JUST BEFORE THE DECADAL TURNED EUROPA TO crushed ice, the core Jupiter Europa Orbiter team at JPL had relocated from a handful of buildings spread across Saint Gabe to Building 321 (Flight Projects), fifth floor. In the aftermath of the Martian triumph, its members should have packed up and limped back across campus to their previous haunts because Europa was no longer a flight project, but rather, yet again, a lowly study.
Two things kept Team Europa in its new digs. First, the senior leadership at Jet Propulsion Laboratory was thrilled with the results of the Decadal. The two top priorities in planetary science were thirty years of Mars sample return missions (so many spacecraft, so much to do) and a Europa orbiter, both of which belonged to the lab. Something would fly to Europa eventually, regardless of how many decades it might take. Second, the now-ensconced lead of the Europa effort, Tom Gavin, was the one who built the building in the first place, and so he had a smidge more say in who would stay and who would go, and, oh, by the way, we are staying.
The Flight Projects office space was raised fourteen years earlier, in the aftermath of the Cassini launch. The lab, which had previously mounted only a handful of projects simultaneously, soon saw a serious business boom with the onset of Faster-Better-Cheaper and attendant missions to Mars and “small bodies” (comet, asteroid). Because of this, Gavin, then a mere thirty-five-year veteran of the lab and newly minted deputy director of space and earth science programs, saw a problem. Historically, new projects came into the lab, and you found space for them just, you know, wherever. There weren’t that many, so it didn’t really matter. But now there were teeming teams planted willy-nilly along the San Gabriels. So he called the deputy associate administrator for science at NASA headquarters and catalyzed a revamp and expansion of the JPL campus.
In the new regime, there needed to be flow, logic, and clear lines of communication. Henceforth, key personnel on projects (e.g., the project manager, financial manager, instrument manager, spacecraft manager, mission assurance manager, science leads, &c.—thirty-five people or so in total) would now be kept together by their project’s pipeline position: Building 301 (Mission Formulation), where the mission would be conceived; a new Flight Projects building, where an approved project would be developed; and then Building 264 (Space Flight Support), where missions were flown.
Tom wanted the Flight Projects building to be utilitarian, something able to hold about six hundred fifty people and just brimming with meeting space: three major conference rooms per floor, at least, and he wanted each floor to be identical, with no corner offices and thus no fighting over said prestige. He wanted a dedicated floor for design reviews (they chose the basement), because reviews were conducted, presently, at local hotel conference rooms, and the packing of people, possessions, and paperwork to and fro was not worth the lost time. Tom’s boss, Charles Elachi, meanwhile, wanted a proper auditorium—the podium, the big screens, the stadium seating with lap desks that unfolded from armrests—just the whole thing—for team-wide all-hands-on-decks. There was also a small gym in the basement for team members (though where the gym came from was a mystery—it wasn’t in the plans, but, Tom had to admit, it also wasn’t a bad idea). The sixth floor of six total would be saved for the program offices of the Mars and Solar System Exploration Directorates, and also up there would be a patio overlooking all of the laboratory and parts of the cities of Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, both of which claimed the lab as their own, the latter pointing to the land on which the lab was built, and the former, the lab’s zip code.
The Flight Projects building took just under a decade to move from cocktail napkin to ribbon cutting, opening in October 2009, just after Tom retired. Some called it, informally, Gavin Tower, but because it was a mission’s last home until the spacecraft launched, it was better known by its building number: 321—as in: 3-2-1 liftoff.
Now, on the fifth floor of 321, the Europa team had to regroup. Things post-Decadal moved quickly and not. Tom had already set in motion a series of internal studies of alternate mission concepts, and from headquarters, Curt Niebur encouraged the lab to reach consensus with Aerospace Corporation, which had done the bonkers cost analyses for the Decadal. Regardless of which institution had hit the target more cleanly, JPL or Aerospace, it was clear that the Decadal steering committee wanted a Europa mission that was simpler and cheaper, so do that.
The Decadal.
Bob Pappalardo was OK with the Decadal. The committee had, he felt, acted in good faith, and Steve Squyres, who led it, was the reason Bob was a Europa scientist in the first place. It was Squyres, all those years ago, when Bob was an undergrad in Carl Sagan’s course, who gave the guest lecture on Europa that so ensnared, enthralled, enraptured Bob. How ironic that Squyres would be the one to announce the end of Bob’s life’s work.
In fact, Bob had had time to get his spleen in check, because he knew the Decadal recommendations before the unveiling. Not far in advance, but enough that it softened the blow psychologically when the results were announced at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It still hurt badly, though, like knowing in advance that he was going to be punched in the face.
