Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–225
ASPATURIAN: And incredibly smart, dedicated people.
TOMBRELLO: They had some great teams, and I believe what happened was they got off to a
very bad start with the Mars Science Lab. And the first chief scientist of the Mars Science
Laboratory [2005-07] was our very own Ed Stolper, who does not appreciate engineering and
thinks you can buy it. I will tell you, in spacecraft, just like in high-energy physics and in
cosmology, if you can buy it, you don’t want it. You want to develop something that’s new and
better. I attribute a lot of the problems with the Mars Science Laboratory to its first chief
scientist. I’ve told a lot of people that. That may not be fair, but it’s what I’ve said. In fact, my
history of the Mars Science Laboratory was weird, because I first learned about it when I was off
looking at a project for Schlumberger in Norway. For lunch they just threw in something extra,
which was their proposal to be part of that mission. They showed it to me, and I said, “God, that
is the weirdest, shakiest mission I’ve ever seen! Is that something ESA [European Space
Agency] came up with?” They started laughing. They said, “No. It’s in your backyard. It’s
from JPL. What do you think is wrong with it?” I said, “Look, it’s a very big, very expensive
mission. And one of the things about big, expensive missions is you don’t have single-string
failure modes. You have so much redundancy, because you’re paying for something that will
work, no matter what, like Voyager. Now, Voyager had an absolute genius for a project
scientist, Ed Stone. That is one of the best things that happened in the 20 th century in science.
Fantastic thing; and Ed gets a huge credit for that.
Let’s talk about him for a minute. I’ve known Ed Stone since he came here as a research
fellow in cosmic-ray physics [1964]. One thing that was clear from early on was that Ed was an
expert at detail. He could take something that other people had done in cosmic-ray physics and
just make it better. It was taste, hard work, insight, whatever. At that time, Ed was a youngster
at Caltech, and he was just chewing up the great people in the field, because his experiments
worked that much better than theirs did. This runs through all the things he did—the balloon
stuff, subsequently the ACE [Advanced Composition Explorer] mission, the Voyager mission.
Harold Brown thought that the mission that became Voyager was in trouble. He threw Ed Stone
[then an associate professor of physics] in there [1972]. It was a brilliant pick. Ed was, I think,
what made Voyager such an extreme success—one of the great scientific achievements. It
wasn’t without troubles; constant troubles. It was out there working far longer than anybody had
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