Ancient Mariners of Space

The two old-timers could have been perched on a park bench somewhere, chatting away about absent friends and golden times. Instead, they were seated side by side in an auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A NASA spacecraft was hurtling toward Jupiter. It was, in a certain sense, their spacecraft.

“Well, we’re here,” the one with the thin gray beard said.

“Finally,” said the other. “I was just thinking to myself about all that it took to get here.”

“A lot of work.”

“I’m glad I bumped into you. You know, you don’t see a lot of people around anymore who worked on this.”

He had worked for years on solid rockets and, for this Galileo mission, on the explosive bolts used to jettison a small probe away from the main spacecraft. Now he’s assigned to the safety office.

“I still see a few,” the bearded one said. “I do a little consulting once a week.”

“Do you ever see. . . ?” The other rattled off several names of old colleagues.

One or two were still around.

They tilted their heads toward one another, straining to hear over the din of hundreds of similar reunions. On momentous days in a NASA mission, those who worked on the project are invited back to bask in the glory. This day, last Thursday, was as momentous as they come for Galileo. Within an hour, an effort that consumed 20 years, $1.2 billion and the efforts of 10,000 engineers and scientists would come to fruition. Or it would fail.

On a large screen upfront, a horizontal line of yellow was inching across a purple background. At the designated moment, the data line was supposed to slice down at an angle. This would signify that Galileo’s main rocket had begun firing to maneuver the craft into orbit, one of the mission’s most crucial moments.

“Exciting, huh?” said the bearded man, a former project trouble-shooter, now retired. He wore a dark suit, no tie and, inevitably, clashing brown Hush Puppies--a classic look at JPL, home of some of America’s best minds and, belovedly, most awkward dressers.

“It’s funny,” agreed the bolts man. “My stuff is all gone from this one. I haven’t been involved since the launch in ’89. But still I am feeling butterflies.”

They compared resumes. Together this pair represented 62 years of JPL experience.

“I worked on Viking,” said one. “Mariner. Viking in ’75. Voyager. Magellan. Ulysses. Galileo.”

“Let’s see,” said the other. “I started in Mariner, and then I went to Voyager, no Viking, and then Voyager. . . .”

They sat silently for a moment, watching the screen, reflecting. So many missions, so many planets.

“That was a golden era,” said the trouble-shooter.

“Yes,” said the other, “it sure was.”

If they seemed a bit wistful, they were not alone. All over JPL on Thursday, a persistent undercurrent of melancholy, even unease, could be detected. Like so many other institutions, NASA is under the spell of the downsizers. At JPL there have been hundreds upon hundreds of layoffs, and the process has only begun. With the scaling back of payroll has come a companion call to scale back--or at least adapt--the reach of science. After Galileo will come the big Cassini mission to Saturn, and that will be it for, if you will, the big ships of JPL.

“What you are seeing today,” said one old NASA hand, “is one of the last of the Queen Marys.”

NASA’s administrator, a former aerospace executive named Daniel Goldin, was on hand at JPL on Thursday, seizing the moment to pound away at his new vision for unmanned flight: More launches, but with smaller, less expensive craft engaged in what he called “small science.” Or, as the author of the Queen Mary analogy put it, “motorboats.”

Goldin’s new order at least makes political sense, given the raging American antipathy toward federal government spending on anything. Nonetheless, any new way of doing business inevitably will be received as criticism by anyone who did business the old way, like these two ancient mariners seated in the auditorium.

“This used to be a great place to work,” one said, “and I hope,” a careful addition, “it still is.”

“We had quite a team here,” said the other. “Now there’s a new set of people getting started. We don’t know a lot of the things they know.” (Pause.) “I guess.”

And so maybe there was a little extra edge to the applause that came when the line at last took its dip. The rocket had fired. Jupiter had been reached, the old-fashioned way, and soon data would come flying back across a divide of hundreds of millions of miles--a miracle. The two ancient mariners applauded, too, and then they slipped away, missing one last speech from Goldin about antiquated approaches and a new day coming and so forth.