His first hint had come about three months earlier. Bob was at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union Conference when his phone rang. He stepped outside to answer. The comings and goings of taxicabs—their double-tapped horns, those slamming doors, the internal combustion, and persistent exhaust—were nothing next to the cacophony of scientists between sessions, bottlenecked in hallways. You get geologists talking about rocks and they just won’t shut up about it. California traffic was quieter.
It was Fran Bagenal on the phone. She was an official reviewer of the Decadal Survey, had scrutinized the flagship mission recommendations, and was miffed straightaway that the steering committee had not pushed the proposal teams to come up with viable, variable price points.345 Here is the small option for a Europa mission (or a Neptune mission, or whatever). Here is a battlestar. Here is the sweet spot. We can do any of them. There were options, and the steering committee could have requested them, if not insisted upon them. Mount the orbiter to a Delta IV Heavy rocket, and you could shorten travel time and add more dumb radiation shielding, the first cutting personnel costs, the latter mitigating the need for custom, radiation-hardened components—it would get rid of the million-dollar computer chips, in other words.346 Those sorts of simple changes would have chopped a bundle from the bottom line, and the Europa people knew that. But they submitted a flagship in the vein of Cassini and Galileo, a flagship proper, designed to deliver mind-bending science that would keep a generation of researchers busy—not just in the Europa community but also in the wider giant planets community. Given the evisceration of the NASA planetary science budget, Fran felt the Europa team should have been sent back to the clubhouse straightaway to pare down this thing before final submission. And don’t get her started on the preposterous sample return sequence proposed by the Mars community.
Of course she couldn’t come out and explain any of this to Bob. The Decadal Survey was conducted in secrecy and embargoed until its unveiling at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. What she said to Bob was that the community was not likely to come out in support of an overly expensive outer planets flagship mission, and that it was imperative he understand that. Think about how a smaller mission might be designed—a New Frontiers–class mission, for example—and how ruthless their principal investigators—their mission leads—were in cutting away spacecraft elements in order to control costs. So it was a work call, but she was calling also as a friend. She all but scrawled for Bob the word REDRUM in crayon.
But Bob stood behind the mission. It was the best mission, he said, the best developed and certainly the one with the best science, and we intend to fly it.
I think you need to prepare yourself for a range of outcomes, she said.347
When Bob learned at last where in that range Europa fell, there were two lines in the four-hundred-page final report that he grabbed hold of as though they were floating fragments of debris from a sinking ship. First, “Mars Sample Return was thus prioritized above [Jupiter Europa Orbiter] not primarily because of its science merit, but for pragmatic reasons associated with the required spending profiles.”348 You take dollars out of the equation, in other words, and the Decadal steering committee was basically suggesting that the science was equal. Bob could work with that! And though Mars emerged as the highest priority overall, in the same section as the Decadal committee endorsement came a caveat: despite being broken into multiple Mars missions, the caching component of the sample return campaign (i.e., the Mars lander that would scoop up dirt) was still a billion dollars too expensive to fly as proposed. It would need to be reformulated to square with budgetary realities (i.e., there is no money). The Jupiter Europa Orbiter, too expensive as well, would similarly require a descope. And if the budget improved—if NASA somehow found a chest filled with rare gems and gold doubloons—then, sure, Europa: Knock yourself out. Build your ship and separate it from the Earth. To lay the groundwork for such an opportunity, said the Decadal, “NASA should immediately undertake an effort to find major cost reductions for JEO, with the goal of minimizing the size of the budget increase necessary to enable the mission.”349
Well, there you had it! The science was equal, and the Decadal wanted NASA to keep plugging away at Europa.
Look, Bob was not unflappable. He was fully capable of being flapped, and flap he did. He found himself sleepy all the time, for some reason, just swallowed by this incessant fog of fatigue. But this was his life’s work—what was he supposed to do except keep going? So going he kept.
