Category Why Mars

On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush came to the NASA auditorium to announce his “Vision for Space Exploration.” NASA, he said, was going back to the Moon by 2020. It would eventually go on to Mars and beyond. It would go first with robots, then humans. NASA would retire the Space Shuttle in 2010 and bring on a successor in 2014. “The vision I outline today,” Bush said, “is a journey, not a race.”36 He indicated that NASA would get a significant increase in funding to jump-start the initiative. The Bush “Vision” appeared to augur well for the robotic Mars program.

The immediate reaction to Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration was gener­ally positive, mixed with concerns about funding. The political mood favored getting out of near-Earth orbit and back to exploration as NASA’s central role in human spaceflight. If America was going to risk lives, it had to be about a goal worth the risk. That was the message of CAIB and subsequent media and congressional importuning. It was also the message of the National Academy of Sciences’ Space Studies Board. Len Fisk, one-time NASA science associate administrator, was now chair of this body. He strongly believed that it was im­perative for NASA to get human spaceflight out of Earth orbit, while also fully supporting space science and applications. Under his leadership, the NAS SSB produced a report that was released on the same day as Bush’s address. There was “synergy” between the report and Bush’s vision, said Fisk.37

O’Keefe had carefully crafted a budget strategy that avoided the sticker shock that had killed the Moon-Mars program of George H. W. Bush in 1989. The strategy was to emphasize the Moon first, as a stepping stone, and the lunar goal seemed manageable the way O’Keefe explained it. Mars—and its prodi­gious expense—was downplayed and pushed for future discussion in regard to human exploration. Conversely, robotic Mars exploration was emphasized for precursory missions. The term “exploration” was inclusive insofar as rhetoric was concerned.

But not everybody believed the NASA rhetoric or budget numbers for the first five years, certainly not everybody in Congress (or at NASA). And even if the numbers were “right,” they required NASA to reprogram money to make resources available for a new mission. There was worry on the part of scientists who did not do lunar or Mars research that they would be losers as NASA re­focused. Weiler tried to calm such fears. “This is not a flags-and-footprint pro­gram,” he said. “NASA intended the Moon as a stepping stone, and scientists are excited about going to Mars,” Weiler declared. So was the president, he added.

What Weiler understood, as did Fisk, was that the vision could be good for NASA as a whole if the necessary resources were forthcoming. Also, it was critical that the scientific community support the vision for it to have a chance to succeed.38 What sent a shock wave through the scientific community, and seemed to belie the reassuring words of the vision rhetoric, was the news on January 15, the day after the Bush announcement, that O’Keefe was killing a planned shuttle servicing mission to Hubble. The information came via an in­advertent leak and appeared in a Washington Post story about the Bush vision.

The decision was about safety, not budget, as far as O’Keefe was concerned, but was interpreted by many astronomers as a trade-off with Moon-Mars. “This is a kick in the teeth,” said one. Hubble became a major distraction as O’Keefe tried to promote the new mission to NASA’s various constituencies in 2004.39 While the selling of the new human space program got off to a rocky start, the robotic Mars program continued to shine amidst the uncertainty and scientific controversy. Moreover, O’Keefe gave it a priority as he dealt with the NASA budget, too much so in the view of O’Keefe critics—Mars’s rivals for space funding.

On January 24, at 9 p. m. (PST), the second Mars rover, Opportunity, en­tered the Red Planet’s atmosphere, beginning the complicated set of procedures that would enable it to land safely. Opportunity aimed at a Martian plain called Meridiani. Once again, O’Keefe and other top NASA officials were present at JPL. So also were former vice president Al Gore and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver. Mission controllers ate traditional “lucky peanuts” as they intensely watched the telemetry. Six min­

utes after starting its descent at 12,000 miles per hour, Opportunity reached the surface. When the signal was returned to Earth that Opportunity had come to rest at a final place, safely, the landing chief at JPL announced, “We’re on Mars, everybody!” Everyone in the room erupted in applause, backslaps, and hugs. As before, O’Keefe got out the champagne. He lauded the Mars science team as “the best in the world.” NASA and its partners had known that the stakes were high. They had put in an “extraordinary effort,” and it had paid off.40

Stern wanted bold projects in spite of the budget constraints. As the principal investigator of the Pluto mission, he was an outer planets advocate. He wanted an outer planets flagship mission to go forward under his watch, to either Jupiter or Saturn. He also, as he had made clear, wanted to depart from Mars incre­mentalism to a truly great leap forward—MSR. He thought big, envisioning a sequence of flagship missions: MSL, outer planets, MSR. How to pay for these larger missions was the question.

