up leaving a student back at Caltech to work on improvements to the flight design while I tested the prototype. For the testing I had to go to Switzerland, which had the nearest available test facility for this kind of instrument.
By this time the project was moving at a frantic pace and I could ill afford to be abroad. Fortunately, e-mail was becoming more commonplace, and it kept me connected to the rest of the project. During regular hours, I worked in the solar-wind test facility, which contained a truck-sized vacuum chamber that could accelerate ions toward our prototype concentrator. Then, as the e-mails started flowing in from around the United States on all the other details related to the mission, I worked on them through the evening, heading back to my hotel room along the deserted cobblestone streets late at night.
This competition round would involve a several-hundred-page volume describing the results of the feasibility study we were carrying out and a full-day presentation by each competing team, followed by a final pitch by the respective science teams a few days later. In the two months after the finalists were announced, large teams of engineers had jumped onto the project at both JPL and Lockheed Martin. These teams seemed to be used to spitting out large quantities of high-quality details. However, giving a full day of live presentations—and making the mission sound exciting—was not part of their repertoire. So our team scheduled a dry run in late September.
We flew to Denver and made our way to the Lockheed Martin plant, which is hidden behind a hogback ridge of the Rocky Mountains, past the southern reaches of suburbia. The plant, which had been part of the military-industrial complex of the Cold War, had been built behind a mountain far enough from the city in the 1950s that an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack on it would not destroy Denver.
The dry run was terrible. We had given Lockheed a large block of time to carefully describe the spacecraft system, and we had done a similar thing for the JPL portions of the project. The initial strategy was to impress the audience with the large number of capable engineers from the relevant disciplines—propulsion, solar panels, batteries, reentry systems, thermal control, and on and on. The day grew late as one engineer after another got up to talk about his particular specialty, often mumbling, stuttering, speaking through a thick accent, and/or staring at the floor. The viewgraphs consisted of way too much unintelligible jargon and unlabeled diagrams. Some of the engineers had conflicting designs. Two things became painfully obvious: this strategy was a failure, and we badly needed to do another dry run.
The second dry run was a world apart from the first. We had taken out the long list of speakers and replaced them with a single charismatic leader who could address all of Lockheed’s spacecraft subsystems. On the JPL side, only a few presenters remained, of whom only two were lackluster, but thankfully their talks were relatively short. Lockheed had brought in a young woman whose sole job was to critique the presenters’ sales pitches. She was soon taking on every speaker, mercilessly hounding anyone with a less than stellar performance.
Finally, the day of the presentation came. Dressed in our scientist best, we headed up
to the sixth floor of the Space Sciences Building in the Lockheed complex. Outside of the presentation room were models and mock-ups of various hardware parts. The solar-wind concentrator I had tested in Switzerland was among the demonstration items. The presentation room was filled to capacity. The review board sat in the front at tables that stretched the length of the room.
Our team had pulled up dossiers on each reviewer’s background and expertise, attempting to get a sense of the reviewers’ interests and demeanors. The board consisted of a few people from NASA Headquarters, but mostly of retired “graybeards,” or experts from the various NASA centers. The head of the board was James S. Martin Jr., an imposing character who had led, among other projects, the twin Viking Mars landers in the 1970s, largely considered to be the most successful unmanned missions ever. Jim was known to be a man of strong opinions and was not one to change his mind easily. Just after the first Mars landing, he had refused to take a call from the president, saying he was busy and wouldn’t be able to talk until later. Jim’s work came first.
The Genesis review started off well. The panel seemed genuinely excited by our mission to gather solar wind to understand the birth of our solar system. By noon we were starting to breathe more easily. But the trickiest aspect was still to come.
In the afternoon we described the details of the planned trajectory, including the dramatic reentry sequence. This would be the first Earth return of a NASA space capsule since the Apollo days. In the intervening time, NASA’s only capsule entry had been on Mars—on Jim Martin’s mission. Our team described the landing site, which was to be the salt flats of Utah. The military, which used part of the flats as a training ground for incoming missiles, had some fifty high-tech tracking stations there to observe incoming objects that were part of their tests. The site seemed perfect for Genesis, and our team was working on an agreement to use the base for the Genesis reentry. But there was another detail.
Because the materials in the capsule were fragile, it needed to be caught somehow, so it didn’t bump or bounce on a rock after it parachuted to the ground. We decided on a midair catch. When this idea had first been presented to us, it had sounded scary—what were the chances that a capsule could be caught in midair? However, the reentry team assured us that not only was it quite easy to do, the military had done it hundreds of times already. During the Cold War the first spy satellites had used film canisters as part of the Corona reconnaissance program. The canisters were “de-orbited” and—to keep them from falling into the wrong hands—caught by aircraft as they parachuted down. Lockheed Martin had recently done a drop test in which a pilot with no previous midair retrieval experience caught the object multiple times with no failures. It sounded like just what we needed!
The review panel was obviously excited about the work we had done to assure the operation’s success. Their confidence was building. The mission was sounding comfortable to them—exactly what we wanted—when we hit an unexpected snag.
Jim Martin asked: “The reentry—what about the wind?” The reentry team had done a preliminary study of the winds at the landing site and reported that it was nearly always calm at the salt flats in the morning. And given its approach from space, the capsule had to land in the morning anyway. The team responded to the question, stating that there were only a few days out of the year when it would be too windy for helicopters to take off and land. But Jim wasn’t satisfied. “What happens if you’re unlucky and it’s too windy on the reentry day? Can you postpone it to another day?” We replied that we could divert the spacecraft and have it return in about thirty days. But Jim became edgy. “What happens if it is windy that day, too?” We replied that it would be extremely unlikely that it would be too windy on both attempts.
