Reagan set a former NASA administrator on the task of working this thing out, and the California Space Institute, a research group at the University of California San Diego, held a workshop to bring together experts on everything from military strategy to space science. In the end, the institute returned a report on how to do it, and the researchers didn’t hold back. This is not easy stuff you want, they emphasized. It will be expensive and it will not happen overnight, Mr. President, because the things you want haven’t been invented yet, and the research is disparate, unfocused, and abstruse. But, they asserted, by engaging NASA, national laboratories, academia, and industry, it could be done.116
To defend the United States from missile attack, the report explained, the United States would need to deploy space-based interceptors (a concept labeled derisively by Senator Edward Kennedy as “Star Wars”117). But there was more to it than mounting lasers to cheap communications satellites and calling it a day. If the Soviets were willing to push the button and wipe out humankind, they wouldn’t worry much about the treaty violations incurred by blowing up our satellites, which wouldn’t be hard in any event, because spacecraft were designed to be as lightweight as possible; every gram increased the cost of launch. Because something as small as an errant flake of paint, flying at tens of thousands of miles per hour, could destroy an orbital satellite, the fleet of spacecraft comprising a missile shield would need to be armored—otherwise the Commies would use a fusillade of impactors, particle beams, heat rays—even nuclear blasts—to target them immediately as a precursor to doomsday. So in order to do this right, the shield would have to be built to last, the totality of necessary satellite armor enormous—three times heavier than the Brooklyn Bridge. Forty thousand metric tons.
The good news, according to the researchers, was that the United States did not need to launch three Brooklyn Bridges into space. Everything necessary to build the armor was already up there. When it came to aluminum, iron, graphite, ceramics, and glasses, Earth wasn’t the only game in town. Rather than mine it here and fight gravity to bring it to space, we could just mine it in space and bring it to Earth’s orbit. Look, hull plating is simple technology: it’s just sheets of metal. We establish resource utilization facilities in space, and it’s practically free, relatively speaking, to manufacture not only armor but also a whole host of things. Shielding, propellants, explosives, structural foundations (e.g., beams, container tanks), projectiles, decoys—none of this is hypothetical. We’ve been running trade studies and feasibility assessments on it since Apollo. Moreover, the same infrastructure for pulling iron out of asteroids can also mine such things as platinum, chromium, manganese—these are strategic materials that the Defense Department requires to maintain a state of warfighting readiness here on the ground—and such treasures are not readily available in the continental United States. Asteroids and the moon, though, are teeming with the stuff. And guess who knows how to go to the moon, Mr. President? The research and technology development for something like this has long been underway on an ad hoc basis at NASA, universities, research institutions, the Defense Department, and the Department of Energy—but there’s never been a unifying purpose bringing them together. And now there is.
So the Strategic Defense Initiative went forward.118 It became, by far, the single largest research and development program in the Defense Department’s budget, which was saying something.119 It wasn’t an overnight thing, never looked like the time lapse of a battleship being built. It was more like the world’s largest science fair, with foundational technologies explored, designed, prototyped, tested: adaptive optics allowing laser weapons to mitigate atmospheric blurring; miniaturization and weight reduction of spacecraft components; radiation hardening of computer processors that were now also an order of magnitude faster; artificial neural networks; guidance systems and control units; propulsive technologies. Five-pound, hundred-thousand-dollar inertial measuring units used for guidance were reduced to four ounces in weight and five grand in dollars. High-speed communications. Reusable rockets—still in development, but the Initiative successfully launched one a hundred fifty feet in the air, flew it three hundred fifty feet sideways, and landed it vertically, softly, successfully. Techniques such as aerobraking, to slow spacecraft down upon arrival at an atmosphere. The Initiative built and launched a spacecraft called Clementine to map moon resources, and they did it in less than two years and for eighty million dollars—an order of magnitude less than what NASA was managing for Mars Observer, which took seven years to launch.120 It wasn’t apples to apples, but there were some salient lessons there.