The NASA budget and its longer-term projection that appeared in February 2008 revealed his solution to the problem. Rather than continue the inherited strategy of missions every 26-month opportunity leading gradually to MSR at some indefinite future date, he decided that money for Mars would be drasti­cally curtailed after MSL in 2009, thereby enabling other non-Mars initiatives to take place. The budget would then rise significantly later in the decade to finance an MSR mission in 2020. This was indeed a daring move, and Stern, confident and fast-moving in style, did not necessarily consult widely either in NASA or externally. He also riled Mars advocates by being quoted within NASA as saying “Mars is just another planet.”87

The White House budget office had been sufficiently surprised by the radi­cal change in approach that it asked a group of scientists independent of NASA to take a look at Stern’s new program strategy. It was a marked departure from the steady “follow-the-water” sequential approach up to now. OMB acquiesced to the Stern strategy, as did Stern’s superiors at NASA. When the projected Mars spending in the NASA budget became public, however, most Mars sci­entists were shocked. Many charged that Stern was hollowing out the Mars budget to get resources for his outer planets flagship. Robert Braun, professor of space technology at Georgia Tech, wrote that Stern was “gutting” the Mars program. With no missions slated for 2011 and 2018, and only tentative mis­sions in 2016 and 2020, the budget “puts the future Mars program on a path toward irrelevance,” he charged. He called on the Mars community to grill Stern vigorously at the next Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group meet­ing, on February 20.88

MEPAG was an outgrowth of the ad hoc meetings of Mars scientists which Hubbard and his associates sponsored to receive broad input from Mars scien­tists generally when they were designing the new program in the year 2000. It had been subsequently institutionalized as a two-way communications mecha­nism between NASA and the scientific community. MEPAG now met two times a year.

Philip Christensen of Arizona State University, chair of the White House – established panel, came to the MEPAG meeting, held at Monrovia, California, to give his panel’s assessment. As Stern sat in the front row, he heard Chris­tensen blast the new strategy. “The phasing [of missions] is just wrong,” said Christensen. “Our assessment is that it just won’t work,” he said, pointing out that it would take substantial funding early in the next decade to develop the technology for MSR in 2020. MSR entailed “launch vehicles, a Mars landing system, an Earth return vehicle, a Mars lander, a Mars ascent vehicle, a rover, an Earth-reentry system, and a sample-receiving and curation facility on Earth.”89

Indeed, Christensen said, to prepare and fly in 2020, NASA would have to cancel everything after MSL, including 2013 and 2016 missions, to do what Stern wanted to do. “You have to come clean,” Christensen pointedly told the NASA associate administrator. “Either you fund the [Mars] program or you ac­cept the fact that it will be significantly reduced for the next decade.”

Stern defended himself and his strategy, stating, “No missions have been cancelled—none, zero, zip, nada.” “The Mars program is really healthy,” he told Science magazine, which reported on the meeting. But various Mars scientists countered him. “I don’t think many people accept his budget,” which went pre­cipitously down and then abruptly up, said Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder. “We just don’t see how you connect the dots,” declared John Mustard of Brown University, who chaired NASA’s Mars Advisory Committee as well as the MEPAG meeting. Moreover, Mustard criticized Stern’s decision to add a $2 million cache to MSL. He said he did not believe it would be able at this early date to pick up enough scientifically interesting material to be worth the expense.90

Stern had few vocal supporters in the Mars community. McKay did stand up at the MEPAG meeting and defend what Stern was trying to do. He believed that the Mars program was “in a rut” and needed to “turn heads.”91 But Stern also turned heads with his money decisions. Just the year before, McCuistion had said there would be stability in Mars spending at the annual $600 million level. That number itself had reflected a substantial cut from a previous projec­tion. Now it was falling to $300 million under the Stern strategy.

Where Stern had support was in the outer planets community, which was pro­jected to receive $3 billion for a Jupiter or Saturn mission. As Frances Bagenal, of the University of Colorado Boulder, chair of the Outer Planets Advisory Group and co-principal investigator with Stern on the Pluto project, explained, “Alan is trying to do the right thing by offering something to keep everyone happy. But it’s impossible.” In any event, said Bagenal, “it’s time to take a break from Mars and work on other things.” Stern said he was trying to have a “bal­anced” program. Stephen Mackwell, of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, commented that there would be “winners and losers” given the bud­get constraints. Most Mars scientists definitely thought themselves “losers” under Stern’s new approach.92

In succeeding months and into the fall, the funding prospects on both sides of the Atlantic worsened. Weiler argued with White House budget officials over a NASA Mars budget they were determined to lower. The year before, he had had to endure the paring of the joint missions with ESA from two to one. Now even that one was in jeopardy. As pressure on Weiler and his budget “racheted up,” he proposed more modest cuts across the board in NASA science to protect Mars. White House budget officials did not relent. They saw in the bilateral program another multimission big science effort that could become a standing commitment through international connections.58

