Dante Loretta

I got the engineering.

Now I have to learn how you manage and how you budget and how you control a budget and a schedule for a program like this.

And that's exactly what we did.

I took over the management and the science sections.

And so by the end of the third proposal, the science, the engineering, and the management were all the same language, all the same thoughts, and they were all connected and cross-referenced to each other.

And we made phase A again.

We went through another concept study report.

This is the document that we submitted.

So that's about a thousand page binder.

That's volume one.

By the way, volume two is just as big.

So we submitted a two thousand page concept study report to NASA.

And they loved it.

Obviously they selected us.

This was May of 2011.

We got the word that we were selected.

and then we're going to go and build and fly this thing so that was really exciting and then mike had been struggling and he passed away in september of that year so i had to become the principal investigator at that point and take over the whole thing so i miss this old guy and i thank him a lot and what we do is in his honor as we move forward

And again, I'm sorry for that.

So we spent the next five years designing, building, testing, and getting the team ready to launch and operate the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.

And this is the awesome acronym that defines our program.