All in all, SDI was the most aggressive aerospace research and development project since Apollo. Congress appropriated one billion dollars to the Initiative in 1984 and increased appropriations each year through 1989—1.4 (billion), 2.7 (billion!), 3.2 (billion!!), 3.6 (billion!!!) (each year!), peaking finally at 4.1 billion.121 The program ran out of steam under George H. W. Bush, however, with appropriations diminishing to a mere 3.6 (billion, sigh) and then 2.9 (billion, grumble grumble), and essentially ended under Bill Clinton. It changed names over time: the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the Missile Defense Agency. Had it continued as initially conceived, the program anticipated the need for crewed and robotic missions, a lunar colony, an orbital transfer vehicle—essentially a barge and tugboat to travel to and from the moon, the shuttle (because we had to find something for it to do), upgraded launch capabilities (something cheaper than the shuttle, because I mean, come on), and a space station.
By the time Mars Observer disappeared on August 21, 1993, NASA had a new administrator named Dan Goldin, who had previously worked on the Initiative while an aerospace executive, and before that was a mechanical engineer at NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. When Goldin took the helm of the agency in 1992, it was one of the least stable jobs in government; NASA administrators served at the pleasure of the president, and President George H. W. Bush was cruising toward electoral defeat. But the likely incoming vice president, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, a space enthusiast, liked him, and Clinton—who had no real connection to the program, emotional or otherwise—didn’t bother replacing Goldin once elected.
The consolation was cold, however. Under the new administration, Goldin had one real directive: prepare for budget cuts, because they were coming, and on the order of twenty percent.122 The loss of Mars Observer was to the agency what dropping your lunch tray was to a grade school student: a crushing embarrassment, but for eight hundred million dollars’ worth of food in front of five billion people, to say nothing of the decades of science now likely lost and the careers placed suddenly in jeopardy. Goldin, who brought with him a reputation for being . . . mercurial (at his last job, they called him Captain Crazy), and whose soon evident quick temper bore this out, could have stopped this Mars madness once and for all.123
But he didn’t.
Goldin, born in 1940, a young man during Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, was a Mars Guy—wanted his whole life to see an astronaut set foot on the Red Planet, had joined the agency in the sixties specifically to be part of the inevitable human Mars mission. Far from losing his cool in the din of disaster, he rallied and inspired the troops. So we lost Observer! It was a mess, foisted on you—the whole program. It’s over now.124 Cancel the Mars program? Are we not explorers? We will grieve later; right now we have a Red Planet to invade.
The chaotic aftermath of Mars Observer allowed Goldin to implement a new development philosophy that came to be called Faster-Better-Cheaper. It worked like this: all new planetary missions would be limited to the small Delta II rocket, budgets were capped at one hundred fifty million, and you had a three-year limit from conception to launch. Go over mass, money, or months, and the plug would be pulled—just like that. This would have been impossible, but Faster-Better-Cheaper had something going for it that no previous program had: that massive thirty-billion-dollar infusion of Strategic Defense Initiative research and development, which had fi
nally filtered down to the civilian sector. All the heavy lifting for technology maturation was done, and from NASA’s perspective, for free. From thrusters to star trackers, the miniaturization, the radiation-resistant tech—it was sitting on a shelf or file server waiting for some special spacecraft to put it in play.
Faster-Better-Cheaper would be run under a nascent competitive mission program called Discovery, which had been nurtured by Wes Huntress, the new head of space science under Goldin.125 The first Discovery mission to Mars would be a small lander and miniature rover that had been proposed originally by Scott Hubbard, a physicist at Ames Research Center in Northern California.126 The idea from the outset was that if it worked—if this tiny lander and its Tonka truck passenger survived, set down on Mars, and actually worked—it could be built in large numbers and deployed in force to the four corners of Mars. Huntress adopted the proposal, nurtured it, and when Ames passed on putting it into development, the job went to Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Project Pathfinder, as the mission became known, carried no transformative scientific instruments; this was no Viking. Its subtle aim was to remain just under the radar so as not to attract cancelation or Christmas tree ornaments, and to test what NASA could do. Miraculously, relative to JPL’s previous Mars efforts, it launched on time and on budget in December 1996 and landed successfully on Mars seven months later.
