The Stern Strategy

Stern wanted bold projects in spite of the budget constraints. As the principal investigator of the Pluto mission, he was an outer planets advocate. He wanted an outer planets flagship mission to go forward under his watch, to either Jupiter or Saturn. He also, as he had made clear, wanted to depart from Mars incre­mentalism to a truly great leap forward—MSR. He thought big, envisioning a sequence of flagship missions: MSL, outer planets, MSR. How to pay for these larger missions was the question.

The NASA budget and its longer-term projection that appeared in February 2008 revealed his solution to the problem. Rather than continue the inherited strategy of missions every 26-month opportunity leading gradually to MSR at some indefinite future date, he decided that money for Mars would be drasti­cally curtailed after MSL in 2009, thereby enabling other non-Mars initiatives to take place. The budget would then rise significantly later in the decade to finance an MSR mission in 2020. This was indeed a daring move, and Stern, confident and fast-moving in style, did not necessarily consult widely either in NASA or externally. He also riled Mars advocates by being quoted within NASA as saying “Mars is just another planet.”87

The White House budget office had been sufficiently surprised by the radi­cal change in approach that it asked a group of scientists independent of NASA to take a look at Stern’s new program strategy. It was a marked departure from the steady “follow-the-water” sequential approach up to now. OMB acquiesced to the Stern strategy, as did Stern’s superiors at NASA. When the projected Mars spending in the NASA budget became public, however, most Mars sci­entists were shocked. Many charged that Stern was hollowing out the Mars budget to get resources for his outer planets flagship. Robert Braun, professor of space technology at Georgia Tech, wrote that Stern was “gutting” the Mars program. With no missions slated for 2011 and 2018, and only tentative mis­sions in 2016 and 2020, the budget “puts the future Mars program on a path toward irrelevance,” he charged. He called on the Mars community to grill Stern vigorously at the next Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group meet­ing, on February 20.88

MEPAG was an outgrowth of the ad hoc meetings of Mars scientists which Hubbard and his associates sponsored to receive broad input from Mars scien­tists generally when they were designing the new program in the year 2000. It had been subsequently institutionalized as a two-way communications mecha­nism between NASA and the scientific community. MEPAG now met two times a year.

Philip Christensen of Arizona State University, chair of the White House – established panel, came to the MEPAG meeting, held at Monrovia, California, to give his panel’s assessment. As Stern sat in the front row, he heard Chris­tensen blast the new strategy. “The phasing [of missions] is just wrong,” said Christensen. “Our assessment is that it just won’t work,” he said, pointing out that it would take substantial funding early in the next decade to develop the technology for MSR in 2020. MSR entailed “launch vehicles, a Mars landing system, an Earth return vehicle, a Mars lander, a Mars ascent vehicle, a rover, an Earth-reentry system, and a sample-receiving and curation facility on Earth.”89

Indeed, Christensen said, to prepare and fly in 2020, NASA would have to cancel everything after MSL, including 2013 and 2016 missions, to do what Stern wanted to do. “You have to come clean,” Christensen pointedly told the NASA associate administrator. “Either you fund the [Mars] program or you ac­cept the fact that it will be significantly reduced for the next decade.”

Stern defended himself and his strategy, stating, “No missions have been cancelled—none, zero, zip, nada.” “The Mars program is really healthy,” he told Science magazine, which reported on the meeting. But various Mars scientists countered him. “I don’t think many people accept his budget,” which went pre­cipitously down and then abruptly up, said Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder. “We just don’t see how you connect the dots,” declared John Mustard of Brown University, who chaired NASA’s Mars Advisory Committee as well as the MEPAG meeting. Moreover, Mustard criticized Stern’s decision to add a $2 million cache to MSL. He said he did not believe it would be able at this early date to pick up enough scientifically interesting material to be worth the expense.90

Stern had few vocal supporters in the Mars community. McKay did stand up at the MEPAG meeting and defend what Stern was trying to do. He believed that the Mars program was “in a rut” and needed to “turn heads.”91 But Stern also turned heads with his money decisions. Just the year before, McCuistion had said there would be stability in Mars spending at the annual $600 million level. That number itself had reflected a substantial cut from a previous projec­tion. Now it was falling to $300 million under the Stern strategy.

Where Stern had support was in the outer planets community, which was pro­jected to receive $3 billion for a Jupiter or Saturn mission. As Frances Bagenal, of the University of Colorado Boulder, chair of the Outer Planets Advisory Group and co-principal investigator with Stern on the Pluto project, explained, “Alan is trying to do the right thing by offering something to keep everyone happy. But it’s impossible.” In any event, said Bagenal, “it’s time to take a break from Mars and work on other things.” Stern said he was trying to have a “bal­anced” program. Stephen Mackwell, of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, commented that there would be “winners and losers” given the bud­get constraints. Most Mars scientists definitely thought themselves “losers” under Stern’s new approach.92