Attempting Alliance

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama became president, and Congress tilted more dramatically in the Democrats’ favor than was the case under Bush. With economic crisis at home and wars abroad, Obama had many priorities. Space policy did not appear to rank high on his agenda, although he extolled Apollo as an inspirational event. Obama’s style was consensual, and he conferred with various senators, especially Bill Nelson (D-FL), in choosing a NASA Adminis­trator. It took him a while to find someone.

As the Obama transition got under way in the early months of 2009, and as he waited for a new NASA Administrator to take command, Weiler plunged ahead with his own agenda.1 He had two immediate Mars tasks: one was to reconstitute the Mars Science Laboratory for the next two years, and the other was to develop a robust program for the years after MSL which would get to the long-sought goal of Mars Sample Return. As far as he was concerned, he had inherited no real program beyond MSL. He had problems financially, in part because of MSL and its overruns. But he also saw opportunity if he and the European Space Agency’s Southwood could mount an effort to Mars together. The challenge was to get NASA and the new administration to commit to a long-term program. He and NASA needed a multimission successor as the ex­isting Mars Exploration Program ran its course. The bilateral effort seemed a “win-win” for the United States and Europe. But NASA and ESA were trying to sell this big science program at a time when resources on both sides of the Atlantic were hard to obtain. What worked internationally depended—at least for NASA—on what transpired domestically. Domestically, the space policy subsystem would face upheaval due to the impact of presidential and congres­sional political struggle. The larger conflicts in Washington were mainly about human spaceflight and overall budgets. But robotic Mars policy could not be protected from these macro events.