Pathfinder reenergized NASA unlike anything since Apollo, its landing received by the public as though the Viking landings had never happened. Maybe it was because an entire generation had missed the Apollo-Viking window, had never seen a Mars landing before, had no idea that such landings were even possible. (Alas, Viking.) Orbiters were exciting, but landers? It was the first successful set-down on Mars in twenty years, the first unambiguously successful mission in ages, and, magnifying the achievement, the first real planetary science mission of the Internet Age, giving it publicity aplenty. (Poor Galileo, lapping Jupiter, was decrepit before launch with its faulty, radiation-poisoned reel-to-reel recorder.) Those images! Papaya Martian horizons and that little rover rolling around—the newly wired global community ate it up. And at one fifty mil, a bargain.127 NASA had its mojo back.
Then came the next two Mars missions, which were . . . less successful. Both launched in 1998. The first, Mars Climate Orbiter, arrived at the Red Planet and swung behind it during orbital insertion, losing radio contact, as expected. The spacecraft should have emerged from the other side twenty-one minutes later. The Space Flight Operations Facility at Jet Propulsion Laboratory waited patiently for a signal to reach the Deep Space Network, and then, suddenly impatient, prompted the spacecraft anxiously for a reply, but response came there none. The orbiter either disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere or skipped off it, a stone on a pond’s surface, forever lost in space. In any event, engineers determined later that a software bug introduced in a single subroutine had caused the catastrophic failure.
But the Faster-Better-Cheaper program expected some level of loss. Failure was an option! That was the whole idea! We keep flying these missions, we launch a veritable invasion armada to Mars in two-year cycles, each time our orbits align, and, well . . . there will be lost spacecraft. Yes, one hundred twenty million dollars was a lot to pay for a shooting star that no one would see, but think of the one that cost eight hundred million! We were practically making money on this deal.
Three months later, Mars Polar Lander arrived, and forty meters above the planet’s surface, the spacecraft’s descent engines switched off. The computer thought the lander had landed. It had not. But then it did, and hard, making a nice, one-hundred-ten-million-dollar hole in the ground. And suddenly—seemingly as soon as it had arrived—the goodwill garnered from Pathfinder evaporated, and headquarters had to come up with a plan, and quick, and it did, and very.
ED WEILER, NASA’S new head of science missions, was in Pasadena for the auguring, faced the press with everyone else, and then flew back home, exhausted. Over the next few days, there would be four opportunities to try talking to the lander. Maybe it survived, simply set down like a ballerina, but had, say, a radio problem. Hope faded, however, with each passing day, and on December 7 the mission was pronounced dead.
He was sitting in gymnasium bleachers when his BlackBerry’s ringtone joined the din of bouncing basketballs and squeaking sneakers. The caller ID read DAN GOLDIN. He knew what was coming. Ed was at his son’s basketball team practice. The hours you put in at the agency, you didn’t miss family time when you got it. You couldn’t hear anything in the gym, so he stepped outside to answer. It felt freezing that night, the wind lightly rustling the leaves, brown and desiccated on nearby trees, and Ed pressed Answer.
You have twenty-four hours to fix the Mars program, said his boss.128
Ed told Goldin he’d get back to him tomorrow.
Despite his boss’s reputation for acerbity and ire and the legion of egos bruised agency-wide, Ed loved Dan—the two had always clicked, respected each other, were honest with each other—and the next day Ed walked into Goldin’s office with a plan for Mars.
We’re going to cancel the entire Mars program, he said.129
What do you mean? asked Dan, and not serenely.
We’re going to cancel the program and start from scratch because clearly we are doing something really badly here.
