The Investigation

The twin failures in 1999 resulted in much soul-searching at NASA, Goldin included. Immediately after the lander failure, Hinners called Goldin on behalf of Lockheed Martin. He “apologized,” saying, “Sorry. We screwed up!” He fully expected to be “chewed out.” But Goldin instead said, “Look, I don’t want finger pointing. This is a management failure, not a technical failure.” It was obvious to Hinners that Goldin was already seeing himself and FBC as part of the problem. But Hinners felt he had himself been blinded by a false sense of optimism.24

Goldin quickly launched a number of investigations. The most comprehen­sive inquiry was by A. Thomas Young, a retired aerospace business executive and former NASA official whose Mars experience went back to Viking. Known as the Young panel, the official name was Mars Program Independent Assessment Team (MPIAT). It was a blue-ribbon team with 16 members. After meeting with Goldin on the panel’s mandate, Young on January 14, 2000, indicated that the word “independent” was serious: “Everything is on the table. There are no limits to what we can do.”25 Young said the panel’s inquiry would take two months. The panel then got to work.

Meanwhile, Goldin worked inside NASA with Weiler. The associate admin­istrator remembered one particular moment after the second disaster which helped define the recovery strategy. Weiler was at a basketball game with his son. He wore a pager. He received a message that Goldin was trying to reach

him. “I went outside the building to return the call. It was a cold January eve­ning, 9 p. m.” When he reached Goldin, the administrator barked: “You’ve got one minute to tell me how to fix this.” Weiler wasted little time in responding.

“I think we may have been too aggressive,” he said. “We need a step-wise process. In addition to large missions, we may need a small mission or two. We could also have competitive missions proposed by the scientific commu­nity.” Goldin listened and commented, “Good. Let’s get together and think this through.” Subsequently, Weiler noted, “Dan and I were arm-in-arm on Mars decision-making.”26

As Weiler and Goldin assessed the damage and what might be done, various individuals were speaking out. In late January, Donna Shirley, a former JPL manager of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, now an assistant dean of engi­neering at the University of Oklahoma, laid the blame on Goldin and his push for MSR at the earliest possible moment. After the Mars meteorite excitement, she said, Goldin “urged a switch from gradual understanding of Mars to a rush to look for life. And the key to that was the sample return mission. Dan has al­ways wanted a sample return mission because he believes it would attract public interest.”27

David Page, a UCLA planetary scientist, also blamed Goldin, as well as his top NASA managers. He said the Mars program needed to get away from the process by which “leaders would propose lofty space exploration goals without consideration for the technical difficulties, hard deadlines, and funding. What was needed,” he said, “was a grassroots process in which the goals, the schedule, the funding, and the risks are defined by the scientists, engineers, and managers who will be carrying out these projects. … In this model, ambitious goals such as a Mars Sample Return would eventually be accomplished, but only after the required technologies are in place and not at the expense of the much broader goal of studying Mars in all its diversity.”28

The accusations continued in February, with some critics, including scien­tists, going beyond Goldin to Clinton and Gore for not giving NASA enough money. Others blamed JPL for poor management. Others targeted Lockheed Martin, the contractor, for underbidding and problems on the factory floor. Weiler retorted that “everyone was to blame,” including the scientific commu­nity, for overconfidence. In 1998, the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council had called NASA’s Mars exploration effort a “well-thought – out and rational approach to achieving NASA’s programmatic goals.”29