Which is what Curt Niebur wanted—and not only Bob, but also and equally Louise and Dave—the lot of them. He knew what was coming before any of them because headquarters had also been briefed of the results, and it was awkward keeping that secret from these absurdly smart, steadfast scientists—his friends, with whom he had been through so much for almost a decade now—but he had to keep quiet about their coming career catastrophes because it was his job. Headquarters had to remain an honest broker, and he believed strongly in that, in the process, and in the Decadal. When at last he could talk with them the day after the unveiling in the Woodlands, Curt had things he knew he could say and things he knew he could not say. COULD NOT SAY: He was disappointed in the large mission recommendations. The notion that Mars sample return was on firmer footing than Europa as a mission concept? That the Mars Sample Return study team had a better understanding of the cost and challenges? Well, it made his eyes twitch. Europa had been through the Quad Studies and the shootout—both costed and reviewed rigorously and independently—before the studies of the endorsed Mars mission had even begun.350 COULD SAY: Get the disappointment out of your systems because this is our Decadal, and we all need to get behind it. If you didn’t get the mission you wanted, in order to keep planetary science as a whole alive, we have to stick together. COULD NOT SAY: Ed Weiler at headquarters was ready to pull the plug on Europa studies. Zero it out. Shut it down. It’s done. The Decadal has spoken! And Ed was serious, and it was nothing personal, but space science as a whole, and planetary science in particular, had been kneecapped by President Barack Obama’s proposed budget, and look, how many times were we going to study this thing? How much money did you intend to give Jet Propulsion Laboratory to keep developing these losing ideas, Curt? Because, Curt, there was no money. COULD SAY: Keep going. Look, this is new. We’ve lived with the previous Decadal for a long time now, and that one was our friend, but that Decadal doesn’t matter anymore. We all need to digest this one. We’ve got to think about it. We’ve got to discuss it, and not just at headquarters, but here too, and at the Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting next week. COULD NOT SAY: He was going to make a concerted effort to sway Ed to, if not fully embrace Europa (wouldn’t happen), then at least let it stagger into the tree line, find a nice cave, and recover quietly.
The thing that worried Curt most was that if Ed truly zeroed it out, all the momentum built during the last four years would be lost. That’s what happened with JIMO, and Europa was able to recover only because of the previous Decadal endorsement. There was also this Texas congressman named Culberson who wouldn’t stop talking about Europa, and he sat on the House Appropriations Committee, and you ignored the guy writing the checks at your peril. But if development died on a Europa mission yet again—just halted entirely until Mars Sample Return started moving—in the six years or so eaten by Mars, Europa would essentially start from nothing: not only as a concept, not only at headquarters, but also in terms of wider support in the community. Science moved quickly, and Uranus and Neptune scientists had been pretty patient so far. That was unlikely to last. (Alas, poor Titan, which was so thoroughly atomized by Aerospace Corporation’s cost estimate that it merited not even a mention in mission recommendations large or small.)
Deep down, Curt was convinced that given the maturity and scientific value of the Europa mission, things were not as dire as they seemed. There was a good chance that in the next two or three years, Mars Sample Return would suffer some setback, some overwhelming obstacle, and NASA would need a hot backup. If such an opportunity presented itself—if any chance at all existed for Europa to get into the queue—the outer planets community needed to be ready to slap a plan on Ed’s desk, unroll it Normandy invasion–style, jab a finger at the icy space eyeball, and say, “Have I got a deal for you.” But to be ready, you had to keep working on it.
The message received by Bob, Dave, and Louise from Curt’s boss was less encouraging. Jim Green, an erstwhile Europa advocate, pulled the trio aside after the announcement and told them that it was over. It was a whole production. Green found an empty table in the back of the conference hall, sat them down, and spent a long time, what felt like admonishing them? Lecturing them? For Bob, it was like being in the principal’s office. And it was so not like Jim that Bob started to wonder about motives. How much of this was Jim and how much was it the direction of Jim’s boss, Ed Weiler?
One month after the results were announced, Bob got a taste of Ed’s opinion directly while in Washington, DC, to attend the fall meeting of the Space Studies Board, the focal point of space research within the National Academies.351 Bob was a board member, one of only two or three planetary scientists out of twenty-two at the table. The meeting that day concerned two issues affecting space science: the president’s budget and the Decadal.
The lobby of the Keck Center was lined with murals from floor to ceiling, engravings of four thousand years of scientific achievement, among them: the breeding of corn; Galileo’s star map; a silicon wafer for the manufacture of microchips. You walked down the hall, and you just felt the possible. Room 100, site of the meeting, was of standard size and layout: chairs, tables, wood-paneled walls with twin white screens for PowerPoint presentations. Bob was tired when he entered. It had been a busy month. But he came loaded with questions.
Representatives from the White House Office of Management and Budget had stood at the podium a day earlier and given their take on the president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, and things, according to them, just could not have been better.352, 353 Sure, the next NASA budget request was flat, but you should be thanking us! Flat was the new up!
