Goldin’s Dream
The new strategy of Goldin and Huntress also called for more international partnership. In April, Goldin initiated a study of a “Mars Together” mission with the Russians. The proposed mission would be reviewed in December by Gore, with June 1995 as the final month for a decision one way or the other. The Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, set up to nurture U. S.-Russian collaboration in the post-Cold War era, had asked Goldin and Koptev to review possibilities of robotic space cooperation with an eye to savings in cost and time.43
In July 1994 Goldin told the media that while he had to give priority as Administrator to the space station, which Congress was now backing more strongly, it was Mars that was his love. He recalled that he had watched in awe when Armstrong walked on the Moon. As a young man, he had pledged to himself that he would someday be part of a Mars mission. He declared that his “deepest dream” was “that in my lifetime I will some way be responsible for a [human] mission to Mars. It would be the next noble thing we could do as a society.” The first, he said, had been Apollo.44 The Clinton administration was not interested in a human mission to Mars but was supportive of the space station, robotic Mars development, and international collaboration. As Goldin saw it, these were stepping stones to human spaceflight to Mars.
NASA was discussing Mars exploration not only with the Russians but also with the Europeans and the Japanese, who were also planning a robotic Mars mission. The Russian mission of 1994 had slipped to 1996, and that meant Russia’s 1996 mission would slip to 1998. The 1998 mission would involve the French and include balloons to be released in the atmosphere of Mars. Given Russian delays and Mars Observer’s demise, the United States would not be helping the Russians as previously planned via Observer, but perhaps another U. S. mission could do that. “Mars Together” was taking a more ecumenical form, as the Japanese invited the United States to include a U. S. instrument on its Mars launch, scheduled also in 1998, called “Planet B.”
NASA had its Mars Science Working Group, an entity whose job was to take NAS Space Science Board recommendations and apply them more concretely to Mars planning. Now NASA and other nations established an International Mars Exploration Working Group. Its purpose was to plan a major international robotic effort to investigate Mars. In October this body convened for the first time, with Huntress chairing the first meeting. Involved were Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Russia, the European Space Agency, and the United States.45
Success internationally required success of national programs. For the United States that meant initially Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor. In December, Spear reported that all was going well with the development of Pathfinder. Being built at JPL with a number of contractors providing components, the project was well under way. Spear said design was completed, and the spacecraft was ready to be assembled.46
Protecting Mars, Reviving Exobiology
In November 1994, the Republicans captured control of Congress. Led in the House by Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), they brandished a “Contract for America,” in which they promised to end the deficit, balance the budget, provide tax relief, and drastically cut back “Big Government.” President Clinton, seeing the country shift to the right, decided that his own political future required him to get ahead of the Republicans and recapture initiative. At the beginning of 1995, he promised his own form of tax cut, deficit reduction, and government downsizing. For NASA, this meant more budget and personnel shrinkage and even greater emphasis on FBC science missions.47
On January 12, 1995, Goldin got a letter from OMB. It said NASA would have to reduce its projected budget over the ensuing five years by $5 billion.48 Goldin had thought he would have some stability in budget; instead, he faced even more stress. “My immediate reaction,” he later recalled, “was one of sadness and frustration. . . it took me two weeks. First you have shock, then you have denial. I went through all those emotions. Within a day, I said, ‘I support the president.’ Then, weeks later, I was enthusiastic. My position was, we’re not going to look at this as a budget cut. This is an opportunity to take the final step in reinvention. This is an opportunity to get NASA to do what it finally had to do.”49
The consequence was that Goldin led a drive to cut “infrastructure,” while
maintaining all existing programs. The aim was to do even more with even less. The Mars Surveyor Program, for example, went forward as planned, but in a context of personnel reduction and reorganization. Many employees feared for their jobs, especially at headquarters. The Science Directorate, along with other program offices, took a hit. There was much talk of a draconian personnel reduction, perhaps 50% at headquarters alone, with additional cuts throughout the centers.50 The contractor workforce would be even more decimated. Goldin vowed revolutionary management reform, and this change included moving more control over programs from headquarters to the centers. Decentralization also meant shifting control over funding. Project managers at JPL, for example, had fewer resources with which to work, but more control over those resources. The downside was that they would have to make exceptional cases to get more money from headquarters, since headquarters had less to provide.
