by Alan Stern
Hunten’s remarks and gravitas turned the tide. At the end of their meeting, the SSES produced an influential report ranking a Pluto flyby in the highest priority category for new missions in the 1990s. That didn’t guarantee a new start, but it meant the idea had successfully made the transition from upstart to serious contender, that it would be among the highest ranked candidates to be considered by NASA for funding.
Things were lining up. The Plutophiles had done what they needed to do by garnering the support of the SSES. As a result, Huntress chartered a new, high-level scientific advisory committee called the Outer Planets Science Working Group (OPSWG) to shepherd the Pluto mission concept through its next development steps, and he appointed Alan to be its chairman.
THE HOUSEBOAT
As we mentioned, in the early 1990s there was an effort within NASA to move away from rare, once-a-decade, multibillion-dollar “do everything” missions carrying elaborate packages of scientific instruments, toward more frequent launches of smaller, less expensive, more-modest, and more-focused missions. The modest and focused Pluto 350 mission was primed to take advantage of that.
But there was—at the same time—another movement in planetary exploration circles having the opposite effect. Some mission designers and NASA managers pointed out that each new planetary mission seemed to reinvent the wheel, designing new spacecraft from scratch. What, this faction asked, if they could develop a standardized spacecraft that would be outfitted—with customized instruments and components—for many different planetary destinations? Wouldn’t such a standardized spacecraft be a way to save money on each flight and thereby enable more missions? This noble goal became embodied in the Mariner Mark II concept.
Wes Huntress was sympathetic to the move toward smaller missions. But at the same time he saw that the Mariner Mark II concept had a lot of momentum and support, particularly at JPL—the most experienced of NASA’s planetary mission development centers, where Wes had worked long before coming to NASA Headquarters.
So almost immediately after the formation of OPSWG, he directed Alan to study a much larger Pluto mission than Pluto 350, one that would share its spacecraft design with both the upcoming, giant Cassini Mariner Mark II orbiter to Saturn, and another large NASA mission to orbit a comet using a Mariner Mark II.
Because Cassini and the comet orbiter were planned to be huge missions with massive complements of instruments, molding a Pluto mission around them was the opposite of the small, focused mission the Plutophiles had been arguing for. Huntress was essentially asking Stern and OPSWG to abandon the lean design of Pluto 350 for a giant “Christmas tree” mission to Pluto, weighing more than ten times as much, carrying a much more extensive load of instruments, needing a much larger rocket, and carrying a vastly higher price tag.
Alan didn’t like it, but Huntress was in effect his boss in this, and so he complied. “I thought it was just crazy. I thought we’d be lucky to get our simple little, inexpensive Pluto 350 to be funded. How was the larger planetary science community going to sign up for, or NASA afford, this much more expensive ‘houseboat’ mission to Pluto?”
When the Mariner Mark II Pluto study was completed in late 1991, OPSWG found that it would cost more than $2 billion. Realizing that was not affordable, OPSWG strongly recommended that NASA pursue something more along the lines of the leaner Pluto 350. By early 1992, with other budget problems on his desk, Huntress agreed and relented on the push to explore Pluto using Mariner Mark II. The young Plutophiles breathed a sigh of relief. The Mariner Mark II detour had been avoided. With that settled and with the SSES’s high ranking for Pluto 350 from the previous year, they hoped the way forward was now clear, and that they were on their way to starting the project.
But little did they know that out in California, there was a fly that was about to get seriously stuck in their ointment.
THE HAMSTER
Following the completion of the Voyager mission’s exploration of the giant planets, in October 1991 the United States Postal Service issued a set of nine postage stamps celebrating the many successes of American planetary exploration. The set included a stamp for every planet, each illustrated with a picture of the planet and a citation to the first space mission to explore that world. But for Pluto—the only planet not then visited by a spacecraft—it was illustrated with a vague and bland artist’s guess, and text that simply read PLUTO NOT YET EXPLORED.
