by Alan Stern
We essentially came up with what later became the New Horizons concept, including the shape of the spacecraft, paring it down to one plutonium battery—a leftover from Cassini—and other innovations to cut cost and to create a believable schedule to launch in time for a Jupiter gravity assist. Our study showed it, and I assured NASA that it could all be done for much less than $500 million, including reserves.
With APL’s proof of concept, Weiler had found his path forward.
ABOUT-FACE
In late December of 2000, Alan got word that the ice was breaking and NASA was going to move forward after all on a Pluto mission. But how they would move forward was not at all how he expected. He had assumed that, if his campaigns of public and scientific pressure were successful, NASA would pick up the PKE mission where it had left off before the cancellation, select the instrument payloads as planned, and proceed to a new start. But on December 19 Alan got a call from a low-level insider he knew at NASA Headquarters: “You guys have won the battle; we’re restarting on Pluto, but it’s going to be your worst nightmare.” His worst nightmare? What could that mean?
The next day Weiler publicly announced that, following the SSES’s recommendation, NASA would try again to find a workable mission to Pluto, but this time the entire mission would be competed in one fell swoop: instruments, spacecraft, ground-operation plan, science investigations. Everything. It was to be done like the Discovery planetary exploration missions, the new mold of PI-led missions that Tom Krimigis had helped to give birth to, but this would be a competition for a much bigger prize—a much larger mission than any previous PI-led planetary project.
The Pluto competition would be open to all. So JPL, who had up to then thought they “owned” the Pluto mission, would now have to compete for it. A winning proposal would have to convincingly describe a mission that met three key criteria: it had to deliver on all the science that Lunine’s Pluto Science Definition Team had said was a must (i.e., no skimping on objectives); it had to arrive at Pluto before 2020, even if forced to use its backup launch window; and it must do all this—from design to build to test to flight—on a breakthrough budget of $750M or less (in today’s dollars, including credible budget reserves). This last was perhaps the tallest order of all—a budget that was barely half of what the PKE mission had been estimated to cost—and only about 20 percent of what Voyager had cost.
What made matters ultra-scary: proposals would be due on March 21; a schedule that seemed nearly impossible. NASA proposals for missions like this often run to a thousand pages of detailed design, comprehensive science, management plans, schedules, budgets, team bios, and more. Here proposers were being asked to cram what would normally be a year or more of work into just a few months to meet the March 21 deadline.
The day of Weiler’s announcement, Alan’s phone rang twice: APL and JPL were both putting together teams to compete for the mission. Alan was only forty-three years old, but after the gauntlet of the 1990s Pluto mission studies and politics, he was known as “Mr. Pluto,” and someone who could effectively lead teams. Both major labs wanted him to head their proposals.
The call from Charles Elachi, by then the head of JPL, came less than an hour after Weiler’s announcement. Alan spoke with Elachi, but held back on agreeing to lead a JPL proposal because he knew from Ralph McNutt that APL’s Tom Krimigis would soon also be calling.
Alan also knew that the less experienced APL team would be the underdog in any competition for a mission of this scope. Yet he was wary of JPL’s history of bloated Pluto missions, and he didn’t really trust their commitment to see a Pluto mission through to completion on cost and schedule.
Anticipating both calls, Alan had put together a brief pair of questions to ask of both Elachi and Krimigis. First: “If I go with you, will I be your only Pluto PI?” This was crucial because Alan wanted to be able to scoop up all the A-team engineers and executives, with no competition for them to be on other Pluto proposals coming from the same institution. He wanted to make sure that any institution he went with had all their eggs in his basket, so to speak—that there was no way for them to win working outside his team’s proposal. Alan’s second question was “If we win, will you promise, in writing, that you will never let it go, that you will fight for it to the death if the mission ever runs into funding or political problems?” Alan:
Both Elachi and Krimigis asked to sleep on my two questions and to call me back the next day. When Elachi called back, he spent half an hour explaining why JPL was going to beat APL by a mile, but JPL couldn’t possibly deliver only one Pluto proposal, and why they couldn’t promise to fight against NASA if it was ever canceled downstream. Basically, he spent the time on the phone telling me no to both my questions and trying to make me feel comfortable about going with JPL even though they would run multiple proposal teams with different PIs and would not promise to fight unconditionally for the mission if it later got into trouble. Krimigis called me back soon after and said, “Alan, you will be our only PI, and if we win it, we will never let it go. I’m giving you my word.” I was very pleased with Tom’s responses, but when I hung up that phone I thought, “I am screwed. JPL won’t really back us, and although APL will, APL is the clear underdog in this and likely to lose to the stronger, more politically entrenched JPL.” There was no easy decision.
