Delaying Mars Observer

The shuttle accident brought much of NASA to a halt—certainly the human spaceflight program. But to a severe degree various robotic programs were also affected, since many were dependent on the shuttle for launch. Fletcher stated that his highest priority was to “get the shuttle flying again.” It was not obvious when that would be, however. He now spoke of a “mixed fleet,” involving shuttle and expendable rockets. However, he had been father to the shuttle during his first tour as NASA Administrator, devoutly believed in its worth, and wanted to maintain its role as America’s prime launch system as much as possible.5

In August, Fletcher decided that the shuttle could not return to flight early enough for all its launch assignments, including the 1990 Mars Observer mis­sion. He set back the date for Observer’s launch to 1992. Those who had banked on Observer to revive the Mars program were shocked and angry. Sagan, Mur­ray, and Friedman knew that an expendable rocket could serve just as well for Mars Observer and that one could be made available by the Air Force. The Air Force, which had been restricted in using expendable rockets under President Carter’s policy to maximize use of the shuttle, had extricated itself from this policy. President Reagan changed the Carter policy and was making expend­able rockets usable for national security and commercial launches. Why not Mars Observer? As far as Planetary Society leaders could tell, Fletcher had not even considered the expendable rocket option when he made his Observer post­ponement decision. Moreover, they discovered he planned to move money that would now not be needed in the next two years for Mars Observer to other priorities.6

The Planetary Society decided to fight the Fletcher decision. “We raised a cry in the news media and elsewhere,” Murray recalled. At first, it appeared that the Society had persuaded the NASA Administrator to change his mind. In Sep­tember, Fletcher stated, “We have decided. . . to continue working on the Mars Observer on schedule to provide launch readiness for the 1990 opportunity.”7 It looked as though Mars Observer would go forward as planned, although it was not settled whether it would go on a shuttle or expendable rocket.

On January 2,1987, Fletcher informed Congress of another change in NASA’s plans. Instead of launching Mars Observer in 1990, NASA would delay launch to 1992. The reason he cited was the Challenger accident. With the shuttle down, there was a logjam in flights scheduled to use the shuttle. In spite of his earlier statement about a 1990 launch, he was now holding to the 1992 schedule. Something had to give, he said, and he had decided (again) that Mars Observer could be postponed two years.8

The new decision came as a second shock to the Mars community. In many ways, the affected scientists felt betrayed. One reason was that the Solar System Exploration Committee had carefully developed plans to reconstruct the plan­etary program and had made Mars Observer not only an inner-planet priority but a key to a sequence of missions demonstrating low-cost planetary explora­tion. In its 1986 report on an “augmented” program, SSEC had proposed that

Observer be followed by long-coveted rover and sample return missions. But it was more than a matter of scientific planning for Sagan and the Planetary So­ciety. For them, Mars stood as a beacon of NASA’s commitment to exploration in general after Challenger.

As Fletcher was postponing Mars Observer, he brought back Sally Ride, a member of the Rogers Commission, to chart NASA’s post-Challenger future. To the Mars advocates, Mars Observer, whatever its limits, was central to that future.9 As Friedman put it, Mars Observer had become “enormously symbolic” to the Mars community, as well as space enthusiasts in the general public. The reasons, Friedman declared, were threefold. First, “it was Mars and therefore an object that we believe should represent the focus and long-range goal of space exploration. Mars Observer was a step toward that goal. So, by putting a low priority on it, NASA was putting a low priority on the one goal that we thought was the most widely accepted and most important to the agency.” Second, he said, “As the first of the Observer-class missions, Mars Observer represents the minimum planetary mission, devised to reconstruct the [Mars] program.” Third, he argued, the Mars Observer represented “the first chance to cooperate with the Soviets in Mars exploration. How could the United States cooperate with the Soviets, which had announced an ambitious program, if the U. S. policy was to delay our only approved program?”10

Sagan, Murray, and Friedman decided to launch a multifront fight and asked the then-ioo, ooo-plus Planetary Society members to write letters to Fletcher and Congress protesting the decision. In addition, Murray took direct action by calling Dale Myers, Fletcher’s deputy administrator, whom he knew, to persuade him to change Fletcher’s direction. Murray found Myers not particularly inter­ested in speaking to him when he placed his call. The former JPL director had a “solution” to propose to Myers. “Why not use the Titan expendable launch vehicle rather than the shuttle?” Murray asked. Myers shouted back at him, “Where am I going to get the $150 million” to pay for the launch?11

Indeed, there was a problem about money. Using a Titan would be expensive. But so would a two-year delay for a shuttle. Fletcher, feeling the heat from the Mars community, discussed with Congress the possibility of using a Titan and getting the money to pay for it, but he ran into resistance from the House Appropriations Committee chairman responsible for NASA’s budget. The con­gressional authorization committees were supportive, but they did not have final word on funding.12 On March 13, NASA confirmed that its spending plan for the year did not include Mars Observer and that money already approved by Congress for the project would be reprogrammed in the next two years to higher priorities.