The stamp set was released in a first-day-of-issue ceremony at JPL. A couple of young spacecraft engineers at JPL saw the NOT YET EXPLORED Pluto stamp and took it as a challenge. They asked, “Why not explore Pluto?” One of those bright young engineers was Rob Staehle, a project manager and a bit of a nonconformist. The other was Stacy Weinstein, a mission designer steeped in orbital mechanics—a talented engineer who had already worked on several successful planetary missions. Together they decided to take Pluto’s unexplored status as a personal challenge to overcome. Unaware of the past two years of work going on in the scientific community to get a mission to Pluto, Staehle and Weinstein took that stamp set to their boss, Charles Elachi, then the head of planetary exploration at JPL, and pitched a radical Pluto mission study.
Staehle and Weinstein wanted to explore the possibility of sending a truly minuscule spacecraft to Pluto. They set their target mass at thirty-five kilograms. For comparison, this was just one-tenth the mass of Pluto 350, which was already a very small spacecraft. They planned to use new miniaturization technology, some of it borrowed from Defense Department projects that Staehle had worked on, to design a tiny spacecraft for a tiny planet. They reasoned that such a lightweight craft could be accelerated to extremely high velocities using available rockets, and thus could reach Pluto very quickly. As opposed to Pluto 350’s circuitous route, which planned to use Venus, Earth, and Jupiter flybys to gain energy over a flight of almost fifteen years before it could fly on to Pluto, they would be able to send their bird directly to Pluto, getting there in just half the time. They called this mission concept “Pluto Fast Flyby,” and they convinced Elachi that it was worth looking into.
Elachi provided Staehle and Weinstein with the funds to put together a first-cut design. It was very simple, and had very little capability—only carrying two scientific instruments.
When OPSWG heard this plan, they didn’t like it. They didn’t think it could really be done as inexpensively as Staehle and Weinstein claimed, or as quickly as they promised, but most critically, they thought the mission went too far in skimping on scientific return. In contrast to the Mariner Mark II “houseboat” they had successfully argued against sending to Pluto, now they were arguing against sending a hamster to Pluto. Pluto 350, OPSWG argued to NASA Headquarters, was the sweet spot between a houseboat and a hamster, and should be started without further delay.
THE HOLLYWOOD MANEUVER
What happened next was as unlikely as anything cooked up in a Hollywood script. In fact, it took place at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, in an ornate auditorium at the headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Rob Staehle was upset that OPSWG had rejected his plan. Ironically, the Pluto Underground had become, in his eyes, the conservative establishment. Staehle thought they were rejecting a chance at genuine innovation in favor of more-tried-and-true methods. He also knew that there was a new alignment of power coming to NASA that would be sympathetic to his approach.
That new power alignment: on April 1, 1992, Dan Goldin began work as the new NASA administrator, appointed by President George H. W. Bush. As we previously mentioned, NASA at this time was encouraging the development of smaller, less ambitious planetary missions, with more-modest and -focused goals, containing fewer instruments but allowing launches to occur more frequently than in the past.
Goldin was an aerospace executive who wanted to shake up the culture of NASA, which he thought was too attached to giant, expensive spacecraft. In addition to pushing for smaller missions, Goldin also wanted to encourage more risk-taking. By his logic, if NASA f
lew a larger number of smaller missions, then they could individually be less risk-averse; that is, if NASA lost the occasional mission, it would be less of a setback because there would be many others. Goldin also reasoned that NASA could save money by taking more risks, cutting back on the tradition of rigorous testing and its conservative, cautious approach toward deploying newer, untested technology. Thus was born Goldin’s mantra, which became NASA’s then guiding philosophy: “Faster, Better, Cheaper,” or FBC, as it became known.
