[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

...from the Space Foundation's Elliot G. Pulham ( http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=20790) :

"As the space community is collectively lurching to find a road to sustainability for America's vision for space exploration, the big success stories most frequently trumpeted today have to do with Mars exploration. Without Dan Goldin, we very well might not have any of those success stories to which we so often point.

"By the late 1990s, Goldin had inherited a flawed and discredited Mars exploration architecture that had produced a string of embarrassing disasters. Most notable among these were the catastrophic uncontrolled landings of the Mars Climate Orbiter (which, of course, wasn't supposed to land at all, much less go full lawn dart), and the Mars Polar Lander that landed with considerably more gusto than it had been engineered to support.

"A key blunder, you may recall, was basic confusion among the spacecraft teams as to whether they were supposed to be working in U.S. Customary System of units or metric measurements. The 'was that inches or centimeters?' fiasco became long-running fodder for late-night comedians like Jay Leno and David Letterman.

"Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, Goldin seized the moment to call for a clean sheet approach to Mars exploration. In 1999, a new Mars program office was established and a new strategy developed. 'Follow the water' became the Mars exploration mantra, and it has had breathtaking success. The new effort got underway with the successful Mars Odyssey - a legacy program that was rigorously re-scrutinized by the new program office leadership."
________________

Well! Y'all know that -- while Mars Observer's subtle (and, in my opinion, largely forgivable) failure was not Goldin's doing -- the 1998 failures were precisely the result of his own half-witted insistence that we fly two missions for less than the combined cost of Mars Pathfinder, and that his "victory" consisted entirely of hastily backing away from his own belief that we could fly a huge Mars program on a shoestring (including his downright lunatic scheme to launch two Mars sample return landers by 2005 for a total cost of less than $1.5 billion -- along with a Mars airplane in 2003 for less than $50 million spacecraft cost).

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Believe me, the evidence for deliberate fraud and perjury before Congress not only exists: it's out there in public in massive amounts, and I am hardly the only person calling it that. There are plenty of space journalists much more prominent (and skilled) than I am who have been saying exactly what I'm saying for a long time: Gregg Easterbrook and T.A. Heppenheimer, just to drop two particularly large names. (Heppenheimer's book "Countdown", for instance, is excellent on the subject.) NASA has never whispered a single threat to sue any of them for libel, and it never will -- because they're not libeling it. (Nor was Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth libeling it when he said, "All government agencies lie part of the time, but NASA is the only one I know of that does so most of the time." He need only have added that this is simply because, having far less reason to exist at its current funding levels than most other government agencies -- at least after the Moon Race was won -- it naturally has to lie far more in order to maintain its funding levels.) In this case, there really was a conspiracy -- and it didn't have to be nearly as absurdly huge and sweeping as Hoagland's implausible ones, because it simply took advantage of the serious scientific and engineering ignorance of most Congressmen. They were sitting ducks for it.

The unnecessary lumping together of smaller spacecraft into Flagship missions was done all the time where planetary spacecraft were concerned. It was the precise cause of the growth of Mars Observer from several small separate spacecraft into a single billion-dollar one (thus causing us to lose tremendously more from that one failure than would otherwise have been the case), and Goldin himself pointed out that Galileo could very easily have been split into two or three missions. The same thing was done to the EOS Earth observation satellites, which (along with their predecessor UARS) were initially grown to gargantuan size entirely unnecessarily so that they could only be launched on the Shuttle. One can even make a case that Cassini could have been split up.

