A Stern Approach to Mars

On April 2, 2007, Alan Stern, age 50, joined NASA. A one-time astronaut candi­date, Stern had a $5.4 billion budget to manage and a constituency up in arms. He pledged to wring more good science out of his budget and to stop “manage­ment by checkbook,” that is, constantly adding money to projects beyond their original cost estimates. Either principal investigators would manage projects within costs, or they would risk project cancellations, he said.63 “There are going to be things I do that cause pain.”64

Griffin had appointed Stern in part to help him deal with the scientific com­munity. Cleave had never been truly accepted by the community. Stern bolstered his office’s status by appointing John Mather to be his chief scientist. Mather was a cowinner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 for his discoveries connected with the big bang. With Stern (planets) and Mather (telescopes) in charge, space scientists had to take the NASA science leadership seriously.65

Griffin, meanwhile, continued to criticize the scientific community. In May, he accused NAS of failing to take account of realistic costs in its decadal surveys of space science needs. The NAS SSB, he charged, routinely—and dramati­cally—underestimated costs and then complained when NASA scaled back or cancelled projects the science body favored. An NAS spokesman acknowledged that Griffin had a point.66

Stern reinforced Griffin, explaining that scientists were involved in a zero – sum game. Echoing Marburger, he noted that to make room for new projects, NASA would have to turn off long-running projects. One of the longest-run­ning and most celebrated projects under Stern’s aegis was that of Spirit and Opportunity. In May, Spirit made a major discovery. It analyzed a patch of Mars soil that was extremely rich in silica. This provided some of the most convinc­ing evidence yet that ancient Mars was quite wet. The processes that generally produced such a concentrated deposit of silica required the presence of water.

“You could hear people gasp in astonishment,” said Squyres, the principal investigator. “This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found some­thing this new and different after nearly 1200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there.”67 Obviously, long – running, still-productive projects like the Mars Exploration Rovers would not go quietly, particularly when led by a scientist with a public relations sense like Squyres.

Stern was a change agent in temperament but, unlike Huntress, was uncom­fortable and unskilled in bureaucratic politics. Stern was impatient with the routines and constraints of operating in a complex organization. Huntress was a quiet entrepreneur. Stern was overt and public. Stern called his administrative philosophy “pragmatism,” and what he meant by that was “exchanging” more perfect solutions for more practical ones by using existing systems, modified to the least extent practical, to accelerate the pace of exploration.68 He applied that approach to Mars. The goal was MSR—this is what counted. To move the date for MSR closer would mean modifying the schedule of missions he inherited and converting MSL into even more a means toward MSR than it already was. In the long-standing tug-of-intellectual-war between leapers and gradualists, Stern was emphatically a leaper in the sense of wanting to get to MSR quickly.

The problem he had was resistance to the changes he wanted to impose and suspicions on the part of many Mars advocates about his motives. This was especially the case because he was seeking to innovate in a major way in a time of budget stasis. To do the new, he had to cut back on the old, including Mars projects that did not fit into his “pragmatic” philosophy. And he was in a hurry.

Griffin focused on human spaceflight and was reluctant to cope with the scientific community—a group he found vexing. He told Stern he would have a relatively free hand to run SMD. Stern took him seriously and told his staff he “had the keys to the program.”69 He wanted to reshape it in accord with his priorities. Many worried Mars advocates saw him as an “outer planets” man, but he vowed he also had a strong interest in Mars. However, he intended to move Mars research in a better direction. For example, one month after he arrived, JPL came to him asking for more money for MSL. He wanted that practice to stop. What he really wanted to do was to speed up MSR. As he recalled, “What I wanted was to give Mars Sample Return a higher priority. Since I was a boy, people have been talking about Mars Sample Return. I wanted to move it for­ward. . . . I wanted to get the first sample back as soon as possible—unlock the door. An imperfect sample return would be better than none at all.”

He spoke to Griffin and told him about his MSR priority. Griffin responded, “Let’s go.” And Stern was off and running.70 On July io, Stern used a telephone hookup to speak to some 500 Mars scientists attending the 7th International Conference on Mars. He said that it was time for NASA to target MSR in a seri­ous way. A new Mars astrobiology strategy recommended by the SSB set “analy­sis of a diverse suite of appropriate samples” as the highest-priority Mars science objective.71 In keeping with this recommendation, Stern said NASA needed to reorient the existing program as soon as possible in spite of the constrained budget. He proposed to begin by attaching equipment to MSL which would allow it to capture a sample of soil and rock as it moved across the Mars surface. “I think there’s something concrete about putting your stake in the ground,” he declared. Retrieving the sample would come later. Such a return mission would be costly, he stated, perhaps $3 billion to $4 billion. To get that kind of money would require skipping a mission between MSL and MSR. However, he said the lost mission would be worth it, given the significance of MSR. MSR would build support for the planetary program, he argued, in the scientific community, public, Congress, and OMB.

