Policy Impacts

NASA wasted no time in trying to build on the positive momentum the landing created. On August 20, NASA announced another Mars lander as the next in its midsized Discovery series of planetary exploration missions. This $425 million mission was called InSight, standing for Interior Exploration using Seismic In­vestigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport. Led by JPL, it would be launched in 2016. It was a stationary lander to study the interior of Mars via seismic readings and would build on technology used for NASA’s 2007 Mars Phoenix.29

InSight won against two other non-Mars candidates (a probe to a Saturn moon and one to a comet). Given the excitement surrounding Curiosity and scientific and congressional outcry against the Mars budget cuts, the choice of InSight was not surprising. NASA wanted to send missions to Mars every 26 months. With MAVEN and InSight, NASA was now covered until 2016. The 2018 mission might initiate what Administrator Bolden had called Mars Next Decade. The question was, what would that mission be and how could NASA afford one?

For months, Mars advocates had been pressing Congress and the Obama administration. By September, the Planetary Society had generated 2,000 physi­cal petitions and 17,000 e-mails to Congress, asking for restoration of the cuts to planetary and Mars programs.30 Although some non-Mars scientists complained of “Mars myopia,” there was relative unity in the planetary community, in part because the NRC Decadal Survey had established Mars as the priority, and Squyres had emphasized to scientists the need for a unified front.

The problem for Mars advocates was that Congress and Washington gener­ally were preoccupied with the upcoming presidential election. It was very hard to get anything done in the fall of 2012 if it required congressional action. On Mars, the Curiosity rover began its trip along the surface of the Gale Crater to Mount Sharp. It would take a while to get there. In the meantime, NASA awaited the findings of the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) led by Figueroa.

On September 25, Figueroa and Grunsfeld briefed an NRC committee on various options that were being developed thus far by the MPPG. They noted that MPPG was trying to design a program that would be relevant to the mis­sions of space science, human exploration, and technology development. That was the charge Bolden had given Grunsfeld, and Grunsfeld had relayed to Figueroa. Bolden, like other NASA Administrators, saw Mars as a NASA-wide objective.

It was pointed out in the discussion that space science and human spaceflight had historically viewed one another with suspicion. Figueroa likened the rela­tion to that of an elephant and a mouse, with each wary of the other. Although the two programs were on different tracks, Figueroa believed they could come together on MSR. He said MSR remained the top science priority and he could see options for human spaceflight involvement in it. For example, astronauts could collect a sample en route back to Earth from Mars. They could ensure it was safe enough to be brought to the Earth’s surface without fear of planetary contamination. Although Figueroa did not specify where astronauts would col­lect the sample, some observers saw ISS as one possibility.31

Both Figueroa and Grunsfeld emphasized that sample return was the best goal to bring the three different directorates together: human spaceflight, science, and technology development. The technologies developed for MSR would benefit human and robotic endeavors. “Sending a mission to go to Mars and return a sample looks a lot like sending a crew to Mars and returning them safely,” Grunsfeld pointed out.32

The immediate need, Grunsfeld stated, was to make a decision about 2018. If NASA were to launch in 2018, it would have to begin preparations in the next four or five months. The 2018 option was ideal from the standpoint of alignment of Mars and Earth, but was limited by what Grunsfeld called “the $800 million cost bogey.” That meant it would be an orbiter. Figueroa said a rover would cost from $1 billion to $1.5 billion.33

Speaking at an international conference the next day, Bolden noted that to reach the president’s goal of human spaceflight to Mars in the mid-2030s, it would take not only cooperation within NASA but also international coopera­tion. Bolden came from a human spaceflight emphasis. He later commented that scientists saw MSR as “the Holy Grail” of the robotic program. “The ques­tion for many of us is what the timing of accomplishing the Holy Grail is. Do you have to do it before you can send humans? Some would say ‘certainly.’ But when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, we did not have a sample.”34

There was obviously debate within NASA about emphases and roles in any cooperative endeavor related to Mars, and the NASA Administrator and Sci­ence Mission director needed to agree. Sooner or later, issues about who paid for what would have to be worked out. In the fall of 2012, as NASA planned for Mars Next Decade, however, there were many more pressing unanswered questions, and they would have to remain unanswered pending further events on Mars and in the country.

One immediate question was answered in November when Obama was reelected president. For NASA, that election seemed a positive development because a victory for his opponent would have meant one more review of the entire NASA program. The agency desperately needed a measure of stability. There was already enough angst for NASA over the looming sequestration of funds, across agencies, in 2013, unless the president and Congress worked out a deal to avert this calamity. For NASA, sequestration would mean $1.7 billion in reductions.

Meanwhile, on Mars, the extreme excitement that accompanied Curiosity’s landing had given way to a muted expectation about what it would discover. The media clung to any word from NASA or the project’s lead scientist, Grotz – inger, which seemed to have anything to do with Martian life. In late November, Grotzinger said that Curiosity would be making history, and the media specu­lated that it had found organic molecules—that is, the building blocks of life sought in the mission and which Viking had not found years before. But that possibility was quickly dampened by NASA. There was, to be sure, optimism among Mars exploration advocates that the rover would find something signifi­cant for life, sooner or later, but the agency said, in effect, “not yet!”35