Chasing New Horizons Read online

  For Pluto’s two new moons, Alan, Hal, and the entire discovery team settled on the names “Nix” and “Hydra.” In mythology Nix is the Greek goddess of darkness, and the mother of Charon. Hydra is a nine-headed underworld serpent (appropriate for a moon of the ninth planet). Nix and Hydra are fine names from ancient mythology, and they dovetailed well with the underworld theme from which Pluto and Charon had been named, but there was something more in these particular names that clinched them: like the P and L that honored Percival Lowell in the name “Pluto,” Nix and Hydra began with an N and an H, and therefore could also be used to honor New Horizons, which had provided the reason to search for them in the first place.

  A NIGHT FLIGHT TO THE CAPE

  When all the spacecraft environmental testing at Goddard Space Flight Center was complete, it was time to ship New Horizons to Florida for launch. The project had the choice of flying the spacecraft down on a military cargo transport, or driving it over one thousand miles in an environmentally controlled truck, surrounded by a convoy of support vehicles. The team decided flying would be safer. So, late on the night of September 24, the world’s first and only spacecraft charged with the exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt was flown from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, DC, to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center launch site at Cape Canaveral. Alan and Glen and almost twenty spacecraft engineers and technicians who would be spending the next several months in Florida preparing their bird for launch flew down with it. Alan has vivid memories of that night flight to Florida:

  I remember flying down the eastern seaboard in that big Air National Guard C-17, thinking, “The next time the spacecraft is at this altitude it’s going to be ‘hauling the mail’ spaceward on its Atlas, headed for orbit.”

  From the panoramic windows of the C-17 cockpit, where the crew let me ride, I remember seeing the lights of cities and shorelines painting the entire eastern seaboard, and then eventually Florida ahead. As we began the landing approach, you could see the launch complex and NASA’s huge Vehicle Assembly Building and the three-mile-long shuttle landing strip that we were aiming for.

  Once we landed, we taxied over to where various NASA people were waiting to receive New Horizons with an environmentally controlled truck. The truck would take New Horizons to its Florida clean-room home, where it would be prepared for launch as the team made final tests, fueling operations, and spin balancing.

  The air inside the C-17 was of course air-conditioned but outside at the Cape, even in late September at two in the morning, the Florida air was hot and muggy. When the back cargo door of the C-17 opened, the cool aircraft air met the dense, warm Florida air, and created an instant, surreal fog, billowing out the back of the airplane. No one could have designed a more dramatic effect, even if this had been in a movie.

  After the spacecraft was taken out of the C-17 and placed aboard its truck, Alan went back to grab his things and then descended the crew stairs. NASA’s Chuck Tatro, the New Horizons launch-site manager, was there at the bottom of the stairs. As Alan stepped onto the tarmac, Chuck put his hand out to shake Alan’s and said, “Dr. Stern, welcome to the launch site.” The words hit Alan like a ton of bricks. Alan:

  After all these years, from 1989 to 2005, we really, finally had a Pluto spacecraft at its launch site. We were really about to fly across the solar system and explore the farthest worlds in history. The reality of the impending launch and decade-long flight across the solar system hit me when Chuck said, “It literally sent a shiver up my spine!”

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  A PRAYER BEFORE YOU GO

  LUCKY 13

  With their spacecraft at the Cape, the New Horizons contingent sent to Florida began a frenzied ten-week schedule of final spacecraft testing and launch preparations. Given the intensive work schedule, Alan and Glen took temporary apartments in Cape Canaveral for that whole period, as did others from APL and SwRI.

  All the activity at the Cape was leading up to their single, three-week launch window coming up in January 2006, when Earth, Jupiter, and Pluto, all moving along in their orbits, would be arranged in just the right way to allow the Atlas to put New Horizons on its fast-paced, 9.5-year trajectory to Pluto. If they missed that twenty-one-day window in January, they would have to face a 2007 launch on the much riskier, fourteen-year-long journey that had no Jupiter flyby.

