Why Mars: NASA and the Politics of Space Exploration

Chapter Six. Moving Up the Agenda

chapter six Moving Up the Agenda The Mars Observer project kept Mars exploration alive in the mid- and late 1980s, but not in a manner that Mars advocates desired. Within NASA’s Science Directorate, Mars policy fell to Briggs, the planetary director, as superiors concentrated on other matters. Briggs found little support for going beyond Observer and raising Mars exploration’s status. He “made peace with the Mars program as it was,” not as he wished it to be. “I was not chaffing to get its enlargement . My goal was to implement the SSEC core program, particularly the inner planets and the Mars Observer.”1 It was clear to external advocates that they had to press NASA harder if they were to get the kind of Mars program they wanted. Advocates like Carl Sagan hoped that the Soviet Union, as a competitor or ally, could help revitalize Mars exploration in the United States. His was an end run around NASA and the space policy subsystem, which he saw as weighted against Mars as a priority. He looked for national and international policy allies . But to succeed in this macropolitical strategy, the Soviets would have to be successful technically. Sagan looked to the White House to resurrect the Mars exploration program —and NASA generally. He and like-minded proponents did so before and after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. Challenger adversely affected the agency, but it did bring NASA to presidential attention. Would Moving Up the Agenda 91 presidential interest make a difference for Mars? It did not do so in the case of Ronald Reagan. President George H. W. Bush, however, made a human spaceflight decision in 1989 to go back to the Moon and on to Mars. The political environment for Mars policy thus wound up better at the beginning of the 1990s than it had been 10 years before. It was a long and torturous haul, but outside and inside advocates succeeded in moving Mars higher on the NASA agenda over the course of a decade. Sagan Seeks an Upgrade What the Mars program needed, the Planetary Society urged, was to translate Mars Observer into a robust set of continuing activities. And to help reach that goal, the program required a new and compelling rationale. Geophysical observation , the stated purpose of Mars Observer, had little public appeal. Sagan, the society’s president, for whom the search for life was the prime rationale, understood that his views were not widely shared in the scientific community. “Life” was out as a motivator for most Mars researchers. But what other rationale would work to rekindle widespread enthusiasm for Mars and elevate robotic Mars exploration on the NASA and national agenda? It lay with the Soviet Union, the Society decided. The Soviet Union had competed vigorously in the 1960s and early 1970s to explore Mars and to discover life first. It had lost in Mars exploration and abandoned the Red Planet. But just as the United States was now planning to go back to Mars, with a 1990 rendezvous, so also was the Soviet Union. The difference was that the Soviet Union was first targeting Phobos, one of the two Mars moons. Rivalry was a motivation for the United States. The Planetary Society also saw opportunity for cooperation. Here was a possible novel rationale for Mars exploration: partnership. The strategy that Sagan and his associates evolved was “To Mars . . . Together.” Cooperation embraced both the robotic and human programs and gave space a political rationale, making it an instrument of foreign policy. In 1984, the Planetary Society brought a number of scientists from the United States, Soviet Union, and Europe together in Graz, Austria, to discuss common interests in space exploration, with Mars as focus. It also commissioned a technical analysis of what it would take to go to Mars in human spaceflight . This activity was taking place at a time when President Reagan was using heated rhetoric about the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and promoting his “Star Wars” antimissile system. NASA was not in a position actively to market 92 Why Mars cooperative programs with the Soviet Union, but the Planetary Society, as a nongovernmental organization, was able to do so. Sagan called space a unifying force in the world. The Society’s vice president , Bruce Murray, joined Sagan in this refrain. The former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director had returned from a stint in...