by Alan Stern
Alan felt pretty good going into their orals. He knew his team was ready and that their proposal was as flawless as any he’d ever been involved in. And personally, after more than a decade of work on various versions of this mission and the intense marathon work on the New Horizons proposal, he felt ready for pretty much any questions that might be thrown at him during the site visit. But he was also reflective of the stakes. Alan:
I remember thinking as I drove to the airport to fly to APL for the site visit, “This could be the last Pluto mission trip I ever take. I’ve been doing this for twelve years—since that first step into NASA Headquarters to see Geoff Briggs back in May of 1989. And it all comes down to this.”
The entire New Horizons proposal team—almost one hundred engineers, scientists, managers, and others—assembled in a large auditorium at APL for the NASA site visit, along with a dozen or so corporate executives from APL and SwRI, and NASA’s review panel of twenty or so experts.
The daylong visit was grueling. Then, after all of the technical and management presentations, and NASA’s detailed questioning, there was a tour of APL’s space department, where the review panel could see the design, test, and mission-operations facilities that would be used to support New Horizons.
Then, to close, the presenters and panel reassembled in the auditorium, where Alan was to give a five-minute soliloquy, the final impression the review panel would be left with. Alan reiterated why Pluto had to be explored and why New Horizons had the right team and was the right mission for NASA. As the room darkened in a final dramatic flair, Alan put up a last slide—showing New Horizons flying by a detailed artist’s impression of Pluto created by scientist-artist Dan Durda. Then, just as Alan was finishing, asking the review panel to recommend New Horizons to go forward, something unexpected happened.
“Just as I finished that closing pitch,” Alan recalls, “and the lights came up, I thought I saw the review panel chair wink at me. From where he was sitting I knew that no one else could see him do that. I just about fell over. I thought, ‘Did he just indicate “good job” or did he just indicate he thinks we’ll win? Did that really happen?’”
WHEN GOLIATH FELL
Late that November, the planetary science community was gathered for their biggest annual meeting—“the DPS”—a planetary nerdfest, mentioned earlier, as a pivotal annual gathering for science, socializing, and politicking about the planets and their exploration. That year, Alan was in charge, and the meeting was held in New Orleans, his boyhood hometown.
On Thursday, the twenty-ninth, just as Alan was leaving a technical session for a coffee break, Tom Morgan, a NASA Headquarters executive, came up to him and said, “See that pay phone? There’s a phone call there for you.” Alan:
We had heard that NASA was to announce the Pluto mission winner that week. So I knew Tom was saying, without saying it, “This is your call—you’re about to find out if you won or lost.” I walked up to the phone and said a little prayer to myself, because I knew I was seconds away from getting NASA’s verdict—and one with no appeal.
It was Denis Bogan on the line from NASA Headquarters—NASA’s Pluto program scientist. I said hello, and he matter-of-factly said, “Alan, we’ve concluded our evaluations.”
Time slowed down. I thought: my career’s most important endeavor was to be decided at a pay phone in the middle of a noisy coffee-break crowd buzzing with conversations. It came down to this one moment; whatever Denis would say to finish his sentence would be IT. And then he said:
“Congratulations. We’ve selected New Horizons to be our Pluto mission.”
I felt a shiver run up my spine! We had beat JPL—Goliath had been vanquished. When I got off the phone I excitedly ran to a computer to write a message to the entire team. It read simply: “We did it! NASA Headquarters just called to say we won the Pluto competition and will be funded to proceed! More soon.” Then I ran out into the crowd of a thousand or more scientists to find Tom Krimigis and whispered to him the news. Tom grabbed me in a hug and we literally started dancing together, right there in the halls of the conference. No one knew what the hell we were doing or why, and we got some pretty funny looks.
That night, the members of the New Horizons team that were in New Orleans for DPS walked in a throng down Bourbon Street, past open bar doors with music spilling out onto the street. Alan thought a lot that night about growing up in New Orleans, of being a kid in the 1960s dreaming of becoming involved in space exploration. Now it was Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s iconic, futuristic year of 2001, and he had won the chance to explore the farthest worlds humans had ever attempted, and he was home in the town where all his ambitions to be a part of space exploration had begun. It was an amazing confluence that he savored all evening and into the next day.
That night the New Horizons team and a large group of well-wishers ended up at a big dark bar off Bourbon Street with a three-piece band playing in the corner. For the next several hours, that gaggle let their hair down and, frankly, just got completely shit-faced listening to the band—drunk with joy, laughter, relief, and excitement for the long adventure to come.
5
NEW HORIZONS AT LAST?
“YOU WON, BUT YOU LOST”
Alan left New Orleans the next day and headed home to Boulder. The following week a letter arrived at his office from NASA’s then science chief Edward Weiler, making the win official. Alan shut the door, opened the envelope, and began reading:
Dear Dr. Stern:
I am pleased to inform you that your concept study report, “New Horizons: Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds,” submitted in response to the awarding of a Phase A study contract for the Pluto-Kuiper Belt (PKB) mission, has been selected to proceed.
