The V.A. is Not O.K.

For the New Yorker, I look at how the Trump Administration’s actions are undermining the Department of Veterans Affairs, and its promise to fire 75,000 V.A. employees risks destroying the system. I interviewed current and former V.A. employees, as well as veterans affected. Here is a snippet:

On March 5, 2025, Samantha Crowder sat in a corner of her bedroom which she’d turned into a home office, staring in disbelief at a leaked memo. The chief of staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs, where she’d worked for nearly a decade, had notified agency leaders that the V.A. would “aggressively” shrink its footprint. In partnership with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the memo said, the V.A. would “identify and eliminate waste” and “reduce management and bureaucracy.” This apparently meant firing about eighty thousand of the agency’s four hundred and eighty thousand workers.

After that, Crowder told me, meetings frequently devolved into discussions about the looming cuts. Her office paused work on a project to speed up the process for granting treatment privileges to new V.A. doctors; hiring was frozen and a number of job offers for doctors had been rescinded, so there was no one to bring on board. (Even after the Trump Administration reversed course on the offers, some doctors declined them.) Meanwhile, a stream of executive orders were affecting federal workers. A return-to-office mandate felt, to Crowder, like an accusation that she wasn’t doing her job from home. The V.A. had hired many people specifically to be remote workers, and the agency was short on desks. One of her colleagues was assigned to the back room of a local post office, and another was placed in the break room of a courthouse.

Read the rest here.

Image credit: The New Yorker

Inside Trump and Musk's Takeover of NASA

The Trump administration is remaking NASA in its own image. Is that really the image we should take to the stars? My latest for The New Yorker takes you inside the DOGE raid on NASA headquarters. A snippet:

NASA headquarters, a bland stone office building that is currently owned by a Korean investment firm, is situated a few blocks southeast of the National Mall. Darren Bossie, the new White House liaison to NASA, arrived shortly after Trump’s Inauguration. Bossie was more or less unknown at the agency, but employees soon found his LinkedIn profile. He had spent four of the past seven years bouncing around conservative politics, with a stint as Trump’s White House liaison to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and had worked as a senior consultant for unnamed companies. For the bulk of his professional life, however—from 2006 to 2018—he had been an assistant manager at a Total Wine & More in Palm Beach County, Florida. “That didn’t seem very promising,” a senior NASA official told me.

Read the rest here.

Image credit: The New Yorker

The Woman Who Sent a Spacecraft to Europa

Over at The New Yorker, you can find my coverage of the launch of Europa Clipper, NASA’s flagship to the Jovian system, and the story of one of the scientists who’s spent her career making it happen. A snippet:

Just after noon on Monday, a SpaceX rocket stood on the same launch pad that once sent men to the moon. Hurricane Milton had recently ripped across Florida, whipping up winds of a hundred miles per hour in Cape Canaveral, but now the skies were a featureless blue. From a restricted viewing area not far away, Louise Prockter, a graceful scientist with sandy hair, glanced at a countdown clock and then back at the rocket, which carried her lifework. “Surreal,” she said softly. “This just doesn’t feel real.” There were three minutes until ignition.

Read the rest here.

Update: This morning, NPR’s 1A invited me on to discuss Europa, its ocean, the Clipper mission, and the origins of life. Thank you to host Rupert Allman for the fun conversation.

The Canary Box

For The New York Times, I tell the inside story of the desperate race to save NASA’s flagship mission to Jupiter’s ocean moon. A snippet:

People at NASA headquarters take deep breaths when the words “First Story” appear in their email. Late this spring, Curt Niebur, the lead scientist for flight programs, received such a message.

“You open that email right away,” Dr. Niebur said. “You read it, and then you reply, ‘Thank you for sharing,’ and then you bury your face in a pillow and you howl in terror.”

The matter prompting Dr. Niebur’s apprehension involved Europa Clipper, one of NASA’s most scientifically important missions. The agency’s science division created the “First Story” process to encourage science project staff members to communicate potentially bad news without fear of overreaction by leadership.

This news seemed exceptionally bad. If what Dr. Niebur was reading was true, Europa Clipper was cooked.

NASA had spent more than $5 billion on the planetary probe. It is the largest ever built — as big as a basketball court with its solar arrays extended. The mission’s job is to help scientists on Earth determine the potential habitability of Europa, the moon of Jupiter that is wrapped in a thick shell of ice, beneath which a warm ocean flows with twice as much saltwater as on Earth. Scientists believe it has all the chemical ingredients for alien life to have emerged.

