The Telescope in the Ice

by Mark Bowen

  * * *

  Francis had met Jim Yeck when they had both sat on a review committee for the controversial underground laboratory in the gold mine where Ray Davis had housed his solar neutrino detector.

  Jim is an engineer by training, with an idealistic streak. He’d joined the Peace Corps after college and gone to Thailand to work as a water resources engineer, building spillways and canals and the like. He then returned to the States and earned a master’s degree in mechanical and nuclear engineering with a focus on plasma physics. (“I was interested in fusion, still this idealistic type, you know. Energy was, as it is today, a big challenge.”) The Department of Energy hired him from graduate school into a project management program, and he went from there to a DOE-funded fusion project at Princeton.

  His big break came at the age of twenty-nine, when he was made project manager for the construction of the $500 million Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (He suspects that the reason they gave so young a person the job was that they were having a hard time getting people to move to eastern Long Island.) Since the project was underfunded, the challenge was “to work through that in a way that in the end we could say that we had built it successfully, on cost, on schedule … and we did.” This introduced him to the world of nuclear and high-energy physics.

  Partway through the RHIC project, it was discovered that one of Brookhaven’s research reactors was leaking radioactive tritium into the only aquifer on Long Island. In the resulting public and political uproar, Jim was asked to step in, and as a person who admits to having difficulty saying no, he agreed. He stepped out of RHIC for about eighteen months to lead the lab’s so-called Tritium Remediation Project.

  “Let’s just say that it was intense and it was interesting and difficult and 60 Minutes and the whole deal.… I can tell you, when you have this boom over your head, heh, heh, when you’re talking to someone from the public who’s saying that their child has cancer and they’re sure that it’s from Brookhaven Lab and the reactor, it’s a very difficult thing to deal with.… It was in many ways a thankless job, but I got a lot of visibility through that, and I handled it in a way that was, let’s just say, satisfactory.”

  RHIC was nearing completion at about the time the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been the U.S. answer to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, was canceled by Congress. Desiring to remain on the high-energy frontier, U.S. physicists shifted their attention to the Large Hadron Collider, and Jim was put in charge of the entire U.S. effort—half a billion dollars or so between work on the accelerator itself and various detectors and experiments. DOE told him he could live anywhere he wanted, so he moved back to Illinois, the state where he’d grown up, and based himself at Fermilab.

  This project gave him the chance to work with the National Science Foundation for the first time and through NSF with the roughly thirty universities associated with the LHC experiments. He found that he enjoyed working with the schools, and he was also coming to believe that the national labs, all of which are run by DOE, were outgrowing their utility. The concept of such huge, centralized facilities had been born in World War II with the Manhattan Project, and they had now been around long enough to have taken on self-serving lives of their own—dragons needing to be fed. “The thought of a university proving to the world or to the funding agencies that they can handle a large project is interesting to me,” he says.

  But he wasn’t looking for a change. He was perfectly happy at Fermilab.

  * * *

  One day, Francis Halzen called Jim and asked if he knew anyone at Fermilab who might be interested in becoming project director for IceCube. Jim gave him a couple of names, and Francis asked if he’d be interested. Owing to his “inability to say no just outright,” Jim responded that he “might” and promptly forgot about it.

  Francis called back the day applications were due.

  “You put your application in, right?”

  “I’m like, ‘No.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, you need to put it in.’”

  The timing was okay, because the LHC was pretty far along and Jim was confident that the U.S. side of things would end successfully. And he still had this hard time saying no.

  Everyone involved in IceCube was in for a lesson in project management.

  * * *

  Jim Yeck does not take on jobs that are set up to fail. One has the impression that he interviewed the Wisconsinites as much as they interviewed him. He talked to Francis, he talked to John Wiley, he talked to Bob Paulos. “Francis is very likable. You know, people like Francis,” he says. “That can be very helpful in something like this.” He liked the other people as well, and the project “met this need to prove that universities could do stuff.”

  He also liked the fundamentals. AMANDA had taken care of the basic research and development. There was institutional support to the level of the chancellor: “absolutely critical, cuz you’re gonna have problems and when you have a problem you need people to pull together and provide the support that’s needed to get past it, as opposed to trying to find out what went wrong and blame someone or distance themselves.” NSF was by now firmly behind the project, so the construction phase would probably be funded.

  And he made sure that he would be in a strong place in the management structure. This made it a bit confusing at the top, owing to the coexistence of the science and construction missions. As principal investigator, Francis held ultimate responsibility in the eyes of NSF, but Jim came in as essentially his equal in the Madison hierarchy. He reported not to Francis but to the university’s vice chancellor for research, who reported to Chancellor Wiley. And this was where Francis demonstrated some management insight of his own: when Jim came on board, Francis told him that if they ever disagreed, he would defer to Jim.

  This was unusual. The history of big physics projects is festooned with stories of arrogant physicist control freaks blowing it the first time around and having to cede control to capable managers. LIGO is a good example.