OMB was correct. NASA wanted to move ahead on a program, not a single mission. The fact that the program was bilateral held down costs. But the U. S. expense still would be great, in view of the endeavor’s bold goal. Utterly frus­trated, Weiler wrote Bolden he had reached the end of the line in his nego­tiations.59 On September 30, Weiler retired, thereby concluding an admirable 33-year government career. For Mars supporters inside and outside NASA, he would be greatly missed. It would now be up to others to try to carry on what he and Southwood had begun. That task would be daunting.

The letter from Bolden affirming NASA’s intent to support the 2018 Mars mission, which was supposed to come in mid-September, did not arrive. A frus­trated Scott Hubbard spoke out against the delay, which was due not to Bolden, but to the White House and OMB. He pointed out that ESA was pledging 1 billion euros to the combined missions; how could the United States not do its part?60 But the United States was making further decisions to cause angst in Europe. It stated that it could not provide the Atlas V rocket to launch the 2016 mission. That had been part of the original bargain between NASA and ESA. Dordain once more scrambled to find additional money within ESA to keep contractors working until the end of the year. He managed to do so. He earnestly sought to keep open options to maintain the 2016 opportunity. But he now knew he would have to find an alternative rocket, from either Europe or Russia, and additional money from ESA to make up for the U. S. withdrawal. The options for Dordain were narrowing, and there was a distinct possibility ESA would have to abort the 2016 ExoMars launch.

But what about 2018? This was the priority for the United States and also ESA. The 2016 mission was supposed to facilitate it. In the first week of Octo­ber, Bolden and Dordain met during the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town, South Africa.61 Bolden told Dordain that NASA wanted to keep the partnership going, but its budget situation was still too uncertain for him to make commitments.62

NASA was living with a continuing resolution most of the year as the presi­dent and Congress staggered toward compromises in late 2011. Moreover, Con­gress had established a “Super Committee” to hammer out extensive budget cuts to reduce the deficit on a long-term basis. The Super Committee failed, however, and draconian cuts across the board would kick in in 2013, unless Congress acted to avert them before then. No one could predict what would ensue. Congress did provide NASA with a budget in November, as well as lan­guage that backed “flagship-class missions” that could be implemented with “international partners.” However, the Obama administration was silent on a commitment to such a mission. Desperate, Dordain asked Russia to join the U. S.-European alliance to keep the 2016 mission alive. The 2018 mission was still planned, and Bolden was hoping all would be well eventually, but Dordain confessed he was becoming a “doubting Thomas.”63

Caltech’s Grotzinger has called the recent period of Mars exploration a “golden era.” He has marveled how missions have built systematically on one another. The coordination and integration of missions have, he wrote, “brought us ever closer to fathoming the broad range of environmental processes that have trans­formed the surface of Mars, beginning over four billion years ago.” Mars ex­ploration is going from following the water to searching for the building blocks of life.11 Beyond that is the investigation of Mars samples for past and present life itself. Optimism among scientists about Martian life has returned as a prime motivator of national and international planning.

The achievements in science and technology would not have been possible without organization and politics. NASA has pulled the components of a dis­tributed multimission big science program together and obtained resources for implementation. Orbiters and landers have been linked, and they pointed the way for the best places for rovers to go to search for traces of life. The pro­gram has not gone as consistently or smoothly as Mars advocates would have liked. The journey has been anything but steady. Science may provide a “guid­ing light,” but politics influences how fast and how well government and the researchers it supports can follow it.12 The political process can result in a pause in activity, as well as acceleration.

The history of robotic Mars exploration has been one of progress, setback, and renewed dedicated effort.13 It is filled with human drama that is at times heroic and at other times tragic. The future of Mars exploration will likely emu­late the rhythm of the past. It will advance, hit barriers, and then advance again. Over the long haul, Mars exploration moves forward. What gives the robotic program direction is that it has relative consensus on a clear technical goal akin to the Apollo lunar landing. For scientists, engineers, and NASA Administra­tors, it is called MSR.

That goal ties together individual missions distributed over time. It is a siren call for most Mars specialists. It has been the compelling goal for decades—and many of the most important conflicts around Mars policy have entailed issues of when and how to reach the MSR objective. For virtually everyone, specialists and general public alike, the goal is also a means to answer deeper and broader questions about life which underlie Mars. A culmination for the robotic pro­gram, it is seen by NASA and its Mars constituency also as a potentially big step toward human spaceflight.