It Looked Good on Paper

by Bill Fawcett

  On September 26, 1991, following a ton of generally positive press, an eight-member team of “Biospherians,” all dressed in dark blue Star Trek-style uniforms, were sealed into the Biosphere for two years. (Unbeknown to the public, a three-month supply of food had been stored in the Biosphere before it was closed.)

  Shortly after the doors were sealed, the scientific underpinning of the Biosphere began to falter and fail pretty quickly. First, oxygen levels rapidly declined. Then, consequently, the Biosphere’s air quality declined. By December, the Biosphere’s leaders were forced to acknowledge that outside air was being pumped into the project. Eventually, the oxygen levels fell from twenty-one percent to fourteen percent—barely enough to sustain life—with a corresponding rise in carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide high enough to cause brain damage.

  Outside, negative stories started popping up in the international press.

  Inside, the crew faced constant hunger—and traded accusations of food theft—as the production of food did not come close to satisfying the occupants (one Biospherian went from 260 pounds to 150). The only hope for a successful conclusion to the project relied on a last ditch repair effort. But instead of fixing the project, the repairs only made matters worse.

  Morning glory vines, introduced to soak up excessive carbon dioxide, grew so fast that they destroyed food crops. Several species started dying off. According to the New York Times, “Nineteen of 25 vertebrate species went extinct, as did all pollinators, dooming most plants to seedlessness. Most insects died off, except for katydids, cockroaches and crazy ants.” The native Arizona ants, which were not included in the Biosphere, infiltrated the structure and ruled the day.

  The planners had also radically misjudged the environments. An overabundance of rain ruined the desert. The temperature unexpectedly rose, and the light, supposed to be filtered in through the glass panes, was too dim. At the end of the first year, after a hearty series of denials, the scientists acknowledged making “10,000 mistakes” and promised to improve.

  But it was way too late.

  By the time the original eight Biospherians left the project, everything was in disarray. Infighting among the team members grew and the board splintered. Unsurprisingly, the guy with the most money, Ed Bass, was left standing. After ousting the board, Bass chose to donate the project to Columbia University in 1996.

  Columbia recognized the problems with Biosphere 2 and tried to make the best of it. It turned the entire project on its head. Rather than having a paradise that would show humanity how to live on other worlds, Columbia instead decided to turn Biosphere 2 into a scientific test of the dangers of global warming. The high temperatures and high levels of carbon dioxide would turn the dome into what a New York Times reporter called a “kind of atmospheric hell.” But the Biosphere could not even get this nightmare dystopia right. Again the desired results failed due to technical problems.

  By 2003, the university had washed its hands of the project, turning it over to new owners.

  Biosphere 2 never achieved its goal of showing humanity how an enclosed world could work together. It never proved how humans could survive on another planet, but it will become what nature truly intended for the Arizona desert: a tourist trap and a planned community.

  “Somewhere between Earth and Mars is a great galactic ghoul. It is an unseen monster that gobbles up spacecraft for lunch and spits out their remains into the cold, dark void.”

  —Charles Piller, Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2003

  Mars or Bust

  Teresa Patterson

  The angry red planet named for the god of war has inspired imaginations since humans first looked upon the heavens. The dream of exploring Mars, once believed only a fantasy, became a reality within the last half-century. But so lofty a goal rarely comes easily, and to say that the Mars program occasionally deviated from the plan would be a serious understatement. In fact, it is quite miraculous that we managed to get our probes there at all.

  The Mars Program plan seemed simple enough—at least on paper. First, a series of satellites would “flyby” the red planet, powered largely by solar panels, snapping photographs and taking readings as they zoomed past. Second, another series of “orbiters” would launch with instructions to stop and enter into Martian orbit, gathering still more data and relaying it back to Earth. The next phase involved landing on the Martian surface with a “descender/lander” to take readings from ground level, followed by a phase utilizing mobile robot vehicles or “rovers” that could gather additional, more detailed data. The landers and rovers would then relay that data back to the orbiters and Earth.

