Adopting Voyager

In December 1964, following preliminary studies by NASA, JPL, and industry, NASA’s Science Directorate, the Office of Space Science and Applications, of­ficially established Voyager as a flight program. Like Mariner, it was conceived as a program, not a single project. OSSA projected a mission to launch the first Voyager spacecraft as early as 1971, with successor flights at later two-year Mars opportunities. Webb, who could deal with LBJ on a one-on-one basis, obtained President Johnson’s assent to include modest definitional start-up funds in the budget Johnson sent to Congress in early 1965. By the end of 1965, buoyed by Mariner 4’s success, Congress approved Voyager.

NASA started with strong scientific support for Voyager. The National Acad­emy of Sciences Space Science Board declared in 1965, “The biological explora­tion of Mars is a scientific undertaking of the greatest validity and significance. Its realization will be a milestone in the history of human achievement. Its im­portance and the consequences for biology justify the highest priority among all scientific objectives in space, indeed, in the space program as a whole.”1 Mariner 4 findings seemed to have made it all the more imperative for Mars advocates with an interest in finding life to have a lander program. They saw no other way to answer their questions.

However, while Congress went along with the initiation of Voyager, the schedule and longer-term prospects were uncertain. The political and funding

environment of NASA began to change rapidly for the worse. NASA budgets peaked in 1965-1966. The Vietnam War and Johnson’s Great Society began to place increasing burdens on the overall federal budget. NASA was clearly catching up to the Russians in the race to the Moon, and some of the urgency behind NASA was ebbing. NASA was still a national priority, but other national needs had arisen. The result was less money for “new starts” or implementation of those that were authorized.

In this shifting environment, various NASA centers looked for work in al­ternative areas. The Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, saw op­portunity in Voyager. An aeronautics center, Langley could boast expertise in the science and technology of landing. JPL did not take kindly to Langley’s foray into JPL’s bureaucratic turf, but Langley had support for a role in Mars activ­ity in OSSA. Edgar Cortright, Newell’s deputy, reacted positively to Langley’s proposed Mars entry system at a meeting in 1965. Langley got a go-ahead to continue developing its ideas.2

While JPL and Langley jockeyed for roles, major decisions at the NASA Administrator’s level were under way with implications for both centers. The in­ability to get new programs authorized or funded adequately increasingly trou­bled Webb. He knew that he had to sell a post-Apollo program before NASA reached the Moon to avoid a major downsizing problem for his agency in the early 1970s. He was having difficulty getting the president to focus on post – Apollo goals. Johnson kept telling Webb to wait until next year. The problem was the production line of Saturn 5 rockets (the Moon rockets). To have future uses for more Saturn 5s, NASA needed post-Apollo programs, and it had none.

Once NASA got to the Moon, what would it do? Build a Moon base? Go to Mars? Decisions needed to be made. Without decisions justifying more work on Saturn 5s, von Braun’s Marshall Space Flight Center might have to start laying off rocket engineers. Webb went to Johnson and Congress and explained that it made no sense to spend so much money to create an unparalleled rocket/ spacecraft system and then not keep it going and put it to use. He received sympathy, but no decisions, and decisions had to start soon with the president and his budget given lengthy technology development times.

Webb got Voyager approved by his political masters at a time when NASA’s budget was still ample. It had not been authorized as a “post-Apollo” program, but Webb sought quietly to use it in this way. He did so by choosing to launch Voyager spacecraft by Saturn 5 rockets. This move in October 1965 shocked JPL, Langley, and the scientific community, because the spacecraft they con­

templated did not need so huge a booster. In fact, it would enlarge the scale and substantially raise the cost of Voyager as a program. It would also complicate roles, for the decision meant von Braun would be deeply involved in manage­ment decisions—maybe in charge. Newell tried to sell the use of Saturn 5s to the Mars scientists, however. From his standpoint, OSSA should have use of Saturn 5s and would find uses for this massive capability. He told the SSB, in seeking endorsement, “Fellows, if you don’t help me, George [Mueller, associate admin­istrator of the Office of Manned Space Flight, and bitter rival of Newell] will get all the Saturn 5s.”3 However, there were many scientists inside and especially outside NASA who worried that a Saturn-driven Voyager would take money from smaller scientific robotic programs they wanted.