Wes Huntress recalls that Goldin, his new boss, wasted no time in explaining the new guiding philosophy to him, and that Goldin seemed to exhibit a certain naïveté about what was realistically possible. Huntress:
When I was introduced to Dan he looked me hard in the eyeballs, poked my chest, and said, “Aha, you’re the planetary exploration guy. I want you to send a mission to Pluto to get a sample from the surface and return it to Earth in less than a decade and do it for less than $100 million.” I was so shocked that I blurted out something like, “Well, that certainly is a challenge. We’ll have to take a look at it.” I wanted to tell him that it was simply not possible. The fact that I didn’t probably saved my job considering the number of Associate Administrators and other top NASA employees Goldin fired over his first year.
Rob Staehle felt that if he could only get Goldin’s attention, the new administrator would be sure to embrace his Pluto Fast Flyby idea. Rob knew he needed to find a way to circumvent official channels and get his mission concept right in front of Goldin. He found that chance when a friend who worked as an usher at the Motion Picture Academy theater told him that Goldin would be attending a ceremony at the Academy in L.A., near JPL. Rob recalls:
She called me up and said, “Rob, there’s a thing happening here at the academy that you might be interested in. It involves your new boss.” I said, “What do you mean my new boss?” She said, “Well, the new NASA administrator, Dan Goldin. You know who he is?” I said, “Yeah, I know who he is. But I’ve never met him, and I know hardly anything about him.” She said, “Well, it turns out that when he arrived in the NASA administrator’s office and he opened one of his desk drawers, there was a gold Oscar statue in the drawer, with a note from his predecessor, Dick Truly, saying, ‘I didn’t get an opportunity to return this to the Motion Picture Academy; maybe you could take care of it.’”
The statue had been flown on the space shuttle during the Academy Awards festivities earlier that year. The shuttle crew had participated in the ceremony, replete with a weightless, floating Oscar statue, as Steven Spielberg presented a lifetime achievement award to George Lucas. Now Goldin, along with a few shuttle astronauts, was coming to return it to the Academy. Rob’s friend landed him an invitation to the ceremony.
Staehle approached Goldin after the ceremony. Surrounded by Hollywood types and a smattering of NASA people, he introduced himself and said, in effect, “Mr. Administrator, I’m a JPL engineer in charge of a Pluto mission study. We have a breakthrough way to do this at low cost with revolutionary technology, but the establishment won’t let us do it. I can get us to Pluto by the late 1990s with a very small spacecraft. The package I am holding is a study that proves it. Can you help?” Goldin said, “Can I have that?” So Staehle handed him his report with all the mission details. Goldin promised he would read it later that evening.
Goldin then quickly embraced the Pluto Fast Flyby concept. Upon his return to Washington, he told Wes Huntress, “I want you to do this.” Wes, again knowing his new boss’s affinity for firing naysayers, contacted Alan and told him that OPSWG had to drop Pluto 350. Instead, NASA was going to pursue Staehle’s Pluto Fast Flyby mission. “That’s what the administrator wants,” Huntress said, “and that’s what we’re going to do.” Alan knew immediately that this was bad news:
I just thought to myself, “We are so screwed, because this thing is not going to work.” You could just see that it involved too many development miracles that would either cause it to become too expensive, or it would end up growing in mass and not really be able to travel as fast as Rob’s team had promised Goldin, or that the SSES was going to see that it was too light on capability and walk away from it. The end result: I thought we would likely spend a year or more trying to develop this and nothing would come of it. And you know, that’s exactly what happened.
At Goldin’s direction, Huntress provided Staehle with more funds to further flesh out the Pluto Fast Flyby concept. But in less than a year, Staehle’s own team proved that the idea could not work as initially conceived in their earlier JPL study. They could not do a 35-kilogram mission. Even a stripped-down, bare-bones spacecraft with only two instruments—a camera and a radio-science experiment to probe Pluto’s atmosphere—came out at more than 100 kilograms. And this was without any backup systems to make the spacecraft reliable enough to undertake the nearly decade-long mission.
Countering the fatal criticism that having no backup systems was too risky for a mission so long, Staehle’s team then produced a more robust version, but this, of course, added weight, bringing their probe now to 164 kilograms—half of Pluto 350’s mass, but with far less capability. Cost estimates had also steadily risen, from $400 million to more than $1 billion—rivaling Pluto 350’s cost.
