Moving Up the Agenda

The Mars Observer project kept Mars exploration alive in the mid – and late 1980s, but not in a manner that Mars advocates desired. Within NASA’s Sci­ence Directorate, Mars policy fell to Briggs, the planetary director, as superiors concentrated on other matters. Briggs found little support for going beyond Observer and raising Mars exploration’s status. He “made peace with the Mars program as it was,” not as he wished it to be. “I was not chaffing to get its en­largement. My goal was to implement the SSEC core program, particularly the inner planets and the Mars Observer.”1 It was clear to external advocates that they had to press NASA harder if they were to get the kind of Mars program they wanted.

Advocates like Carl Sagan hoped that the Soviet Union, as a competitor or ally, could help revitalize Mars exploration in the United States. His was an end run around NASA and the space policy subsystem, which he saw as weighted against Mars as a priority. He looked for national and international policy al­lies. But to succeed in this macropolitical strategy, the Soviets would have to be successful technically.

Sagan looked to the White House to resurrect the Mars exploration pro­gram—and NASA generally. He and like-minded proponents did so before and after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. Challenger adversely affected the agency, but it did bring NASA to presidential attention. Would

presidential interest make a difference for Mars? It did not do so in the case of Ronald Reagan. President George H. W. Bush, however, made a human space­flight decision in 1989 to go back to the Moon and on to Mars. The political environment for Mars policy thus wound up better at the beginning of the 1990s than it had been 10 years before. It was a long and torturous haul, but outside and inside advocates succeeded in moving Mars higher on the NASA agenda over the course of a decade.