That was NASA’s overall budget, however. Planetary science was set to lose money over time, as opposed to the flat (and thus up!) shape of the other science divisions. And not just a few dollars here and there: the proposed budget projections for fiscal years 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 would cumulatively carve nearly twenty percent from the planetary science budget. This was an extinction-level event. Already the division was eating ramen to pay its bills. Members of the Decadal steering committee were no fools in their recommendation, foreseeing a doomsday budget scenario. But what the Obama administration was proposing was so much worse than what the pessimistic Decadal committee members had foreseen.
When Ed Weiler gave his talk to the board, he laid out the issues, financial and otherwise, affecting NASA science. In his opening, he said that NASA would try to follow the Decadal, budget permitting, adding later—twice—that Europa had an estimated cost of four-point-seven billion. Sure, he conceded, although Cassini—a comparable mission to that of Europa—would cost similarly if inflated to 2011 dollars, the climate had changed. And anyway, he said, there was now an agreement with the European Space Agency to do a joint first phase of Mars sample return (the sample cache mission) in 2018, meaning NASA would have to pay only one-point-five billion.
When the floor opened up, Bob, having Ed pinned down and in public, decided to get some answers. Look, he said, on the Europa side, we get the message, and we are looking hard at less expensive options for a mission.354 But if we managed to slash costs, how could we be sure that, yet again, Mars mission overruns wouldn’t devour the funding that might get Europa going? How could we be assured that the Mars mission in 2018 wasn’t yet another case of—and here he was diplomatic—cost over-optimism?
Ed promised to put independent cost reviews in place.
Would there be a public airing of the Mars 2018 mission concept, asked Bob, and would the community be kept involved?
Of course there would, said Ed.
Then Bob pressed harder: It’s just that we need to ensure that this airing would include community commentary on whether the Mars 2018 mission would get through the gates set by the Decadal.
And here Ed went into full Ed mode: What gates? They’ve cut costs considerably, two-point-five to one-point-five. The gates are crossed. The gates are past tense. There are no gates.
Ah, said Bob, but what about cost realism? (That is, though he didn’t say this, the fictional fiscal promises that led to Curiosity consuming the budget of an entire Discovery mission.)
All of this was starting to really annoy Ed. Bob, said he, you are coming at this as a Europa advocate, and, oh, by the way, even if you get the Europa cost down, we’re not going to start a Europa mission until 2030!
TWENTY THIRTY!
Well—and Bob was getting terse and testy, too—are you really suggesting that there won’t be a flagship mission until TWENTY THIRTY?
No, said Ed. The Mars sample return spacecraft sequence is our flagship mission now, and yes, they are sequential, and no, they will not finish the job until 2030. You do the math, Bob.
Bob was stunned. Ed saw in the Decadal what he wanted to see: that it was Mars missions all the way down. He seemed to overlook the part in the Decadal about getting a Europa mission in the cost box and thus on the flight manifest, and so of course Bob pushed back, and later that day (in an aside), Ed threw Bob a bone and noted that an inexpensive Europa mission would be a good thing, because budgets changed all the time. But it was clear where Ed’s heart was, and it wasn’t the Jovian system.
Over time, others in the planetary science community pushed back against Ed’s interpretation of the Decadal as well. Every time Ed came back from a trip, he would lament that Europa Squad—both the uniformed regulars like Bob and the underground resistance in the community—had not gotten the message. So he went to Curt Niebur with some instructions.
Europa is dead, Curt! It is your job to carry that message to them, and YOU ARE NOT DOING A VERY GOOD JOB OF IT, ARE YOU?355
But Ed, said Curt, Europa is not dead. You keep misquoting the Decadal. If you want to drive a stake through Europa’s rocky, saltwater-wrapped heart, you need to say, Yea verily, I, Ed Weiler, hereby slay the icy enigma circling Jupiter. Because you have that power, Ed. But the Decadal cannot be your justification.
And Ed did have that power. But he never killed Europa. Ed was Ed, doing what Ed did, always did, did best: speaking loudly, in very declarative sentences designed with astrophysical precision, to challenge, rile, or annoy—with ninety-five percent of the time, his words not matching his actual thinking on the matter. Ed was making a point, gauging his opponent’s reaction, poking a stick into the soft spots and waiting for the opposition to fly off the handle. It was all by design and intended to take them off-balance.
It was exasperating but Curt loved it. From his little glass office at NASA headquarters, his bookcases filled with binders of mission concept studies for outer planets exploration, Curt watched associate administrators come and go, some effective, some not, some professorial, some political, but Ed was the only one who would walk in, sit down, look you in the eye, and say: Let’s debate this. And Ed never phoned it in. I am going to push all your buttons and force you to consider every single way of looking at this. That’s my job, and we are going to hash this out right now. Without heat there can be no light. The discussions would come just short of name calling, but Ed would change his mind when presented with a credible argument, and either way, by the time he left, you would think differently about the problem, and progress would be made.
