To find life, the landers would each extend arms and scoop up soil samples for testing. (The Viking camera was a test of sorts as well: if something scurried or slithered on the surface of Mars, Viking would see it. Paw prints, snake trails—the cameras could capture them.) A scoop of soil would be tested for photosynthesis. Another test would look for markers of metabolic activity. A third would check for respiration. Any positive result would be tested and retested so that scientists might know conclusively.
For the first time since Apollo, the media were absolutely into this NASA endeavor, which was great . . . except . . . well . . . scientists were being asked for instant analyses of data that might take months, years, or entire careers to evaluate. Reporters pestered them for instant, definitive statements in the affirmative or otherwise on the most consequential question in all of science, religion, and philosophy: Are we alone?89 Even on the easy stuff, scientists hesitated to give yes/no responses—there’s always an exception. But with Viking, only an absolute answer would do! Is there life or isn’t there? To the dismay of editors around the world, Viking seemed to produce only hedging headlines with terms such as could,90 hints at,91 still a puzzle,92 inconclusive,93 unsure94—even weasel words without scientific pretense, like hope95 and belief.96 Coverage in the New York Times read as though written by coin toss. Two months after the landing, the evidence for life was “beginning to mount impressively.”97 Twelve days later, findings “did not bode well for life-on-Mars theories.”98 Whom to believe! What were we doing up there?
By the onset of the eighties, with White House budgeters picking off spacecraft like Special Forces snipers at a carnival shooting gallery—ding!—ding!—the Viking answer to the life question was: maybe, but probably not. And though Viking 1 still maintained a heartbeat, still performed in situ science, it was elderly and infirm, and a prime candidate for the purge.
Enter that Viking Fund, with ten thousand fans of far-off worlds saying in unison, “Count me in!”99 and contributing small sums: five dollars, maybe fifteen. Robert Heinlein himself dropped into the jar ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.100 The fund’s very existence spread word-of-mouth, geek to geek, a science-fiction convention here, a Dungeons & Dragons gathering there. It was moving, but it was dismaying. American space science had been reduced to a Beautify the Park initiative. Stan Kent dutifully sent to NASA the sixty thou he had collected . . . and the agency had no idea what to do with it or how to handle it, because federal offices were forbidden by law from accepting private donations for specific projects. Of course, this wasn’t a bribe, exactly. It was just normal people sending money to a federal agency? Because they believed in it? Well, it was unheard of and completely crosswise with the rising Reaganite zeitgeist, but, look, things were bad, so NASA lawyers found a way and cashed that check.101 It amounted to the first private funding of a deep space mission, and the initiative ultimately raised one hundred thousand dollars.102 But the bake sale model of space exploration was neither ideal nor sustainable, and somehow things only got worse from there.
Emboldened by its progress and politically invincible, in December 1981 the White House Office of Management and Budget pushed in its pile of chips, proposing the termination of the entire planetary program at NASA. If you were a space scientist, it was just comic-book-caliber villainy. It was like canceling biology or math! But the president’s science advisor concurred, as did the deputy administrator of NASA, who supported astrophysics, but that was about it (he was a physicist). He certainly didn’t see a future for Jet Propulsion Laboratory and had only a few years earlier written a paper declaring the results from space science in our solar system thus far to have been of no major consequence.103 The science return simply wasn’t commensurate with investment. What’s the rush to visit Jupiter? It’ll be around in ten years. The Venus orbiter was just going to return higher-resolution data of something we had already. And it’s not like there would be a political price to pay. The reptilians on Venus didn’t vote and were unlikely to stage a counteroffensive. At the time, every single planetary scientist in the world could fit on a single international flight.104 You could probably win votes by killing planetary. Selling off the Deep Space Network, running the bulldozers across Jet Propulsion Laboratory—or better yet, giving it to the U.S. Defense Department—that was prime real estate in the San Gabriel Mountains (Rose Bowl Stadium was three miles away)—it was an easy dollars-and-cents decision.
