by Roger Wiens
The launch was to coincide with our first morning of Christmas break. Doug and I were thrilled. We wouldn’t miss this launch for anything—or so we thought.
On the morning of December 21, I expected to be awakened by my brother in time to watch the historic Saturn V rocket roar off the pad on its way to the Moon. Seven million pounds of thrust lifting a gargantuan 6-million-pound rocket the height of a thirty-story building! But when I woke up, sunlight was already streaming through the window and Doug was not in bed. Instead a strange stench filled the room. I ran upstairs. The TV was not on, and it was well past launch time. Doug was nowhere to be found. Then Mom saw me.
“Doug had to be taken to the hospital, dear. We hope he will be okay,” Mom told me, trying to be reassuring. My brother had vomited blood in the night and then crawled upstairs half unconscious to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Dad, who was the doctor in our small town, rushed him to the hospital.
It turned out to be a stomach ulcer, but at the time I was sure my big brother was going to die. As close as I was to him, this calamity turned my world upside down. I spent the next few days wandering the house aimlessly, thinking mostly about my brother, and only occasionally about the astronauts on their way to the Moon. To make matters worse, on the second day a blizzard enveloped our small prairie town. Snowdrifts several feet high soon closed all the nearby roads. A new fear gripped me—that Doug would be stranded at the hospital with no doctor available. But before the evening was over, a big snowplow stopped in front of our place, engine roaring and lights flashing. Mr. Goosen, who ran the plow, picked up my dad and delivered him to the hospital. Dad stayed with my brother for the night as the storm raged.
As the astronauts traveled on their journey, our town recovered from the storm, and my brother slowly recuperated. Finally—after three of the longest days of my life—we welcomed Doug back from the hospital on the same day the astronauts rounded the Moon.
That evening, as the Lunar Module (LM) orbited the Moon, all the networks turned to a special Christmas Eve broadcast: the first ever from lunar orbit. After opening our Christmas presents, which included a toy rocket, our family huddled around our black-and-white TV in the kitchen. Doug was wrapped in his blanket as we all listened and watched intently. After a description from news anchor Walter Cronkite, the picture came in from the astronauts 250,000 miles away.
“Welcome to the Moon, Houston. . . . This is Apollo 8, coming to you live from the Moon.” Astronauts William Anders, James Lovell, and Frank Borman went on to show and describe the lunar landscape rolling past 60 miles below them. While they did so, they also shared their thoughts on the unique perspective they had. Finally, as the Sun began to disappear behind the horizon, and the broadcast was about to end, Anders read a passage from the Bible—the first ten verses of Genesis—and then gave his farewell:
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.” Bill Anders closed just as Apollo 8 disappeared into darkness behind the shadow of the Moon.
It was indeed a memorable Christmas.
In addition to rocketry, Doug and I were fascinated by astronomy. We started our telescope observations with a small store-bought model when I was in fourth grade, but we quickly began dreaming of what we could see if only we had a bigger telescope. How would we get such a thing? The telescope of our dreams would cost several hundred dollars, an insurmountable sum for us. Fortunately we shared a paper route, and we worked in the fields in our grandfather’s farm every summer. So we got the idea of buying different pieces of the telescope as we could afford them. We could buy the 6-inch parabolic mirror for under $100 and we could save money by mounting the mirror and eyepiece on a long board instead of a tube. The tube would be purchased later.
Getting the telescope finished was an urgent matter, because there would be a close approach of Mars later that summer. Every twenty-seven months the Earth laps Mars as they orbit the Sun, and as the planets pass each other the disk of Mars becomes many times larger and brighter than it is at other times. We didn’t want to miss this opportunity!
A century earlier, Giovanni Schiaparelli in Europe—and later Percival Lowell in the United States—claimed to have discovered canals on Mars from their telescope observations—signs of alien life. As larger telescopes improved the view of the Martian surface, the canali observations had not held up. Spacecraft flybys of the planet in the 1960s had not shown any signs of the canals. But these claims had ignited the public’s interest in the Red Planet. Now, in 1971, NASA was planning its first orbiter, Mariner 9. But Doug and I desperately wanted our own views of Mars.
The mirror, eyepiece, and mount were ordered, our dad writing the checks as we paid him cash from our paper-route earnings. We went to the lumberyard and bought enough plywood for the main body of our telescope. We also bought a fence post, which we installed in a dark location behind our house. To use the telescope we would carry it out and mount it on the post. Hauling the bulky telescope outside was definitely a two-boy job.
Our work was rewarded with fine views of Mars as it drew close to the Earth, coming within 35 million miles. We could make out most of the bright and dark features identified by Lowell, Schiaparelli, and other early Mars observers. One of our favorite features was Syrtis Major, a dark, slanting hieroglyph tapering to a point at the lower end. On some nights, when the atmosphere was turbulent, the planet’s surface would appear to boil and seethe. On these occasions the lower tip of Syrtis Major seemed to connect, perhaps by a line, to features below it, and I could imagine Lowell envisioning canals through vast Martian deserts. As the days and weeks went by we could see one of the polar caps grow as Martian winter approached. We bought a sketchpad and recorded our views of Mars, noting the dates of observation. Little did I know that one day I would be exploring these features with my own instrument as it rode on the surface of the reddish orb that appeared so far away through our telescope.
