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13 chapter two Getting Started During the period from 1995 to 1999 when MCO and MPL were being constructed and launched to Mars, I was engaged in two projects, managing the Lunar Prospector mission and then establishing the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and had arguably laid the groundwork for a third (Mars Pathfinder) that set the stage for my eventual role in restructuring the Mars Program, which may help explain why Dan Goldin turned to me, far across the Rockies, rather than a NASA Headquarters insider down the hall. I had come to NASA in the late 1980s from a small start-­ up that I had co-­ founded, nurtured, and eventually sold. I felt it was time to have a little stability in my life and took a job at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. At that time many people, even in the adjacent Silicon Valley, didn’t know that there even was a NASA center in Northern California, let alone one that had been there for decades. By the time Goldin summoned me to Washington, D.C., I had progressed to being associate center director, responsible for all the space projects at Ames. Many projects at NASA—in fact, I would argue many of the best—have longer histories than might be readily apparent to the public. Some of this is because projects that later grow into missions often change names, sometimes more than once, as they develop and make their way from concept to proposal to potential mission and finally to fully funded mission status. Mars Pathfinder began as the first element of the MESUR concept, an acronym drawn from Mars Environmental Survey, a mission proposal for many small landers that I developed at NASA Ames from late 1989 through 1991. 14 · Exploring Mars Pathfinder was to prove the technology for the later series of low-­ cost landers designed to gather data from all over Mars. What it needed to fit into the exceptionally tight cost box that constrained it was a robust entry, descent, and landing (EDL) system. Viking had required parachutes and retro rockets and quite sophisticated landing controls, all of which cost money in themselves, plus they added “mass,” or extra weight, which means a bigger landing package, and this really begins to drive up the costs. It’s all part of the “Mars is hard” scenario. Pathfinder needed to demonstrate a low-­ cost way to land that could be repeated in unknown and potentially rugged terrain just in case there were more rocks like Big Joe around. The MESUR study, eventually to be Pathfinder, began in late 1989 when automobile airbags were just becoming standard on some high-­ end European cars. I started thinking about airbags and wondering if they could protect a small spacecraft from a crash landing the way they were protecting drivers from auto crashes. My proposal to NASA Headquarters in April 1990 was a low-­ cost approach that used the venerable, but smaller and cheaper than usual, Delta II rocket for the first time in a planetary mission, employing a disposable “cruise stage” to provide the navigation and propulsion adjustments that would guide the probe to Mars. Unlike the Viking mission in 1976, this spacecraft did not orbit Mars first, but rather went nonstop from Earth through the thin atmosphere of Mars to the surface. Coupled with the airbag EDL system, the mission concept was estimated to cost only about $180 million in 1990—far less than previous landed missions. After about a year of study, the mission concept was adopted by NASA Headquarters, assigned to JPL for development, and eventually became known as Mars Pathfinder, the 1997 mission that carried Sojourner, the little rover that could. The early 1990s also saw the definition of what became known as the Discovery Program, which would further exemplify Dan Goldin’s “faster, better, cheaper” approach to missions. The program would fly well-­ defined, efficient, highly focused science missions, cheaply and often. The idea was to avoid the “Christmas-­ tree approach” wherein mission opportunities were so relatively hard to come by that every science group around wanted to hang their own ornament—that is, science instrument—on any available spacecraft, knowing that another opportunity might not come for many years or even decades. This approach had plagued NASA from the agency’s inception and was notorious for causing schedule delays and cost overruns. Unlike so-­ called strategic missions that were assigned to specific NASA centers, the Discovery missions would be competitively...

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