The California Institute of Technology, which managed JPL, fought back successfully. First, it authorized increasing the lab’s intelligence and defense work to about thirty percent, as defense spending was sacrosanct in Reagan’s DC, and better to make satellites for the war machine than to clean out our desks. Next: Caltech’s powerful, well-heeled, and well-connected trustees took a sort of Chesty Puller attitude toward the problem: So, we’re surrounded? Good—now we can fire in any direction! The lab was a California institution, and California was Reagan country. There were direct lines of influence that reached the Oval Office, and the trustees tapped into them. Through correspondence and cocktail party offensives, they began a systematic petitioning of the government across the nation’s capital. They struck pay dirt finally with Howard Baker, the Republican Senate majority leader from Tennessee, who intervened personally on behalf of the Galileo mission, extending a political shield that made it invincible. From that point on, one by one, the dominoes stood themselves back upright. Preserving the mission meant keeping the lab and necessitated the Deep Space Network which in turn saved the Voyagers.
Salvation did not all systems forever go. The planetary program wasn’t on solid footing, but having narrowly averted an apocalypse, scientists could circle the wagons and take stock of the situation. If their field was to survive, everyone knew, it would have to find a new way of doing business.
THE FIRST TRY was called Planetary Observer. The idea was to take flight-proven, Earth-orbiting satellites and refit them for cheap, focused missions around other rocky worlds. Rather than build billion-dollar battlestars that did everything (including attracting too much attention from appropriators and budgeteers), why not build a lot of low-cost, “no-miracle” spacecraft that each did one thing really well? We could actually afford to build those and could launch them in regular cadence.
Programmatically, the idea with Planetary Observer was to replicate an even older mission model called Explorers, which managed small satellites that could be built and launched in a short amount of time. These were single-issue science affairs, live hard and die young. One might map the magnetosphere near Earth and, eight months later, fall from orbit. Unlike larger lunar and planetary missions, their budgets were practically rounding errors in congressional appropriations. Accordingly, Explorers program managers didn’t have to go out and seek permission to get a new mission going. The Planetary Observer program, the idea was, would work the same way. They would keep costs low by using only heritage hardware and off-the-shelf parts. Earth satellites were cheap and plentiful, and worked well. There was no reason that you couldn’t repurpose one for, say, the planet Mercury or the asteroid belt. The spacecraft’s science payload would be small and sharply defined. A mission might study only atmospheric conditions. Later, another precision expedition would work on magnetic fields. The next might do composition or imagery. Each would build on the one before, would keep the science coming in, would keep the cadence going. The program, by design, would control costs by way of a fixed budget. And because everyone in the community could be confident that there would always be another orbiter just around the bend, you didn’t get a “Christmas tree” effect, with everyone trying to hang his or her science instrument on the spacecraft. Instead, you waited for the next chance in two years and submitted your spectrometer specifications then.
Right away and on cue, the White House had a problem. Fine, NASA could start up an office to manage this new “heritage spacecraft” paradigm—knock yourselves out—but we weren’t about to give you a fixed budget. Yo
u want to fly a mission, you still go through us. So that’s what happened. The first of its line to get the go-ahead was the Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter.
The last of the Vikings had finally died. The Red Planet looked lifeless, but to know for sure, you would need to study its soil up close with big binocular microscopes on long black tables on Earth. The holy grail was thus a sample return mission, but if you were going to take samples, the more context you had for them, the better the science you might be able to do. So planetary scientists rolled up their sleeves and proposed a panoply of potential Mars missions. The orbiter, designed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, emerged as best of the lot. It was a sensible first step toward an eventual sample return expedition that might be mounted, if all went well, in the late nineties. It was approved in 1984 for the following fiscal year, and it would cost less than three hundred million, total, top to bottom, start to finish.105 That, everyone agreed, was a practical price tag in these tough times. In keeping with the spirit of simplification, the lab shortened the mission’s name to Mars Observer.106
It was doomed from the start.