  “Ninety-nine point nine percent of physicists always think they’re the smartest person in the room and that nobody can do anything better,” says Francis. “I realized that was not the case. You put people in charge that know how to do things and then let them do it. And the most important thing is to choose the right person.”

  Yeck joined in October 2003.

  * * *

  Jim was neither surprised nor fazed by the chaos he discovered when he got to Madison—and chaos it definitely was. The Antarctic season was just beginning. They were planning to ship the drill to Pole at the end of November—not to drill, just to get it down there and stowed for winter—and they were planning to drill something like twelve holes the following year. It was already late enough in the day that they’d have to airlift the parts to McMurdo rather than ship them by boat, and everyone was panic-stricken. NSF’s hired consultants were calling daily to ask how close they were, had they done this or that test—Jim says they didn’t know what they wanted; they were just nervous—and the folks in Madison weren’t admitting even to themselves that they didn’t stand a chance of meeting their deadline.

  Jim is soft-spoken and might even be a little shy, but he does not lack self-assurance. A couple of weeks into his new job, he called an engineering meeting that resulted in a decision to push the schedule back a year. He then sent a letter to NSF, thanking the foundation for working with them, acknowledging that everyone had worked hard, and suggesting that it would not be in their “collective interest” to ship the drill that year. They’d ship the largest subsystem, the hose reel, and get it assembled, but that was about it.

  He believes the NSF managers were “delighted to get that letter, because they knew that somebody was going to be accountable and responsible—which is me. I put it on my shoulders.” Until that moment, the buck hadn’t stopped anywhere. Responsibilities had been blurred.

  As it worked out, they barely got the drill to Pole a year later.


  * * *

  Jim quickly made the project his own. At the third Hartill review, which took place only three months after he arrived, he presented a revised budget, which increased the cost for eighty strings by about 13 percent, to $270 million, and a new schedule that called for construction over six Antarctic seasons, with completion in 2009–10. Instead of drilling twelve holes in the coming season, they would aim for four.

  The previous cost estimate, hammered out in the second Hartill review, had been $240 million. Since the Europeans had pledged $30 million, Jim’s budget took NSF’s contribution from $210 million to $240 million. (All these numbers were assumed to have a 20 percent “contingency”: it was understood that they could go that much higher if something big went wrong—if they had to work an extra year on the Ice, for example.)

  Jim also took them to school on the federal budget game. He was quite aware that there was a political aspect to funding and that NSF wasn’t dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. They had essentially cast their vote on his competence by hiring him, and they trusted him to make this work. He’d also been around the block with the Office of Management and Budget and Capitol Hill enough times to know that Madison could probably get $240 million for the project. They went to NSF with a request for two-fifty, and when the foundation balked, “showed blood on the floor by cutting strings”: they “de-scoped” to seventy strings at a total cost of $270 million and got NSF to agree to Jim’s original goal of $240 million.

  * * *

  Then there was the rat’s nest at the Space Science and Engineering Center. Aside from the management problems previously mentioned, the various administrators, in their wisdom, had set up a strange “ghost organization” within the center to house both IceCube and the Ice Coring and Drilling Service (the new PICO). It was named the Antarctic Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Institute (A3RI), and at least one astronomer who had nothing to do with IceCube was involved.

  A decision to separate IceCube from the center had been made before Jim arrived, but nothing had been done in that direction. He concurred in the decision, of course. “SSEC really didn’t give a shit about the project; they wanted the overhead. And it had the wrong culture for the project we were building, which was this ‘engineers are smarter than physicists’ problem.” He wanted to build a culture where the physicists were in charge but were respectful of the engineers.

  SSEC did have the advantage, however, of enjoying a special arrangement with the university in regard to overhead. In a normal grant, a scientist will request a certain amount of money for the cost of a project, and a significant percentage of that amount will be added to the total grant award in order to pay for the services her university provides in enabling the scientist to work. The most prosaic of these would be the cost of maintaining buildings and space, keeping the telephones ringing and the internet running, and so on. More important would be the incredible capabilities that a large and thriving institution can bring to the party: the university’s Physical Sciences Laboratory was building the drill, for example. At Madison at that time, the overhead rate was 46 percent.

  Jim saw A3RI as a distraction and a breeding ground for petty academic politics. Why should IceCube be tangled up in unrelated drilling projects and unrelated science? He managed to kill it, and he and Francis proceeded to work out a deal with the deans and the chancellor whereby IceCube would become its own center in the graduate school, similar to SSEC, and similarly keep its overhead. This was something of a benign shell game, perhaps, since the university would have supported the project in any case, but it did ensure that maximal resources would be focused specifically on IceCube and that the people on the front lines would be calling the shots.

  Francis makes the point that a university does not plan to “make money” on a project like this. It hopes not to lose money—and most importantly not to fail. This is the biggest risk, since the school’s main goal is to enhance its reputation and visibility. Being in Antarctica and being about neutrinos and cosmology, both AMANDA and IceCube attracted a lot of attention in the media. Academically, they had intangible benefits such as attracting good graduate students and even faculty. “You don’t see how many undergrads come here and get motivated by projects like this,” he adds. “It’s kind of like the argument, if you don’t do this you won’t be a great university. You cannot quantify it. It’s like if you don’t do fundamental research you won’t be a great country.”

  Part and parcel of the separation from SSEC was the question of space. Where would the new IceCube center be housed? Jim saw this as an important management issue. In the current situation people were spread out, because they couldn’t all fit in the SSEC building. They had offices there, in some space down the street, in the physics department; they were out in the countryside at the Physical Sciences Laboratory. This bred mistrust. “I knew from my experience that if you have a project, ya gotta have this sort of we’re all in it together under one roof thing, if you can pull it off.”

  He worked with the university, and it took about a year. At one point the administration proposed some space in a local correctional facility—a suggestion he rejected out of hand. “I just kept saying, ‘Nyet. Nyet…’”

  They finally found an entire floor of an upscale office building not far from campus and only a couple of blocks from the mall that surrounds the state capitol building. (Madison is the capital of Wisconsin.) It was large enough to accommodate everyone on the project outside of the engineers at the Physical Sciences Laboratory, who needed to be out at PSL anyway, and it was entirely unfinished, so Jim could design the space from scratch. With the help of an architectural firm, he designed it to force interaction. There would be a lot of glass: in the conference space, in the break rooms, “all good stuff, because the project makes more progress when people are communicating.”

  “I wanted the space to be attractive, so the physics people would want to be here and not at physics,… so that they would see this as their home, and they have. And then I wanted it attractive so that the collaborators would want to have meetings here. So they would come here and spend time.”

  He succeeded in making it reasonably attractive, in a corporate sort of a way. When Dave Nygren first visited the place, he referred to it as the IceCube Savings and Loan.

  * * *

  Clearly, the Madisonians got more than they’d bargained for. They had figured they could handle internal management themselves and had expected Jim to be the guy who would “take care of NSF” for them. Jim says that this meant, basically, “push back at them and stuff, so they stay out of our shorts.” Not only was this obviously very different from his view of his role, he also knew it was not the way to work successfully with the foundation.

  He introduced the novel idea of working with them, rather than against them—partnering, he calls it. This is what he was aiming at with his allusion to “collective interest” in the letter he wrote to delay shipment of the drill. They should also partner with Raytheon, the foundation’s Antarctic contractor. But when he arrived in Madison, he encountered quite the opposite: “Short version is, they say, ‘NSF has got their head up their ass, and Raytheon has their head up their ass.’ And I said, ‘You know what? And so does Wisconsin.’” (He has an understated, frank way of speaking that makes this sound humorous rather than threatening. Jim is tough, but he’s good with people.)

  Neither NSF nor Raytheon knew much about partnering either. The foundation has many of the flaws inherent to a federal bureaucracy: an “inside the beltway versus outside the beltway” mentality; the occasional short-term political appointee who is partisan or unqualified; petty bureaucrats who have “burrowed in”—the term for someone who has been appointed to a certain job under one presidential administration and shifted to an empty permanent post, usually lower in the pecking order, in whatever agency he or she can find, a month or two before the next president takes office. The director of NSF’s Office of Polar Programs all through IceCube’s planning and con
struction phase was a burrower. This is a powerful position; he was in charge of all the foundation’s activities in both polar regions, and in the view of virtually everyone involved in IceCube, he was an obstructionist and grave detriment to the project, much more concerned with ducking risk and protecting his scalp than in working toward success. Considering the atmosphere at the foundation, on the other hand, such fears were understandable even if inexcusable: Robert Eisenstein, the foundation’s Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences in the early 2000s, was well-respected and perhaps too good at his job. He played a major role in getting two large physics projects into NSF’s “mega-project” pipeline, IceCube and LIGO. In 2002, the same year that he got some sort of a plaque from Congress or the president for being one of the outstanding administrators in Washington, he resigned abruptly from NSF. “Sources” told Science magazine that “he had lost the confidence” of Director Rita Colwell. The Madison folks understood that Eisenstein had earned Colwell’s enmity by bringing too much notice—and money—to physics at the expense of her field of biology.

  You may have noticed that AMANDA and IceCube have dealt with many different program managers over the years. This comes in part from natural organizational change and in part because NSF, like other science agencies, employs “rotators,” people who step out of academia to work at the foundation for a few years and then return to their academic posts. Willi Chinowsky was a rotator. AMANDA and IceCube have been blessed with helpful managers, by and large. Without John Lynch, AMANDA probably never would have happened, and Gene Loh was the hero who did the same for IceCube. (Loh continued to help as NSF’s Program Director of Astrophysics until shortly before his death in 2006, at age seventy-two.) And, luckily, about a year before Jim Yeck came on board, a superb manager named Jack Lightbody was named project director for IceCube. Francis says his arrival “was like the Sun rising in Arlington.” The great thing about Lightbody was not only that he actually knew how to manage a big project, he was also senior enough to push back against the incompetence in Polar Programs. A longtime NSF employee, he had shifted over from an executive position in the Physics Division.