  In mid-December, as spacecraft launch preparations were winding down and plans were being made to put New Horizons atop its Atlas launcher, Chuck Tatro came to Alan with a request. “We’re on target to launch on the very first day of the launch window,” he said, “but we want to give the team a few days off at Christmas and a couple more days at New Years. So we think you should give up five days of the launch window for that.” Knowing the risks of not launching by January, and hence the risks of this decision, Alan asked to see the statistics on previous Atlas launches and how often they flew within what would now be only a 16-day window. Alan recalls the conversation:

  Tatro looked me in the eye and said, “I know this isn’t an easy call for you, but we are going to make the launch window, Dr. Stern. We know how to do this, and the risk of giving up these five days is low. In fact, we think the risk of not giving the time up, of not giving the launch crew rest and the morale boost of time with their families at the holidays, is greater than letting the five days go.”

  I knew how hard the launch team had been working, and I knew that the launch record showed the Atlas team rarely took more than a week, even with weather delays, to get launched once the rocket was ready to roll to the pad. So I made my decision and agreed to give the team time away for the holidays.

  Done deal. But just as the team came back from those holidays at the first of the new year, now barely two weeks from the opening of the launch window, Tatro came to Alan again, with a detailed schedule for the dozens of steps still remaining to prepare New Horizons and its launcher for its countdown. Alan was familiar with the task flow, but now it was laid out on a calendar with actual dates for every step across the first half of January.

  Tatro told Alan, “There’s one thing we want to ask you about. If you look at this schedule, the day that we fuel the spacecraft with plutonium and it becomes electrically alive in its final flight configuration is Friday the 13th. This may sound a little silly, but does that make you uncomfortable?” Alan:

  They literally said, “We can fuel the RTG a day later, on Saturday the 14th, if you prefer, and we’ll even pay the overtime for it. We just don’t want you worried at launch or as you fly it to Pluto that the spacecraft went live on Friday the 13th.” The first thing that came to my mind was a boyhood memory of Apollo 13, and how some people then had thought they should never have given the mission the number 13, or launched it at 13:13 on the clock in Houston.

  But then I reminded myself: I’m a scientist. Superstitions about Friday the 13th are completely irrational. So I decided that fueling on the 13th was preferable to giving up another precious day of launch window and that instead we would make Friday the 13th a rallying cry for the project. “From now on,” I told myself, “every Friday the 13th we’re going to celebrate the day as both the birth of New Horizons and a victory for rational thinking.” I looked over at Chuck and said, “Oh, to hell with Friday the 13th. Fuel that bastard. Then let’s light up that Atlas of yours and go fly!”

  “BALLSIEST THING I’D EVER SEEN”

  The final authorization to roll any NASA mission to its launch pad depends upon a launch approval document called a COFR: the Certificate of Flight Readiness. All the key NASA stakeholders for the flight have to sign it, certifying that the spacecraft and the launch vehicle and the spacecraft and the mission control and tracking network—all the elements of the mission—are ready to fly. Glen would sign for APL, and Alan would sign it as mission PI. About a dozen other key managers from Lockheed, Boeing, the Department of Energy, and NASA would also sign.

  The signing of a COFR isn’t just a ceremony. It’s the final step in a long, careful, and
technically complex launch-readiness process NASA conducts to make sure that every element of the project is ready. Literally thousands of items have to get checked and verified that they are ready in order for the various signatories to be authorized to sign the COFR.

  When the New Horizons COFR authorization process began in the late summer of 2005, there was one issue about the launch vehicle that reared its head. It stemmed from an incident the previous summer at the Atlas V factory. Lockheed Martin had been testing a non-flight liquid-oxygen tank to verify it would hold pressure even beyond its flight design limit. To do this, the Lockheed team deliberately over-pressurized the tank to see if it would hold. But the tank burst, leading to a massive engineering investigation to determine why the proof tank failed.

