The Political Environment Grows Toxic

The macropolitical context of Mars exploration changed significantly at this time, making it even more difficult than before for Griffin and the scientific community to reach an accommodation. The Democrats recaptured control of Congress in the November elections. With Bush in the White House, relations in policymaking grew toxic. Fights between Congress and the president in No­vember and December made it almost impossible to get budget bills through. This was bad news for NASA, space science, and robotic Mars exploration. The lobbying campaign by the Planetary Society and others had paid off in getting congressional bills that added money to science at NASA. Moreover, friendly senators had gotten the Senate to pass a $1 billion supplement to NASA, above its regular program appropriation, for shuttle recovery and Katrina-related re­pairs. Such legislation—if it had become law—would have been a great help to the agency in restoring some of the cuts to science, including Mars exploration.

But legislation of this kind was not to be. The best Congress could do was to pass a continuing resolution to keep most agencies, including NASA, funded at their current year’s rate. This meant no raise at all, at least until after the Demo­crats had taken charge of the new Congress in January 2007. If the continuing resolution held the entire next fiscal year, NASA would have to cut deeper into its programs. Mars research could be further damaged.58

The year 2007 opened with NASA getting decidedly mixed signals from its political masters. In February, the new Congress, led by the Democrats, ex­tended the continuing resolution that funded NASA and various other federal agencies at the 2006 level through the end of the fiscal year, September 30. In doing so, Congress gave some agencies small increases at the expense of other agencies that received modest cuts in order to maintain the overall figure. NASA was one of the agencies cut. However, the president’s FY 2008 budget, also announced in February, gave NASA a raise, to $17.3 billion. That was a 3.1% increase over the president’s 2007 request, which Congress did not grant thanks to the continuing resolution. So NASA had to do the best it could, Mars science included. The president’s science advisor, John Marburger, suggested that space scientists curb their appetites and turn off missions before launching new ones.59

Griffin focused all the more acutely on his own priorities under the circum­stances. Everything narrowed down to his view of the core mission, and pro­grams were weighed in terms of their value to that mission. For Griffin this meant concentrating on the first phase of Constellation, Orion-Ares I, which promised a shuttle successor and technology development relevant to Orion – Ares V, the heavy-lift Moon rocket that would come later. Mars research gave way to lunar research. The Mars budget was far from what it had been projected to be when O’Keefe left the NASA Administrator’s post. But Mars was treated better than many other planets or science projects. Astrobiology was especially hard-hit, not just by budget reduction, but also by Griffin’s words. “If they [as – trobiologists] want to work for government money,” he declared, “they must look at what the government wants—not what they think it should want.”60

Implementation of the existing MEP continued. The next mission in line for launch in the Mars program—Phoenix (2007)—was experiencing an over­run. NASA considered killing Phoenix, the first Scout mission, but wanted to stay with its launch-at-every-26-months strategy. NASA decided to meet the additional costs. McCuistion indicated that the Mars program had very little flexibility and that “the overrun on Phoenix was going to have some effect on us,” which meant that NASA would have to take money from elsewhere in the Mars budget to pay for Phoenix.61

In 2007 MSL also revealed overrun issues. Solving the overrun problem for MSL was going to be much more difficult than for Phoenix given MSL’s size, the criticality of the mission, and the scale of the potential overrun. Dealing with MSL would not be Cleave’s problem, however, as she had retired in De­cember 2006. Colleen Hartman served in her place on an acting basis. Griffin in February announced that S. Alan Stern would succeed Hartman in April, as associate administrator for science. Stern was executive director of the South­west Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He was a well-known, respected planetary researcher and the principal investigator of the Pluto mission.62