by Alan Stern
Then, one rare Saturday back home in Boulder, Alan was taking a run and working out ideas in his head. His thoughts turned to the naming dilemma. Alan:
I decided then and there that the very positive word “new” should be part of the name, because what we were doing was new in so many ways. Damn, I thought, “New Frontiers” was soooo close, but it’s got political baggage. Then, as I waited for a streetlight to change so I could run on, I happened to look to the Rocky Mountains on the western horizon, and it just hit me. We could call it “New Horizons”—for we were seeking new horizons to explore at Pluto and Charon and the Kuiper Belt, and we were pioneering new horizons in how to run the first-ever PI-led outer-planets mission. Nobody, I thought, could find a black cloud connotation lurking in a bright name like New Horizons. New Horizons was easy to say, easy to remember, and it symbolized that the mission would be doing something new in two important ways. I could tell it was right as I ran farther. I tried to shoot it down in my head, but I couldn’t find a way. By the end of the run I was settled on it, and I recall thinking that it was in a way a historic decision: “If we win this competition, and if Congress finds the funding to make this mission happen, and if the mission actually reaches the launch pad, and if all these things go our way and we successfully explore Pluto—then the name New Horizons will be found in textbooks and encyclopedias for centuries.”
INVENTING NEW HORIZONS
To win, a number of features of the New Horizons proposal were intended to differentiate it from its more experienced competition. The core of that was an expanded instrument payload that promised to achieve all of NASA’s required scientific observations at Pluto, but which was supplemented with other instruments adding new dimensions to the science. Alan felt that even though some of this was not required, it would broaden the mission and bring in whole new communities whose support he might later need to keep the mission funded. Adding these bonus instruments was possible largely because APL had a track record of spacecraft and mission development that was much less expensive than what the JPL mission studies had said was possible, in turn opening a budget wedge for the additional scientific gear.
The proposed New Horizons payload was centered around the integrated imaging and spectroscopy package that Alan’s team had put together for the (now-canceled) PKE competition.
First was PERSI (Pluto Exploration Remote Sensing Investigation): a powerful set of cameras and composition spectrometers in the visible, infrared, and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum. PERSI would photograph the surfaces of Pluto and Charon in detail, seeing details small enough to pick out features the size of city blocks. It would also make infrared observations that would map what Pluto and Charon’s surface materials were made of. In the ultraviolet part of the spectrum it would reveal the structure and composition of Pluto’s atmosphere and search for an atmosphere around Charon.
Next REX (Radio-Science Experiment) would probe the pressure and temperature of Pluto’s atmosphere as a function of altitude, a requirement by NASA. To build REX, Alan landed Stanford professor Len Tyler’s team—the most experienced radio-science team that had worked on Pluto mission radio-science-experiment development in the past and that possessed the most capable technology in the world for this type of experiment. By bringing in Tyler’s Stanford team, not only was Alan locking in a highly capable radio-science group, he was gaining a major strategic advantage over all competitors.
Next he selected two instruments for charged particle observations (Ralph McNutt and Fran Bagenal’s area), called PEPSSI (Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation) and SWAP (Solar Wind Around Pluto), designed to study the composition and escape rate of gases escaping Pluto’s atmosphere.
The cherry on top of the New Horizons payload was LORRI. LORRI stood for LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager. It was a simple black-and-white camera, but it was fed by a big, long-focal-length telescope that would add three very important aspects to New Horizons science, none of which any JPL mission had ever really planned for. First, with LORRI’s high-resolution telescope, New Horizons could obtain images with five or more times the resolution that NASA required for the mission’s Pluto and Charon maps. As a result, LORRI would vastly amp up the game for geology results and provide the kind of detailed images that first planetary flybys never had before, with resolutions good enough to detect features the size of buildings rather than the size of city blocks. Second, because it was a high-magnification imager, LORRI would also allow New Horizons to beat the Hubble Space Telescope’s best Pluto resolution for ten weeks on approach and ten weeks on departure—meaning they could turn a fast flyby “weekend at Pluto” into a multi-monthlong science visit—a huge bonus that would allow for many new kinds of research to be done. Third, and perhaps best of all, LORRI’s high-magnification imaging made it possible for a single spacecraft flyby to obtain basic maps of the far sides of Pluto and Charon, the sides that would not be visible except from afar during a single flyby.
This instrument suite packed a lot more punch than what was needed to meet NASA’s minimums, but proposing it also required a degree of shrewd salesmanship. The New Horizons team had to simultaneously present the payload as accomplishing much more than the minimums, but also as entirely feasible to build on budget and on schedule—lest the proposal be deemed overreaching.
To accomplish this, the New Horizons proposal was careful to demonstrate the simplicity of each instrument and the risk-lowering “heritage” of each. That is, how each was built on designs from previous space instruments with which the team had direct experience, whose performance had already been previously proven in space.
