[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."
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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_*]

There was a piece on just that subject in "Science" (about half a page long) at the time of the Mars Observer failure. Mars Observer in its original form around 1983 was supposed to carry only about 4 experiments, with projected (if unclearly defined) later spacecraft to follow. Like Topsy, it growed -- and it growed because NASA kept piling additional instruments on the first spacecraft, instead of splitting them off onto one or more follow-up craft (which, of course, was what finally did happen after Observer failed).

Then the next event, as I said, was NASA's decision to try to keep it on the Shuttle even at the expense of a 2-year launch delay and the loss of one of its two most important instruments, VIMS. (VIMS got the axe because it was one of MO's two "facility" instruments paid for largely by NASA itself -- the other being the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer. All the other instruments were built and paid for mostly by their own experimenters, so that their costs were separate from NASA's own costs for the mission.)

I do also have the GAO report on Mars Observer, and will review it -- but just keep in mind that, technically speaking, every single thing that NASA did to start breaking up planetary missions and flying smaller ones after Challenger could have been done just as easily before Challenger. (The proposed Lunar Observer also started out dinky -- with only about 4 instruments -- but ultimately NASA was planning to put about 9 instruments on it. In the end, of course, LO didn't get funded at all.) There is a reason why that kind of breakup wasn't done -- even after COMPLEX recommended it in its 1983 advisory report (which I also have a copy of) -- and the reason is the one I mentioned. (COMPLEX even recommended splitting Cassini in two.)

As for Ted Stryk's comment: "Frankly, I would think a great conspiracy, in which the planetary programs were made impossibly large so that their funding would be gobbled by the shuttle, would be far more sophisticated and organized than those who supported the shuttle from the bureaucratic end were ever capable of": sorry, but that's exactly what happened. After all, it didn't have to be a sophisticated or complex conspiracy -- all that was necessary was for NASA's top-level officials (and particularly its Administrators from about 1972 through 1985) to say, "No, we're not going to fly a lot of small missions; we're going to fly just a few big ones." And, in fact, they did say that. One other little item I have in my files is Thomas Gold's 1992 piece on the subject in "Nature", in which he points out that NASA documents obtained from this period through the Freedom of Information Act (after years of resistance by NASA) have turned out to regularly include little handwritten notes from Fletcher, in particular, talking openly about the need for just this sort of dishonest move to bolster the case for the Shuttle. Gregg Easterbrook calls Fletcher "the Rasputin of NASA", and he deserves the title.

Once again: whether you guys like to hear it or not, this DID happen. We aren't even speaking in terms of it "probably" happening -- it provably, with no doubt whatsoever, DID happen. (And we get another indication of how it could have happened by considering the way in which, after Sean O'Keefe took over as NASA Administrator, his own underlings successfully flim-flammed him into supporting such wasteful absurdities as JIMO and the Hubble Repair Robot -- simply because he was an accountant who lacked training as an engineer. So do virtually all members of Congress.)

I'm going to spend a little while tonight digging up these documents I've mentioned; but I am not going to spend too long on this or on quoting them here in detail. If you want to find out for yourselves whether it happened, just read the same sources I use. They are absolutely unambiguous on the subject -- as unambiguous as Reagan's science advisor was when he called NASA a huge nest of habitual liars.

[mcaplinger]

There was a piece on just that subject in "Science" (about half a page long) at the time of the Mars Observer failure. Mars Observer in its original form around 1983 was supposed to carry only about 4 experiments...

Bruce, just because it says so in SCIENCE doesn't mean it's true. You can go back and look at the AO if you can find it, but there was no such "original form". MO did not "grow": the instruments were selected to the mass, power, and volume limits as stated in the AO. VIMS was subsequently deleted because they ran into massive development problems, and the radar altimeter became MOLA for the same reason, but there is no evidence of the kind of growth you suggest in the historical record, only from poorly-informed outsiders and long after the fact. And a lot of the misinformation seems to be sour grapes from unselected instruments, and the VIMS guys talking trash about those of us who made the cut.

According to "The Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter 1990 mission" by Low et al, 1984, an Ames-led climatology study and a JPL-led geoscience study had been combined by the SSEC into a single MGCO mission by January 1984.