It was the kabuki dance that Ed had once described to Todd May. Ed slayed Gravity Probe B repeatedly and with mirth and quiet calm. But the probe did launch in 2004. Ed killed Alan Stern’s Pluto mission in September 2000, banned scientists from even studying the mission, vowed publicly that Pluto was “Dead! Dead! Dead!”—his actual words!—his actual exclamation marks!—because of Pluto’s price problems, and two months later, Pluto’s partisans having found a fiscally feasible way forward, why, Ed hopped on board, and New Horizons launched in 2006.356 Similarly, Ed killed the entire Mars program back in 1999, before presiding over five consecutive Mars mission successes, culminating with the Mars Phoenix landing in 2008, and there were possible sixth and seventh successes in the pipeline—Mars Science Laboratory and the orbiter MAVEN—both wrapping up development.357 Numbers eight, nine, and ten—the multidecadal Mars Sample Return campaign now embraced by the planetary science community—would follow thereafter.
So when Curt and Jim Green came pounding on Ed’s office door, saying no, Ed, you cannot end Europa entirely under the guise of a Decadal decision—there is more work to be done, as expressly, unambiguously described in the Decadal, more studies needed to bring down costs, Ed said: OK. You have a budget, Jim. You find the money for another Europa habitability mission study and knock yourselves out. And Jim found the money.
THE RECONSTITUTED EUROPA science definition team, as directed by Curt, was thirteen strong and had eighteen months to do its job. After that, the money would be gone, and none would likely follow. In the official paperwork, Bob called them the Europa Tiger Team to really drive home the point that this was an agile group of lean and hungry scientists.358
Most of the Tiger Team met for dinner on May 2, 2011, at a place called Il Fornaio in a part of town called Old Pasadena. The restaurant was in Smith Alley, named for Willis Smith, a small-time businessman who, a hundred years and change before, had sold saddlery and harnesses to Pasadenans when saddlery and harnesses were what Pasadenans needed. When a three-hundred-room hotel called the Raymond opened a few miles down the road, Smith went into the laundry business. (Someone had to wash those sheets.) The resort catered to wintering well-to-do northeasterners, and with the influx of wealthy tourists, the city boomed and bustled, renovated and thrived. The Raymond attracted presidents and silent screen stars alike, and eventually, residents of obscure stock who knew a good sunset when they saw one.
The hotel didn’t survive the Great Depression, but Old Pasadena did, as it always did, from the moment Spanish soldiers stacked the first two bricks that would become San Gabriel Arcángel, the now ancient and still photogenic mission of mortar and stone. Everything proceeded from there.
In a private room in the back of the Smith Alley restaurant, the Europa team was at a standstill. A bottle of white selected by Don Blankenship was passed around. After a day of discourse, the scientists wore rims under their eyes like it was the new black. For four years, Bob and Co. had built the perfect mission for what they wanted at Europa. Their orbiter was derived from the Europa Explorer, which won the Quad Studies in 2006, which in turn traced some of its heritage to the Europa Geophysical Explorer (2005), an internal lab study. The Europa Geophysical Explorer drew much of its science from the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (2005), which drew much of its science from the Europa Orbiter, itself canceled formally in 2001. Europa Explorer became the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, which became one half of the Europa Jupiter System Mission (deceased, March 2011). This didn’t even count the dozens of internal variation studies of these missions. The point is: it had been a long time since a Europa mission started from a blank sheet.
Which is how this one would begin.
The Europans had begun the day atop Saint Gabe, on the fifth floor of Gavin Tower, Building 321 at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Bob welcomed them, dimmed the lights of the conference room, and projected onto a screen a PowerPoint slide, solid white and free of text. They were starting over.
The science side of the team included the usual suspects: Bob, Louise, and Dave, the three of whom would run the project science; Don Blankenship from the University of Texas at Austin was there and would lead ice; Jeff Moore from NASA Ames Research Center was in charge of the geology working group; Bruce Bills and Diana Blaney from Jet Propulsion Laboratory would handle ocean and composition science, respectively; and Melissa McGrath from Marshall Space Flight Center would run the local environment group.