As the Red Planet faded with increasing distance from Earth later that year, our astronomy interests expanded into other areas. We learned about the American Association of Variable Star Observers, a group of amateur astronomers who made observations to aid the professionals, hoping to understand and categorize various stars that periodically changed in brightness. The organization never asked our age, so we became regular contributors, charting and submitting data on the vagaries of our favorite stars: R Coronae Borealis, R Leonis, and Z Ursa Majoris. We also became familiar with multiple star systems, gas clouds, planetary nebulae, star clusters, nearby galaxies, and meteor showers. The night sky held many wonderful secrets.
As Doug and I grew older, other activities entered our lives: football, grocery-store jobs, and high school. Likewise, the Moon landings ended and the space program faded into the background of national events. Of course, NASA didn’t go away. But its budget shrank below a third of what it had been in the 1960s. Astronauts no longer ventured so far from Earth, and the bulk of space exploration shifted to robotic missions.
Even as the last astronauts walked on the Moon in 1973, NASA was in fact building a bold robotic mission to the Red Planet. The Viking project consisted of two identical spacecraft, each of which carried both an orbiter and a lander. The Soviets had technically beaten the United States to the surface of Mars in 1971, when Mars 3 landed successfully during a powerful dust storm, but it only survived for 14 seconds, and then went silent. It was the last time Soviet or Russian transmissions were sent from the surface of Mars.
The idea of the US Viking program was to comprehensively map the planet with orbiters and then land the two craft to search for life and to make gains in understanding the environment. The orbiters were needed to help confirm landing sites for the descent vehicles. The half-ton landers were each sent to the surface a month after their mother ships arrived at Mars, and both were successful. The landers survived for up to six years and provided information on the composition of the Mars rocks and so
ils within reach of a scoop, and of the atmospheric composition and seasonal variations on Mars. Viking was best known for its life-detection experiments. One such experiment detected the release of oxygen when soils were moistened, considered a positive result for life. However, because the other life-detection experiments did not come out positive, the result was widely dismissed. The cause of the oxygen, the presence of a perchlorate in the soil, was found by the Phoenix lander in 2008.
Unfortunately, the successful Viking landings were not rewarded with new Mars missions. It would be twenty years before another ship from Earth visited the planet.
Much to my surprise, I got a chance to study Mars as a graduate student, although not as part of a space mission. The summer before I started at the University of Minnesota, I took a job in Robert Pepin’s research lab there. Pepin, a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, studied Moon rocks and meteorites, which we viewed as samples of ancient asteroids. When these “fallen stars” are dated in a laboratory, they yield an age only slightly younger than that of our solar system, the difference being the relatively short time these asteroids took to cool and become volcanically dormant.
The one thing that interested me most in Pepin’s research was a set of meteorites that didn’t date back to the beginning of the solar system. Instead, their relatively young age suggested that they must have come from somewhere that was geologically active well after the planets were formed. The short list of places that would qualify included Mars. But theorists of the time assured us that no rocks would survive the shockwave necessary to launch them from Mars. They dismissed any notion that the meteorites may have been chipped off of the surface of the Red Planet and somehow traveled through space to end up on Earth.
Then a researcher at Johnson Space Center, while trying to date the rocks, found pockets of gas trapped in the meteorites. The proportions of the gases matched the Viking measurements of the Martian atmosphere. Interesting evidence, but not sufficient to prove they were from Mars. A real clue lay hidden in the nitrogen, a gas that Dr. Pepin’s meteorite lab had just learned to study in minuscule quantities. During my first year of graduate classes, another researcher in Pepin’s lab analyzed samples of the putative Mars rock. The results were strikingly conclusive—the rocks were clearly from Mars—but left many questions. How did the rocks survive the event that ejected them from Mars? How did the gases get trapped inside?
The presence of Martian rocks on Earth captured the imagination of the national media. As for myself, I was thrilled by the idea of working on the rocks. I wrote a proposal and was funded to study them. We spent the next several years analyzing more of the Mars gas, finding new insights about the history of the Red Planet in the process. On one trip down to Johnson Space Center, where some of my research was carried out, I even got to hold this special meteorite in my own hands. I thoroughly loved this work, but I still assumed Mars was, for me, a passing fancy.
That is why I was so surprised when, just a few years later, I ended up, almost by accident, with a job at Caltech working on a potential space mission. It wasn’t a Mars mission, to be sure, but at the time, it was close enough.
chapter
two
THE DAWN OF AN ERA
WHILE THE PROSPECT OF WORKING AT CALTECH EXCITED ME, the job I signed up for seemed at first like a dead end. The eighties had been a terrible decade for planetary exploration. Between 1978 and 1989, not a single spacecraft had been launched to the Moon or to another planet. There were no Mars missions after Viking. NASA was in a rut. The agency had poured its resources into developing the space shuttle, which promised—but never delivered—cheap access to space. After several years of delays, the first shuttle was put into orbit in 1981. Over the next several years NASA focused on increasing the shuttle fleet and the number of yearly flights. But within five years of the first launch, the Challenger disaster reminded everyone that space flight was still a risky proposition. NASA spent the next several years reviewing the program and rebuilding.
