Born to Explore: John Casani’s Grand Tour of the Solar System

Once, there were giants in the heavens: billion-dollar machines of wonder and science that flew to the outermost planets and told us what secrets had been lying in wait. In charge of the people and processes behind these missions was a humble father of five who did the job not for money or prestige but simply because it represented a challenge like no other. That man was John Casani. The full story of his unparalleled life and career is told here for the first time.

Young Casani was obsessed with the mechanical world yet lacked direction in life. After restarting college for an engineering degree, he then whimsically road-tripped to California in the late 1950s and was hired, almost by accident, at Pasadena’s secretive Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Beginning as a workaday technician, Casani rose through JPL’s ranks to senior management--while battling politics, funding, physics, and occasionally colleagues. With inborn skill and uncommon methods he kept his troops focused on success. Casani ran nine-figure space missions off the index cards in his shirt pocket, once employed a live goat to press people into action, and even sent messages to aliens in space.

Born to Explore examines a transitional period of space history, when planetary exploration faced threats from an adversarial space shuttle program that consumed the lion’s share of NASA funding. Recounted by Jay Gallentine, Casani’s life story unfolds in conjunction with the tribulations of the Galileo mission to Jupiter--a twisting case study of what can go wrong even with the best intentions and the best minds in the world at work.

Jay Gallentine is an award-winning space historian from Minnesota. He is the author of Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft (Nebraska, 2014), winner of the Eugene M. Emme Award for astronautical literature, and Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969-1989 (Nebraska, 2015), which examines the first intensive reconnaissance of the inner solar system.