Once-Jinxed Galileo Probe a Triumph for Its Creators

Hard of hearing and with a failing memory, an old warrior that had been all but given up for dead begins its greatest battle Thursday. The Galileo spacecraft has risen from its own ashes once again to begin a historic encounter with Jupiter.

Much will be said in the weeks ahead about this amazing piece of hardware as it strips away the secrets of the gas giant, but that is only part of the story. Over the years, scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena have watched as their careers rose and fell with the fate of the $1.5-billion project.

There have been many times when all their efforts appeared to have been for nothing. That was particularly true after the space shuttle Challenger exploded: New launch regulations prohibited the use of the upper stage rockets that were to have carried Galileo from the shuttle’s cargo bay to Jupiter.

The wizards at JPL found themselves with a dandy spacecraft and no way to launch it.

“That was really a low spot for the project,” Ed Stone, the articulate director of JPL, told me Tuesday. But they soon devised a way to get there by starting off in the wrong direction, launching Galileo toward the inner solar system instead of its outer reaches. The spacecraft used the gravity of Venus to turn itself around, and then made two slingshot passes by Earth to hurl itself toward Jupiter.

The feat was so amazing that the folks at JPL who figured out how to do it have been upstaged by the robot they created. I remember sitting in the offices of people like Clayne Yeates and James Dunne, Ken Severy and John Zipse as they labored to bail Galileo out of the crises that seemed to attack it on a regular basis after its launch in 1989. Chances are you’ve never heard their names, or if you had, you’d long since forgotten them.

None of those four will be around for the celebrations at JPL on Thursday. All died during the long, tortuous journey to Jupiter.

Stone says at least a dozen others outside JPL but intimately involved with the project have also died. And 80 veterans of Galileo have retired from the Pasadena lab, unable to last long enough to take part in the final chapter of this agonizing saga.

In some ways, it would have been easier a long time ago to give up on Galileo. There was serious talk at NASA headquarters of killing the program after the Challenger disaster.

Even at JPL, the feelings were mixed. Mission planners knew the long delays meant the spacecraft was growing obsolete as it waited for its launch, but they just couldn’t let go. Projects like Galileo that involve so many lives over such a long period of time seem to take on a life of their own. They become somewhat humanized, more like children than hardware, and their originators watch over them like zealous parents.

Mission planners convinced Washington to keep their baby alive, despite some deep misgivings of their own. And their fears proved justified when the craft’s primary antenna failed to open, jeopardizing the entire mission. They figured out how to get around that problem too, by using a secondary antenna, and Stone believes about 70% of the original mission will still be accomplished by the crippled spacecraft.

So in the end it sounds like a great success story, but that’s not all there is to it.

No matter how successful the mission turns out to be, there will always be a downside to Galileo. It became one of those missions, like the launch of the flawed Hubble space telescope, that cooled the fires for space exploration in this country. NASA became associated with failure, not the great successes of an earlier era, and funding for space science has declined ever since.

That cannot be blamed entirely on Galileo or the Challenger or the Hubble or any other troubled mission. But they all played a part.

Yet the mere fact that Galileo has reached Jupiter at all is a triumph that should not be diminished. Not because it’s a great piece of hardware, because it isn’t, but because it is an extraterrestrial monument to people who wouldn’t give up on a grand dream of exploring the worlds that lie beyond our own.

It’s too bad they can’t all be there Thursday to see Galileo drop into orbit--hopefully--around Jupiter and begin a historic study of another planet. That is, after all, what they worked for all those years. As Stone puts it, “This is what it’s all about.”

Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com