With a significantly decreased budget, NASA’s robotic missions had an equally dismal fate over this period. The typical sequence of events was that some large mission would be conceived by a group of scientists and the project would receive approval in Congress. But as development began, the costs would rise steeply and the mission would invariably be canceled.
Not only were big missions perennially delayed or canceled, but the ones that went through were prone to failure. The complete failure of a big spacecraft meant the loss of billions of dollars of effort and disruption of any number of scientific careers. Several large missions had recently suffered severe problems. The Galileo probe to Jupiter, conceived in the 1970s and finally launched in 1989, was never able to open its main antenna. And the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), launched in 1990, was found to have a seriously flawed mirror.*
Furthermore, things were not looking good for two new projects on the drawing boards near the end of this period. The Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby (CRAF) mission, an exploratory mission to send a spacecraft to encounter an asteroid and then fly alongside a comet for three years, was devised when the United States pulled out of the group of nations flying spacecraft to meet comet Halley during its 1987 visit to the inner solar system. Halley was ultimately visited only by Russian and European spacecraft. In addition to CRAF, a new spacecraft, Cassini, had been designed to visit the ringed Saturnian system. As plans proceeded for both of these missions, the budgets spiraled out of control. It became clear that there were only enough funds for one project, and in early 1992, CRAF was canceled amid much protest from the scientific community.
A third major failure was yet to come. The Mars Observer spacecraft, the first US Mars mission since the 1970s, was a billion-dollar bird with an impressive array of remote sensing instruments designed to look for water, study Mars’ weather, and map the surface composition from orbit. It was launched in September 1992, but just as it arrived nearly a year later, contact was lost. It was the last big Mars mission for twenty years.
It was into this climate that a new NASA administrator named Daniel Goldin entered on April 1, 1992. As soon as he took office, Goldin began pushing for small robotic missions. The advantages of small missions were numerous: NASA could afford to fly more of them, they could be developed rapidly, and, with less investment on the line each time, the small missions could afford to take on a little more risk, reducing the overall cost of exploration.
NASA’s new direction quickly became clear. On May 8 of that year, Goldin announced a new line of planetary science missions that were to take less than three years to develop and cost less than $150 million each, a far cry from the multidecade, multibillion-dollar projects that had characterized the space agency since Apollo.
The new “Discovery” line would be competitively selected. This approach represented a sea change from past mission decisions, which had been made in the proverbial smoke-filled boardroom. Discovery missions would be scientist-led (by a principal investigator, or PI) with help from a NASA center and an industrial partner.
Previously, all missions had attempted to placate multiple scientific constituencies. A typical planetary mission would try to include instruments to study magnetic fields, magnetospheric ions and electrons, radio waves, atmospheric dynamics, atmospheric composition, and different aspects of the planet’s surface features. In short, every mission tried to do a little of everything. There were great political advantages to doing this, because as mission costs invariably started to balloon, all involved groups would lend support to the budget increases. In this old way of doing business, a project that didn’t include all these different subgroups was more likely to be canceled.
The net effect of the old style, however, was that each mission tended to be hulking and over budget. Someone once noted that the large spacecraft with instruments hanging on various appendages from the main structure resembled a large Christmas tree, with the scientific instruments as the many ornaments. The term
“Christmas tree” became a derogatory term for any large, overinstrumented spacecraft. In Goldin’s model, each spacecraft would have only three or so instruments, all of which would be focused on a common theme of the planet or object of study. The mission that focused on the most pressing scientific question of the day, properly led, would most likely be chosen for development.
Leadership by a single scientist was a huge change from the governing science committees and management cadre at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA center that had led all previous deep-space missions. Aside from the scientific and political pressures to please various constituencies, the old NASA management style had been motivated to make each mission as big as possible as a way to provide more jobs at the NASA center, more money for the organization, and a greater power base for the management. In proposing scientist-led missions using NASA centers as partners, Goldin had wrested control from the leadership at JPL. Each center and each industrial partner would have to compete for involvement in missions. The idea was that competition would drive the price down.
Equally important, these proposals would be winner-take-all and cost capped. Anyone interested in leading a mission would have to assemble a scientific, technical, and management team, including a NASA center and industrial partner, and submit a proposal. Independent reviewers would select the mission most likely to yield the best “science return per dollar,” a new term that Goldin coined. The mission would be completely defined prior to proposal selection, with a fixed cost. There would be no adding on of instruments or team partners. A 20 percent increase in cost would automatically trigger a cancellation review.
To help seed new ideas for the Discovery program, NASA announced a competition for new concepts to be held later that year. Based on short proposals and presentations, NASA would select the ten best for further development. Each of the ten concept winners would receive $100,000 and recognition in an exclusive club of likely-to-be-selected missions, well positioned for the showdown to occur just over a year later, in 1994.