  The investigation lasted for months, examining every aspect of the proof tank’s design, materials, manufacturing history, and handling. No stone was too small to turn over, right down to looking at the microscopic structure of the materials the tank was made of, testing hundreds of samples of that material, analyzing their strengths, searching for any weaknesses to explain the burst that shouldn’t have been.

  The investigation stretched on for the remainder of 2005. Of course, it had nothing specifically to do with the Atlas meant for New Horizons—its tank had passed every test—but with a plutonium-filled RTG aboard, the proof tank failure meant that New Horizons could not launch unless the investigation proved that cause had no relation to the materials, parts, or assembly processes of the Atlas that would fly New Horizons.

  The issue came to a head in a NASA Headquarters meeting the first week of 2006, barely a week before the launch window opened. Called a Program Management Council (PMC), this high-stakes meeting had more than a hundred executives, managers, and technical experts in the room when the final decision was to be made. Ultimately, it would be up to then NASA administrator Mike Griffin—a brilliant, savvy, but then almost brand-new NASA boss—to make the call.

  Much was riding on Griffin’s decision. If something went wrong during launch, it would doom not only New Horizons and the possibility of exploring Pluto, but it might well make it almost impossible to launch future nuclear missions in general. An accident on New Horizons could, in effect, doom the future exploration of the outer solar system.

  PMC meetings are normally for official NASA personnel only. But Alan felt that as PI of the mission he should be there to hear the arguments and to weigh in himself—to give his own “go” or “no go”—so he appealed directly to Griffin and was given permission to attend.

  In that PMC, some made the case why New Horizons should launch, others made the counterargument. There were technical presentations and counter-presentations that went on, literally, for hours. The main case, however, was prosecuted by the chief engineer of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, James Wood. Wood, a bespectacled, sure-footed, mid-career rocket man, was known for doing his homework and checking it twice (maybe even three times). Wood made a detailed case that the proof tank anomaly was completely unrelated to the tank New Horizons was flying, and he recommended launch. Griffin and his senior NASA Headquarters lieutenants asked dozens of questions, probing every aspect of the case Wood made. When Wood and the other engineers had finished their presentations, and Griffin and his staff had finished asking all their questions, Alan stood up. From what he’d heard, both as a former aerospace engineer himself and as the man who had to face the consequences of whatever outcome the meeting yielded, he had concluded from Wood’s presentation that New Horizons was not at risk to fly, but that it was definitely at risk if the launch was delayed to 2007 while more studies of the tank rupture took place. Convinced of the logic of Wood’s case, Alan addressed the room:

  I told them, “I just want to say, first, that for those of you who don’t know me, I have been involved in almost a dozen NASA mission launch decisions, so this isn’t my first rodeo. I also want you to know just how much is riding on this decision for us to launch this month.” Then I explained why, if we didn’t make the January Jupiter launch window, there wouldn’t be another like it for a decade, and that our only option would be to fly in 2007 on a long, slow 14-year flight to Pluto without a Jupiter gravity assist. I also pointed out that if we couldn’t launch in 2007, even the Atlas V 551 couldn’t get us to Pluto if it launched in 2008 or 2009, in fact not until 2014 or so. Then I carefully explained the much higher risk to the spacecraft of a 14-year flight time compared to a nine-year flight time, and I also noted the greater expense of both the yearlong delay in launch and the four-year delay in arrival time. Then I gave the reasons why we wanted to get to Pluto before the atmosphere froze out, which also argued for an earlier launch and arrival, and how if we arrived later there would also be less of the surface in sunlight to map. Finally, I closed, making it personal. I said, “I have put 17 years into this project, stretching back to 1989. It’s the NASA administrator’s decision, but as the mission PI, and as someone with a lot riding on this launch, I want you to know that based on the data, I have no qualms whatsoever about launching this Atlas as is.” Then I sat down. My case was made. A couple of people rubbed me on the shoulder in that kind of way that means “Nice job, but I hope you can handle whatever Griffin decides to do.”

