The Last of the Great Observatories: Spitzer and the Era of Faster, Better, Cheaper

  • George Rieke
University of Arizona Press: 2006. 264 pp. $40 (hbk)/$19.95 (pbk) 0816525226 | ISBN: 0-816-52522-6

Modern space observatories, in at least one respect, are like ancient monuments: planned by elders and built by their children for the benefit of their grandchildren. The creation of the Spitzer Space Telescope took 20 years from start to launch, encompassing nearly half of a scientific career. George Rieke, principal investigator on one of three Spitzer instruments, worked on the project from its inception in 1983 through to its launch in 2003. The Last of the Great Observatories chronicles the evolution of the project, its highs and lows, and the many near-death experiences due to political, management and technical problems. He also describes the emotional roller-coaster that a scientist whose career is wedded to one project's success rides along the way. For anyone who has taken part in a large space project or who wants to appreciate the commitment required to do so, this is a good read.

Rieke goes beyond telling a good story and tries to glean lessons for future projects from the Spitzer experience. Spitzer's 20-year genesis spanned several eras of NASA management styles. The book spends considerable time discussing the contrast between the Apollo-era command-and-control organization adopted from the military and NASA administrator Dan Goldin's “better, faster, and cheaper” era, as well as the individual-tinkering style appropriate to small university groups.

Rieke shows the difficulty of coordinating large teams from disparate cultures: scientists, whose rewards depend on individual achievement; contractors, who focus on fees and developing technical prowess; and managers, who worry most about time, money and team performance. Rieke's own preferences for working style are barely disguised in his writing, and his partisanship is on display when he compares Spitzer to other great observatories or discusses the contributions of different teams in the project, a subtle reminder of how difficult it was to keep the Spitzer team working together. He nevertheless manages to show how each style has its place, and acknowledges that each has strengths and weaknesses in coping with the different scales and complexities of NASA projects. Many thoughtful insights are unfortunately relegated to an appendix that might have made a nice final chapter.

The issues tackled in this book are not unique to space science — almost all large projects, from mediaeval cathedrals to the Brooklyn Bridge, required more time and money than their promoters believed at the outset. But the modern era poses unique challenges, with projects that depend more on the coordination of people's knowledge than on marshalling their physical labour. These challenges are nicely chronicled in Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine (Little Brown, 1981), a Pulitzer-prizewinning book about a team of engineers at Data General Corporation who created a new computer. They will be increasingly important for the future health of space science. Despite NASA's enormous reservoir of talented and well-intentioned managers, large missions and their inevitable cost overruns put pressure on the rest of space science.

The Last of the Great Observatories recognizes that although the Spitzer experience is not applicable to all space projects, the human emotions involved in the organization of these complex undertakings may well be universal. The description of these emotions will be a valuable guide to scientists and engineers ambitious enough to participate in large-scale, multi-decade projects.