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68 chapter five To Land or Not to Land? From late March, when I was appointed, until early October 2000 the replanning of the entire Mars Program was ongoing, not in an easy-­ to-­ follow serial fashion, but rather in a multiplex, multifaceted, intertwined, and interconnected way. As is customary with NASA missions, there are a series of reviews between approval and launch. In the midst of deciding on the 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009 missions I still had to attend to the launch preparations for the 2001 mission, the orbiter, Mars Odyssey. As difficult as the decision to cancel the 2001 lander had been, an even more challenging and complicated decision was whether we would try to fly a mission in 2003 or not—and if so, what would it be? This decision was actually being made as we were developing the science and engineering strategies outlined in chapter 4. Throughout my tenure as Mars Czar there were multiple planning issues proceeding in parallel, which required a great deal of juggling and simultaneous decision making. The appendix lists the multitudinous issues and actions I needed to address. The issues had varying degrees of urgency, but I knew that everything needed to be concluded in time to match the upcoming budget cycle. In addition, there was the unforgiving celestial mechanics cycle of the 26-­ month launch window from Earth to Mars. That window of only 20 days every two years or so was the single greatest pressure that everyone on the team felt and is a truly unique constraint of planetary science missions. The original decision to launch a Mars orbiter as well as a lander in 2001 was made very quickly, but the process of planning what to do in the To Land or Not to Land? · 69 2001 opportunity had, in fact, begun even before I was named as Mars program director. I arrived in Washington, D.C., and took up an apartment in early April 2000. I had met with Dan Goldin on March 11, given him my “Yes, I will do this” answer within a couple of days, and taken off for Washington, D.C., soon after. To make all this happen on such a short schedule was an exercise in urgent planning and rapid deployment. My wife and I took a very quick trip to D.C. and looked at a number of possible apartments, keeping in mind that the government’s compensation for a relocation like this was minimal. On our taxi ride out to the airport on the afternoon of the final day, we asked the driver where there might be places to live. To our pleasant surprise he had a good answer. He said the greatest place is Alex­ andria, just across the river from D.C., and if you get the right apartment , it’s near a Metro line. If you’ve spent any time in Washington, you know that the Metro, the sprawling subway lines that serve the nation’s capital and its suburbs, is the very best way to get around town. The surface streets are confusing and clogged with traffic during most of the regular hours of the day—the subway makes that moot. Of course, this rapid move from Burlingame, California, to Washington , D.C., also included packing up a very aged cat along with my wife and our household goods, moving everything out of our house to storage, and quickly leasing the house to what turned out to be a great young business couple who had moved to town as a result of a corporate consolidation. I moved first, to establish a beachhead in our Alexandria apartment. Susan took care of the logistics—no easy set of tasks—of packing, storage, and house leasing and arrived in Washington about three weeks after I did. As I assembled my staff and looked at the immediate decisions and at the unchangeable launch window clock, it was very clear that the decision to fly or not in 2003 had to be made nearly instantly. Ordinarily a new mission will receive one to two years of intensive study followed by three to four years of development. The launch window in 2003 was only 38 months away, which meant a very rapid development time, no matter what was decided. My notes show that discussions about the mission decision for the 2003 launch opportunity began at least as early as April 11, shortly after I arrived . We had established a program replanning...

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