One reason why APL was such an underdog was that, unlike JPL—who had historic success with two Pioneer flyby missions, two Voyager flyby missions, and both the Galileo and Cassini outer-planet orbiters—APL had absolutely no experience or track record of missions to the outer solar system. This mattered tremendously because there are numerous technical and management challenges unique to outer solar system missions. The travel times are much longer than those in the inner solar system, so spacecraft have to be built to last for years longer, and there are challenging operational logistics involved in operating spacecraft for those durations. The reliability and spacecraft “fault protection”—the ability of the spacecraft to automatically handle problems—have to be equal to the task of navigating in space for the years-long hauls between outer planets. The temperature extremes encountered require exquisite and reliable thermal engineering. Also, spacecraft operating at those greater distances from the Sun cannot power themselves with solar panels. They require nuclear power, which introduced another whole host of challenges, both technical and regulatory. Alan:
I thought about the JPL-versus-APL decision long and hard that evening. I knew APL was up to the task, but it was a kind of Hobson’s choice because going with them was riskier.
I woke up in the middle of the night knowing the decision had to be to go with APL. I knew that I had to go with the team that really wanted it and would back it forever, but I knew that I would be making a choice that had real weaknesses. I also knew that if I went with APL, Elachi would consider me persona non grata at JPL for the rest of my career. It was sobering to choose APL, because if we did lose, which I thought could happen, the personal consequences of losing would be so high. But given what Elachi had said to my questions, versus what Krimigis had said, my choice just had to be APL.
As I layed awake that night, thinking about the coming competition, I got more and more charged up by the challenge of beating JPL. I went to work very early that morning to call both guys back with my decision. Krimigis was excited. Elachi was flabbergasted.
GOING TO WAR
Once Alan had agreed to lead APL’s Pluto mission proposal, he and Tom Krimigis set about putting together a dream team. For the proposal and project manager APL brought in Tom Coughlin, their most experienced space project manager. Tom was also the man who had managed their successful NEAR planetary mission and brought it in $30 million under budget. In order to steer their Pluto mission through the perilous shoals of nuclear launch approval, they brought in APL’s Glen Fountain, the coolheaded and brilliant head of engineering in APL’s space department. Then Alan got to work choosing which scientists to invite to join the team as co-inv
estigators.
Alan spent the Christmas holidays in 2000 at work recruiting a science team and working with APL on spacecraft design studies, handling a dozen top-level trajectory and spacecraft trades for how to architect the mission, and organizing team meetings to hammer out agreements on how the project work would be split up and what instruments would fly aboard the mission to explore Pluto.
What followed was a crazy period of seven-days-a-week, nearly round-the-clock work to design the mission in detail and to write up the phone-book-thick proposal addressing all of NASA’s information requirements about it.
The pace was furious: decisions that would normally involve years of considered study were being made in days. It was thrilling, but every single decision was deeply consequential: any overreaching could produce a proposal that was unrealistic in its ability to meet cost and schedule or weight or power limitations; and underreaching could cost them dearly in how the review panels would rank the proposal against competitors. Alan felt he was riding a knife edge between two ways to lose, and he knew that he had to create a finely balanced proposal that was technically and managerially perfect, because any flaw could be seized on to justify a win by the more experience competitor teams at JPL.
