[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_*]

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.

[Stephen]

Not sure how much help the following will be to the MO debate in this thread but I came across the following while doing a search of the NET:

(1) A 1992 document titled "Preliminary Design Review for [the] PERCIVAL Mission To Mars" (which this document says "has been designed as a follow-up mission to the Mars Observer...spacecraft that is currently in route to Mars") lists amongst Percival's mission objectives: "To provide a platform for scientific instrumentation cut from the Mars Observer mission due to funding cutbacks".

Among the instruments planned to be flown on Percival was VIMS.

(2) Meanwhile, this page of David Portree's "Romance to Reality" website refers to VIMS as "an instrument deleted from the prime MO spacecraft to make up for the cost of moving MO's launch from 1990 to 1992".

(3) On the other hand a more complex situation seems to be being suggested by a statement that appears on page D-2 (ie first text page of part D, chapter D1) of this PDF document from late 1993 (volume 1 of the "Mars Observer Mission Failure Investigation Board Report"):

"Envisioned as a low-risk, well-bounded, first-of-a-series project for focused science, the
Mars Observer mission underwent a number of significant changes during its eight-plus year
development period. The majority of these changes were driven by events that were external to the
project, and included funding reductions, launch vehicle uncertainty, redirection in the number and
complexity of science experiments, and elimination of follow-on missions. The net result of these
changes was to stretch the schedule by two years, change the launch vehicle from the Space Shuttle
to a Titan III, and increase the cost by a factor of two."

The report then goes on:

"These changes also had a more subtle, but possibly more serious effect. They led to frequent
violations of one of the basic tenets of the program: namely that Mars Observer was simply a
slightly modified for Mars Observer version of a well-proven, reliable, high-heritage-design
spacecraft that would undertake a different mission. In fact, many of the spacecraft systems had
been so extensively modified for Mars Observer that their heritage had been lost; others, whose
heritage remained intact, should have been requalified to verify that they would function properly
on an interplanetary mission of three years duration (an environment for which they were not
designed)."

(Elsewhere, Ronald F. Draper of JPL in a 1992 paper for a Symposium titled "Microelectronics for Planetary Spacecraft" noted:

"The Mars Observer spacecraft is an attempt to reduce the cost of planetary
missions by using a commercial Earth satellite slightly modified to do a
Mars Orbiter mission."

)

(4) Meanwhile, Mike might find this 1997 paper useful: "A Management Approach for Allocating Instrument Development Resources" by David Porter. Section 2.1 (beginning on p5) is titled "Mars Observer Instrument Cost and Mass Growth" and includes (on p6) a graph (figure 2) showing "Mars Observer’s Instrument Cost Growth", which from the reference given appears to have been taken (or based on data taken) from "Mars Observer Project History" by C. Polk, JPL D-8095, JPL, December 1990.

At the foot of p5 Porter has this to say:

"The potentially hazardous effect of instrument cost and mass growth can result in instrument descopes in capability or de-selection from the science payload. In the case of Mars Observer, the instrument cost and mass growths (see Figures 2 & 3) resulted in the descope of the RADAR Altimeter & Radiometer (RAR) for the simpler Mars Observer Laser Altimeter (MOLA), and the de-selection of the Visual & Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS)."

======
Stephen

[EDIT: On reflection I've amended the Porter quote to give the complete version, which included mention of the RAR change as well the VIMS one.]