If only the letter had stopped there. But as Alan kept reading, his smile straightened and then was lost altogether. The next paragraph began:
However, there are a number of requirements that must be met before NASA will continue proceeding.…
The letter went on to describe what were, in effect, a gauntlet of ways New Horizons could be canceled by NASA. To avoid that, first, it had to stay on track to launch in order to meet the last 2000s Jupiter launch window. Second, the budget cap for the project’s total cost couldn’t be raised, so any overrun would prove disqualifying. The letter also listed numerous categories of milestones, which had to be met on schedule and a requirement to successfully navigate the complex maze of nuclear launch approval. Weiler’s letter didn’t offer any help, or even encouragement, it just described a minefield of obstacles—and made it clear that any single one could result in cancellation.
Alan had won many other NASA projects by then, and never had he received any award letter like this. The letter’s tone indicated that NASA didn’t believe they could make the schedule, or get the project funded by the Administration, or get nuclear launch approval in time. “I read that letter three times, and I sat down and I thought, ‘My God.’”
Also buried in Weiler’s letter was a launch delay from December 2004 to January 2006—from the next to last to the very last Jupiter-gravity-assist launch window of the decade. This delay was a mixed blessing. It gave more time for all the work and planning and building and approvals necessary to be ready for launch, but it also meant there would be no backup window: if the team missed 2006, there would be no other gravity assist for a decade. And that delay also had a more insidious implication on the mission budget. Those additional 13 months that extended the project to 2006 would add expenses that in turn would require stretching the budget even thinner because they would have to carry the engineering team longer, making it all the more likely to go over budget—crossing one of the Weiler letter’s boundaries for cancellation.
When Alan later shared the letter with a colleague not on the team, the assessment was just as dispiriting: “You won, but you lost. You’ll spend the next year or two or three working on this, but most likely fail on one of Ed’s stipulations, and then you’ll be canceled
. It might have been better to have lost, as Esposito and Soderblom did; at least they won’t have to sink the next few years into this.”
BUSHWHACKED
A few months later, as the project was just spooling up, in early February 2002, Alan found himself on one of the many public outreach trips he took for New Horizons, this time in New Mexico, at a school-wide assembly of the Clyde Tombaugh Elementary School to give a talk about the budding project. After he finished talking to the students and answering their questions, his host, planetary scientist Reta Beebe, took him aside.
“Have you seen President Bush’s new budget that came out today?”
“No, why?” said Alan.
“New Horizons has been canceled.”
Alan was in disbelief. That couldn’t be right. It was just awarded by NASA, a part of Bush’s very own executive branch! Alan:
Reta and I went straight to her office and got online, and I found the NASA language in the president’s proposed budget, which had been released that morning. It was true—the Administration had zeroed our budget in the next fiscal year. Amazingly, it stated that the Pluto mission was cancelled “due to cost overruns.”
Alan’s jaw hit the floor. They weren’t over budget. Indeed, how could there be cost overruns when the project didn’t even have a formal contract yet? Was this just double-talk revenge for forcing the competition to completion via Senator Mikulski the previous year? Or was it some misunderstanding inside the Bush White House that Pluto Kuiper Express, cancelled back in 2000 had been in overrun and now it was canceled? But if that was so, how did New Horizons become the victim? Where did this move even come from? Perhaps the guys from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who seemed obsessed with funding Europa exploration and had been gunning for Pluto, had found another way of killing off Pluto exploration. Or had JPL, knowing now they had lost the proposal competition, worked to see that if they couldn’t win it, then the entire effort would be scuttled? None of it was clear except that Reta had been right: New Horizons had been canceled, and their job to stay on schedule now included a tough budget battle ahead.
Thankfully, Senator Barbara Mikulski, as the chair of the Senate’s Appropriation Committee for NASA, stepped in again, providing bridge funding for the next year. But for future years, the Senate language made clear, funding would be dependent on what the next planetary exploration “Decadal Survey” decided about the priority of exploring Pluto over other missions like Europa.
That Decadal Survey was, as its name implies, a new, once-in-a-decade review of all of NASA’s planetary mission priorities, undertaken by the National Academy of Sciences. It is a hugely influential shoot-out in which representatives of all the different areas of planetary science, and advocates for different kinds of planetary missions, make their cases and then agree on a consensus ranking of priorities for which missions are to be funded and launched for the entire decade to come.
Following Senator Mikulski’s quick intervention, Alan heard from Ed Weiler. The Bush Administration had agreed that they would support New Horizons if, and only if, it was ranked at the top of the Decadal Survey. And Weiler made it clear, saying in effect: “You can’t just be on the A-list; you can’t even be number two on the A-list. You have to be ranked as the number one mission priority. If you are not, then it will be over. Period.”
That was a tough challenge—that New Horizons had to get past the Decadal with more than just a recommendation for funding, they had to be #1 on the runway for priority. And then this news came: the National Academy declared that, due to conflict of interest, all key members of the New Horizons team were prohibited from serving on the Decadal Survey panels. The rationale: they were conflicted by having their funding at stake. Perhaps so … But this meant the most knowledgeable and passionate advocates for Pluto exploration were barred from having direct input into the very process that would decide the fate of the Pluto mission.