The work to build, review, and perfect an entire mission proposal by NASA’s deadline in March continued week after week, and weekend after weekend. But what happened next was simply Kafkaesque: In early February 2001, just as the assembled draft proposal had passed its first complete review, the brand-new Bush administration released its first federal budget. Shockingly, and despite NASA’s just-announced competition for Pluto missions, the budget zeroed all NASA funding for a Pluto mission and instead made the Europa mission a new start! Within a day or two of that, NASA aborted the Pluto proposal competition.
Alan was incredulous. And furious. And he suspected the hand of JPL, who stood to gain from the competition’s demise:
I was so mad I couldn’t see straight, and I smelled something fishy. If Europa went forward, JPL would be guaranteed to get the work, because that mission had simply been assigned to JPL—without competition—and it was also a far bigger monetary prize than winning Pluto would be.
Alan speculated that JPL had worked behind the scenes to persuade the Bush administration more or less to trade the Pluto mission for a new start on Europa. He also believed that JPL had another interest in killing Pluto, because if APL actually won, APL’s hand would forever be strengthened as a powerful competitor in all future outer solar system exploration.
Alan immediately called Krimigis. He recalls Tom saying something like, “It’s time to break some legs.” He had never heard a space scientist talk that way. “My God,” he thought. “I definitely chose the right guy. He’s going to war for this mission!”
Tom decided to fight fire with napalm, calling his political ace in the hole—the powerful senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, where APL is located, and then chair of the Senate funding committee responsible for space exploration. At Tom’s behest, Mikulski wrote a sharp letter to NASA, demanding that NASA resume the Pluto mission competition. Her letter scolded NASA, reminding them that by cancelling the competition they were stripping the power of the U.S. Congress to decide on whether to fund a Pluto mission. She told them they could not do this. As the chair of the Senate committee that held NASA’s purse strings, NASA had no choice but to listen. NASA resumed the competition.
The game was back on.
“WHATEVER IT TAKES”
Aside from Alan’s team with APL, four other teams were preparing Pluto mission proposals to NASA. Two of the most formidable teams were from JPL, with more senior, and more-experienced principal investigators, each famous veterans of Voyager and other legendary missions. One team was led by Larry Soderblom, a widely respected planetary geologist from the United States Geological Survey, who had been point man for studies of icy satellites on the Voyager camera team and who was a darling of JPL upper management. The other was led by Larry Esposito, a planetary polymath, principal investigator of the ultraviolet spectrograph aboard NASA’s Cassini Saturn orbiter, and a professor of planetary science at the University of Colorado (which also meant that Alan was going up against one of his former grad-school professors). Alan knew he was too inexperienced to match the track records of these giants of the field; his team would simply have to turn in the best proposal. Alan often thought of the competition as if he and his team were David, going up against multiple Goliaths.
Enter budding planetary scientist Leslie Young, who had been a part of the discovery team of Pluto’s atmosphere when she was an MIT undergraduate back in 1988. By 2001 though, Leslie had a Ph.D. under her belt and had come to work for Alan as a postdoc.
Leslie became a key part of the proposal-writing team. Brilliant, and brimming with enthusiasm, she put in epic amounts of work and even led a key piece of the proposal on her own: to make the proposal credible, NASA required each team to show a flyby plan that actually fit in all the needed observations within the capabilities of the proposed spacecraft design. And it wasn’t enough just to show that the planned scientific instruments had the right resolution, the right sensitivity, and all the other technical specs to do the observations being promised to meet (or exceed) the mission objectives. The team also had to demonstrate that the spacecraft design and instrument capabilities proposed, along with their chosen flyby trajectory, could conduct all the needed observations in a flight plan that fit together, showing that it could work seamlessly, that there was enough time between turns, not too much power drawn at any given time, never exceeding the available amount of data storage, and so on in many other respects.
