Spectacular though the results of the 1979 missions were, it was confidently hoped that they would be quite surpassed within a decade. The Voyager spacecraft spent only a few hours in the vicinity of Jupiter, hurtling past the giant planet and its moons on the way to Saturn. But in May 1986, NASA planned to launch Galileo, an even more ambitious space probe. This would make not a brief fly-by, but a rendezvous; Galileo would spend two years, starting in December 1988, on a detailed survey of Jupiter and its major moons. By 1990, if all went well, there would be such a flood of new information about these exotic worlds that a third Space Odyssey would be inevitable. That was what I was planning to write; I’d hitched my wagon to Galileo, and could hardly care less about some amateur science fiction author’s ideas. How to turn him down politely? I was still pondering this when Scott continued:
“Peter Guber wants to fly out to Sri Lanka, just for thirty-six hours, to introduce this guy to you. His name is Gentry Lee, and let me explain who he is. He works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he’s the chief engineer on Project Galileo. Have you heard of that?”
“Yes,” I said faintly.
“And before that, he was director of mission planning for the Viking landers, that sent back those wonderful pictures from Mars. Because he felt the public didn’t appreciate what was going on in space, he formed a company with your friend Carl Sagan to make Cosmos — he was manager of the whole TV series—”
“Enough!” I cried. “This man I have to meet. Tell Mr. Gabor to bring him here right away.”