  We had already proven that we could get a satellite into space and keep it there. We had also proven we could safely land a craft from space. All we had to do was make it happen several million miles farther away on another planet.

  Unfortunately, if the Russians were any example, it wasn’t as easy as it seemed on the drafting board. The Russians led the space race, with the first satellite, dog, man, and woman in space, but by 1964, despite five launches, they had still not managed one single successful Mars mission.

  Marsnik 1 (also called Korabl 4, Mars 1960A), launched on October 10, 1960, would have been the Soviet Union’s first planetary probe. It was equipped with two folding solar panels to provide power for its long journey as well as a vast array of sensing, recording, and communications equipment. The launch vehicle, a new rocket designated SL-6, was basically a Molniya booster with an added fourth stage.

  The new rocket never even made it to Earth orbit. After reaching 120 kilometers, the third stage failed to ignite and the ship returned to Earth the hard way. The Soviets launched Marsnik 2 (Korabl 5, Mars 160B) a few days later only to watch it suffer the same fate. Apparently it didn’t occur to them to try to fix the problem before turning another expensive rocket into a smoking crater.

  It took two years for the Soviets to try again. Sputnik 22 (Korabl 11, Mars 1962A) was launched October 24, 1962, for a Mars flyby. The SL-6 rocket made it to Earth orbit this time, but the spacecraft exploded shortly after, probably during the engine burn that was supposed to put the ship into Mars trajectory. Pieces of the shattered ship remained in orbit for days.

  Bad as it was, the failed mission almost cost the Soviets more than a ruined spaceship. The launch occurred at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. In Alaska, the United States Ballistic Missile Early Warning System detected the debris and initially mistook it for the start of a Soviet nuclear ICBM attack. Fortunately someone figured it out before pressing the red button.

  The Soviets’ next attempt, Mars 1 (Sputnik 23), which launched less than a week later, was almost a success. An automatic interplanetary station designed to fly by the red planet at a distance of approximately 11,000 km, Mars 1 was equipped to collect and relay data on surface imaging, cosmic radiation, the planet’s magnetic field, atmospheric structure, and lots of other cool critical data. Equipped with two solar panels, this craft actually made it out of orbit and well on the way to Mars before the communication system failed, making it impossible for ground control to send course corrections—or receive the data the little probe was probably still dutifully collecting. Mars 1 eventually passed uselessly by its namesake at a distance of almost 200,000 km, ending up in orbit around the Sun. It did succeed in taking and transmitting some valuable readings from open space before the radio failed, but none of them had anything to do with Mars.

  Korabl 13, launched a short time later that same year, proved that the U.S.S.R still didn’t have the bugs in their SL-6 rockets worked out. In what must have been a frustrating repeat of Sputnik 22, it too exploded upon reaching Earth orbit. Fortunately, by this time the folks at U.S. Missile Defense knew how to tell the all-too-common Russian space debris from an incoming ICBM. The Russians pretended Korabl 13 had never happened at all, omitting it from most records and waiting until 1964 to try again.

  The U.S.S.R. was 0 for 4, and yet NASA decided that the Martian curse only appli
ed to Russians. The Mars program administrators were certain the superiority of American know-how would prevail in reaching the red planet. On November 5, 1964, NASA launched the first U.S. Mars probe, Mariner 3. Avoiding the launch vehicle problems that plagued the Russians, NASA used the tried and true Atlas Agena rocket, a proven military intercontinental ballistic missile, rather than attempt to design a new booster with new problems. Mariner 3 was actually the third probe of its type, though the first allocated for Mars. Mariner 1, a flyby mission to Venus, had failed, its rocket veering wildly off course shortly after launch. Mariner 2, however, had completed its flyby, successfully recording conditions on Venus. Mariner 3 was simply the same mission with a slightly different destination.

  The launch was successful, the powerful Atlas lifted its payload into space as planned—but the probe went nowhere. Its protective shroud stuck, failing to jettison, trapping the probe and ending the mission. It was NASA’s first encounter with the “Mars curse,” but not the last.

  The next launch, later that same month, had better luck. Mariner 4 became the first probe to complete a Martian flyby, take readings and photographs, and actually transmit them back to the Earth.