Sagan and his allies at the Planetary Society reacted sharply. They took their case to the media, Congress, and the general public. Sagan went to the Mars Underground’s third conference in Boulder and gave the keynote address, rous­ing the 400 attendees to the Mars cause. In speaking to the media, Sagan, on March 15, called NASA’s decision “a great mistake and an example of a consis­tent lack of vision that NASA has had since the middle 1970s.”13

NASA’s leaders sought to head off criticism, especially with Congress. Myers wrote Congressman Bill Nelson (D-FL), chairman of the House Subcommit­tee on Space Science and Applications, explaining the agency’s position—and that Challenger had caused a backlog of shuttle missions for the 1990 period and that NASA did not have the money to use an Air Force expendable Titan rocket.14 He also wrote Murray, saying the obstacles to launching in 1990 were “insurmountable.”15

But Sagan and his allies were not quieted. They condemned the decision and pointed out that delaying the launch would cost almost as much as using an expendable Titan. The real reason, the Planetary Society leaders said, was that not using a shuttle would undermine NASA’s claims about the shuttle’s necessity as a launch system. They specifically chastised Fletcher, who was “besieged by personal phone calls from members of Congress, some of whom were key to his important budget items like the Shuttle and Space Station.” More than 10,000 Planetary Society members sent off 25,000 letters to Congress.16 On April 27, the three Planetary Society leaders testified before Congress. NASA’s public affairs director called the press release preceding the testimony an “unconscionable attack on both Dr. Fletcher and the agency in general.” She recommended that NASA and JPL not cooperate with the Society in using JPL facilities for meet­ings involving possible joint U. S.-USSR activities the Society was promoting.17

She did not get her way. The next month, in May, the first International Conference on Solar System Exploration was held in Pasadena. The Soviet Union sent delegates who unveiled grand plans for exploring Mars, starting with the Phobos mission. The Soviets said they intended to sponsor a Mars rover and sample return project by the end of the century. David Morrison, head of the SSEC, spoke. He said that the United States had “fine plans. We have great inherent capability. But we have been very slow to turn those plans into actual programs.”18

On May 14, Murray paid a personal visit to Myers in hope of mending fences and getting him to help in reversing Fletcher’s Mars Observer decision. What he found was that Myers “was really steamed up.” He and Fletcher were furi­ous that the Planetary Society had created such a big public relations problem for them. Murray wanted to see whether NASA and the Society could work together and he could rebuild the personal relationship he had with Myers. “How can we help, Dale?” Murray asked, hoping he would use that opening to outline an area of future cooperation. “We’re 100,000 dues-paying members, a real Mars constituency.” Murray reminded Myers that Fletcher had recently brought astronaut Sally Ride to lead a task force studying long-term options for NASA’s future. Ride’s report was not public as yet, but there was ample reason to assume that her options would include Mars robotic and human missions.

“We may not choose the Mars options,” Myers replied in a manner Murray called “gruffly.” “If we do, we’ll contact you,” he declared. That was that! Mur­ray had found no common ground, and Myers signaled that Murray’s time was up. As Murray interpreted the meeting, Myers considered the Planetary Society just another pressure group, one giving the agency headaches rather than sup­port.19 The Planetary Society could not get NASA to budge on the decision to delay Observer.

The man responsible for directing science at NASA was now Lennard Fisk, 43, who had succeeded Edelson as associate administrator for space science and applications in April 1987. Fisk had been vice president for research and financial affairs at the University of New Hampshire. He was an astrophysicist who had a number of projects other than Mars on his agenda when he came to NASA. Moreover, he became increasingly interested in a new activity within NASA that would be called “Mission to Planet Earth” (MTPE).20 Started by Edelson, this effort was rapidly developing in NASA, and the earth sciences along with it. NASA had played the lead role in the mid-1980s for determining the causes of the ozone hole over Antarctica. Some of its scientists provided technical advice contributing to the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals in 1987.

The issue of climate change was rising on the national and international agenda, and Fisk, like Edelson, wanted to position the agency for leading in a growing and important mission. Moreover, the NASA Administrator, Fletcher, personally cared about NASA’s environmental role. In his earlier tenure as Administrator he had termed NASA “an environmental agency.” His strong Mormon beliefs, which had mattered in his Viking advocacy, also made him extremely attentive to the concept of stewardship of the planet.21

In short, Fisk had good reasons to push the new Earth priority for the Office of Space Science and Applications. He supported, but did not stress, the Mars program. Like Edelson, he let his subordinate, Briggs, largely direct Mars ac­tivity. In addition, he took seriously the SSEC emphasis on broad solar system exploration as opposed to Mars-centered exploration. The next new start in planetary science he wanted to sponsor, pursuant to recent SSEC recommenda­tions, was Saturn, with an expensive mission that would be called Cassini. For a while, Cassini was connected in planning with another project, the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF). These projects were aimed at the outer solar system.

But the most important reason Fisk did not give Mars exploration the prior­ity its advocates wanted was that he was spending a great deal of money from his program on missions that were well past Observer’s development stage and were literally sitting, waiting in storage, to be launched on a shuttle. There was little Fisk could do about Fletcher’s intent to use the shuttle for major science launches. That being the case, he recollected his challenge as follows:

Everything was stacked up. We were spending $5 million a month just to watch the Hubble Space Telescope. We had Galileo [Jupiter] at the Cape and shipped it back to JPL. We had Ulysses [a project to study the Sun] at the Cape. We came at it [decision making] this way: What’s the most cost/effective way to get rid of this backlog? It cost us $2 billion to stand down science in the post-Challenger period. We had to get Hubble off the ground. The most expensive science missions went first. Mars had to wait. Hubble especially had to launch. Our most expensive science mission. Tremendous hype about Hubble.22