With his vocal enthusiasm for reform and loyalty to the president, Goldin became the poster boy for Vice President Gore and his reinventing government campaign. This campaign, under way since the advent of the Clinton administration, became more pronounced in 1995 and seemed to be especially associated with governmental downsizing. Goldin basked in favorable publicity as he did battle against “bureaucracy,” but, inside NASA, he was much criticized, and his seemingly callous offhand remarks helped create fears at JPL and elsewhere. “People are terrified,” said one aerospace industrial official. Goldin, in the view of his critics, equated disagreement with disloyalty. He would, it was said, kill the messengers of bad news. He called his senior managers “pale, male, and stale” and replaced half his center directors, although not the head of JPL.51
Planetary science suffered along with other science programs in the cutback atmosphere. However, within planetary science, Mars was relatively favored as a priority. Mars was the destination of choice, Huntress emphasized: “It is the most Earth-like planet, and it is a place where life may once have formed.”52 So, it was going to get the priority within space science generally and planetary programs particularly. As part of the Mars priority, NASA was reviving exobiology.
For years, exobiology had languished. Under Huntress, exobiology was reinvented, with Michael Meyer, one of the few relatively younger scientists at NASA retaining this interest, in the lead. In 1995, Meyer brought together a number of researchers who had persisted in conducting exobiology research despite what Sagan had called its “disreputability.” Chuck Klein of Viking, now retired, was among them. They developed “an exobiological strategy for Mars
exploration.” The emphasis was on robotic research, but eventually there would be human exploration. Sagan was an advisor to the group. Klein and others, particularly at Ames, had worked to bridge the gap between exobiology and other fields in emphasizing “habitable environments” over life per se. Still there was an estrangement of “exobiology and the disciplines of traditional planetary science.” The group called for the research communities to work together, even though that might “strike some as far-fetched, even fanciful.”53
The Meyer role reflected not only renewed interest in exobiology but also new organizational clout for Mars within the Space Science Directorate. The same was seen at JPL. Indicating this Mars emphasis organizationally, JPL had appointed Donna Shirley to the position of manager of its Mars activities. She presided over Pathfinder and other Mars projects under the Mars Surveyor Program. In doing so, she advanced over Spear, a move that grated on Spear but did not hurt Pathfinder. She noted in May that in 1995 dollars, Viking cost $4 billion. In comparison, the spacecraft JPL were now developing to go to Mars would cost a small fraction of that amount, and they would do more science. The new Mars program would go beyond what Shirley called Viking’s “veneer science” to a point where you could actually start to bore in and do some indepth studies.54
Mars Pathfinder, the first of the series of Mars ventures, would be the smallest planetary spacecraft ever, at 1,500 pounds. But it would be big compared to the 1998 probe NASA was developing, which would be half Pathfinder’s size. Then would come even smaller spacecraft. One JPL scientist said the laboratory’s aim was “to create a ‘virtual presence’ for mankind” in the solar system through the various robotic devices JPL and NASA planned under the FBC regime.55 That “virtual presence” began at Mars.
In July, as NASA celebrated the 30th anniversary of Mariner 4, the first spacecraft to successfully view Mars, there was a strong sense among a growing number of advocates inside and outside the agency that NASA was gathering momentum in respect to Mars—in spite of the funding crunch. Goldin said that the adversity was forcing the agency to be more innovative, leaner, and meaner. He spoke of NASA’s long-range strategy and said that the robotic precursors would lead the way to human missions later on. “I want to go to Mars,” he avowed.56 He predicted that NASA could spend wisely in the remaining years of this century and then begin preparations for a concerted effort to send humans to Mars in the twenty-first century, with 2018 the target year.57
The governmental downsizing mood of the times, shared by the president and Congress, enhanced Goldin’s power to get his way within NASA. But there were many who were skeptical that more with less would work.58 Those critics inside NASA tended to keep quiet, however, fearing for their jobs. Goldin avowed he was going to do what was right, and not worry about being loved. What was right, in his opinion, was to go to Mars—by way of the FBC strategy.