  Meanwhile, the Soviets launched their fifth (or fourth, depending on who’s counting) attempted Mars mission, Zond 2. But this one, an ambitious design, was an automatic interplanetary station fitted with six experimental low-thrust plasma ionc engines that allowed it to maneuver without expending fuel. Zond also carried a special descent craft for entering the Martian atmosphere. Otherwise Zond contained all the same basic equipment that had been on board the ill-fated Mars 1.

  On launch day, the Tyazheliy Sputnik launch delivery vehicle made it to parking orbit—without blowing up—and successfully released Zond 2 to unfurl its solar panels—well, one of them anyway—and head on its merry way to Mars. Unfortunately that Mars 1 equipment had apparently seen no improvements in the intervening years. Six months and three-quarters of the way to the rendezvous, the radio stopped responding. Three months later, in August of 1965, Zond 2 passed silently within 1500 km of Mars—the closest failure yet.

  In 1969, the United States launched two more Mariner probes, 6 on February 24, and 7 on March 27. The two were identical, fully automatic—although each could be reprogrammed from Earth at need—and both were successful, relaying valuable data and photos back to Earth.

  At the same time, in a mission that was never officially announced, the Russians decided to one-up the Americans by moving directly to stage two, Mars orbit—even though they had yet to succeed with stage one. On March 27, the same exact day as the Mariner 7 launch, the Soviets, who routinely attempted to launch planetary probes in pairs, launched not one, but two Mars orbiter missions simultaneously.

  At 10:40 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), Mars 69A, powered by the more reliable Proton SL launcher, lifted gracefully off its pad and completed a successful burn and separation from stages one and two—before the stage three engine exploded a little over seven minutes into the flight, scattering pieces of the ship over the Altai mountains.

  Nearby, Mars 69B didn’t fare as well. Its Proton booster failed less than a second into the flight when one of its six first-stage rocket engines exploded. The crippled ship’s control systems struggled to compensate for another twenty-five seconds before the rocket began to tip over. Then all five remaining engines shut down. Forty-one seconds into the flight, Mars 69B slammed into the ground and exploded. Designed for Mars, it managed to travel three whole kilometers.

  Oblivious at the time to the failure, NASA successfully launched Mariner 6 and 7 on flyby missions, retrieving valuable images and data from both, but not before Mariner 7 gave ground control a serious scare. Months after launch, for no known reason, the probe lost communications, battery, and power and started gaining speed and tumbling erratically. Ground control watched helplessly, fearing that the curse had found their little probe. Then, equally inexplicably, five hours later Mariner 7 regained communications and power, and corrected its velocity.

  Scientists started commenting, only half joking, that the “Great Galactic Ghoul” was waiting to waylay any craft that dared attempt to reach Mars. The Ghoul became the “here there be dragons” warning of the space age.

  Mariner 7 suffered no more strange failures, so NASA went ahead with the next step, the Mariner Mars 71 Project. The plan involved two separate Mariner spacecraft which would insert into Martian orbit to perform different, but complementary tasks.

  The plan went bad when Mariner 8’s Atlas-Centaur booster experienced trouble soon after liftoff. The upper stage began to oscillate, then tumble, causing the main stage engine to shut down only a little over six minutes into the flight. The payload and engine separated before re-entering the atmosphere to fall into the Atlantic Ocean.

  But NASA was undaunted. Twenty-two days later Mariner 9, now a solo mission, launched successfully and carried out its planned orbital reconnaissance, sending back stunning pictures of Martian volcanoes and canyons.

  But the Galactic Ghoul wasn’t through.

  That same year the Russians, now determined to at least beat the U.S. on to Martian soil, decided to skip both the flyby and orbiter stages—since they had done so well with them—and move directly to the landing on the planet stage. Again working in pairs, they built two identical ships, designated Mars 2 and 3 respectively, each carrying both an orbiter and a descent/lander module. The sister ships were designed to approach Mars and enter into orbit, recording data as they went, then, once safely in orbit, to detach the lander to float through the thin atmosphere and gently touch down on the Martian surface. The landers, each proudly carrying the Soviet coat of arms, would then study the topography, soil, magnetic fields, and so forth, and relay the findings back to the orbiter.