Like everything else, NASA needed to tie this thing to the space shuttle. America’s “space truck” had been intended primarily to build space stations, but space stations were not being built, partly because there was no money left after building the space shuttles. And maintaining the fleet was proving to be a colossal (and expensive) headache.107 But we couldn’t just give up! We have four of them to use, said headquarters, and we will use four of them. So planetary launches would work like this: Mars Observer would be carried to orbit as a shuttle passenger, the payload bay doors would open, and the spacecraft would launch from there to Mars.
It was that final step that threw things off. NASA headquarters couldn’t reach consensus on the rocket element that would blast Mars Observer from shuttle to target. You could build the booster into the spacecraft itself (a common practice among Earth satellites) or use what NASA was proposing to call a “transfer orbit stage”: an expendable rocket that would shoot the spacecraft from the shuttle and then separate, letting gravity do the rest. The advantage of a transfer orbit stage was that the design could be used again and again for future planetary missions, saving money down the line. The disadvantage was that . . . it didn’t exist. And the whole point of the Planetary Observer program was to use cheap, off-the-shelf parts: no miracles.
The result was a comedically complicated spacecraft design process. NASA pressed the Mars Observer team to allow private industry to submit spacecraft proposals for either method of propulsion, and if a transfer orbit stage spacecraft happened to win the competition, Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville would build it. This slowed spacecraft selection, so to make up for lost time, the agency announced an opportunity for labs across the country to submit science instrument designs . . . before the spacecraft bus had been chosen. That was new! Not all spacecraft were created equal. Some could hold one instrument, which might be a camera or mass spectrometer or magnetometer; some could hold a dozen. Size, mass, power constraints—those things varied—and nobody knew which spacecraft would win or how many instruments it might be able to accommodate, so the selection process now had to account for multiple payload configurations. Ultimately, an eight-instrument payload was chosen by NASA, and it would ride on a transfer stage spacecraft capable of holding . . . seven. Moreover, the instruments turned out not to be the off-the-shelf parts previously planned for. Because the Planetary Observer program was already so hobbled, the mission was being treated by scientists as the Last Mars Mission Ever—because with Reagan at the wheel, it might well have been. Proposed instruments, therefore, pushed the technology envelope and promised spine-tingling new data, which meant an increased risk to budgets and schedule. (The original plan for Mars Observer didn’t include a camera. But the public loves space pictures, and since taxpayers were footing the bill, they’d get their postcards from Mars. Add it.108)
If the problems stopped there, the spacecraft might still have gone over budget, but respectably so. But they didn’t! Here is the problem, it was later learned, with repurposing reliable, flight-proven Earth satellites for interplanetary exploration: “reliable” exists on a sliding scale. The Earth spacecraft technology chosen for Mars Observer was used frequently by the Pentagon. That was a major selling point. But—and this wasn’t factored into the decision—if one of those Pentagon satellites circling Earth glitched—say, its avionics or thermal protection were wonky, or it simply conked out and crashed back to terra firma—the military would just go to the warehouse out back, wheel out another one, slap it on a rocket, and launch it to space. No one would lose a lot of sleep on the deal, and from that standpoint, yeah, the spacecraft were totally reliable. But take the same spacecraft, load it with delicate, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art scientific instruments, send it to Mars, and it glitches . . . then that’s it! Years and hundreds of millions of dollars are lost, no spares waiting in the warehouse.
Moreover, launches local versus those interplanetary work differently. An Earth satellite goes up and all the dirty work basically happens at once: the trauma of launch, the engine firings to place it in proper orbit. By the time the satellite blooms like a flower, unfurls its solar panels and instruments and arms and booms, it is in a Zen-like state of total serenity, at peace with the universe and in position in orbit. The whole process takes hours. Not so for a spacecraft to Mars. You repurpose an Earth satellite for a multiyear voyage to the Red Planet, and, to take but one example, you’re saddled with joints that weren’t made to endure that type of torque. Another: Earth-orbiting spacecraft have instantaneous and constant communication with Earth. The same luxury does not exist at Mars; it takes minutes for a signal to send, and minutes more for messages to return. Further frustrating things: we are not always listening. The Deep Space Network is shared among multiple spacecraft. It’ll point to Voyager 1, listen, send commands, and then Voyager 2 (same), and then Pioneer 12 and so on, meaning that spacecraft in deep space can count on communications only for an hour or two each day. They have to be smart and semiautonomous, because if something bad happens, they can’t wait twenty-two hours for instructions from Earth. They need to react immediately. All of this would thus have to be designed, built, tested, and integrated into the spacecraft.