He pointed out that even at the present scaled-back level that the Mars pro­gram had undergone, it still absorbed almost half of all the money the planetary

program had—46%. The Mars community, he urged, should thread the needle. He warned that if the community did not opt for concentrating resources in the manner he described, the Mars budget would shrink. “That’s my analysis,” he said, “not my wish. . . that’s my analysis of the way the politics will go.” He called for an MSR mission in 2018. “Let’s get this done.. . make some history,” he exhorted.72

The Mars community reacted with considerable wariness. MSR was indeed the holy grail of the robotic program. It was the goal toward which the sequence of missions designed by Hubbard and implemented by Figueroa and now Mc – Cuistion moved, the culmination of the “follow-the-water” strategy. What sent a shiver through the community was the trade-off. Stern’s comment about drop­ping a mission to get the money sent a signal of alarm. Which mission? There were many Mars scientists who were not astrobiologists and had other technical interests. And would omitting one mission be enough?

Philip Christensen, a leading Mars scientist and professor of geological sci­ences at Arizona State University, spoke for many of his colleagues when he declared, “I am concerned that the sample return mission would take over the Mars program. If you put that mission too far in the future with not much in between, then you lose a lot of momentum. . . a lot of young talented scientists and engineers.” He saw “a real serious challenge” in carving out enough money in the near term to pay for MSR and still maintain a dynamic program.73

Zubrin wrote an op-ed in Space News entitled “Don’t Wreck the Mars Pro­gram.” He indicated that Stern was possibly thinking beyond killing one mission for MSR, to the point of considering sacrificing all missions, including the 2011 Scout project, to get money for sample return. Zubrin defended the robotic program as an essential precursor to human flight. “Since the origin a decade ago, the existing fly-every-opportunity robotic Mars program has proven to be a brilliant success.” He claimed to be no fan of Dan Goldin, but he gave the former NASA Administrator credit for launching a “sustained exploration program involving frequent launches” which created not only an infrastructure on Mars but a “proficient team competent to carry out ever more complex Mars missions.”74

Stern was undeterred by the criticism. He directed Ames to design a caching box for the MSL. Chris McKay, one-time Mars Underground leader and now an astrobiologist at Ames, was one who supported the push for MSR by starting with changes in the MSL rover. Indeed, he wanted to go further. He called on NASA and the Mars community to think not of one sample return mission, but a program of missions. The first sample return, he said, should be a “simple, pathfinder-like sample return… a technology demonstration.”

By using MSL to cache samples, NASA would get people to begin focusing on sample return as a goal, said McKay. “It ties sample return to the ongoing program. There’s a tendency to think of sample return as something ‘out there.’ … It doesn’t need to be. It can be something in the Mars program.” McKay argued that sample return had to “connect, ultimately, with human exploration of Mars.”75

The European Space Agency, meanwhile, expressed interest in cooperating with NASA on an MSR mission. NASA indicated openness to the possibility, and discussions began in a very general, long-range way.76 Stern had wasted no time in putting his stamp on the implementation of MEP.

As Stern planned what the next development steps in the Mars program would be, the operating program he inherited continued to move forward. In August, NASA launched the first Scout mission. In contrast to the other proj­ects, this mission was generated through a competition in the scientific com­munity and largely run by non-NASA scientists. A Scout mission was intended to be smaller in cost and personnel than a typical NASA/JPL venture. However, it had to be relevant to the NASA strategy, i. e., follow the water.

The goal of Phoenix, as designed by the University of Arizona’s Peter Smith, was to go near the Martian North Pole and “touch” water ice. From Lederberg’s entreaties at the time of Viking, there had been the view that near the poles there would be water (in the form of ice) and evidence of possible life. Phoe­nix would not be equipped to actually determine life issues. Moreover, it was stationary, not a rover. But at $400 million, it did carry a digging capability. It would try to penetrate the ice and see what characteristics it had that might be favorable or unfavorable to life. MPL had had this objective, but it had crashed. Phoenix “rose from the ashes” to take MPL’s place.77