Creating this flyby plan was like a chess game in ten or more dimensions. Leslie led that development, and in doing so she became a world expert in this kind of complex mission planning. At first, Alan was a little concerned that a young postdoc like Leslie could lead what he knew would be such a complex effort. But Alan saw all the right qualities in her. And when he asked her to sign up for nights and weekends of work for the rest of the proposal effort, Leslie told Alan, “I’m here to win. It’s whatever it takes.” That phrase, “whatever it takes,” became both Leslie’s mantra and made such an impression on Alan that it became a rallying cry for the project whenever the going got tough.
More than one hundred people became involved in the APL proposal effort. A few of the key people included Alice Bowman, an experienced APL flight director who was put in charge of designing how New Horizons would be operated across its ten-year journey; Chris Hersman, an electrical and system engineer who was put in charge of overall New Horizons design; and Bill Gibson, of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), their most experienced space project manager, who was tapped to corral together the design, building, and testing of all seven scientific instruments across four separate corporations and universities, on cost and on budget.
In addition to tackling all the engineering and management design challenges and trying to write a spotless proposal, Alan wanted to put the proposal through an unusually intense gauntlet of internal “red-team” reviews to find and remove all of the technical, managerial, and even pedagogical problems in their proposal. Most proposals of that era planned an intensive red-team review like this, where a mock review panel of experts would assess the proposal critically and find weaknesses, but Alan wanted three red teams to rise to this higher standard as an antidote to their more experienced competition at JPL. That would be expensive and time-consuming—and it was borderline manic. APL resisted due to workload and cost issues, but Alan prevailed. Alan:
For a while I wasn’t very popular within the proposal team because I demanded so much—so many reviews, so many revisions, so many long nights and long weekends. I wasn’t in it just to propose. It was win it or go home, make or break, with no prize for second place.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A NAME
One seemingly minor but vital task while writing the proposal was coming up with a name for the proposal an
d the mission. As PI, Alan was responsible for picking the name, but he wanted buy-in from the larger team.
Anyone who has ever started a band is familiar with this process. You want to come up with the perfect name, but so many get rejected that after a while they all run together, or they all start to sound equally bad.
Alan wanted a name that was both descriptive and inspiring. This being NASA, of course, lots of acronyms were suggested. Given that it was a Pluto mission, they all had P’s in them, and there were lots of E’s for “exploration” or M’s for “mission.” Names came and went: dull, forgotten acronyms like COPE, ELOPE, POPE, and PFM. Some slightly better ones came in, such as PEAK (“Pluto Exploration And Kuiper-Belt”), or APEX (for “Advanced Pluto EXploration”). But none was particularly inspiring, strong, sufficiently catchy, or memorable.
Along the way, Alan’s team learned that one of their competitors—the proposal being written by Larry Esposito at the University of Colorado, in concert with JPL—was to be called POSSE for “Pluto Outer Solar System Explorer.” This was a fine descriptive name, but Alan thought it lacked inspiration. He joked, “Who are they looking to arrest?” Alan wanted something more hopeful.
After dozens of tries with acronyms, Alan realized he was going to have to break out of the NASA acronym mold. He decided that instead of a conjured acronym, he wanted a good name that was in itself a short inspirational phrase or slogan, one that captured the essence of what they would achieve with the mission.
Again there were many suggestions. Someone suggested it simply be called “X” in honor of Tombaugh’s original search for “Planet X,” and for the futuristic feel of that name that hinted at NASA’s pioneering X-planes, like the X-15. Other suggestions that came in were “New Frontiers” or “One Giant Leap.” But something was wrong with each of these: to some, “X” connoted the drug Ecstasy, and “New Frontiers” referred to Kennedy’s space program, something Alan feared the Bush administration, then in office, would chafe at. As to “One Giant Leap,” in honor of Apollo’s “one giant leap for mankind,” he was afraid their proposal would be ridiculed as “one giant leap of faith.” Time was slipping by: with every passing week, Alan was barraged with the plea, “We need a name. We’re already red-teaming the proposal and we have no name for it. Get us a name!”