The upshot is that Earth satellites, chosen to reduce cost and complexity, increased both. But not as much as the shuttle would! (Again!) In 1986 the space shuttle Challenger and all hands aboard were lost at launch. It was a national tragedy, and to prevent such horrors from ever happening again, NASA grounded the fleet for a two-and-a-half-year inspection and refit. (Galileo’s antenna lubricant dried during this hiatus.) Mars Observer, tied to the shuttle for launch like everything else, was a relatively low-priority mission. Even once shuttle operations resumed, the Mars team was told there would be a long wait ahead. That turned out to be correct, for several reasons: because contracts with industry would have to be renegotiated; because the launch vehicle changed (after all that, the spacecraft was given a Titan III rocket—a blessing, really, as it allowed more mass than the shuttle did); because NASA was strapped for cash; and because Mars missions were tied to celestial dynamics. Ultimately, the fast, cheap mission first funded in 1985 didn’t launch until 1992. Its original cost: three hundred million. Its cost by the time it left the launch pad: eight hundred million. Which might have been worth it, had the spacecraft not vanished without a trace.
What possibly went wrong was this. Mars Observer used pyrotechnic valves to pressurize its fuel system before beginning its orbital insertion. But its communications system, built for Earth operations, wasn’t rated to remain active during the jolting, percussive pressurization sequence. To mitigate the possibility of damage or crashed communications, upon arrival at its destination, the spacecraft would switch off its radio, perform the Mars maneuver, and switch it back on.
Here is what NASA now knows for sure: the spacecraft successfully switc
hed off its communications system.
It was never heard from again.
Mars Observer was the first total failure of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory spacecraft in decades. A big part of the lab workforce didn’t know a spacecraft could fail, so successful had they been for so long. And no emotional closure would be forthcoming because there was no telemetry transmitted to perform an autopsy. The loss of Mars Observer devastated lab morale, embarrassed the cash-strapped agency, and set science back by years.
If it was any consolation, however, the lab’s Mars program would not only recover, but become the dominant force in space exploration for the next twenty-five years. Here is how it happened.
MAYBE REAGAN WAS playing four-dimensional chess, though more likely it was just a happy accident, but while he was cutting planetary science to the bone, and then shaving bone to the marrow, and then just sort of idly needling around in there to see which bits of gooey tissue NASA could do without, the president was also funding a secret space program that would eventually pay Apollo-level technological dividends and enable planetary exploration for the next two decades.109 It was called the Strategic Defense Initiative and, as envisioned, would be a missile defense shield designed to deflect or destroy an incoming Soviet nuclear strike.110 The idea was to nullify the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which asserted that if Ivan launched nukes at Uncle Sam (or vice versa), it would be suicide because the other side would retaliate with everything it’s got.111, 112 The Strategic Defense Initiative, went the argument, would deter the Soviets from attacking because we would survive the onslaught unscathed. But for this new type of deterrence to be effective without destabilizing global security, the missile defense shield would have to perform flawlessly one hundred percent of the time—be able to knock out an endless, simultaneous barrage of thirty-five thousand nuclear warheads113 delivered from launch silos, submarines, bombers, and mobile launch platforms.114 Its strategic folly was that by its very existence, if the balloon went up, the Soviets would now have a legitimate reason to launch those thirty-five thousand nuclear warheads at once. You had to get through that shield! And if, say, just two or three got through, and Washington and New York City and Los Angeles were vaporized, then the shield wouldn’t have done its one job.115 So there was a downside.
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