Accelerating Mars Sample Return

As 1996 got under way, NASA found itself pressed between the Republican Congress and President Clinton, as they fought over the federal budget. This bitter struggle had led to the government’s shutting down in 1995 because of an inability to get a budget bill passed to keep it running. That shutdown was over, and most agencies were now operating on a continuing resolution, under which Congress permitted them to spend at a level commensurate with what they spent the previous year.1

NASA eventually got its 1996 budget—$13.8 billion—in May, but the fiscal uncertainty continued. Clinton promised a balanced budget by the time he left office, and the Office of Management and Budget proposed cuts in NASA’s bud­get in ensuing years. Under the OMB plan, from $13.8 billion in 1997, NASA would plummet to $11.6 billion in 2000. Making matters worse for NASA was its need to cope with Russia’s torpidity in fulfilling its space station obligations, thereby helping to delay that project and adding to its expense. Under the 1993 presidential-congressional agreement, the station was getting $2.1 billion a year. With the overall budget falling, space science and robotic Mars exploration would be further squeezed. Huntress complained that NASA could not sustain its science initiatives under the projected funding.2 Goldin, meanwhile, seemed to want more rather than fewer initiatives as he allied himself closely and vocally

with Gore’s “doing more with less” policy. NASA and its Mars program seemed to need a miracle to extract itself from a dire financial prospect. This miracle came—in the form of a meteorite from Mars. The agency’s response was to reorient the Mars Surveyor Program from a comprehensive, gradual approach leading to Mars Sample Return to one that was targeted to achieving the sample return goal at the earliest instance. The Mars meteorite provided Goldin with what he needed—a way to raise Mars above the space subsystem level to national and even global attention. It was a punctuation point that altered the political equilibrium, at least for the moment. With support from the president, vice president, and Congress, Goldin seized the opportunity to forward his dream.