This wasn’t good enough for Jim; he was becoming obsessed with the wind. Now it was making everyone nervous. He pounded his fist on the table and loudly proclaimed, “I want to know what you are going to do even if there’s only a 2 percent chance of it happening!” The presenter and mission leaders nodded their heads and said they would work on it. We were shaking our heads in disbelief. This esteemed man had blown the issue way out of proportion.
The rest of the review was anticlimactic. The project manager got up and described the cost plan and the schedule for building the spacecraft, and we finished with a description of the public relations and education plans. The review board congratulated us on a promising mission concept before disappearing into a closed session.
We breathed a collective sigh of relief as we left the room. This review had been our sole purpose for the weeks and months leading up to it. Finally it was over. There was really only one issue the board had expressed concern over—the wind—which shouldn’t be such a big issue. Or could it be?
As I stepped outside the building, I was slammed in the face with a blast of wind-blown sand. I shielded my eyes. Dust and debris were blowing across the road. Denver was not usually so blustery. What could it mean?
The gale force continued all evening. As we retired to a restaurant and finally to our motel rooms, doors were jerked from our hands and more dust was blown in our faces. The wind’s howling gave us no peace, reminding us of Jim Martin pounding on the table. An ill wind was blowing.
Three weeks later we got the call. Genesis had not been chosen. Instead, NASA selected Stardust, which, interestingly enough, was also a sample-return mission, designed to return particles from the tail of a comet. We were heartbroken. We had done so many things right.
A debrief was held three weeks later at JPL. We would potentially have another opportunity when NASA competed for the next Discovery mission, so we wanted to know what we had done wrong. To our surprise, we were told at the debrief that the Genesis mission had scored as high or higher than Stardust in all areas except public relations, an insignificant area in the scope of the whole project. We weren’t sure what had happened, but we couldn’t help but think that Jim Martin’s outburst about the landing-site winds might have made a difference.
*There are three different types of solar wind: “slow” wind, which travels a little under 1 million miles per hour and predominates in the ecliptic, that is, where the planets orbit; “fast” wind, which goes nearly 2 million miles per hour and is characteristic of the solar wind near the solar poles, but sometimes extends to the ecliptic; and a third, transient type called “coronal mass ejections,” which at times interrupts the other two types of flow. The compositions of these three solar-wind types were thought to differ slightly, with the fast wind being the most representative of the Sun’s composition, but we wanted to make sure that Genesis could answer questions about the differences between them.
chapter
four
MAKING GENESIS
OVER THE NEXT YEAR THE GENESIS ENGINEERING TEAM DRIFTED out of orbit. Their full-time jobs kept them busy, and Don Burnett and I finessed the concept as best we could, trying to ensure that technical issues would be covered better next time. The job market was finally opening up a little, so I interviewed for several positions. Through the Genesis proposal process I had gotten to know the folks who built spacecraft instruments at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. A member of their group had left to become an astronaut, creating an opening. The group had been impressed with my work at the Genesis review, and so I got an offer in late 1996, which I accepted.
Los Alamos had been set up by Robert Oppenheimer in 1943 to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II. It was a far cry from the urban laboratories of Southern California, seeming instead like the remotest place in North America. From the beginning, the lab had facilitated an open flow of information in unclassified areas, much like a university campus. This philosophy remained in place for some sixty years. Hence, we were largely autonomous compared to the classified areas with their restrictions. When I arrived, there was a minimum of bureaucracy, reflecting the laboratory’s isolation from large cities and government centers. As a result, building spacecraft instruments at Los Alamo
s was significantly less expensive than it was at many other places.
The Space Instrumentation group at Los Alamos was located in several double-wide trailers along a canyon at the back of the main lab site. The fact that it was relegated to the far corner of the Los Alamos lab complex was symptomatic of a larger issue. The lab management paid little attention to our group, as we were doing nonclassified work far removed from the main mission of the lab. Still, the people in this division had already flown some four hundred instruments in space by the time I arrived.
As space scientists, we were big fish in a small pond. There were only a handful of people at Los Alamos who were involved in NASA projects. It was a perfect place to live as a “renaissance person.” Rather than being forced to specialize in a certain part of the solar system or a certain type of instrument, we could try our hand at many different areas. I liked the freedom; the possibilities, like the landscapes, were wide open.
The Los Alamos surroundings were straight out of my dreams. The lab was located a mile and a half above sea level on the side of a huge extinct volcano. It was a few miles east of the volcano’s central crater, a huge bowl-shaped meadow called the Valles Caldera on which cattle and elk grazed. A local ski hill was perched on a north-facing slope on the edge of the caldera. There was an abundance of wildlife, as well as forests and canyons, in the area. In addition, the small town of Los Alamos had the highest concentration of PhDs in the world. I had escaped the congestion of Los Angeles without having to sacrifice the intellectual atmosphere of Caltech.
One of the last things I did before leaving Caltech was to resubmit the Genesis proposal for the next Discovery mission cycle. This time the initial round focused much more on science than engineering. With the bulk of the work already done in the previous round, little additional effort was needed to resubmit. It was mostly a matter of polishing our scientific arguments and fitting them into the page limits.