A New Start

In early February 1994, the White House unveiled the president’s budget pro­posal. The request for NASA was $250 million below the previous year’s budget.

This reduction was the first time since 1974 that the White House had requested a decrease in NASA funding.36 However, within this budget, there was a new start in robotic spaceflight, the Mars Surveyor Program. The budget proposed initial funding for a new Mars orbiter, one that would be smaller and less ex­pensive than Mars Observer. It would carry a number of the eight instruments borne by Mars Observer. It would be called Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) and be managed by JPL. Subsequent orbiters would bear the remainder of Mars Observer’s instruments. In essence, the new program would do what Goldin wanted: carry out Mars Observer’s missions and then some, in a “product line” of smaller spacecraft. The Mars Surveyor Program was extremely significant. For the first time since Mariner, there was political acceptance of a sustained series of spaceflights to Mars. This program would embody and be a showcase for FBC and the notion that government could be reinvented to produce more for less. It conveyed the idea that big science could be made into smaller and more affordable science through distributing missions and costs over time.

In mid-March, at a senior management meeting, Goldin indicated that find­ing more funds for space science was a top priority.37 On April 1, NASA issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to develop and build the MGS craft. Martin Marietta won the MGS task in July. The process from RFP to award was seven to eight months shorter than usual. Under Goldin’s new “faster” rules, Martin Marietta would have 28 months to build MGS in order to meet the 1996 Mars launch window. Getting the RFP out this fast was new, a result of administrative streamlining. So was the award decision.38

Congress was meanwhile coming through with authorization of a program line for the Mars Surveyor Program, as well as the money for implementing NASA’s first mission in the series. Sagan helped NASA promote the program to Congress. So did the National Academy of Sciences, which gave it endorsement. Congress listened to such supporters. So, apparently, did OMB. The country would get more science for less money. Said Huntress, “There was consensus.”39

It was not just Goldin who was pushing FBC efficiency to the agency. Hunt­ress was doing so also, and on April 12 he attacked NASA’s “outdated tech­nologies and attitudes.” He condemned NASA’s “resistance to change,” saying NASA was “two decades behind the curve in engineering the way we operate our missions.”40

In September, NASA chose a landing site for Pathfinder, scheduled to arrive at Mars in 1997. Tony Spear, project manager for Pathfinder, said that this mis­sion would indeed reveal the new way of doing business. He declared he had “as­sembled a team and dumped all the formality.”41 As Huntress later commented, “Tony ran the show. He established a Skunk Works at JPL. . . . JPL didn’t like this approach. It is used to certain engineering practices. JPL expected fail­ure. Tony made it work. He recruited young engineers and scientists who did not know what had been done in the past. He pushed innovative practices. He mined their creativity and put it to work. The old guard watched with no con­fidence in what he was doing.”42