Because Ron Greeley, the maestro who had led the previous studies, was now chair of the Planetary Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council, and thus unavailable, Curt tapped Bob to stand up the team, with some strings attached: first, invite all the critics (though that’s not the word Niebur used)—the members of the community who had real problems with the cost or ambition of the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, or even the orbiter concept itself. So Bob brought on board Fran Bagenal, who was hostile to the ossified structure of flagship-class missions, preferring instead the nimble New Frontiers model of small, agile missions; Bill Kurth and Amy Barr, who had been part of the competing Titan Saturn System Mission and the Enceladus study, respectively; Jack Connerney from Goddard Space Flight Center, who seemed to hate everything Jet Propulsion Laboratory did (too expensive, too big); and David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was listed as lead author of a white paper submitted a year earlier to the Decadal, asserting that Europa exploration should be divided into smaller, more manageable missions and implying that science definition teams were clueless to the programmatic and political realities of space exploration today.359 The British-born research scientist spoke from authority, having placed scientific instruments on nearly every major object in the solar system. At the time, Bob and Louise mocked Smith’s paper as ridiculous, given the challenges of selling a single mission, but he was on the team now, and no one was mocking. No idea was ridiculous anymore.
Next came hours of recap, debating head-on the problems of cost, mission design, and the general malevolence of mighty Jove. Earlier, the team had invited speakers to give insights from other missions and the successful strategies for separating a spacecraft from Earth.360 Alan Stern talked about how he helped get New Horizons in the cost box and off the ground. Connerney described the spacecraft Juno, set to launch three months hence, and the lessons learned along the way. Alfred McEwan of the University of Arizona described his idea for an Io mission that, rather than orbit the moon, would circle Jupiter nine times or so, capturing a little more of Io with each successive flyby.
A procession of engineers at the meeting described the problems with Jupiter Europa Orbiter, and they discussed mission options: orbiters and multiple flybys and trajectories and what science we could do on the cheap. A lot of ground was covered that day, and by the close of business, everyone needed that wine. Once it was procured in the little room in the back of Il Fornaio, Bob asked what everyone was already thinking: What are we doing here? And they filled glasses.
In retrospect, it was the inclusion of Jupiter research that likely killed the orbiter’s chances to get the Decadal flagship endorsement. The Europa Jupiter System Mission went out of its way to incorporate as much Jupiter science as possible, which should have garnered the support of the giant planets panel, thus tipping the results to the Europa mission over Mars. The icy satellites panel was, of course, on board (Europa was an icy satellite) but the giant planets people went their own way, literally choosing nothing over a Jupiter system mission. A Uranus mission, which they wanted, wasn’t going to happen.
Accordingly, Curt directed the new science definition team that, when developing their mission, in accordance with the recommendation of the Decadal Survey, remember this: We will never point the cameras of this spacecraft at the planet Jupiter. Period. It wasn’t pettiness. It was following the Decadal Survey, hip and thigh, chapter and verse. The Giant Planets people didn’t want this mission, and so we would not spend a dime to burden them with it.
Over that bottle of wine or three—Don kept ordering them, and Bob forgot even the color imbibed by evening’s end—they came back to Dave Smith’s white paper. Smith had proposed three small spacecraft concepts: an orbiter, a multiple flyby, and a lander. At the table that night, they dismissed the lander out of hand as too expensive and unable to meet the science objectives set down by the Decadal. But what would a small orbiter at Europa look like? How much would it cost? What about a multiple flyby spacecraft, orbiting Jupiter rather than Europa, and just encountering Europa at intervals, one slice at a time? What science would one do that the other couldn’t, and vice versa? The orbiter would handle remote sensing. The multiple flyby would do the geophysics. You break up the mission, a flagship no more. And Bob would captain not some mighty vessel splitting shimmering trails of light on an infinite eighth sea—the HMS Enterprize of the eighteenth century or the USS Enterprise of the twenty-third—but rather . . . two somethings smaller.
They had laughed bitterly at this idea before the Decadal was released, but (and maybe it was the wine) the way they were now describing it, the orbiter would be the best little orbiter it could be, and doing only the science that you absolutely needed an orbiter to do, and nothing more. And the multiple flyby would be the best multiple flyby spacecraft it could be, doing only what multiple flybys do best, and nothing more. It could circle Jupiter scores of times, maybe hundreds (why not, after all—this was still a thought experiment), and in its hundreds of flybys, capture Europa one strip at a time. You didn’t have to launch the two spacecraft simultaneously. You’d launch one, get your science, and later, when the budgets were favorable, send up the second. Collectively, with this “split mission” concept, you’d get everything the larger Jupiter Europa Orbiter would have done.