In late May, Europa Clipper was set to be shipped to Florida to prepare for its October flight opportunity. If it missed its launch window, scientists would face a long wait for another shot — if the problem could even be solved.

Across NASA and its affiliate research labs, teams would soon find their summer dominated by a terrifying question: Was Europa Clipper doomed?

Read the rest here. (It will be on newsstands next Tuesday.)

Update: It is today’s “Great Read” —what an honor!

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Europa Clipper Imperiled

For the New York Times, I reveal details about a critical issue affecting Europa Clipper, NASA’s flagship mission to Jupiter’s ocean moon. From the story:

The equipment issue on the spacecraft could result in a lengthy delay of the mission, Europa Clipper, which NASA classifies as “flagship,” a designation for its most scientifically significant endeavors. Experts say that if the spacecraft launches in October, as scheduled, it may fall short of its scientific objective of assessing whether anything could live on Europa.

At issue is the ability of the transistors, the electric switches that are the building blocks of computer chips and other electronics, to resist the powerful radiation of the Jovian system.

You can read the rest here. And if this subject interests you, perhaps I can interest you in a book about the scientists who spent a decade convincing NASA to fly this mission.

A New Era of Moon Exploration

In my latest essay for The New Yorker, I explore why the moon is so busy these days, and what that means for life on Earth.

On February 22nd, a robotic lander named Odysseus touched down on the sun-washed highlands near the south pole of the moon. It was the first time since the Apollo 17 mission, fifty-two years ago, that an American spacecraft had landed gracefully on the lunar surface. And yet NASA hadn’t designed or built Odysseus; it was renting space onboard. Intuitive Machines, a relatively small aerospace firm based in Houston, was responsible for the lander, which launched atop a SpaceX rocket. The event was historic not just because it signalled a return to the moon but because it was the first time that a private company from any country had landed a spacecraft there. It won’t be the last: Odysseus marks the beginning of a new, relentless, and open-ended campaign of robotic and crewed lunar exploration. The program is called Artemis.

Read the rest here.

Earth's First Cookbook

My latest for the New Yorker was seven years in the making. I first covered the OSIRIS-REx mission when it launched in 2016, for the Week. The following year, I embedded with the team for the Earth gravity assist, and wrote about it for the Atlantic. In 2018, I was also with the team for the spacecraft’s arrival at the asteroid Bennu, which I covered for Scientific American. And now, for the New Yorker, the return of the sample to the Utah desert, and the opening of the capsule in Houston, Texas. It begins:

On a brisk day in February, 2004, Dante Lauretta, an assistant professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, got a call from Michael Drake, the head of the school’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “I have Lockheed Martin in my office,” Drake said. “They want to fly a spacecraft to an asteroid and bring back a sample. Are you in?”

Read the rest here.

What the Webb Will Show Us Next

For The New Yorker, I interviewed the astrophysicist Dr. Jane Rigby, senior project scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope. Here is a snippet:

What gaps in science do the J.W.S.T.’s unique capabilities fill?

J.W.S.T. works in the infrared. It was designed to see the light from the universe that is totally invisible to Hubble, which sees primarily in the optical and ultraviolet. About the “bluest” light that J.W.S.T. can see is the shade of red wine, and then it goes redder from there.

Because of the big bang, space is expanding—not just stuff in space but the fabric of space itself. And the light that we see from distant objects has actually been stretched by the expansion of the universe as well. That causes light from those distant objects to get stretched to longer wavelengths. It gets shifted to the red, to lower energies.

It’s just really cool that we can see almost to the end of the universe, right? We can do that because that light only travels so fast: the speed of light. We are studying galaxies whose light has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years. The universe is only about 13.8 billion years old! Those are the baby pictures of literally everything, and, in particular, of the baby galaxies that would have turned into mature galaxies like our Milky Way.

You can read the rest here.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

Wine Enthusiast Magazine Debut

In the June/July issue of Wine Enthusiast, I write about my time at the extraordinary, not-to-be-missed Big Sur Food & Wine Festival. Here is a snippet:

We would walk that morning on private coastal land fenced off from the public. The festival is famous for finding breathtaking vistas few have ever seen, and this one especially had everyone eager to get going. “I’ve lived here my whole life and never seen it,” said one anticipant attendee.

