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39 chapter three Inside the Beltway In an ideal world, I would have sat down in my “Mars Czar” office at NASA HQ on E Street SW and started methodically planning how to approach the enormous task before me—get ten years of demanding interplanetary missions planned within the available budgets and make certain they all were successful, that the program was coherent and made sense, and that it would be sustainable to the end of the decade. Oh, and by the way, I had to deal with enormous pressure to integrate a possible Mars sample-­ return mission into the queue (list of missions). In fact, the issue of Mars sample return became much bigger than I could have anticipated. In reality, no such leisurely approach was even remotely possible. Immediate decisions loomed like wolves howling at the door. There were two missions under development for launch in May 2001—an orbiter and a lander. I had to understand what shape they were in and quick, and my team and I almost certainly would have to come up with some way to decide whether or not both or either of them should launch. This is the kind of decision that brings center directors, CEOs, and congresspeople breathing down your neck. Jobs, reputations, and millions of dollars are on the line. Inexorable pressures of planets in motion meant that inefficient use of a week or two could easily result in missing the launch window down the road and mean another two years and the attendant very expensive marching army. It was April 2000. There was barely a year before launch. In the space world this is usually the time when development challenges are behind 40 · Exploring Mars you. All the designs have been finalized for months. All the hardware is built. Most, if not all, of the software is written. The project focus moves to the final integration and testing of the payload with the spacecraft to ensure that everything works together as it should. Although it is not uncommon to find problems during testing, most difficulties have traditionally been failures of parts (for which there were often already-­ built “spares” available for just such contingencies) but are now more commonly software glitches that require rewriting and debugging. It is rare, if ever, to challenge the whole development philosophy and process so late in the game. Never­ theless, that is where my HQ team, the JPL Mars Program staff, and the contractors found ourselves. A bit of a political digression is in order here. The truth is that politics is never truly a digression in the federal world. Everything is politics every minute of every day. One of the key people on the political side of things for me was a fellow I came to truly respect, Steve Isakowitz at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Steve is now the chief financial officer for the Department of Energy, but at the time in the spring of 2000 when I was restructuring the Mars Program he was a budget examiner and branch chief at OMB. His job was to review, critique, and recommend budgets for the science part of the Department of Energy, for all of NASA, and, I believe, for the National Science Foundation as well. Isakowitz and his team were responsible for looking at the planning, the budgets, the technical effort, and the work that went into creating a new Mars Program. I learned that Steve was not a simple budgeteer but rather was an engineer trained at MIT who had worked for a while in the aerospace program at Martin Marietta. This meant that Steve came to the job with an understanding of the engineering and science challenges and an appreciation of them, as well as being very knowledgeable about the federal budget process. Steve also had the ability to think and probe critically at any assertion you made and any of the technical approaches that you were taking. At first his questions seemed, frankly, a bit hostile, but as I got to know Steve I understood that he was simply trying to be sure that he understood, and you too understood, what was being proposed. At my first meeting with Steve I was accompanied by Ed Weiler, who introduced me and proceeded to lay out the initial part of the discussion for the restructuring. Eventually Ed got to where he had observed that Steve and I had a good working relationship and that I could hold my...

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