The more they talked, the better it sounded. Blankenship, as leader of the ice working group, thought a multiple flyby mission might do a better job with his radar instrument than an orbiter. Don first came to the project in 1998, when he chaired the original Europa Orbiter radar study.361 He had by then been flying terrestrial radar in aircraft over Antarctica for fifteen years, a science he pioneered, and he recruited colleagues from Europe and the United States to converge on JPL sporadically and offer counsel regarding how best to use a radar at Europa. Not everyone in the earth science community jumped at the chance to help, of course; competition in Earth’s polar regions was steep, and academic rivals had no interest in sharing their secrets, seeing it as career suicide, an insane act. By the dinner at Il Fornaio, Don was the singular ice scholar who hadn’t given up, Ishmael of the cryosphere. He only was escaped alone to tell thee. The surfaces of a planetary body, he knew, were inadequate to the task of assessing whether life arose and flourished on the body. That secret could be found only in the subsurface.
On Earth, if you didn’t understand the ocean, you wouldn’t understand our planet’s ability to sustain life and evolution. The ocean interior—Earth’s subsurface—was everything when you were talking about habitability. Which is what made Europa special. For celestial objects generally, and Mars being the obvious example, the most a spacecraft instrument could see were the top few microns, the width of a human hair, or, if you were absurdly lucky, a millimeter or two. For all the orbiters and rovers NASA had there, scientists didn’t understand the subsurface of Mars—not even a single inch beneath its veneer. Mars is not made of stuff you can see through. But Europa? Its surface was made of ice. And Don’s job—his calling—was to see through ice.
He was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois, spent his childhood and adolescence on the till plains, which were as boring a geology as a human being could imagine. To find a single rock in his whole county, you’d need a shovel and patience enough to dig down three hundred feet. But his dad built factories for a living, and in the summer, they would travel, and when Don saw mountains, he would just become transfixed. As a freshman in college in the early seventies, he took every senior-level geology course at the school. It was there that he discovered he was really into ice and glaciers, and when he told his father about it—“I’m really into ice and glaciers”—his dad didn’t even blink. Well go figure out glaciers, said the elder Blankenship, reaching into his pocket, pulling out the car keys, and tossing them to his eighteen-year-old son. Go for it.
That summer, Don took the car to Glacier National Park in northern Montana to see what he could learn, spent weeks skulking around, hiking every glacier he could find, and when the season ended, he came home and promptly quit the university because nobody there could teach him what he had just taught himself. Pocketing his newly acquired knowledge, he then focused his efforts on racing motorcycles.
He first got into dirt bikes as a kid. His part of Illinois didn’t have much, but the till plains did lay claim to the best motocross tracks in the world. Don was moderately good at the sport, raced on the weekends, and took jobs here and there to keep the gas tank full. He tried working in factories but found almost immediately that you couldn’t race hard and then work at a factory—the human body could take only so much. So he found a job at a bank, worked the drive-up windows. Ahhh—it was heaven. You could sit down all day, like he was being paid to recover from his weekend exertions. After working there for a while, he ran a bank vault, which taught him that giant stacks of money were meaningless (an important lesson to learn if you were in science, as he came to discover). He raced for four years—was a shade away from going pro—and had plans to try for two more years to see how far he could take this thing.
Then young Don Blankenship, not long after turning twenty-one, crashed and suffered a severe knee injury, was told he might never walk again. He spent six weeks in recovery sitting on the sofa next to his mother watching daytime soaps, and when at last he found he could hobble about, he went back to school with vim and verve. This time it was Eastern Illinois University. He was a little more mature, and the geology program was as serious as he was. He hit it hard. To rehabilitate his leg, he hiked tirelessly in the mountains. Don eventually hitched a ride to the Appalachian Trail, hiked a hundred miles in the winter cold. His shanks held up, and it paid off academically: he earned a pretty solid reputation as a field geology guy. After taking a sequence of physics classes, however, Don realized to his shock and horror that he liked physics more than geology—that maybe his future was in geophysics, which in the rock community was heretical, like renouncing one religion for another. Ever the infidel, however, graduate school in geophysics it was.
