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Edward Stone with a model of a Voyager spacecraft in 1980. Caltech Archives
The Lives They Lived
Edward Stone
B. 1936
To run a scientific expedition that lasts for decades, it takes more than great engineers — it takes a great manager.
By Jon Gertner, New York Times Magazine (NYTimes.com)
In 1972, Edward Stone was working as a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology when he was asked to become the lead scientist for a new, hugely ambitious NASA mission to the solar system’s outer planets. The mission involved two identical ships to be launched in 1977 on a trajectory to Jupiter and Saturn; after that, one ship might also go on to Uranus and Neptune. Eleven different teams would be responsible for the 11 science instruments on each spacecraft. Though Stone’s specialty was cosmic rays, the subatomic particles that emanate from exploding stars, his main job would be to manage a potentially unruly scientific corps of nearly 100 people.
Internal tensions are inevitable on a big space project. A ship might require a certain flight path or orientation, for instance, to ensure optimal viewing conditions for its cameras, but at the expense of some other scientific reading (an ultraviolet sensor, say). With the probes swooping past planets at upward of 30,000 miles per hour, observation opportunities would be brief, the trade-offs unpleasant. What Stone came to realize, he later told an oral historian of Voyager, as the project eventually came to be known, is that “if you decide to do this versus that, because you can’t do both, you’re basically deciding that this team gets to make a discovery and that one doesn’t.”
Stone’s first demonstration of organizational acumen came during an early meeting of the science team. His sharp intellect — “Whenever I talked to him,” his colleague Alan Cummings recalls, “I felt like I was talking to the smartest person I’d ever met” — did not preclude a sense of humility. He was, according to his daughter Janet Stone, “a true lifelong learner” who could devote extraordinary amounts of time to anything necessary for his job. Warren Keller, from NASA headquarters, once said that at the first meeting, when each of the scientists — the primary investigators, or P.I.s — stood up to explain their Voyager instruments, “Ed Stone knew more about every one of their instruments than the P.I.s themselves knew. This man was tremendous.”
His next move, to keep 11 teams from focusing only on their own agendas, was ingenious: He plucked out members to form “working groups” that hewed to scientific interest rather than scientific instrument — atmospheric science, for example, and planetary moons. These new teams could discuss common goals and how certain instruments or trajectories might yield superior results.
Through it all, Stone pressed his own brand of intellectual empathy on researchers: Advancing science meant considering a competitor’s point of view. And whenever Voyager reached a planet — Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1980, Uranus in 1986, Neptune in 1989 — Stone conducted workshops in the backrooms of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which ran the mission for NASA in Pasadena, Calif. The science teams presented their new data to help Stone decide what merited an announcement. Ultimately, Stone was judge and jury, yet he weighed every argument and counterargument.
Understanding the internal politics of Voyager might be akin to understanding the inner workings of a championship sports team. What was in their playbooks? How important was the coaching, compared with the players’ natural talents? Such questions would lack salience if the mission ended as a middling scientific effort. Yet it went on to become the farthest-reaching expedition in human history, with Voyager 1 now 15.4 billion miles from Earth and Voyager 2 now 12.8 billion miles away. Stone remained Voyager’s research chief for 50 years, overseeing this once-in-a-generation investigation that overturned many established ideas about the outer planets and their moons and gave us thousands of images that have defined how we see our solar system. Several missions have built on Voyager’s discoveries (one set out two months ago for Jupiter’s icy moon Europa), but Voyager is alone in passing near Uranus and Neptune.
The findings go beyond the planetary. By traveling toward the solar system’s edge, Voyager told us where the influence of our sun wanes (beyond a protective bubble known as the heliosphere) and where a stream of incoming particles (the interstellar wind) picks up. Those discoveries required a dexterous act of management, too — helping Voyager receive steady funding, for more than 20 years, after the ships passed Neptune and turned their cameras off. It helped that Stone had increasing political influence: Late in his career, he also became the director of the Jet Propulsion Lab.
The Voyagers are now ailing: geriatric, glitchy, unsteady. Visiting J.P.L. during a recent crisis, I watched engineers plot how to repair a computer on one of these far-off ships. With luck and effort, the Voyagers might last another five years. On a previous visit, I had met with Stone at Caltech, and his reminiscences drifted to a row of journals near his desk that chronicled every Voyager meeting he had attended. “I think this helped my credibility with the team as I made those hard decisions,” Stone told me. “They saw that I was actually recording what they were saying.” In asking his colleagues to explain their differences, in other words, he grasped one thing from the start: If you seek to lead, you need to be the most attentive listener of all.
Jon Gertner has been writing about science and technology for the magazine since 2003.
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)