Thirsty though we were, no one complained about the delay, which somehow made the proceedings all the more charming—a dramatic pause before the big reveal. The festival is entirely volunteer run; every dime flows right back into the community. As such, despite the opulence of the gathering, all the good wine and meals prepared by a battalion of award-winning chefs, the entire weekend feels as though its planners are just barely one step ahead of every event, Indiana Jones-charging across a collapsing stone floor. Somehow, they manage to pull it off with panache.

Read the rest here, or pick up a copy at your local bookstore or newsstand.

Image Credit: David W. Brown, made available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Department of Survival

Image credit: The New Yorker

In a special digital issue of The New Yorker for the week of April 24, I have a story about NASA’s failure on the methane emission detection issue, and how NGOs have taken it on themselves to pick up the slack. A snippet:

When his phone rang, Berrien Moore III, the dean of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, was fumbling with his bow tie, preparing for a formal ceremony honoring a colleague. He glanced down at the number and recognized it as NASA headquarters. This was a bad sign, he thought. In Moore’s experience, bureaucrats never called after hours with good news.

Read the rest here.

Journey to Doomsday

In the November 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, I have a magazine cover story recounting my most recent expedition to Antarctica. Here is the opening:

I first saw our icebreaker, the RV Araon, when we were due to leave for Antarctica. The largest icebreakers are more than five hundred feet long, but the Araon was only the length of a football field; I wondered how it would handle the waves of the Southern Ocean, and how it would fare against the thick sea ice that guards the last wilderness on Earth. Its hull was painted a cheerful persimmon color, and its bow was conspicuously higher than the rest of the ship, with a curved shape suggesting that icebreakers don’t so much carve through ice as climb and crush, climb and crush. It was January 3rd, summer in New Zealand. In the heat, ice was a little hard to picture, let alone icebreaking.

Our voyage would last two months. We would spend a week or so sailing from Christchurch to the edge of Antarctica, then break through the pack ice of the Amundsen Sea, before arriving at Thwaites Glacier—one of the fastest-retreating on the continent. Our expedition was led by the Korea Polar Research Institute, which had brought some forty researchers from around the world to the Araon. They would have a month at Thwaites to conduct their respective research projects before the return trip began.

I had been “on the ice,” as Antarctic explorers say, once before, in 2019, while researching a book. There’s no room for passive observers on the most remote expeditions, and so, on that trip and this one, I’d signed on as a field-research associate, sponsored by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation, an Earth-science nonprofit. For the second time, I would be working alongside Jamin Greenbaum, a forty-two-year-old scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego. We’d be hurling torpedo-shaped probes from a helicopter into cracks in the ice, with the aim of studying the warm ocean water that is melting Thwaites from below.

We had successfully placed sensors in the water during our first expedition, on the eastern side of the continent, throwing them from the back of a refurbished cargo plane from the Second World War. We weren’t sure we could repeat this feat. Weather on Thwaites is notoriously hostile, and, because dense cloud cover makes satellite reconnaissance virtually impossible, we wouldn’t be able to identify promising fissures until we were flying over the ice. Greenbaum’s style of adventure is less romantic than world-weary. “Antarctica occasionally lets you pull something off,” he told me. “But not often.”

You can read the complete story online here.

The Asteroid Killer

For The New Yorker, I write about NASA’s efforts to stave off doomsday from above.

On the evening of September 26th, Elena Adams, the lead engineer for NASA’s asteroid-smashing DART spacecraft, peered at the data streaming to her computer console in mission control, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Maryland. Some forty other engineers were crammed into the room with her, sitting at rows of similar stations or gazing at large telemetry displays mounted on walls emblazoned with NASA heraldry. The DART spacecraft was seven million miles from Earth; after charting a ten-month, hundred-and-one-million-mile course around the sun, it had squared up for its terminal run against an asteroid called Dimorphos. If all went according to plan, DART would collide head on with Dimorphos at fourteen thousand miles an hour, fundamentally deforming the asteroid and changing its orbit. For the first time in more than sixty years of spaceflight, our species would be not just exploring the solar system but rearranging it.

Read the rest here.