Six months after he arrived at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, his advisor, the famed glaciologist Charlie Bentley, had him in the back of a C-141 cargo plane—landing gear stuck—as the aircraft went in for a final approach at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. (They survived the landing.) The continent, he found, was a land of punishing extremes: cold, obviously, blizzards occasionally, but also bright: the sunlight from open skies reflected on pristine white below, and without sunglasses, it was utterly blinding, like staring directly at the sun. You went out in the field, and you were in the last real wilderness on Earth, and there was such solitude that only astronauts knew, perhaps, or ships lost at sea. Yet after all Don had done, Antarctic expeditions were fairly inside the box. An essential element of the productivity of a geophysicist working “on the ice,” he soon learned, was the ability to tune Rotax two-stroke engines in snowmobiles—a skill he’d picked up in his dirt bike days. This made him really, really effective in the field. He’d be out there, another scientist staring at a snowmobile, lamenting: It won’t run anymore; I can’t do my work. And Don would walk over, rip apart the engine, fix it, make it go. Thus did motorcycle racing prove critical to the success of his Ph.D.
That doctoral thesis was on mobilized till beneath ice sheets in West Antarctica. At the time, mountain glacier people thought that the glaciers moved on highly pressurized water; that the ice just slid across like a puck on a hockey rink. Don conducted geophysical studies of the bottom ten meters of sheets a thousand meters thick using acoustic waves. It was like doing a high-resolution sonogram of a child, and he discovered that glaciers moved quickly not because of pressurized water, but because they were sliding on mobilized, saturated sediments—real sloppy stuff. Those findings were an absolute affront to classical glaciology. Sliding along mud was just not attractive to the orthodoxy, and they confronted Don at conferences, but he stood his ground. And years later, the part of Antarctica he had studied was drilled. He was sitting in a galley at McMurdo at two thirty in the morning one day when a driller walked in, sat down at the table, and said, I have something for you.
He pulled a baggie out of his pocket. It was the mud!
What’s the porosity? asked Don.362
Forty percent!
And the pressure?
One hundred kilopascals!
It was exactly as Don had predicted. Poetically, the Illinois till plains that so bored him all his life were created by mud on which glaciers glided. Blankenship grew up on the sort of mud that he discovered in West Antarctica beneath fast-flowing ice streams.
He spent the next twenty-five years studying how the geology of Antarctica controlled the evolution of its ice. He did this concurrently with his Europa work, and by the time he was uncorking a bottle at Il Fornaio, he and his team at the University of Texas at Austin had completed the geophysical mapping of most of the continent through a project he founded called ICECAP. He was ready to get to work on Europa as well. His instruments could see through kilometers and kilometers of ice on Earth, and they could do the same at Europa to reveal the secrets of the ice-ocean interface—a key to understanding habitability. If Earth was any indication, if Europa’s ocean floor was populated, the ice-ocean interface would be populated as well. Though the ice on Antarctica’s surface was paper white, the underside over water was pretty gnarly, rich in biology, coated in brown webs of algae—entire ecosystems of microorganisms, really—with fish swimming up, nibbling away. Europa’s ice might be no different.
But the cost. An orbiter radar would have to be radiation hardened, running about a million dollars per chip to build. And radars were data intensive, which meant a lot of chips. Not so on a multiple flyby mission, however. You wouldn’t have to soak in thermonuclear bathwater; you could dip in and out and do so for years. So it was clear which of the two spacecraft the radar belonged on. And by removing the pricey radar from the small orbiter, that spacecraft was suddenly a bargain!
It was a breakthrough—not technical, scientific, or even conceptual—but psychological. That night, there was a clear severing of the past, and the next day, back astride Saint Gabe, the science definition team of this Europa habitability mission started parceling the thing out. Bob literally drew a line on a whiteboard, and on one side scrawled ORBITER and on the other, MULTIPLE FLYBY, and they worked it through, wrote which instrument fit better on each side. The payload practically split itself in half. Each scientific instrument just swooned naturally to the left or right, and with the division, Bob ballparked prices in his head. Billions of dollars had tumbled away from the price tag overnight.
The next day, he emailed Ron Greeley with breathless delight:
The Europa SDT just had its first meeting, which resulted in a radically new approach toward achieving the Europa science objectives and goal. Even the floor (“core”) Europa payload that we have discussed in the past cannot be done cheaply. But after several presentations and much discussion on what can and cannot be done from flybys, it became clear that the floor payload splits itself based on what needs to be in orbit, and what could be done via flybys. By splitting the payload into 2 different mission elements, flyby and orbiter, we are now optimistic that each might be done for ~1.5 to 2 B$. We would recommend that the less expensive option go first. It seems probable that this would be the orbital element, which we hope will fit into a $1.5B cost.363
He went on to detail what would do what, and where, and who would be doing it, and ended the note by saying, “Let’s stay in touch as this idea develops.”
The Jupiter Europa Orbiter—indeed, the very notion of any outer planets flagship mission—was dead. But the possibility of actually going to Europa? It suddenly seemed as alive as any mission in NASA’s portfolio.