  After Alan spoke, Griffin polled all of the major heads of NASA for their recommendations on whether the Atlas V tank issue was sufficiently settled for New Horizons to launch. Many voted to launch, but some voted against it, saying they had no solid reason to doubt the New Horizons Atlas, but they just didn’t want to take any chances. The seasoned head of NASA Launch Services, Steve Francois, responsible for all NASA rocket launches, voted to fly. So did NASA’s chief engineer, Rex Geveden, as did the head of planetary exploration at NASA, Andy Dantzler. But the head of NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, Bryan O’Connor, a former space shuttle commander voted not to launch.

  Next, Mary Cleave, another former astronaut and the head of all science missions at NASA, voted no. Alan: “I was thinking to myself, ‘Griffin can overrule these guys, but if he does, he’ll now be on record as going against both the head of safety and the head of science. If this launch doesn’t succeed, no matter what the reason, he’ll probably lose his job as NASA administrator and his career.’”

  Hal Weaver, who was also in the meeting, remembers feeling incredibly discouraged. Hal recalls, “I was getting pretty depressed. Of course you might expect the safety and mission assurance officer to vote it down, because his head will roll if something goes wrong if he had voted to launch. But the head of all science missions?”

  The last to vote was Griffin’s most trusted lieutenant, Bill Gerstenmaier, responsible for all NASA launches. Gerstenmaier voted to launch, explaining calmly and carefully why he thought that the proof tank–burst issue had been studied and analyzed thoroughly and that the analysis, presented by Wood, had clearly exonerated any risk for the New Horizons launch. He said that launching was the rational choice.

  Then it was Griffin’s turn. Speaking as the head of NASA, he stood up and gave a long closing argument to the room. The room was totally silent. Everyone knew that, with split opinions within Griffin’s executive team, it was up to him to make the final decision.

  Griffin reiterated that the burst of the proof tank had nothing specifically to do with the New Horizons launcher and that the flight safety record of the Atlas was perfect. He praised the analysis of the proof tank failure and laid out his own rationale for why the proof tank was unlikely to affect the rocket New Horizons was sitting on, which was not expected to see any tank pressures even close to the burst level. Griffin then pointed out that the probability of a launch failure was 2–3 percent on any launch, and that the risk associated with the tank was far lower, so the net effect of the oxygen-tank issue was only a small factor in the risk calculation. Then he reminded the room that every RTG was built to survive even a catastrophic launch vehicle accident and that, in fact, long ago just such an accident had occurred and RTGs had demonstr
ated that they do survive. Griffin’s logic was cold, rational, quantitative, and impeccable. It was devoid of emotion, as he carefully and thoroughly reviewed the facts, concluding that the risks related to the proof tank failure were demonstrably minimal and that the risks of waiting were almost certainly greater.

  Griffin concluded the meeting by overruling Cleave and O’Connor, and declaring that as NASA’s chief, he had concluded that the vehicle was safe to launch. He signed the COFR right there, in front of everyone and walked out of the room. Alan:

  It was the ballsiest thing I’d ever seen in my twenty-plus-yearlong career working NASA missions. It was literally like something in the movies. The NASA administrator just put his job on the line to overrule the head of safety and the head of science missions to give New Horizons permission to launch. Hal and I just looked at one another not quite believing the drama we’d just seen. Griffin proved both his spine and his spunk that day, and he became another hero of New Horizons.

  SAY A LITTLE PRAYER

  As launch week approached, people started to gather around the Cape by the hundreds, and then by the thousands. In addition to the engineers, managers, launch staff, scientists, and others directly involved with the mission, there was a growing army of journalists, documentarians, students, and teachers, as well as thousands of space fans and curious onlookers coming to view what promised to be a history-making launch. There wasn’t a hotel vacancy to be found within an hour’s drive of the Kennedy Space Center.