The Drop

For over a year now, I have written for The Drop, an online magazine edited by the inimitable Felicity Carter for Pix.wine. All good things come to an end, however, and despite the efforts of the best wine writers in the business, The Drop has published its final issue.

I owe more to Felicity than I can express in a mere blog post. She is not only the best editor in the wine business, but one of the best in all of publishing. If I wrote anything of quality for the The Drop, it was because of her deft talents with the blue pencil.

Below are a few stories I wrote for The Drop that I believe turned out quite well. I hope you enjoy them.

A Wine Tasting at the End of the World

I was there to research my next book, part of an expedition led by the South Korean government. But because space on $100,000 per-day expeditions is too precious to waste on writers, I was officially with the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, and one-half of a two-man team from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Our project, led by geophysicist Dr. Jamin Greenbaum, was to take readings of water temperatures, salinity, and currents beneath the glacier to better understand how the ocean is eating Antarctica from below.

I was also there as a smuggler.

Deep in my duffel bag were two bottles of wine. Before boarding, I had spent two weeks quarantined in a New Zealand hotel, conspiring with The Drop to drink wine in Antarctica and to write about it. I would do so no matter the cost.

Porch Wine After the Storm in New Orleans

After Hurricane Ida obliterated the New Orleans power grid earlier this year, it took about two days to accept the reality of the situation, and after that, things weren’t quite so grim. New Orleans is a subtropical city. Post-Ida, temperatures reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day with 97% humidity and stagnant winds overall. At night, it was like being slow-roasted. We knew only that electricity would be out for weeks, and maybe months.

Wine helped, in ways it could only help here, in one of the great wine cities of the United States.

On that second day, not long after 9 a.m., I brought to the balcony of my Prytania Street apartment a 2014 Burgundy from Jean-Jacques Girard, set out my best stemware, applied key to cork, and began to pour. It wasn’t my first bottle since Ida’s arrival, but now, with the rain stopped and cell service down, life was on pause. Wine was the order of the day.

5 Life-Changing Wines from Rex Pickett, the Author of Sideways

Rex Pickett wrote a novel from his heart, “Sideways.”

Everybody hated it.

It was inappropriately personal, said one. Another advised him to burn it. One editor asked why he even bothered submitting it. In all, Pickett received over 230 rejection letters. When it finally sold, it was for an insulting $5,000 — and the publisher acted like they were doing him a favor.

The story follows aspiring writer Miles, and his best friend Jack, on a road trip through Santa Ynez wine country in California. Jack is engaged, and this is a celebration of sorts. For Miles, a devoted Pinot Noir drinker, it is a journey of self-discovery.

And yet, it changed the wine world.

If the site goes down, I will republish my work here, and hopefully, elsewhere. As it stands, however, The Drop is dead. Long live The Drop.

Presenting the Paperback Cover!

I am thrilled and honored to present the cover for the paperback edition of THE MISSION, which lands in bookstores on January 25, 2022! It is now available for pre-order at your local indie bookstore, or on Amazon.

NPR Interviews, and Select Others

Over the last few weeks, I’ve done scores of interviews for THE MISSION. Here are a few of my favorite, though there were many, many more, and I will add them as I find them.

NPR 1A, hosted by Jennifer White on National Public Radio. We discussed THE MISSION, Mars and Europa, creative nonfiction and literature, and a second Genesis (third, if we count the band) in our solar system. Jennifer is masterful—brilliant and quick-witted, asking one informed question and follow-up after another. Speaking with her was the thrill of a lifetime.

NPR Conversations, hosted by Dan Skinner on National Public Radio. We talk Europa, creative nonfiction, human exploration of Mars, and the politics of spaceflight. Dan is a first-rate interviewer and asked probing, lettered questions. It was an honor to join him and I hope to do so again very soon. What a pleasure this was.

Scientific American, interviewed by my friend, the inimitable author Lee Billings, wherein we discuss the state of planetary science, Mars, the future, and writing books about all this stuff.

Houston Chronicle, interviewed by Andrew Dansby, in which we discuss building tension into stories, writing with a large cast of characters, recurring motifs in a narrative, and how I (hopefully!) pulled all those things off.

Universe Today, interviewed by Fraser Cain, probably the best space blogger in the business, and one of the friendliest and most generous people I’ve ever met. (Embedded above!)

The Mission

Two months ago, my book, THE MISSION, hit bookstores in the United States. This week, it was released in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. This book is the culmination of my life’s work. Seven years of my life went into it, and I can honestly say that every single word in its pages is literally the best I could do. And I am very proud to report that the response has been incredible. It was a book of the month for The Wall Street Journal and BBC Science Focus. In addition, here is a roundup of the big national reviews of my book that I’ve seen so far. If you find others, please let me know!

• “An enthusiastic account of an interplanetary probe to a distant moon. ... NASA continues to accomplish great feats, and more are in the offing, including this book’s subject: the 2024 launch of a multibillion-dollar spacecraft to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. ... Brown engagingly describes the cutthroat NASA political landscape. ... A delightful slice of NASA life.” — Kirkus (STARRED review)

• “Brown brings to vivid life the 17-year effort to put together a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. … Brown skillfully braids biography, science, obsession, and accounts of bureaucracy-wrangling into this mesmerizing tale of “good, bare-fisted science.” Salted with pop culture references and humor, Brown’s fascinating outing will entertain anyone curious about space exploration.” — Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)

• "Scientists believe that any extraterrestrial life in our solar system would most likely be found on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. This book chronicles the work of a tenacious team of researchers who have spent decades investigating that possibility, despite obstacles both bureaucratic (NASA’s long-standing preoccupation with Mars) and physical: Europa lies within a 'pulsing, rippling' belt of radiation and is covered by an ice shell 'kilometers thicker than any hole ever drilled on earth.'" — The New Yorker (OH MY GOD I RECEIVED A NOTICE IN THE NEW YORKER)

• “Brown is a nimble, gifted writer, downright Dickensian in his pointed descriptions and irreverent humor… Brown’s language drew me in to the world of interplanetary science and made me a part of it. The Europa Clipper mission is scheduled to launch in 2024 and, thanks to The Mission, I will be looking up, dreaming of Europa’s oceans, and those plumes, and waiting for news of what we find there.” — Air Mail

• “Brown leaves no door closed as he covers the science, logistics, personalities, and politics of this extraordinary NASA mission. His extensively researched, humorous, raucous, dramatic, and pop-culture-and science-fiction-laced immersion in planetary science will have readers hanging on every word.” — Booklist

• “This inspiring story provides a look into some of the characteristics needed to make change in a large industrial complex. Extensive notes are provided for further research. … An engaging read for all, especially for anyone curious about the details of space exploration.” — Library Journal

• Brown spent seven years interviewing these folks, and it shows in the way he vividly captures the challenges, triumphs and disappointments they have confronted, including the 20 years it took to convince NASA to sanction Europa Clipper. … Brown’s experience writing for publications such as The Atlantic, Scientific American and Smithsonian also shines through as he provides context about the vast distances involved in space travel and explains the hardcore science in layman’s terms while adding a humorous tone. He writes with descriptive prose, such as when he coins Sun’s beginning as ‘a swelling union of dust and hydrogen . . . its rapacious core inhaling everything available.’ Combining science and technology with the emotional human experience, The Mission is a fresh look at the future of space exploration.” — Bookpage

• “This book cannot answer the question of what—if anything—lurks in Europa's dark abyss, but it masterfully reveals with remarkable clarity what lies within the hearts of the men and women determined to find out.” — Scientific American

• “The Mission is fascinating. … Poetic.” — The Times

• “The Mission reads almost like a novel. Brown immersed himself in the lives of his characters and their work, coming away from his research with a richly realized story about fascinating characters." — The Houston Chronicle

• “Written in a smooth, fluid style that offers a tip of the hat to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, this beautiful book is a gem of an introduction to our Solar System and how, over decades, human minds and robotic spacecraft have learned more about it. … Brown’s prose is refreshing and demonstrates his credentials as a superb wordsmith, handling complex issues of science, technology and politics with stylistic flair.” — BBC (5 stars out of 5)

• “This is an exceptionally absorbing and thrilling work, thanks to the narrative skills of its author and his various inspired choices. … Even when a story is exciting and gripping, you need a good narrator to translate it into writing, and this is what you get here. The spirited style of Brown balances levity and drama skillfully, and keeps the attention of the reader throughout the book without losing the thread. … The story up to here is worth being told, and The Mission does it masterfully.” — Nature Astronomy

Thank you to all of the critics who spent their columns writing about my book, and to all of the readers who traded their time and hard-earned money to take part in this journey. It means more than I can ever say. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The Moon is Not Enough

I was very proud to write my first essay for the Wall Street Journal—the cover story for the weekend review. In it I call for NASA to drop the moon element of the Artemis program and go directly to Mars. The short, short version is this: Everything NASA would develop for the moon would have to be re-developed entirely for Mars; there is virtually no technological overlap. If we are going to start from zero anyway, why not go with the more ambitious, long-term self-sustaining target?

A snippet:

The idea of yoking the two destinations together may be politically appealing, but fiscal reality suggests that it will be one or the other, the moon or Mars. Congresses and presidents have often rewarded NASA’s astounding achievements with punishing budget cuts. The Apollo program was arguably the greatest engineering and exploration feat in human history, but the U.S. government treated its final missions as the end of a public works project; little was done to build on its success and hard-won institutional knowledge. At the height of Apollo’s development in 1966, NASA accounted for 6.6% of federal discretionary spending. Today, that figure is about 1.6%, a figure that has barely risen to accommodate the current lunar aspirations, let alone the exploration of another planetary system in our lifetimes.

Why shift gears and make Mars the priority? NASA estimates that just landing on the moon again—not building a base there—will cost $30 billion and says that lessons learned on the moon can be applied to future Mars plans. Broadly speaking, this is true, in the way that Antarctica and the Mojave are both deserts, and survival skills cultivated in one might help in the other. But the tools necessary to do anything useful in the two environments are very different and require, for the most part, very different technologies—including, crucially, an entirely different landing vehicle to navigate the Martian atmosphere.

Read the rest here.

How We Discovered Water on the Moon

She was on the phone with Paul Lucey, then her dissertation advisor at the University of Hawaii, when she began processing it and realized what she was seeing. “Oh my God,” she said. She screamed. “You’re not going to believe this! There it is. It’s so obvious!”

—From my New Yorker story of how a young, brilliant scientist discovered molecular water on the moon, and why it matters. Read it here.

(image credit: addy1969)

Mars Fatigue, and What’s Next

In the New York Times last week, author Rebecca Boyle and I wrote a colloquium about the dominance of the Mars program in planetary science and what worlds are neglected as a result. Wrote Rebecca:

Even in other countries, Venus doesn’t get the attention that other worlds do. Dr. Byrne told me he attended a meeting in Moscow in October focused on future Venus missions, including a beefed-up, modern version of the Soviet Venera lander, so far the only spacecraft that has survived on the Venusian surface (the last one, Venera 12, lasted 110 minutes). Only two Russian geologists turned up to the meeting.

“There isn’t a tradition among young Russian scientists to do Venus, same as here,” he said. “There hasn’t been much of an effective selling of Venus. It’s being subsumed by Mars. And people who were funded for Venus have, with very few exceptions, gone away” to retirement or other projects, he said.

Moreover, we discuss the benefits and consequences of an aggressive Mars strategy, and look at what is next now that the Perseverance rover has launched. You can find the piece here.

The New Yorker

This story for The New Yorker was almost a year in the making. In it, I offer an insider account of of the fabled mission development teams at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Team X and the A-Team, and tell the story of the 2019 Planetary Science Summer Seminar, the NASA “bootcamp” for planetary scientists who wish to learn how to plan missions to other worlds. A snippet:

… Two years later, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, an astronautical engineer named Randii Wessen stood before a wall-sized whiteboard in a room called Left Field. Facing him were eighteen researchers—planetary scientists, astrophysicists, engineers—most in their mid-twenties, all graduate students or postdocs. Bald, bearded, and trim at sixty-one, Wessen worked on the Voyager and Cassini space probes. He is now the lead study architect of J.P.L.’s so-called A-Team—a group in charge of early space-mission concept planning at the lab’s Innovation Foundry. (The team is named both for the discipline of mission architecture and for the nineteen-eighties TV show about a crack team of do-gooding mercenaries.) No two of the hundreds of thousands of identified objects in the solar system are exactly alike; each must be explored according to its own characteristics. Successful missions, therefore, emerge from the spot where the proved and the fantastic intersect. The best way to explore Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon, could be an orbiter, but it could also be a lava boat. Often, these so-crazy-they-might-work solutions begin on Wessen’s whiteboards.

Read the rest here.