Dante Loretta

He was the director of the Lunar Planetary Laboratory when I was hired and in 2004, so I've only been here like three years, into an assistant professorship where you're trying to build laboratories and get grants funded, develop your courses and recruit graduate students and do all the things that professors are expected to do, Mike calls me up and he says, hey,

I've got a representative from Lockheed Martin Corporation in my office, and we're talking about proposing an asteroid sample return mission to NASA.

I was like, wow, that's cool.

I was like, so what's up?

He's like, well, I want you to come and join me, and I want you to be the deputy principal investigator for this program.

And I was like, wow, that's a big responsibility.

I said, what am I going to do?

What do you want?

He said, it's going to be an easy job for you.

He said, all you have to worry about is the science.

Why do we want to do this?

What are we going to do?

What kind of asteroid do we want to go to?

What kind of sample do we want to get?

What are we going to do with that sample when it's back on Earth?

And I was like, okay, that sounds pretty easy, because I know exactly where I want to go, and I know exactly what I want to get, and I know exactly why I want to get it, so I could do that in a couple of months.

Give me some summer salary, I'll write the science program, and you and Lockheed Martin deal with the engineering, and you deal with the management, and the cost, and the budget, and the politics, and the administration, and all the other stuff you've got to worry about to run a NASA mission like that.

So that was 2004, we submitted a proposal that's humorous in hindsight to go back and look at it because it's very naive.

So we got NASA when they grade your proposals they give you four categories.

Category one is we love it, it's great, we want to fund it, it's high priority.