It was all a huge challenge. Why? Because, first, there was an intense competition in the Decadal Survey; a lot of missions were vying to get funding priority. Second, unlike New Horizons, many of the other missions being considered had not yet been selected, so they had the advantage of making unreasonable promises—basically “Christmas-treeing” their benefits to increase their appeal. Third, the advocates for those missions—like a Europa orbiter or future Mars rovers—were able to serve on the Decadal Survey’s panels because their missions hadn’t been selected and people hadn’t been named to the teams: they hadn’t been funded and so weren’t seen as conflicted in the way the New Horizons advocates were. It was maddening: “I felt like we were trying to drive a car without our hands on the wheel,” Alan said.
CLYDESDALES
During the same period that the Decadal Survey was being conducted, the intense work of designing the New Horizons spacecraft was moving forward aggressively, involving a growing army of engineers and scientists. New Horizons was also going through a mountain of work to prepare for NASA’s Mission Confirmation Review (MCR) and doing it in record speed and on a record low budget. But the Bush administration’s cancellation and the review by the Decadal Survey was taking a huge amount of time and energy and had cast a pall of uncertainty over the future of the mission.
Ordinarily, when a NASA mission is heading toward its Confirmation Review, the project team can count on a great deal of help from NASA Headquarters, with many kinds of technical and logistical support. But, given the at best tentative funding state of the project, the New Horizons team was more or less stuck with going it alone. Another problem in getting support was then NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe. O’Keefe had come to NASA from the Office of Management and Budget where he had been when OMB had tried to kill off the Pluto mission in favor of one to Europa. After arriving at NASA, O’Keefe made it clear that he was no friend of Pluto or New Horizons.
Senator Mikulski’s bridge funding gave New Horizons enough oxygen to run for a year. But during that time the players in NASA were not enthusiastic about New Horizons, because it wasn’t a Bush Administration–supported mission. The result for New Horizons was more than frustrating—it was just bizarre. Alan:
It was a weird “Alice in Wonderland” time. My project manager, Tom Coughlin, who’d done so many space projects no one could remember all their names, one day called me and said, “Alan, I have never been on a project like this. Normally, all the horses at Headquarters are pulling for you. They’re on your team, but not on this one. The Clydesdales aren’t even hitched to our wagon, in fact it seems like the Clydesdales are just staring at us thinking, ‘What’s the wagon even for?’”
DECADAL DECISION
Yet again, the exploration of Pluto and the New Horizons team was in a situation of “win big or go home.” And all the while the project had to play two fronts at once: while the team worked tirelessly to design New Horizons in 2002 and early 2003, they also had to wage an intensive campaign to make the case why the exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt should be the very highest priority of the Decadal Survey. Project members spoke to individual members of the Decadal Survey, wrote scientific white papers for its committees, worked on getting positive articles in the press, and encouraged the public to weigh in; they even once again enlisted the Plutophiles of The Planetary Society to help them build support.
That June, on the night before the press conference at which NASA and the National Academy of Sciences were going to announce the results of the Decadal Survey, Alan got a call from a journalist who was close to people in Sean O’Keefe’s office. Apparently the journalist had received some leaked information and told Alan, “You’re going to get what you want tomorrow, but not quite the way you expected.”
Recalling something similar that he’d been told in December of 2000 when the Pluto mission was being resurrected, Alan had thought: “What the hell does that mean?” and then he chuckled to himself, “Why is this beginning to sound familiar?” Alan:
The next morning, I was in my office early becaus
e Ed Weiler wanted to speak at 7:30 A.M., and I knew it must be about the decision of the Decadal Survey. I was at my desk when the phone rang. It’s sort of like that phone call I got in New Orleans the day that we won the proposal competition: you know in the next sixty seconds something big is going to be settled one way or the other. Weiler said hello, and then he said, “The Decadal Survey has ranked the exploration of Pluto as its top priority, and the Administration is going to go along with that.”
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “We finally are going to have clear sailing after all these years.” But then I remembered the journalist’s caution of the night before, and sure enough, no sooner had Weiler shared the good news about the Decadal’s decision than he continued: “But there’s one other thing.”
What Ed said was that NASA wanted to add another rocket stage to New Horizons, a high-tech ion-propulsion stage using solar energy to add even more speed and shorten the trip time. And they wanted to have JPL build it. “Don’t worry about what it costs,” Weiler said, “we’ll cover it.” But I thought, “What is this? We don’t need this stage, or any of its complications.”
It was so laden with unnecessary complication that Alan believed that it was a JPL or JPL-Weiler ploy to hamper JPL’s then arch-rival APL. And it didn’t make any sense. Why? First, with a fast launch like New Horizons, the spacecraft wouldn’t be near the Sun for very long, so solar energy simply couldn’t power the ion stage effectively for more than a matter of perhaps a year. Second, although Weiler was saying its cost would not come out of the New Horizons budget, the funds still had to come from Weiler’s own limited budget, and it would be expensive. Alan and Glen ballparked the number at $300 million, maybe more. Alan: