KARLA CLARK HAD SPENT THE LAST DECADE WARGAMING Europa invasions—developing mission concepts—brooding over notional spacecraft designs—science payloads—power sources—trajectories—communications—mission operations—with each effort attacking the problem from some previously untried vector, and when the Quad Studies started in 2007, she was the natural lead at JPL.216 When NASA wasn’t writing checks for such studies, the lab covered costs, and the mountain people of Saint Gabe had cultivated over the years all the engineering expertise and insights necessary to do this thing, were ready to go, wanting only a nod from on high. But Curt Niebur had made it clear that this time in particular Europa had better bring its A game because no nod was assured. Yes, the Decadal Survey said DO EUROPA, but NASA had already tried; success or not, that box was checked. Cassini’s electrifying Titan discoveries weren’t to be dismissed lightly, and that moon’s team was hungry and motivated, wanted to know more. The Saturnian system had momentum, without even mentioning Enceladus blasting its ocean into space. Europa has a subsurface ocean, sure, but good luck getting through that thirty-kilometer ice shell. At Enceladus we could basically fly through the fountains, fill a bag, and ferry it home.
The point is, said Curt: Europa, do not underestimate those teams.217 Karla got the message.
In the fifties and sixties, the United Kingdom experienced what the Royal Society in London called exquisitely and with uncharacteristic alarm a “brain drain.”218 Statistics seemed to suggest that science scholars were slipping across the Atlantic for more favorable funding and better research billets.219 And why wouldn’t they? If America’s anticipated atomic-age Shangri-la of side-finned, fusion-fueled flying Cadillacs didn’t materialize, then the post-Sputnik space age assured spots for scientists on every NASA moon base and Mars colony soon to see construction. The U.S. National Science Foundation, meanwhile, reported with zero modesty that the “American scientific community could continue to absorb foreign scientists at approximately their present rate of entry for some time.”220 The British government was spending more annually to subsidize chicken food than serious scientific research.221 NASA, meanwhile, had a blank check and Wernher von Braun.
Those were the conditions that in 1960 brought Karla Benjamin’s father, a Welsh research chemist, and her mother, who managed the household, to the city of Cincinnati, where Karla was born and raised. Dad did research for Procter & Gamble, hopped the globe on behalf of the conglomerate, and when foreign scientists came to town, standing dinner invitations kept the Benjamin household lively. Via these kitchen table cultural exchanges, these spontaneous scholarly symposia, Karla came into her own.
She attended Rice University for her undergrad, double-majoring in chemistry and chemical engineering, the first because she loved the science—and especially the quantum chemistry subfield—and the second because she loved the idea of gainful, meaningful employment, which the quantum chemistry subfield provided sparingly outside of academia’s grind. After graduation, Hughes Aircraft Company in Glendale, California, made her a solid offer, and she accepted, working on flight batteries for communications satellites. Thus Karla Clark (née Benjamin) joined the American space program. And while working during the day on flight projects (i.e., things launched or launching to space)—no small task, spacecraft batteries, power being king in space exploration—at night she attended classes at University of Southern California, which had a great graduate program for working professionals. This time she studied and earned master’s degrees in both engineering management and mechanical engineering with a focus on the thermal subfield.
In 1987 Karla jumped ship to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just down the road from USC and Hughes. She was hired as a battery engineer for the lab’s flight missions, including the prospective Cassini project, though it wasn’t called Cassini at the time. The job overall entailed designing, procuring, and delivering spacecraft batteries. Since Hughes launched communications satellites all the time, she was one of a handful of such engineers in the entire lab with any previous flight experience. JPL projects were big but launched only rarely, and the battery group became closely knit, supporting the lab entire and representing it at other NASA centers across the country, as well as at agency headquarters and in various prestigious working groups that kept America at the forefront of space science. It was just an unbelievably good deal if you had ambition and knew what you were doing, and within three years, Clark had been to just about every NASA center and learned from peers working not only in batteries but also in complete power systems. In addition, she had joined the review panel for the Hubble Space Telescope and been thoroughly educated in how flight projects worked from a systems perspective. She was on her way in the world, and others.
Eventually the Cassini team did away with the batteries in its design, but a position for power subsystem engineer opened, and Karla asked the project management to take a chance on her, and they did. It was a pretty important job, and she held it for most of the spacecraft’s development, eventually becoming assistant technical manager and then technical manager, responsible for a team of twenty.222 By the time Cassini launched, she was responsible for its power subsystem, having seen it through assembly, test, and launch operations (or ATLO, and pronounced that way), the final, critical phase of the project.
In 1997 lab leadership asked her to become project system engineer for the nascent Ice and Fire program to develop low-cost missions to three difficult destinations: Pluto, which required a spacecraft to fly twenty-three times faster than a bullet for a full decade, culminating in a precision flyby lasting three minutes at most; the sun—specifically, the twenty-five-hundred-degree deep interior of its atmosphere, which randomly reaches outward explosively in every direction; and Europa, which was considered the hard one.223
Clark was responsible for everything from the look of the spacecraft to their essential needs—computer systems, power systems, structural design, deep space communications, launch vehicle, science instruments—and she drew on trade studies of each to pull together basic mission concepts. It was Karla’s first detailed introduction to Europa, and from the start, the radioactive badlands surrounding the Jovian world—there was more radiation there than would be found immediately after total thermonuclear war—vexed and confounded the Ice and Fire team.224 Any spacecraft’s computer and delicate scientific instruments would need heavy shielding, which was doable but for a thorny mandate from NASA headquarters: the Europa orbiter was to fly directly to Jupiter; there could be no gravity assists along the way.
Few impediments could have been more severe. For a spacecraft to reach the Jovian system with enough speed to eventually achieve orbit around Europa, it had to either launch from a powerful rocket (which NASA lacked, limiting spacecraft to a space shuttle deployment) or be absurdly light (which the required radiation armor rendered impossible). JPL engineers dashed out hastily written equations in chalk before driving fists against blackboards in fits of despair.
Nothing for NASA was ever free . . . except for gravity assists. Ordinarily, the agency could compensate for the meager speeds of heavy spacecraft by taking indirect flight paths and using planets encountered along the way to yank and shove the robotic pilgrim outward, inward, or onward.225 The laws of physics being immutable, and the salient numbers known, NASA’s orbital dynamicists could do this all day, running the numbers to sling spacecraft precisely, one planet to the next: free propulsion from Isaac Newton.226 It was incomparably the best bargain in space exploration.
But then television tabloid journalism got involved, and everything became complicated.
In 1997, while waiting at Cape Canaveral for liftoff, the Cassini mission was beset suddenly by political protest. Cassini carried three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which were powered by the decay of plutonium 238. The plutonium wasn’t of the Back to the Future variety—a disquieting drop of Scary Substance Indeed into a homemade flux capacitor—but rather was stored in a ceramic form, wrapped in iridium, and caked in graphite. It could not corrode, or be obliterated by heat, or vaporize, or disintegrate as an aerosol, or dissolve in water. It was made to withstand not only the explosion of the rocket carrying it, but even a catastrophic reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Because it couldn’t vaporize, in a disaster situation, no one would inadvertently breathe it in and develop superpowers or extra appendages. In fact, it was designed so that you could even eat the stuff.227 The human body could not absorb it.
But ten days before three and a half million pounds of rocket thrust put inches between Cassini and Earth, a much smaller number—sixty, as in 60 Minutes—nearly nailed NASA to the ground. The CBS TV newsmagazine aired a feature on the soon-set-for-Saturn spacecraft, Steve Kroft starring in the segment. The correspondent’s opening line: “On October thirteenth, a Titan IV rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral carrying seventy-two pounds of deadly plutonium; enough plutonium, in theory anyway, to administer a fatal dose to every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth several times over.”228
And it got only worse from there. Cassini was an afterthought in the story, and interviews from experts were interspersed with comments from . . . nonexperts, to be kind, but very well-spoken nonexperts, whose contributions—the generous ones!—included lines such as: “What gives anybody, including the federal government, the right to risk the population’s death or—or injury just for space exploration?”
The segment featured a plutonium expert from the Department of Energy stating flatly that even if the rocket, spacecraft, and graphite-sealed, iridium-wrapped, ceramic plutonium blew up on the launch pad, it was literally impossible for the debris to do what protesters said it would. But just to be balanced, Kroft’s menagerie of doomsayers described in lurid detail what plutonium—not in the form used by NASA, which you could safely sprinkle on your breakfast cereal, because, again, you could eat it—could do to the human body. Among the highlights: “it can produce pulmonary cancer” and “you could have numbers like one hundred thousand or more people who develop lung cancer” and “if there is such an explosion, you can kiss Florida good-bye.”
Kroft even found a former NASA employee (“He’s neither a scientist nor an engineer,” admitted Kroft, “but . . .”) to lament publicly his role in endangering lives for such frivolities as space exploration. “I feel guilty, quite frankly,” bewailed the penitent insider.
To seal the deal, Kroft intercut the story with snippets of an interview with Wes Huntress, head of NASA’s planetary program, who had presided over the successful landing of Mars Pathfinder only months earlier.
“This is from your own environmental impact statement,” said Kroft to Huntress—the tone of the host solid but affable, his countenance hard but eyes somehow benevolent. “I want to read you a couple of things from it.”
Huntress was a pioneer in the study of interstellar clouds and one of the world’s foremost experts in planetary exploration, but he was not exactly tabloid-TV material, and after the cavalcade of activists arguing compellingly and without interruption, he seemed less than confident in his responses.
Quoted Kroft: “If there’s an accident it talks about, quote, ‘removing and disposing of all vegetation in contaminated areas, demolishing some or all structures and relocating the affected population permanently.’”
“If there should be any such accident,” said Huntress, accurately but unhelpfully.
Replied Kroft, “I mean, that sounds fairly drastic . . .” and Kroft waited patiently for Huntress, in possession of rope necessary to hang himself, to fill the silence, which 60 Minutes interview subjects always did, and he did, and did.
“Well, the—what they’re probably talking about mostly is—is the damage on site, near the—near—near the launch pad because there’s clearly, when one of these things goes, a lot of damage near the launch pad.”
And after Huntress tap-danced and staggered—this guy didn’t even know what his own official Armageddon report said!—and at last swung gracefully from the gallows, well-honed doomsayers followed up, explaining precisely how Life as We Know It was drawing to a close, and kiss your babies tonight because our foolhardy quest to conquer the cosmos—Saturn! This pointless mission to a gas giant, whatever that meant—will leave mutated survivors fighting for the last canned goods on ransacked store shelves.
Worse yet, Cassini would take a second swing at the peaceful people of planet Earth! If it didn’t blow up on launch, it was set to follow a VVEJGA trajectory to boost its way toward Saturn: that is, two swings by Venus (V, V), and then it would play chicken with the Earth, and if something went wrong . . . (but if all went well, from Earth [E] to Jupiter [J] for a gravity assist [GA]).
The Clinton administration really did not have time for this but dutifully absorbed the panicked letters and optics of protesters grasping concertina-topped chain-link fences on Cape Canaveral’s perimeter, while on the inside, police lined up in body armor and carrying riot shields stared silently, just waiting to—what? Open fire? Brandish batons?229
Nevertheless, NASA went forward with its reckless rocket launch likely to leave only cockroaches crawling the Earth (or whatever some future species would call this planet), and things were fine, as they had been for previous launches dozens of times over. But the message from headquarters to those filing future space missions: if you must launch radioactive material, do not plan trajectories taking the spacecraft back to Earth for a gravity assist. Nobody needs the headache.230
Which meant, for Karla and company, years-long discussions on potential trade-offs for the Europa Orbiter mission, as it came to be called. They analyzed other trajectories, other launch vehicles—anything to get more mass for a suitable science return. What hardware do you make “rad-hard”—impervious to radiation (but expensive)—versus simply wrap in “dumb mass” (i.e., big blocks of cheap protective shielding)? What was the absolute smallest science payload possible? Ultimately, they found a relatively happy medium: a spacecraft that could launch direct and achieve the minimum science required to make a Europa expedition worthwhile, and NASA loved it, and then the cost doubled, and in 1999 Ed Weiler shot it dead. Just like that.
WHEN PROJECT PROMETHEUS came along, Karla was already at work on a conventional Europa mission, building from the previous Europa Orbiter effort. She had, by now, more engineering experience on that moon than most, having led or been part of four separate studies. When she learned what the Prometheus people planned to propose for Europa, she saw problems. She told John Casani point-blank that his engineers were underestimating the amount of mass necessary to pull off this sort of mission. The shielding, the instrumentation: Europa wasn’t the place you parachuted into with only a bowie knife and moxie—you went there, you packed for war. She told him this again and again until finally he pulled her aside and said gently but firmly to quit complaining about it, and either come over and help him on JIMO or leave him alone.
It was not a difficult choice. If there was something to learn about doing big things in space, John Casani could teach you. What hadn’t he done? The first American spacecraft to land softly on the moon? The one that would figure out if the descending Eagle would actually land or just . . . keep landing? That was a John Casani probe. The Ranger missions to map the moon? Casani. The Mariners, Surveyors, Pioneers, Voyagers, and Vikings? Also Casani. Galileo and Cassini? Casani and his three fellow pillars of JPL had touched everything, had seen it all, success and failure. The chance to work with such an engineer and learn from him? Karla didn’t know if the project would last three months or fifteen years, but she agreed on the spot.
And she was not disappointed. Watching John Casani work was a master class in teaming and project management. The way he built bridges between scientists and engineers. His interaction with aerospace contractors. To see how he managed the political part of Prometheus, unifying major NASA centers (erstwhile and elsewhere mortal combatants for slices of the agency’s pie). Integrating the U.S. Navy reactor cadre. The way he treated people as a team of interlocking professionals in service of the impossible, and how he forged bonds between them—Karla absorbed every lesson she could.
What she learned remained relevant after the later deaths of Prometheus and JIMO. With the battlestar concept filed away indefinitely, and eight years now removed from the Great Gravity Assist Panic of 1997, NASA was willing again to stipulate on mass and radioactive power sources. This gave engineers a freer hand to incorporate heavy shielding, saving the mission millions otherwise spent hardening individual spacecraft electronics on a microscale, and they applied their new liberties to a small, internal study that resurrected the orbiter concept of old. Even as the engineering made headway, however, the Europa project was missing something other than NASA’s money—some spark, a wild card, a part that could make for an exponentially bigger sum.
Enter Robert Pappalardo.
It was a real coup in May 2006 when Gregg Vane, a manager in JPL’s Solar System Exploration Directorate, hired him. The lab needed a scientist to put Europa on a war footing, and Bob’s arrival was a sign from above that management meant for this mission to happen. It was better still that he and Karla hit it off from the start. The lab had made it clear that if a mission flew, Bob would be the project scientist. (They made no such promises to Karla, though she aspired to be the project manager by launch.) The two roles were complementary. The project scientist—always a scientist—oversaw all decisions affecting the project science. The project manager—usually an engineer—was in charge of delivering the spacecraft on time and on budget (“time” and “budget” both being defined by the Powers That Be). In Bob’s view, both were simultaneously in charge, by necessity—ensuring the scientific integrity of a science mission required coequal footing with the one delivering said spacecraft.231 In keeping with this logic, a compatible project manager and project scientist could achieve anything. If they hated each other, however . . .
Bob worked in the science building and Karla worked nearby in Building 301, mission formulation. Her knowledge of How Things Work was as good as anyone’s at the lab, and she knew everything necessary to get the agency to bite on a mission concept. When it came to icy satellites, meanwhile, he had revised the story of the Europan ice shell, hypothesizing that it operated by way of solid-state convection: i.e., Europa’s ice shell is like a lava lamp, with relatively warm, slushy spots in the lower shell rising upward, and cold, hard regions at the top sinking lower. And while top-tier scientists could sometimes be abrasive, Bob didn’t talk down to anyone. The pairing was a sign from above that these endless explorations of Europa mission concepts were not exercises in wheel spinning. You didn’t entice someone like Bob Pappalardo away from the soft life of academic tenure if you didn’t plan to use him.
Europa science when Bob met Karla was much improved from when Bob met Carl. What started as an image of a stunning, scratchy, blurred ball taken twenty-five years earlier by the camera of Voyager 2 was now a real world in space starting to make sense. There were maps now, and you could slap them on a desk, point with a flourish at features, plan your attack. What is this and why? There were hypotheses for Europa’s inscrutable lineaments—an appreciable achievement for a world that once made no sense at all, lacking anything comparable in the known universe. And things had names now! On Earth, Africa and Everest and Loch Ness and the Seine and the Amazon and Egypt and the Pacific—they just always were. But Europa was tabula rasa. So there was Cynthia Phillips, a second-year graduate student in the nineties at the University of Arizona—an affiliate member of the Galileo imaging team, lowest-ranking person in the room, and doer of grunt work—and there was no real role for her here at this stage in her career, and so she made one for herself, taking data beamed back to Earth from the spacecraft Galileo and uploading them to the file server for scientists nationally to begin to study, and while she was there, she pieced together the pictures, and she named things. Just like that! Craters, it was decided, would be named from Celtic mythology. That area is called Deirdre, said Cynthia.232 There is Maeve. That is Gráinne. Millennia from now, when wondered by all why we called this Europa mining town Maeveton—we call it that because Cynthia decided that that would be its name. She drew heavily on heroic women in particular. She pulled in data from the Voyager archives and pieced together the best map of Europa in existence and the baseline for the mission going forward.
But a map of what, exactly? Europa’s giant slabs of ice were definitely pulling apart. You need never have audited a geology class to see where they separated, and that something rose from below to fill the resultant cracks. But here was a problem on Europa: while there were all sorts of places where the sheets were plainly pulling apart (called extension), there was no evidence of places where they pushed together (called contraction). The whole moon was made of these giant sheets—there were no blank spots on the map—so, by definition, they had to push together somewhere, but for twenty years, nobody could figure out where.
Louise Prockter and Bob Pappalardo figured it out.
That their breakthrough involved extension and contraction seemed appropriate given that their relationship oftentimes worked the same way. The Europa community was small, and the upper echelon of icy satellites scholars smaller still. You worked closely with each other, saw each other at conference after conference around the world. You saw colleagues more often than you did some family members, and sometimes more often even than family members with whom you lived. Clashes could be familial and thus titanic. Louise and Bob both wanted the best science possible, and when they disagreed, they disagreed. When Louise asked Bob to meet her at the 1999 American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco about something she had discovered in the Galileo data, he was hesitant; they hadn’t really spoken in months.
The conversation went something like this:
—Bob, I think I found something.
—Whatever.233
But he agreed to meet with her. It was the cusp of Y2K, and maybe all the world’s computers would stop working and the apertures capping nuclear silos would open and end the dreams of our ancestors. Or maybe not—it was in the hands of COBOL developers now—and meanwhile, the annual geology conference went on as normal. (Geology played the long game, after all, would survive doomsday in any event.) At AGU, dozens of talks were given simultaneously in fifteen-minute bites, one after the other eight hours a day for a full week—thousands upon thousands of scientists revealing results to colleagues, with ancillary meetings held throughout for various concerned parties, and poster presentations were spread across one million square feet of the Moscone Center. It could be crowded.
The two met at the top of a quiet, remote set of escalators, taking seats on an adjacent staircase. Louise pulled out her laptop and brought up an image of Europa’s surface. Right there, Bob: that’s a fold in Astypalaea Linea. (Latin for “line,” and referring to long line-like geology.) It’s compression. Louise was a geomorphologist: her job was to look at a surface and tease out its history. Bob, meanwhile, was of the Carl Sagan school of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, but he saw it, too: there was something there.
And together now, they pressed forward. You’ve seen something, but what does that mean? They wrote the paper quickly—collaborated brilliantly—understood each other and the implications of the work, this key part of the Europa story, and they found more evidence yet at Libya Linea. The paper was published in the journal Science, where neither of them had been published previously or so prestigiously, and suddenly they were doing interviews with beat journalists in the national press.234 It was Dr. Prockter’s first-authored-paper debut.
Scores more would be written post-Galileo, as scientists squeezed the sum of Europan scholarship dry. Bob had published on solid-state convection in Europa’s ice shell, and he developed the science of Europa’s subsurface ocean. Geoff Collins, their former colleague at Brown, and by then an assistant professor of geology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, was looking at chaos regions on Europa and how hydrothermal vents on Europa’s seafloor would and would not affect the ice shell above.235 Greg Hoppa, a principal system engineer at Raytheon and a former student of famed orbital dynamicist Richard Greenberg at the University of Arizona, was working out the origin of the moon’s cycloidal ridges—bizarre, connected scallops, like the open sea as depicted in a child’s drawing, hundreds of miles across—helping explain the way daily tidal stresses made tectonic features on Europa.236 Little by little. This explains that. That tells us this. How much heat does this motion create? How would that affect the ice shell?
Meanwhile, back at the lab, Bob toiled tirelessly on the most ambitious activity of his life: he had decided to write the book on Europa. It began as a series of papers he drafted while standing up a Europa lab for JPL, summarizing where the planetary science community was in its thinking about the icy moon. Alan Stern’s 1997 textbook, titled Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System, which similarly assessed the state of thinking for those two worlds, had helped organize and galvanize scientists interested in the Plutonian system. Indeed, Stern’s book, as part of a wider push by guerrilla outer planets scientists parachuting into space conferences to explain their work and what more needed to be known, led ultimately to a decisive endorsement by the Decadal for a medium-sized mission there, which led to New Horizons. It was clear to Bob that Europa scholarship had reached a similar level of maturity, and he reached out to the University of Arizona Press, publishers of Stern’s book, pitching one similar but for Europa exclusively. The negotiations were quick (“You’ll write it for free.” / “OK.”), and Bob approached two coeditors: Bill McKinnon, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University at St. Louis (who also coedited Fran Bagenal’s Jupiter book), and Krishan Khurana, still of UCLA. Three weeks later, they had written a proposal and submitted it to the publisher. It was accepted shortly thereafter. At no other time in human history could these books—the Europa book, the Pluto-Charon book, the Jupiter book, and a growing library of others—have been written. It was only with the launch of spacecraft and space observatories that the knowledge within their pages was attainable.
When the Quad Studies had started, NASA headquarters formed a science definition team for what Bob Pappalardo and Ron Greeley, who would lead it, would call Europa Explorer. A science definition team comes up with the science goals for a prospective mission. Team members are not doing new research but rather organizing and taking full measure of the collective knowledge of the planetary target in question. Each scientist brings his or her expertise to the table (e.g., geology, magnetic fields, composition) and says: Here is what we know. What are the biggest things we don’t? What are the most important questions that this mission should answer? How do we answer them? They use these questions to build a “science traceability matrix”—a straightforward but densely detailed grid listing the science goals of a mission and how to achieve them—and move forward from that.
Bob was essentially the assistant to Ron, who was conductor of this symphony of scientists, each cell and section adding a rich and complementary layer to the composition. You wouldn’t call Ron a “strong leader,” because it implied something he was not. Rather, he was a leader with gentle fortitude, and he prodded you in the right direction without your realizing it. This was even more impressive since Ron could have crushed you, whether with the weight of his experience or the force of his intellect or his blunt power in what was, after all, a political program. He could have dictated terms for the mission. But he did not. He’d been there from the start, in human and robotic exploration, in the field of planetary science, understood the whys of how things worked, had defined some of those whys in the first place, and perhaps that shaped him. When Ron first set foot on a NASA facility, Apollo science was practically a blank piece of paper. By the time he left, he had helped choose landing sites for moon missions and had pioneered the science of lunar caves. And it was just the beginning: of his career, of the space program, of true exploration, of a new realm of scientific inquiry.
The real start, though, was in Mississippi in 1957. Before that, there was Ohio. California. Texas. Alabama. Colorado. Greeley was an air force brat; he came from lots of different places. Ron had wanted to be a geologist, had known it since he was eight, and it gave him clarity of purpose, focus. The Greeleys would drive cross-country, back and forth, one base to the next, and when they’d roll through the mountains, where rock was cut away for road, you could see the stone stratigraphy, and it fascinated him. But Mississippi was where he met Cynthia—Cindy—and it all proceeded from there. They were in high school then, and he was the lifeguard at the Great Southern Country Club pool in Gulfport. She was there to swim. They struck up a conversation. He would be a junior when summer ended; she a sophomore, barely sixteen. He had lived all over the country. She was from here. She had a date that weekend. So did he. But after that? Yes.
So Ron and Cindy planned it out while they spent that overlapping year together. Her parents, wise and genteel, wouldn’t allow them to get engaged while she was still in high school. It was just . . . too much. He graduated, enrolled at Mississippi State University, a five-hour drive away, and during her senior year, he drove home to see her every weekend. The day she graduated from high school, Ron pulled out an engagement ring and proposed. She said yes. He was studying geology at Mississippi State, and she studied chemistry at Mississippi State College for Women, just twenty-five minutes away. The distance was more bearable, and the plan was to graduate and marry before he pursued his doctorate. She would have finished school by then, too, or have been on the cusp, and they could really get started on life.
During Cindy’s freshman year, his sophomore, he was headed her way to pick her up for one of their regular dates. It was always hot in Mississippi, but in March 1960, on that short stretch of Highway 82 between Starkville and Columbus, laced along the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, at night it could drop into the midthirties easy, and there’s not much between the two towns (or in the towns, really), but that night, there was another car, and tires crossed the yellow line, and the vehicles met head-on. Ron was in a sports car, and this was when automotive safety features consisted entirely of whose car was heaviest, and Ron’s was not. His head absorbed the worst of it, the concussive blow crunching it in places, slicing it in others. The emergency response team rushed him to Columbus Air Force Base (his father still an air force man), and they took one look at Ron, the surgeons on call, and they knew they could not save this one. They flew him to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, where maybe there was a chance.
Maxwell was a training base, its lineage beginning with a special school in 1910 set up by a man named Wilbur Wright, who felt certain that his heavier-than-air flying machine would be of benefit to civilian and soldier alike, and that those with surnames other than Wright should know how to fly them. The Wright school didn’t last long, but its legacy made it a natural choice, much later, for an air force training center. By the sixties, airmen and officers of every specialty converged there for advanced training, including physicians, and its hospital was first rate. When Ron Greeley arrived, this son of an air force officer, the prognosis was unfavorable, and the attending physicians knew it, and the race was on to stabilize the patient and find specialists who might be able to piece Ron back together.
He spent the next three months in that hospital room. Cindy was there, too. And when he could talk, they talked, and having had this close a shave with the reaper’s blade, they made some decisions. Life is too short. Yes. Anything can happen. Anything. Do we want to wait? No. When the finest doctors in the U.S. military had finally made Ron whole again, he was released, and he and Cindy married immediately.
Cindy would make sacrifices for this change in plans. She quit school, found a job at the university press, first as a typist and then as an editor. She worked on things like Mississippi agricultural brochures, of which there were many, and she did it all: design, type-setting, and print prep. She continued taking classes on her lunch hour but belonged more to the Student Wives Club. Ron, meanwhile, back on his feet and in need of money to feed his new family, joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Everybody in those days did a stint in the service, it seemed, and certainly Greeley the Elder was an example to be followed. Anyway, that monthly thirty dollars from ROTC really helped the young student marriage. The downside was that eventually he’d have to serve two years on active duty, but they would cross that bridge soon enough. Global sanity seemed to be holding, and America’s presence in Vietnam consisted barely of a battalion of advisors. If President Kennedy upped that number even tenfold, that was still less than a division’s strength.
Soon enough, Ron graduated with a bachelor of science in geology, and the Student Wives Club threw Cindy a small ceremony of her own. Ron had to choose whether to knock out that two-year commitment to the army or postpone things to pursue a master’s degree. He went with the master’s.
They were a serious couple, always had been. Before they’d even married, Ron and Cindy made their first major purchase together: a canoe for sixty-five dollars—sixty-five!—exorbitant!—but they were outdoorsy, she a Mississippi woman, he a geologist. She taught him the water, and he loved it, learned to love boats. They ran rapids, paddled down rivers and tributaries, and found camping spots. Her folks had a house out on Cat Island in the Gulf of Mexico that they used for vacations, and they swam and skied and paddled away the summers.
When it came time to choose a doctoral program, it boiled down to the University of Nevada or the University of Missouri at Rolla. Nevada made him an offer, but he liked the micropaleontology program at Rolla and its attendant fellowship, and geography (Missouri was closer to home) put Rolla over the edge. Ron started teaching as part of the program, first as an assistant, and he was good at it, and soon stood on his own. Micropaleontology entailed studying tiny fossils under a microscope. If you were a geologist in the early sixties, that was about the best you could do financially, because it meant money from the oil industry. When Greeley graduated in 1966 (his dissertation was on lunulithiform bryozoans), the military deferrals ended, and he had a nine-month window before having to report for training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore. Ron took a job at a Standard Oil office in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he put his expertise in micropaleontology to good use, and where, when his eventual army hitch was up, he’d have a good job waiting. Standard Oil subsidiaries and partners would bring in these giant cores drilled by oil rigs and extracted from deep within the Earth, and his job was to take slices from the core and study them under the microscope. He was looking for foraminifera (undersea invertebrates, though you just called them “bugs”), and if particular bugs presented in the slice, that would tell the drillers that they were boring the right holes—that oil was likely nearby. No bugs, and the rigs would relocate to begin the coring process anew.
Ron did this for nine months and absolutely hated every minute of it.
It was almost a relief in 1967 when he reported to Army Intelligence School. (Almost.) They put him through an intensive course on aerial photography—“imagery intelligence,” it was called—in which reconnaissance aircraft flew over an area and took standard and infrared images for later analysis. The training was geared to prepare him for Vietnam. Global sanity, it seemed, was never the best bet. By now, troop numbers were sky high—nearly a half million U.S. military personnel were there—a hundred thousand more than the year before, and thousands would spend the rest of their lives in Southeast Asia.237 It was going to happen, Ron’s tour, and he would experience that army marching cadence that begins:
Got a letter in the mail / Go to war or go to jail . . .
When Ron finished intelligence school, he got his letter in the mail.238 He opened it. He scanned it.
. . . Greeley is assigned . . .
. . . Presidio . . . San Francisco . . .
. . . attached to the Space Sciences Division . . .
. . . National Aeronautics and Space Administration . . .
. . . Ames Research Center, Moffett Field . . .
There weren’t many geologists in the U.S. Army, but being a geologist didn’t prevent you from going to Vietnam. There weren’t many imagery intelligence officers in the U.S. Army, either, and being one pretty much guaranteed you would go to Vietnam.
But there also weren’t many people in the army who could read the words lunulithiform bryozoans, which sounded like something moon related and could possibly be of benefit to perhaps the only institution in America that had a higher priority than the ongoing conflict overseas.
Got a letter in the mail, read Ron’s letter, essentially. Go to Ames or go to jail . . .
JFK had called for an astronaut on the moon by decade’s end, and his successor, LBJ—a real space hawk from the start—was going to see it through. But despite the urgency, and like every federal office, NASA had a maximum head count for civil servants. To meet the impossibly accelerated goal of a crewed lunar landing, the agency exploited a loophole that said that military service members tasked to NASA didn’t work against the agency’s head count limitation. And a guy like Lieutenant Ron Greeley was perfect for the moon mission. NASA now had miles of surface terrain photography from the Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter reconnaissance spacecraft. Geologically speaking, the moon was one big, baffling mystery. Where was it cement-solid and where was it limestone-porous and crumbly? Was it covered in places, meters deep, with ash-like cosmic dust? And what would astronauts do when they got there, anyway? What valuable geology could you do at the various proposed landing sites? Furthermore, the astronauts were going to take pristine samples back to Earth. What defined a good sample, and how could you teach a bunch of test pilots to tell the difference?
Ron wasn’t a moon expert, but this was the sort of gee-whiz geology that not even his eight-year-old self could have imagined because of its fantasticality and preposterous ambition, so, of course, he was beside himself. And even without considering the Southeast Asian alternative, as far as army hitches went, an assignment to Ames was about as good a posting as any soldier was ever likely to get. A bonus: where the doctors had reassembled Ron following the car crash as a young man, scars remained, and he had grown a beard to help conceal them. But Mother Green sanctioned no facial hair—this isn’t the navy at sea, Lieutenant. NASA, however, didn’t care. Grow it as long as you’d like, Dr. Greeley! And that was his rank at Ames: doctor. It turned out that his only actual connection to the Presidio was the PX (for tax-free grocery shopping) and to pick up his paycheck. He didn’t report to anyone. He didn’t file reports with anyone. He didn’t wear a uniform. He just . . . showed up at NASA like a standard-issue civil servant. If you didn’t see his personnel file, you would never have known.
They had driven from Missouri to California, Ron and Cindy and Randall, their firstborn, packed in a blue Chevy station wagon, and rolled across rolling prairies, waved at the passing amber waves, and drove through mountains carved away, stratigraphy showing, Ron’s life, full circle. Cindy found work near Ron at the naval air station in Sunnyvale. She was an administrative assistant; they called her the secretary of the navy. The air force was building a test center for satellites, and the navy was in charge of its construction. Cindy mostly handled paperwork related to that project. It was interesting stuff. Artificial satellites were still a pretty new invention and the Defense Department didn’t want any single contractor knowing everything there was to know about one of them being built, so each floor in the new building was sealed off, keeping things physically compartmentalized. Cindy also took night classes that year at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. Deciding finally that it was her turn to go back to school full-time, she enrolled at San Jose State College, but changed majors from chemistry to history. She soon, at last, earned her degree.
And there they were: the historian and the moon scientist, making lunar history. At night, the two of them would sometimes go outside and look up at the moon and just think . . . wow. Not only about the Apollo program, but where their lives had taken them. They’d look up, and they knew it would happen, the moon landings—had no doubt. What they didn’t know was that with Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon and his second sentence on its powdery surface—an instant geologic analysis—this would not be the capstone of some brief, bracing phase of Ron’s career in geology but rather would mark the beginning of something new entirely. After his two-year army hitch ended, Ron was supposed to go back to Lafayette and look for bugs, but you put men on the moon, be among the first to apply scientific rigor to something so spectacular and unsullied, unpack the geology of a pristine world unspoiled by humankind, and you look around yourself at Ames, see not only what they’re doing—they—us—what we’re doing—and not temporarily: Armstrong was the starting point—and he knew Armstrong! There were astronauts to train and more celestial geology to do, and not only here—von Braun was talking about Mars! Knowing now what Ron and Cindy knew, having done what they did, you don’t pack the station wagon and head back south to pick petroleum-portending bugs from oil rig cores, you just don’t.
Job openings at Ames were scarce, so he applied annually for independent research grants, and he was successful. Their new life unfolding before them, Ron and Cindy bought a little gray Eichler house on Somerset Drive in Cupertino—red door, glass from floor to ceiling—for thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars.239 By now, Ron was doing deep dives on proposed Apollo landing sites and training the astronauts of Apollos 15 and 17 to conduct geology experiments. He was one of a small group of such trainers, including a guy named Jim Head, who later ended up teaching geological science at Brown University.
In 1977, a decade after his arrival at Ames, Ron joined Arizona State University as a full professor and brought with him a Regional Planetary Image Facility: a NASA library of maps, texts, and tomes.240 Among his Tempe colleagues, there was resistance to this Greeley guy setting up shop and shaking things up. He’d unbalance the department, they warned—turn us into a school of space exploration! But you met Ron and felt . . . better about things. He was a gentleman, soft-spoken. By then, he had been part of multiple missions to the moon; had run the Apollo Data Analysis program, the Mars Data Analysis program, the Mars Geological Mapping program, NASA’s Planetary Geology and Geophysics program; and on the Viking mission to Mars, had been in charge of geological mapping and helped certify the landing site for Viking 2. Now, as a lead on the Galileo imaging team, he was standing up the Jupiter Data Analysis program for when that spacecraft finally got off the ground. So at least he knew what he was doing.
When visiting the Phoenix area, Carl Sagan was a regular dinner guest. There he was, in an animated discussion with Ron and Cindy’s ten-year-old daughter, just so good at talking to people. Of course, when Sagan was off to visit Hollywood and talking to Johnny Carson, somebody had to do Carl’s work for him on Viking. Carl can’t work today. He’s doing The Tonight Show again. Ron was among those who had to fill in. You weren’t bitter about it, exactly. It was more of an annoyed-eye-roll sort of thing. Carl was popularizing the work, and that brought great benefits. But on the Viking team, the science was relentless and sleep sometimes in short supply, and those doing Carl’s work weren’t above grumbling about picking up their celebrity’s slack.
Ron and Cindy were friends not only with Carl but also with the entire mission team. Later, on Galileo, Ron and Jim Head had split the planning of the Galilean moon imaging campaigns, with Ron receiving Europa—what he called the “gem of the solar system.”241 Of course, the mission was postponed for so long, and then lasted for so long, that it turned into this careerlong thing for most of the team. Ron, Cindy, and the scores of Jovian scientists from around the world would attend meetings in Germany or France or California or wherever, gather for dinner parties, and they would see one another’s children growing up. You really want to bond with someone? Watch their kids grow from pigtails to parenthood.
BY THE TIME Curt Niebur at NASA headquarters asked Greeley to co-lead the science side of the Europa flagship competition study, Ron had not only been around the block; he’d mapped it, paved it, built its public transit, and taught half of the block’s fellow travelers how to drive. He had advised everyone from the French to the Kuwaitis, been part of almost forty major committees and science definition teams (chairing the majority of them), been part of flight projects to Venus, Mars, Jupiter—even Earth, sending an experiment to space on the shuttle. But by now, his beard was white and he knew as well as anyone that were this Europa mission to prevail—were NASA, indeed, to spark welding torches and begin cutting metal tomorrow on a spacecraft—the years of development ahead, coupled with the nontrivial travel time necessary to achieve orbit around Europa, meant he’d never see it happen. He was pushing seventy. At best, he would be retired, traveling the world with Cindy. You become a scientist to answer questions, to ever elevate the threshold of collected human knowledge. You publish papers, get grants. But do it long enough, and you realize that raising the threshold is only half of it; your real job is to make sure that science doesn’t stop with you, that the threshold is ever rising. The Dark Ages are always one day away.
He didn’t make some maudlin show of any of this, of course, not Ron. He was too stoic for that. So as scholars since Socrates had done, he made it his mission to impart all he had learned so that others might be able to answer the questions he would never know were even asked.
Robert Pappalardo was the sorcerer’s apprentice, der konzertmeister, the first chair of the violin section, and in ways worthwhile and subtle, Ron was handing over the baton. Bob, would you help organize this group? Perhaps you could iterate on the meeting agenda? I’m thinking of this researcher and that as co-leads of this part of the project—what do you think? Relax, Bob—what happened at that meeting was normal; every committee has to go through it. Would you prioritize this list? Give this talk. Lead this section. What do you think of these notes? And those?
Up front, the two men huddled and worked through Europa questions big and small. Some were sophisticated, but some involved “first principles,” e.g., Why are we using an orbiter? What other mission scenarios can achieve the desired science? Do we keep the option for a lander alive? What about an impactor? What instruments would we need for each? It was brainstorming, mind mapping, standing before blackboards, arms crossed and eyebrows furrowed, and approaching the study with a beginner’s mind.
The basic objectives of Europa Explorer weren’t that different from those enumerated by small, previous internal lab studies; or the JIMO science definition team years earlier; or the Decadal Survey; or the Europa Orbiter proposal from 1998. The goals were refined further during regular meetings of the Outer Planets Assessment Group. Meanwhile, the left and right parameters of the mission were set in stone by Curt Niebur at headquarters: among them, a three-billion-dollar cap, standard radioactive power sources, and no “miracle” technologies.
To develop Europa Explorer, there would be four meetings of the eleven-person science definition team, the first convening at JPL on February 19, 2007.242 The average meeting might last two and a half days, with science discussions, instrument presentations, lectures led by team members, and guest talks by experts unaffiliated with the team but with insights that could help the team better develop the mission. Louise might give a forty-five-minute master class on Europa’s geology. Don Blankenship, a geophysicist and Antarctica scholar from the University of Texas at Austin, would explain how an ice-penetrating radar would work and what it could do. Krishan Khurana would talk magnetic fields. Professor Christopher Chyba of Stanford University would tell you what you needed to know about astrobiology. Later meetings would look at such issues as planetary protection: If Europa has life, how do we protect it from Earth microbes that have stowed away on the spacecraft? And as study lead, Karla sought constantly to find the sublime intersection of what scientists wanted and what engineers could actually do.
The core of the Europa mission, they determined together: an ice-penetrating radar, a camera, and a composition instrument (the latter to figure out what the moon was made of—what those stripes were, and why the different hues). Those data—Europa’s makeup, its ice shell in three dimensions, and surface imagery to understand its geology—you didn’t even need to prioritize them. In fact, Ron specifically insisted that they not be prioritized, as they had already agreed that the mission wasn’t worth flying without every single one of them. Greeley was adamant that if there was no need to begin a difficult discussion, don’t.
Karla was ever astonished by the quiet intensity of the scientists, and the way Ron let them work. It was a dream team, for sure, which meant that you put a stick of chalk in anyone’s hand and had him or her debate the relative merits of some abstruse subsect of an abstruse subsect, suddenly you’re dealing with a weaponized mind, and if there was disagreement, how could you possibly bring them into accord? And there was Ron, this quiet force, never raising his voice no matter the room’s temperature, this wise grandpa saying, OK, let’s talk. What I’m hearing is . . . and suddenly—magically—maddeningly—when you really thought about how easily he did it—he pulled the whole thing back together, the tangents collapsed recursively, and Ron had somehow absorbed every argument, placed each one in context, finding the areas of overlap, finding the places of mutual disagreement and dispatching them, simplifying, simplifying, simplifying—he’d even write on the board K-I-S—the KIS principle: Keep It Simple (this was Ron Greeley; he’d never add an obscenity like “stupid”)—and by the end of the meeting, everyone was content and optimistic about the work they’d done and the work yet to do. A dozen scientists in total agreement? That’s hard—but he could do it. Karla had been doing this for twenty years, but to see Ron Greeley work? It was spellbinding.
A SCIENTIST ANSWERS to humanity. What she does, she does for the benefit of all humankind. It is the loftiest goal. But she’s also trying to make a living and not lose her job. She wants to get her mission approved and her spacecraft designed and built, or later, if she’s on an instrument team, she wants to keep her instrument on that spacecraft so that all of the engineers at her institution don’t lose their jobs. NASA wants to obtain the best science, but it also needs to keep civil servants employed at its many centers. NASA must also keep the White House Office of Management and Budget happy. The agency might choose a spacecraft or instrument that isn’t capable of carrying out the highest priority science but is low-risk and unlikely to go over budget and cause problems down the line. NASA must keep the public happy; it must engage the taxpayers and excite them about what is happening in space. It must also keep Congress happy. So the agency is thinking about a lot of things beyond whether a science goal is responsive to the Decadal Survey.
Three weeks before the final flagship competition study reports were due to NASA headquarters, Curt Niebur got a panicked call from an engineer at the Applied Physics Laboratory. A manager there had had lunch with Alan Stern and mentioned the flagship studies. Somehow the cost came up—three billion—and Stern stopped him cold. Why are you coming in that high? I only have two billion for this thing. Curt, the caller explained, management here is presenting the two-billion-dollar cost cap as a directive from headquarters.
It was like a bomb had gone off in Curt’s head. He was at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Georgetown with his wife when the call came. Seven weeks earlier, doctors discovered a two-centimeter something in Susan’s right breast. She had been having difficulty breast-feeding their newborn.243 The boy, their second, was five months old when the problems started. She thought maybe he wasn’t latching properly—left worked, right didn’t. Her lactation consultant suggested finally that she give up on the right and let it go back to normal. But it didn’t go back to normal. It hardened and hurt, had the texture of an orange peel. She wasn’t worried, really—there was no lump—but she went to see her obstetrician for reassurance. She didn’t receive it. He had never seen anything like it, he said, and ordered her to a specialist. The mammogram revealed something, they did a biopsy, and the next day, she was told that she had inflammatory breast cancer, invasive, fast spreading. There was no time, so her options—the list inclusive—were: chemotherapy. Two weeks later, they started. The nausea arrived promptly, the splitting headaches. Another two weeks, and her hair came out in clumps.244 She shaved her head.
Susan had left NASA the year before, wanting to work from home and spend more time with her first child, who was one at the time. An agency manager didn’t want her to telecommute, so she chose her family, and started a home-based consulting firm to help companies put together good proposals for missions in the Discovery and New Frontiers classes. She had run the Discovery program from headquarters for four years, so she certainly knew what the agency wanted. She was her own boss now, worked her own hours. Meanwhile, she blogged every step of her cancer treatment and built an online community of survivors. Susan didn’t do half measures. She kept in her office a talisman: a Lego minifig that she called Princess-Who-Can-Defend-Herself. The Lego princess wore eyeglasses and carried a sword. But now in addition to blogging, doing her job, and raising her sons, Susan was also doing things like explaining to her toddler why Mommy’s hair was falling out, and she’s at the store or the traffic light, and people look-don’t-look when they see the hair or lack thereof, and it hurts sometimes, a lot, and she’s carrying around stage three cancer and there is no stage five, and she knows math.245
The day Curt got the call from the APL manager, they were at the cancer center for a blood draw. Susan’s counts were down. She could feel it. She had taken her two-year-old on their weekly playdate and had to leave early, light-headed, and when they got home, she nearly passed out on the couch. It was all so frustrating for Susan, to slow down. She’d never not worked, never not, well, reached for new heights to reveal the unknown for the benefit of all humankind (as was the NASA vision statement). Curt accompanied her to the treatments, tried to lighten the mood. He would have quit rather than missed one. His boss, Jim Green, was a saint, though—take whatever time you need, stay home. The grandparents helped with the little ones. There was no balance—it was all happening so fast, each minute focused on whatever needed attention for the next sixty seconds.
And in this set of sixty seconds, while waiting for the latest counts, suddenly the flagship studies—two years of planning by Curt and eight months of intensive work by the study teams—had been cut by one billion dollars. It was a catastrophe.
When he got back to the office, Curt sat down with Jim, and they tried to figure out a way forward. There was no time for the study teams to descope, or “strategically abandon,” key objectives of their missions. Even slashing instrument payloads to the core wouldn’t get them down that far. It was an especially severe blow to a Europa spacecraft, given the heavy (and expensive) shielding required for it to survive marination in the Jovian radiation belt.
The next Monday, Curt flew to Boulder for a workshop called Ices, Oceans, and Fire, which brought together researchers studying the outer planets of the solar system, and their moons in particular. Ron, Bob, Louise, and Dave Senske (who co-led the Ganymede study with Louise) were there, and they weren’t thrilled. The big problems were: 1. we just lost one billion dollars, 2. our respective laboratories still want these missions to fly and will carve one billion dollars from our spacecraft without our consent or advice, 3. but those sorts of cuts would remove core science from the spacecraft, 4. and we are not going to sign off on the science value of a two-billion-dollar mission without full face-to-face consultations with our science definition teams, and 5. that will take months to organize and will push the study delivery dates well into 2008.
The discussion went on until ten thirty that evening, and, ultimately, all Niebur could propose was that they descope their missions as best they could. Don’t be drastic, he added. You cannot validate the appropriateness of billion-dollar descopes by the study deadline. Just do your best and make mention in the study reports that you can get lower given more time—and that the plan, indeed, is to go lower—but, again, look, we need more time.
THE FINAL REPORT of the Europa Explorer mission study came together on November 1, 2007, assembled physically from a hundred stacks of pages arranged in a grid on a conference room floor, Bob orchestrating it at this level, piecing the book together one section at a time. Karla’s job was to give NASA everything necessary for it to say yes to Europa. To win this thing for Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And she was proud of the Europa Explorer report. The thing was massive: hundreds and hundreds of pages, filling a three-and-a-half-inch-thick binder.246 You could use it as radiation shielding. Objectively speaking, all they had done was written a book, but, really . . . it was more than that. It was the first time in all the years she had been doing this that Karla knew without a doubt that this mission could go forward. That they could build it tomorrow and deliver on time. That they could travel to Europa, get back the science within the promised cost of less than three billion. They were ready to execute. It was a political decision now.
A couple of weeks after Karla handed in the study report, Curt pulled her aside. He had read it, of course, but needed to ask her, honestly, in that soft Breese accent of his, Do you really think you can do this mission for this cost? And she told him, honestly: If we can control the instrument costs, yes.247
It was always Europa’s to lose, and Karla’s report was everything Curt had hoped for. In fact, each study submitted was better than it should have been. Ganymede, Enceladus, and Titan . . . well, that last one was truly extraordinary, like something out of Victorian-era science fiction. As planned, Curt convened independent review panels of scientists and agency personnel, one for technical, one for science, and they studied the studies, then issued replies at the close of 2007. Only one should have emerged, but two came out on top: Europa and Titan.
At a three-hour meeting, Curt briefed Alan, as well as the chief scientist of the Science Mission Directorate and the division directors of planetary science, heliophysics, astrophysics, and earth science. Alan was especially taken by the Ganymede study led by Prockter and Senske. But since there wasn’t enough money to get any of the missions going at their current price points, they wouldn’t decide just yet.
So for the teams, each of which had whole worlds at stake, things got ugly.