Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars by Erik M. Conway (review)

A few years ago, I interviewed an engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center who spoke to me about his first memory of Mars. He was a teenager when the Pathfinder mission landed in 1997 and recalled seeing coverage of the landing on the front page of the New York Times. His reaction: “Holy crap! We have robots on Mars!” He was glued to the internet, and followed Pathfinder and its rover, Sojourner, as they returned photographs from the surface of the Red Planet. He downloaded the computer application that allowed people to feel like they were driving the rover around the surface. “It was almost like you were there,” he remembered.

This bourgeoning public awareness of Mars as a destination, the robot explorers NASA has sent, and the question of what it means to explore somewhere remote are a few of the themes NASA historian Erik Conway traces in his latest book, Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars. Conway focuses in detail on a period of robotic Mars exploration that largely was run from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He catalogs satellite, lander, and rover missions to Mars from the failed Mars Orbiter of the early 1990s to 2009’s successful Phoenix lander. In recounting the changing geopolitical climate, shifting funding priorities within NASA, and evolving modes of management, the robots developed within this landscape deliver on the promise of engineering as exploration. But Conway’s study concludes with a discussion of the fundamental tension between two kinds of exploration: the robotic missions sent thus far aim to catalog an uncontaminated Mars, whereas human presence would immediately curtail efforts to know a planet in such a way.

This incisive observation bookends a straightforward (though not simple) accounting of missions as familiar as the Mars Exploration Rovers and as infamous as the Mars Polar Lander. The strength of this volume lies in Conway’s commitment to symmetry. With equal detail he recounts both the successful and unsuccessful missions, such that unless you are already familiar with them you are left in the dark along with the engineering team as to whether the craft will safely reach its destination. This strategy serves to highlight that failed and successful missions had much more in common than in contrast. Conway takes care to explain the lead-up to, and fallout from, the twin loss of the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. These case studies demonstrate that missions don’t fail or succeed due to technical error, but rather due to the bureaucratic climate and engineering culture in which they are formed. When mission success depends on such a complex sociotechnical system, it is impossible to predict which projects will land and which will crash.

Any NASA history dealing with this time period necessarily must wrestle with the “faster, better, cheaper” paradigm. While this mentality might have helped conjure dreams of expansive, constellation programs that would blanket Mars, the cost came in curtailing testing practices and refashioning old systems to carry out new tasks. An interesting discussion throughout the book concerns the expediency or lack thereof of using such “heritage” designs. While this could lead to cost savings and alignment with the faster, better, cheaper model, Conway shows that rarely was a heritage design used without major alteration. The Mars Exploration Rovers were initially conceived as a Pathfinder heritage project, but were almost entirely redesigned at a great price. If, as Conway writes in the conclusion, NASA, JPL engineers, and the interested public are ultimately most interested in novelty, was there then a fundamental incompatibility between a design process targeted at such novelty and one, like heritage-based projects, that strove to be faster, better, and cheaper?

Conway’s book will be helpful to historians of NASA, robotics, and the engineering process. While the narrative remains firmly tied to the events, with the...