The Saturn 5 decision ignited a debate within the Mars science community. The debate had many nuances, but at its heart was a question of priorities. There were scientists who were not exobiologists who envisioned a string of Mariner flights to Mars at every two-year launch opportunity. They saw robotic Mars exploration in incremental and multidimensional terms, leading gradually to Voyager’s landing. Murray of Caltech was most articulate in expressing these concerns.4 He was an avid Mars advocate, although a skeptic about finding life on the Red Planet. He and his allies wanted a more comprehensive Mariner program that would systematically study geologic, meteorological, and numer­ous other disciplinary questions in addition to biology. Murray was himself a planetary geologist, and he believed that understanding the Mars physical en­vironment came first and was intrinsic to detecting life on Mars—if there was life on Mars. Exobiologists did not necessarily disagree with this gradualist, comprehensive approach, but they were anxious to get moving as fast as possible toward Voyager. After all, they reasoned, finding life was the big prize, and why not go for it while they could?

The real pressure for more direct flight to Mars came not from scientists but from NASA leadership, and the issue was use of the Saturn 5. Once Webb made that decision, it was obvious that not science but post-Apollo needs were his reasons for the Voyager priority. Moreover, cost considerations in a steady – state NASA budget might mean eliminating possible intervening Mars Mariner flights. Doing so did not sit well with scientists generally or with JPL. But JPL found its own influence in NASA decision making slipping. In the first half of the 1960s, when headquarters was overwhelmingly preoccupied with the Moon, JPL was where the most important technical decisions affecting Mariner were made. In the second half of the decade, headquarters began pulling decisions upward as it thought about the future, and NASA funding became constrained. Plans called for managing Voyager in an Apollo mode, with a strong headquar­ters director making use of multiple NASA centers, industry, and universities.5 The “incrementalists” and Saturn 5 “leaper” camps were both represented in OSSA, but OSSA was not making the Saturn 5 decision.

Pickering, seeing competition from Langley for Voyager, tried to be sup­portive of larger NASA decisions. He said he wanted to move toward Voyager as soon as possible but did not want to eliminate Mariner flights. Some head­quarters officials described the JPL attitude as “schizophrenic.”6 As Koppes, in his history of JPL, wrote, “The ambivalence about, and outright opposition to, Voyager derived from the fundamental question of what the laboratory should be. . . . Voyager would entail a huge expansion of JPL. . . the sheer size of the project would divert the laboratory from the in-house tasks that Pickering and the senior staff considered vital to its elan and substitute extensive monitoring of industrial contracts. JPL staff were ‘doers’ rather than ‘managers,’ and Mariner – type projects allowed them to do what they had come to the laboratory to do.”7

Voyager’s high-level proponents in headquarters were aware of the resis­tance to Saturn 5-Voyager within the scientific community and at JPL. JPL’s attitudes, and traditional independence in general, did not help its cause with NASA Headquarters in decisions about roles in the Voyager program which JPL might play vis-a-vis Langley. Nor did JPL’s use of the California congres­sional delegation to get its way go over well with Webb.

President Johnson postponed post-Apollo decision making as long as he could. At the end of 1966, he acquiesced to Webb’s importunings. As January 1967 began, Johnson sent a budget to Congress that provided $71.5 million to begin developing Voyager hardware using a Saturn 5 rocket. The proposed program would send two large orbiters and landers to Mars in 1973 (a slip from the previously projected 1971 launch) and then do so again in 1975. It was im­plicit that those two missions were the beginning of a major robotic exploration program that would extend further in time and destination. Mars would come first, but NASA would develop a capability to explore the solar system.

The budget also included for the first time funds to start an Apollo Applica­tions Program (AAP) that would also use Saturn 5s in near-Earth orbit. The Skylab “space station” effort would evolve from this activity. The point of both AAP and Voyager from Webb’s perspective was to sustain institutional infra­structure and technological capability in space after the Moon landing, pending the nation’s readiness to make a national policy decision akin to Apollo. The only decision that could be like Apollo in size and dramatic challenge would be one about human flight to Mars. Webb was thus buying time for his agency in a deteriorating political environment. Voyager would be justified publicly in its own right, on the basis of science, but it was also a means to an unstated end— keeping Saturn rockets, von Braun’s center, and human space exploration going.

Webb also wanted to link von Braun to Voyager not only technically but politically. The famed rocket engineer and Marshall Space Flight Center direc­tor had dreamed of going to Mars for years. Webb believed that von Braun could help him sell Voyager in the difficult budget climate. Telling von Braun he could build not only the Saturn 5s for Voyager but also “the main vehicle that would stay in orbit around Mars,” Webb “wanted to link the Voyager to Dr. von Braun’s name and to a proven management team.” He even asked von Braun to move to Washington at least for a time to help sell the program to Congress.8