At the same time, the proposal pointed out that there were many instruments that could have further enhanced the science but that the team chose not to include, such as a magnetometer, which would search for Pluto’s magnetic field. This part of the win strategy—arguing they had actually denied themselves many other good ideas—had the feel of a high-stakes poker game in which they were trying to read and outsmart the competition by offering to do more with less.
In addition to this spectacular instrument set, New Horizons also proposed several mission innovations to make their proposal harder to beat.
First, the proposal offered to achieve a very fast trip to Pluto. How? In addition to planning the Jupiter gravity assist, which would shave almost four years off the flight time, they also added a simple but reliable solid rocket stage to the giant Atlas V launcher, which would cut the travel time to Pluto. Overall, the proposal offered to make the journey in just eight years, arriving in mid-2012, if they could launch by the December 2004 Jupiter-Gravity-Assist (JGA) launch window, or nine years if they had to launch in 2006—the backup launch window that was the last chance for a JGA for many years. The New Horizons team argued that this faster trajectory also lowered risk, because the shorter mission timeline meant less time for something to go wrong. The faster flight, they pointed out, also meant an earlier arrival, reducing the additional risk of an atmospheric freeze-out happening before the craft got to Pluto.
The team also proposed several ways to make the spacecraft extremely effective at Pluto. The flyby was going to be fast, there was no way around that. The spacecraft would whip past Pluto at more than thirty thousand miles per hour, and all the most crucial observations would be made in a matter of just hours. So the design included the capability to run up to five instruments simultaneously during the flyby, and vastly increased the onboard solid-state flash memory to be able to store a whopping thirty-two times the data harvest that PKE had promised to gather. The design also made it possible for the spacecraft to execute very quick turns back and forth between Charon and Pluto, packing even more science into the choreography of the many observations planned for the day of closest approach.
In order to afford all these capabilities, the proposal had to be very clever about making offsetting cost savings in other parts of the spacecraft and the mission to keep it all within NASA’s budget box
. The most ingenious of these savings was the plan to have the spacecraft go into “hibernation” during a large part of the trip, meaning that the spacecraft would shut down most of its systems for years between Jupiter and Pluto, with only minimal communication and navigation capabilities remaining active. Such hibernation had not been done by any NASA mission before (though some Pluto mission studies had also included it), but importantly, it promised to greatly reduce mission-control staffing costs because only a skeleton crew would be required to maintain contact with the spacecraft during hibernation. As a result of this and other mission-operations innovations, the team planned to run the flight mission with a staff of fewer than fifty people—a dramatic breakthrough compared to the 450-plus that it took to run Voyager. Also, New Horizons chose to purposely reduce the telecommunications capability of the spacecraft to ten-times-lower bit rates at Pluto than Voyager had at Neptune. This allowed a smaller, lighter-weight, lower-cost antenna, and a lower-power transmitter, letting the craft get by with just one nuclear power supply rather than two—all saving even more power, cost, and mass. The idea was that as long as they could maximize data collection at Pluto, and reliably store the data on board the spacecraft, then they could take their time returning it all to Earth. The proposal team adopted the mantra “If you can take almost a decade to fly it to Pluto, then surely you can take one more year to get all the data back.”
The New Horizons team also found several important ways to minimize the risks of a low-cost mission to the very edge of our planetary system. Sending only one—rather than two spacecraft as had all the previous first missions to planets—was an inherently risky venture, but they could not afford two. So the proposal countered by making all the active spacecraft systems “fully redundant.” From propulsion to onboard memory storage to flight control and guidance computers, to twinned power systems and twinned telecommunications transmitters and receivers—every crucial component had a fully functional backup that could be used in the event of a malfunction.
Some past Pluto mission studies had sacrificed such redundancy in the name of weight or cost savings. The New Horizons team made it a selling point, in effect telling NASA that if the space agency was going to fly the mission, New Horizons was going to make sure it was capable of getting the goods even if there were some hardware failures along the way. The New Horizons proposal’s scientific payload also included redundancy. With eight separate imaging cameras, two different spectrometers that could record composition, two separate plasma instruments, and two REX radio experiments, the design lowered risk by being able to cover all key science goals even if any given instrument failed before or during the one and only Pluto flyby.
PLAYOFFS
The NASA competition to win the Pluto mission was set up in two stages. Anyone who could amass a team and the necessary financial resources to propose could enter the first round of competition. NASA would then “down-select” only the two best proposals from the first round, and those two teams would enter a more elaborate and detailed head-to-head final round of competition. In a way being a finalist is like the difference between the regular season and the playoffs in pro sports because only one team goes home with the trophy.
But then, unlike in sports, the losing Pluto proposal team wouldn’t be playing again next year; in fact, they would never get another shot.
Five teams registered with NASA to compete in the first round. Of those, one underdog team dropped out mid-stream, but on April 6, 2001, four teams crossed the finish line, turning in massively detailed technical and management proposals outlining how they would build and fly a Pluto mission. NASA then convened large panels of experts in every technical subspecialty—in project management, in budget analysis, in risk analysis, and a dozen other areas, to rank and evaluate the four proposals. Their in-depth review process took two months.