Staehle’s team brought a full-size mock-up of its spacecraft to the 1992 World Space Congress in Washington, DC. The team thought it had really accomplished something, but when Dan Goldin heard about the dramatically higher mass and cost, he became incensed. “What happened to 35 kilograms?” he asked.
Perhaps Goldin felt he had been sold a bill of goods, and that his so-called beautiful dream of an inexpensive, head-turning Pluto Fast Flyby had gone up in smoke. Staehle’s concept had also become a nightmare for the Pluto community, which had been directed to study only that concept, with no alternative.
Alan surmises now that it was at this point that Goldin decided that the Pluto community (which for him was embodied by Rob Staehle) had been disingenuous in their promises. Both Goldin and Huntress maintain today that they remained committed to flying a Pluto mission as soon as possible, but Alan believes this was the moment Goldin soured on it.
The end result: work toward Pluto missions did not stop, but the road became rockier. Goldin still publicly spoke of Pluto as a high priority, but now new demands and hurdles kept appearing from his office. What was to follow were frustrating years of seemingly endless mission studies, cancellations, then new mission studies, and then new mission cancellations.
Around this time two other big obstacles arose to make matters worse, both were crashes: first a budget crash, then a rocket crash. The first was the release that February of the president’s budget for 1994, in which money for planetary missions was flatlined by the White House. An expected increase, which Huntress had been counting on to fund the start of new missions to the outer solar system, had been entirely erased. The second big setback came just months later, in August 1993, when NASA’s Mars Observer spacecraft blew up three days before it was to fire its engine to go into orbit around the red planet. This orbiter had been conceived as NASA’s triumphant return to Mars, ending a long hiatus since the Vikings, which were launched in 1975, but now it had become space junk orbiting the Sun.
Goldin’s response to the Mars Observer failure was typically bold: he started an entirely new program of multiple spacecraft to be sent to Mars, replacing the lost science and doing much more, with a whole series of missions to be launched over many years. He would use this new Mars program to implement his “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy, investing less in testing and redundancy, and accepting more risk as a trade-off against more-frequent missions. To fund the new program Goldin swept up all the money he could find. As Alan recalls:
Goldin told us, “I love Pluto, but I’ve got a new Mars program to fund and you’ve got to get it down in the range of $400 million including launch costs.” That just seemed like an impossible assignment. Pluto 350 had a much higher price tag, and even Staeh
le’s stripped-down idea for a mission was over $1 billion. Launch costs alone those days were nearly $400 million. Goldin’s new dictum all but foreclosed any way of doing a mission to Pluto, unless we could find a clever way out of his cost box.
THE RUSSIAN GAMBIT
Stern’s OPSWG and Staehle’s JPL Pluto mission office were still joined at the hip by NASA headquarters, and they were in lockstep on one point—that Goldin’s new cost target just didn’t make sense. The Voyager mission had cost nearly ten times that. How could anyone do a Pluto mission for just $400 million? The high prices of launch vehicles alone seemed to make a trip to Pluto impossible under these circumstances, unless they found an overseas partner to pay for the launch.
At that time, in the economic disruption that came in the wake of the Cold War, the former Soviet space program was moribund. Their planetary exploration program, which in past decades had been so successful at landing spacecraft on the Moon and on Venus and intercepting Halley’s Comet, was barely on life support. They had capable scientists, and they had huge, reliable rockets, called Protons. But they had no interplanetary spacecraft to launch on these rockets, and no resources to build new spacecraft. They also lacked NASA’s experience with missions to the outer planets.
In Alan’s view, the United States and Russia each had what the other needed. So Alan envisioned a joint project: Russia would provide their powerful Proton launch vehicle, America would build and fly the spacecraft, and both would share the glory. In the then-thawing relations between the two countries, Alan thought the ticket to Pluto could be a triumphant closing chapter to the first exploration of the planets: a joint mission by former rivals to the last and the farthest of all the known planets.