And -- to repeat -- after getting the Shuttle funded in the first place in 1972 by making utterly ridiculous claims about its low cost and high flight rate, NASA naturally had to provide incentives for the program to be maintained after its cost started rising and its flight frequency started dropping. One of those dishonest incentives was arranging for most scientific satellites to be so big -- whether they required it or not -- that they couldn't be launched on Delta or Atlas. This was done SIMULTANEOUSLY with NASA's strangulation of the ELVs; it did not either precede or follow that event. It was done to nip any initial pro-ELV mutterings in Congress in the bud before they could get rolling. But in the case of the Pentagon, this sort of deception failed, because the Pentagon DID know enough about space travel to see through it after a few years. (The battle between the Pentagon and NASA on this after the Pentagon finally put its foot down was ferocious; if I remember correctly, it took about six months of furious lobbying by the Pentagon to overcome NASA's attempts to continue tricking Congress on this subject.)

Another part of the plan -- described by the former head of the National Academy of Sciences' Space Studies Board about four years ago, in print -- was to keep the astronomers who wanted the Hubble Telescope from following through on their planned announcement that the Telescope would actually work better if it was only launched once, to an altitude too high for the Shuttle to reach, with a new telescope being launched whenever necessary instead of carrying out repairs on the old one with the Shuttle. NASA informed the Hubble team that --unless they kept their mouths shut and went along with the agency's claim that the Telescope would do best in a low Earth orbit with periodic repair visits by the Shuttle -- the agency would make sure they never got any big space telescope at all. So they did.

Yep, that's my article, about Robert Thompson's testimony. Thanks very much for digging up the CAIB testimony records; I urge everyone on this site to read his testimony. It was a lulu, I assure you. The only real surprise in it to insiders, however, was his casual but startling revelation that Nixon, for his own political reasons, was in on the plot with NASA -- the previous assumption by historians had always been that it was deceiving him at the same time that it deceived Congress in 1972. That man seems to have had some kind of religious scruples against being honest.

And, as Easterbrook says, it may not be coincidence that James Fletcher -- the NASA Administrator who launched NASA on its path of really huge post-Apollo fraud and dishonesty -- was a Nixon appointee. Bruce Murray, in his bitter book "Journey Into Space" -- another very good source on all this -- calls Fletcher "a strange man", and recounts the time Fletcher asked him to provide fake "true-color" photos of Mercury from Mariner 10 to sweeten the press. One strange and dishonest man appointed by another one. Murray, by the way, also informed me by E-mail that he had only learned from the CAIB testimony that the NASA official who told him in the book not to push for a Titan launch for Galileo because the Shuttle was sure to be ready by Jan. 1982 -- "Hell, Bruce, we have two years of pad" -- already KNEW when he said it that it was totally false. The guy wasn't mistaken; he was deliberately lying. By the time of the CAIB testimony, however, he was also safely dead and thus safe from any indignant confrontation by Murray.

(One final tidbit: even after Challenger, NASA was still so determined to launch Mars Observer on Shuttle rather than on a Titan, just to keep the Shuttle program propped up, that they deliberately delayed its launch from 1990 to 1992 for that reason alone -- a delay which raised the project's total cost so much that one of its most important instruments, VIMS, had to be kicked off it to compensate. They finally ended up having to launch it on a Titan anyway, of course.)

[mcaplinger]

The unnecessary lumping together of smaller spacecraft into Flagship missions was... the precise cause of the growth of Mars Observer from several small separate spacecraft into a single billion-dollar one...

While this seems to be the common wisdom, I don't think it's accurate. Mars Observer as flown looked very much like the Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter proposed by the SSEC in the early '80s. The main difference was the addition of two small instruments (MOC and TES) instead of one big one (VIMS). The cost increases through May 1988 are documented well in the GAO report NSAID-88-137FS and say nothing about spacecraft size changes. I see no evidence that there was ever any serious plan to fly multiple spacecraft to address the goals of MGCO. The whole time I worked on it (1988-1993) MO was viewed as a low-cost mission, which in comparison with Galileo and Cassini, it was.

Note that MGCO was originally supposed to cost $250M, not counting its Shuttle launch. The final figure, about $813M, includes the Commercial Titan launch, which was probably at least $150M not including the cost of the OSC TOS upper stage. The GAO report details cost increases for the spacecraft and payload of $163M.