When the announcement of NASA’s down-select decision came, Alan was in Paris, at an international Kuiper Belt meeting. Many in the Pluto/Kuiper Belt community were there and knew that the announcement was imminent. Near midnight on the evening of June 6, Alan got back to his hotel near the Arc de Triomphe. As he was walking through the lobby a clerk at the front desk said, “Mr. Stern, you have four phone messages.” (This was, of course, before the modern smartphone era.) Alan looked them over but none of them were from NASA Headquarters. One, however, was from a Ms. “Yung,” with a Colorado area code. Alan recognized the number and realized it was actually from Leslie Young, but he thought it was about a research paper they were just then finishing. He almost let it go until morning, but then decided to return her call. Leslie picked up the phone, but all Alan could hear was background pandemonium. Leslie shouted over the partying crowd in Boulder to Alan, “We’ve been selected to be one of the two finalist teams!”
New Horizons made it! Well, at least they were in the finals, but the next round of competition would be even tougher.
The other winning effort was the POSSE proposal from JPL, with principal investigator Larry Esposito from the University of Colorado (CU). So the Pluto mission competition had come down to Boulder versus Boulder, CU versus SwRI, in a crazy three-month final race to develop detailed plans for the mission.
Esposito’s team was formidable, and their mission proposal was excellent. The POSSE team also had the weight and track record of JPL on their side, with the highly experienced Lockheed Martin corporation as their spacecraft builder. The New Horizons team still felt like it was the David in this battle, but at least now it was only up against a single Goliath—one team or the other would prevail.
The POSSE proposal differed from New Horizons in many respects. Because JPL and Lockheed were institutionally more expensive than APL, POSSE needed to use a lower-performance launch vehicle with no third stage to fit in the cost box. As a result, their flight times to Pluto were longer. Additionally, their spacecraft was heavier and had not made conscious trades like a lower-performance telecomm system to save cost. And POSSE also took what Alan considered “sucker bait” and proposed to develop new technologies, like tiny high-performance thrusters that, while scoring points for technology development, cost money and introduced the risk that these new technologies might not be ready on time, or that their cost might escalate. Additionally, POSSE had loaded their spacecraft up with eleven scientific instruments, falling across the bad side of what Alan considered the “Christmas tree line”—with too much promised for a breakthrough small budget and short development timescale.
With the news that New Horizons had been selected as a finalist, so began three more months of incessant travel between Colorado and Maryland, new, more-detailed design analyses, cost analyses, instrument performance analyses, backup planning for a possible 2006 launch, red-team reviews, and late nights working seven days a week. The team members’ home away from home became a Sheraton hotel in Columbia, Maryland, barely ten minutes north of APL. They spent so many late hours working in the bar there, over beers, with laptops open, scribbling on napkins, that the hotel staff knew them all by name. One of the bartenders, Linda Lappa, became a regular at their after-hours meetings and was affectionately added into some of the unofficial project-management charts, shown as “project bartender.”
The final few weeks before the September 18 deadline for “best and final” proposals were an insane sprint. As Leslie Young often said, there would be time for sleep after the proposal was turned in.
On September 10, 2001, the team conduced their final review of the materials that would go to print for signatures before being shipped. But the next morning, only a week before proposals were due, came the terrible shock and tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Everyone who is old enough to remember that day will recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news about terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Anxiety choked the air, especially so in Maryland, only a short distance from Washington, DC, where one of the planes had hit. All air travel was shut down. APL—itself a defense lab—w
as completely evacuated due to bomb threats.
Like everyone else in the country, the New Horizons team found themselves in 9/11 shock, but the NASA deadline was only a week away. So the team evacuated from APL and moved the final work on the proposal to a marathon session at the Sheraton where they rented conference room working space on the spot. Alan recalls, “It was hard to go on during such a tragedy, but we had to keep going. I think that somehow our national pride, combined with the fact that we were working on trying to create something historic, in the face of so much meaningless destruction, helped to motivate us that terrible week.”
Ultimately, with all business in the nation virtually shut down over the tragedy, NASA gave both teams an extra week to complete their work, extending the proposal deadline to September 25, and both teams made it.
With the finalist proposals in hand, NASA began an even more rigorous set of technical, cost, and management reviews to ferret out the strengths and weaknesses of the two competing teams and their approaches to exploring Pluto.
In the final stage of every mission competition like this, NASA does a “site visit” with each team, during which NASA’s panel of experts grills the proposal team in an intense, daylong oral exam that involves a detailed presentation of the team’s proposal. Every aspect of the proposal is examined: the team, the institutions involved, the design, the budgets, the management team, the detailed schedules with thousands of events to reach the launch pad, and, fundamentally, the science that will be accomplished. For New Horizons, the oral exam came on October 16. The New Horizons team spent the prior two weeks reviewing and critiquing one another’s presentations, doing dress rehearsals, even bringing in a panel of outside experts to simulate the grilling NASA would do.