Ed never wanted to run NASA science. He had spent the last nineteen years as head of the Hubble Space Telescope, which, for an astronomer, was like being mayor of Disneyland. And how far he had come. Born in blue-collar Chicago, his mother managing the home, his father a steelworker and meat cutter; they scrimped, his parents, saved and sacrificed to put Ed through Jesuit prep school, to give him that better lot in life that every parent wants for his or her child, and Ed didn’t waste the favorable prospects they bestowed upon him. He worked his way through college at Northwestern University (disappointing the priests of his youth, who called it a pagan school), studied astrophysics, was no slacker—did a clean sweep: baccalaureate, master’s, doctorate. There was never any doubt about what he wanted to do with his life. When he was twelve, his dad had found and ordered a four-dollar mail-order cardboard telescope for Ed, and that was pretty cool—you could point it at the moon, see the craters along its crescent, the terminating line of the moon where met the lighted and unlighted regions of the disc, every feature along it cast into relief, and through his telescope you could make out mountains and ridges—the moon was no cue ball, no polished pallid orb, however it looked with the naked eye, and though teachers could tell you there are mountains up there, to see them? With your own eyes? Mountains on the moon? This stoked something inside of him—this fire he didn’t even know he had—and his dad saw this and went out and found his boy a two-inch Japanese refractor telescope—a Tasco—and in retrospect it was one step above a toy, but it really set young Ed’s imagination ablaze, and he joined the Adler Planetarium’s Junior Astronomical Society, which offered a telescope-making class, and there you are, a teenager, a kid, a lover of the stars, living in a working-class Chicago apartment, and now you are learning how to grind your own telescope mirror, and he built—built!—young Ed!—a six-inch, two-hundred-pound Newtonian reflector. It was the early sixties, and he had decided already that he wanted to be an astronomer, wanted to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. His entire life: meticulously mapped at thirteen years of age.
Ed didn’t know that he would one day launch and lead the Hubble Space Telescope, inarguably the most successful science program in NASA’s—if not the nation’s—history. Like so many others, the plan initially involved being an astronaut, and he applied for the first class he saw advertised to the general public. There were thousands of serious applicants, and he made it through the first couple of cuts, but the numbers were not in his favor and Weiler never left the planet Earth.
After graduate school, there weren’t a lot of jobs out there for astrophysicists, and young Dr. Weiler was set to sign, of all places, a
t American Hospital Supply, where he would work as a computer programmer. While doctorates in physics were scarcely useful in the labor market, a side effect of doing the discipline’s advanced mathematics was an unrivaled ability to write complex computer software. In those days, that meant Fortran on mainframes, and American Hospital was right: Dr. Ed Weiler could play a CDC 6400 mainframe like Handel at the organ. Before he committed to a lifetime of writing subroutines for company accounting, however, he heard from his doctoral advisor that Princeton University was looking for someone to work on its small orbiting astronomical telescope, Copernicus, which NASA had launched four years earlier, in 1972. The principal investigator was a guy named Lyman Spitzer. Ed interviewed for the position, presented well enough, and was hired as a staff astronomer, although his job kept him mostly at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which ran space telescope operations. It was a case of on-the-job training. At the time, there were only a dozen or so “space astronomers” in the world—everything was ground based. So the community was small but eager. Copernicus, a one-meter telescope limited to spectroscopy (studying ultraviolet emissions from stars, for example), wasn’t that powerful, but it was a science-making machine, and while working on the project, Ed met some of the greatest astronomers in the world, including Spitzer, who was his boss. He (i.e., Spitzer) talked frequently about another telescope he hoped to launch: a powerful orbital observatory free of the distortions and interferences of Earth’s atmosphere. He had first proposed it in 1947—ten years before Sputnik—in a paper titled “Astronomical Advantages of an Extra-Terrestrial Observatory.” Spitzer had spent his entire career lobbying for it, arguing the idea of it to the community, and eventually selling it successfully to Congress.130
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