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.