[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_*]

The more I look into this, the more I think that -- at least on Mars Observer -- Caplinger and Stryk may well have a point; there seems to have been a significant amount of (mistaken) pressure from the scientists themselves to fuse two small missions into one bigger one there. I'm still reading on this (for instance, I've just discovered Howard McCurdy's 86-page report on the start of the NEAR project, which provides some information and some more new document leads on Mars Observer), and will report back again on this.

As for Mike's statement that VIMS got the boot from Mars Observer because of "severe instrument development problems": that's a new one to me, and I'd like to hear more. I've been working off (1) a very brief 1988 Aviation Week piece which said flatly that it was to deal with the price rise resulting from NASA's decision to delay the launch until 1992, and (2) a Mars Observer scientist I talked to back in 1991, who wasn't part of the VIMS team but was mad as hell that it had been removed and didn't say anything about development problems.

[mcaplinger]

As for Mike's statement that VIMS got the boot from Mars Observer because of "severe instrument development problems": that's a new one to me, and I'd like to hear more.

I'll have to retract that because I can't find any public supporting documentation about rises in instrument cost. It might have just been that VIMS was the most expensive instrument.