  Both ships launched successfully on May 19 and 28—using Tyazheliy Sputnik rockets this time—and approached Mars as planned. Four and a half hours out from the planet, Mars 2 released its descent module. The module entered the atmosphere—and fell uncontrollably as the descent systems malfunctioned, failing to fire braking or maneuvering thrusters. Moments later the little lander smashed—not so gently—into the Martian surface, delivering the Soviet coat of arms to the planet at the bottom of a smoking crater. The Mars 2 lander gained the dubious record of being the first manmade object to reach the Martian surface.

  Mars 3 fared better. The Mars 3 lander actually managed to land relatively softly. It opened its petal-shaped protective covers and began transmitting an image to the orbiter—for all of twenty seconds. After twenty seconds it simply went dead, enveloped and destroyed by a massive dust storm. The Russians still insisted they had earned the title for the first soft landing—though the resulting shards of useless space junk left sitting in the red dust certainly didn’t look like a successful surface mission.

  They did finally manage the orbiting part, however. The Mars 3 spacecraft entered a creditable orbit, despite a fuel loss that forced a change in the original trajectory, and transmitted valuable data for almost eight months.

  In 1974, the Russians also finally got their flyby mission with Mars 4—though on paper it was supposed to be an orbiter. A degraded computer chip failed to fire the retro-rockets, so Mars 4 never slowed down, flying right on by its target—though it did dutifully record data. The Russians got lots of information about the open space between planets as Mars 4 raced towards the sun.

  Mars 5 and 6 succeeded in reaching Mars, though 5, which was intended as the main orbiting communication link to the landers carried by 6 and 7, failed after only nine days. Mars 6 successfully deployed its descent module. The lander transmitted atmospheric data almost all the way to the Martian surface before it suddenly went silent—probably after hitting the ground at around 61 meters per second. Mars 7, the last in the series, released its descent module early, so that both the ship and the lander sailed right on by the planet to be lost in solar orbit.

  Feeling buoyed by the success of the Mariner m
ission—and the fact that the Galactic Ghoul seemed to prefer the taste of Soviet hardware—NASA scientists took their time, and lots of money, preparing the Viking Orbiter/Lander Program. In 1976, Viking 1 made the first really successful landing on Mars—Russian space debris and coat of arms notwithstanding—and Viking 2 followed with equally glowing results. Both orbiters and landers worked almost exactly as planned, sending back thousands of images and massive amounts of data. Americans forgot about the curse and began to get comfortable with the idea of a United States presence on Mars.

  The Russians couldn’t forget. The ghoul got two more ships intended for a Martian moon in 1988, though Phobos 2 did send a few nice photos before it failed.

  Seventeen years after Viking, the United States prepared to launch again. The Mars Observer was to be first of a series of sophisticated observation satellites designed to study the climate, geology, topography, and gravitational and magnetic fields of Mars. Based on a commercial communications satellite design, the Observer had not two but six solar panels, a long-lasting high-tech battery system, high-resolution cameras, and state of the art systems that would allow it to map the planet from orbit with a resolution of one meter, one hundred times better than all previous photographs. It was also the most expensive planetary mission yet, costing over $183 million.

  The Observer worked like a dream, exactly according to plan until August 21, 1993. Three days before the scheduled Martian orbit, ground control prepared the ship for firing its engines by pressurizing the fuel tanks. To prevent loss of the transmitters from the stress of the fuel pressurization sequence, ground control ordered Observer to switch off all communications. After the time allocated for the prep-sequence they switched communications back on—but Observer wasn’t there. They continued to try for hours, then days, but the probe, all 183 million dollars of it, had simply vanished. Even now no one knows for certain what happened to it. Experts believe it probably exploded during the fuel pressurization sequence. After all, the pressurized fuel was designed to explode when mixed. If it happened to leak and mix in the wrong place, like the titanium tubing, it would still explode—with much less pleasant results.