The origin of the smaller, faster, cheaper approach in NASA’s solar system exploration program1

Space Policy 14 (1998) 153 — 171

The origin of the smaller, faster, cheaper approach in NASA’s solar system exploration program1 Stephanie A. Roy* Futron Corporation and The Space Policy Institute, Center for International Science and Technology Policy, George Washington University, USA

Abstract The current emphasis on smaller, faster, cheaper (SFC) spacecraft in NASA’s solar system exploration program is the product of a number of interacting — even interdependent — factors. The SFC concept as applied to NASA’s solar system exploration program can be viewed as the vector sum of (1) the space science community’s desire for more frequent planetary missions to plug the data gaps, educate the next generation of scientists, provide missions to targets of opportunity, and enable programmatic flexibility in times of budgetary crisis; (2) the poor publicity garnered by NASA in the early 1990s and the resultant atmosphere of public criticism (creating an opportunity for reform); (3) The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization’s and the National Space Council community’s desire to advance the Space Exploration Initiative and their perception that the NASA culture at the time represented a barrier to the effective pursuit of space exploration; (4) the effective leadership of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin; and (5) the diminishing budget profile for space sciences in the early 1990s. This paper provides a summary of the origin of the smaller, faster, cheaper approach in the planetary program. A more through understanding of the history behind this policy will enable analysts to assess more accurately the relative successes and failures of NASA’s new approach to solar system exploration. ( 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction NASA’s program of solar system exploration has undergone a dramatic change over the course of the 1990s. The agency has moved from a reliance on large, flagship missions to the incorporation of an array of smaller, less expensive spacecraft for planetary science. Cassini, launched in October 1997, was the final ‘leftover’ from the billion-dollar missions of the 1980s. NASA has no current plans to use anything larger than a Medlite launcher to boost planetary science spacecraft after 1998.2 The move toward smaller craft is accompanied by

* Corresponding address: 444 College Parkway, Rockville, MD 20850, USA. Tel.: (301) 907-7158; fax: (301) 907-7125; e-mail:[email protected] 1 This article was the first prize winner in the 1998 Space Policy student essay competition. 2 The Medlite concept is not tied to a specific booster, but rather to a class of launchers of a certain payload capacity, about one-half that of a Delta II 7925. Currently, NASA’s Medium Expendable Launch Services Contract (the Medlites) includes the Delta II 7320 (three solid rocket motors and no third stage), and the planned Taurus XL.

more highly focused mission-by-mission science objectives, tighter development schedules, and the use of more advanced technology. This reinvention of NASA’s solar system exploration program is summed up in the mantra of ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ (SFC). The current emphasis placed on smaller spacecraft in the planetary program grew out of multiple interacting factors. No single influence is responsible for NASA’s move toward smaller craft. Rather, a combination of historical vectors came together to make up the philosophy behind ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’; these vectors were (1) the space science community, (2) a period of poor publicity and public criticism NASA, (3) the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and the National Space Council, (4) the leadership of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, and (5) a diminishing civilian space budget. While none of these factors can be said to have been entirely independent of the others, for purposes of analysis they are presented as converging vectors that ultimately came together to move NASA toward the SFC approach. There are many on-going efforts to assess the appropriateness and usefulness of this approach in NASA’s

0265-9646/98/$ — see front matter ( 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 6 5 - 9 6 4 6 ( 9 8 ) 0 0 0 2 1 - 6

154

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

programs, planetary and otherwise. This paper is intended to supplement those efforts by providing a summary of the origin of the smaller, faster, cheaper approach in the planetary program which will enable analysts to assess the relative successes and failures of NASA’s new approach to solar system exploration more accurately.

2. The space science community The concept of using small spacecraft for planetary sciences is not a novel one. The space science community has, on three separate occasions, attempted to establish a line item in the NASA budget for small missions in solar system exploration. Prior to the current Discovery program (the third attempt), proposals for first a ‘Planetary Explorers’ series and then for a ‘Planetary Observer’ series were essentially discarded before they had begun. Despite this, on all three occasion these proposals shared much the same vision: a more rapid response to scientific opportunities, the education of graduate students, and the supply of a continuous data stream to sustain the community. Unfortunately, for the advocates of these missions, the supporting constituency in the science community alone was insufficient to translate this vision into reality. Recurring budget difficulties for the nation’s civil space agency repeatedly choked off small missions in favor of sustaining the few large, flagship missions in the late 1970s and throughout the course of the 1980s. Only the most recent attempt at establishing a small mission budget line for solar system exploration has been successful, an achievement that was depended upon both the needs of the planetary science community and the relative influence of the vectors analyzed in Sections 3—6 of this paper. 2.1. Planetary explorers NASA has past experience with the use of small spacecraft with focused science objectives. The NASA Explorer and Pioneer missions of the 1960s were small to moderate missions. Even early planetary missions were moderate in cost compared to what followed in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Solar system exploration missions, however, grew rapidly in both complexity and cost. The Viking missions — launched in 1975 — have an estimated total cost of $3.28 billion [1]. There was an attempt to institutionalize the concept of small planetary spacecraft in the late 1960s. In 1968, the Space Science Board of the National Research Council proposed that NASA ‘initiate now a program of Pioneer/Interplanetary Monitoring Platform-class spinning spacecraft for orbiting Venus and Mars at each opportunity, and for exploratory missions to other targets’ [2]. The community’s response to this proposal was the Planetary Explorer concept. In 1970 the Space Science Board

listed the advantages that small, inexpensive missions had over their larger counterparts. These included an emphasis on the training for the next generation of scientists, the ability to respond rapidly to targets of opportunity, and programmatic flexibility in times of crisis [3]. Many of these same justifications are used today in discussions about the Discovery missions for the planetary sciences and the Explorer program in space physics and astrophysics. However, NASA failed to establish any continuing line-item for the Planetary Explorer program. The first Planetary Explorer mission, Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Multi-probe, was destined to be the last. NASA was beset by growing development costs for the Space Shuttle over the 1970s. This situation was compounded as the Viking program and the Voyagers consumed ever-increasing portions of the space science budget. The cost growth in these large programs and the increasing development demands of the Shuttle program were magnified by the steadily declining economic situation of the late 1970s; an increasingly restrictive federal budget left little room to increase Shuttle funding without transferring money from within the NASA budget itself. The Pioneer-Venus mission looked increasingly like the last bus leaving the station. Accordingly, the mission — originally intended as a small, inexpensive mission — grew in both scope and cost. In the end, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Multi-probe mission, launched in 1978, cost an estimated 479.8 million dollars ($1994), and carried 24 scientific instruments between two spacecraft [3]. 2.2. Planetary observers The planetary science community tried again to establish a small to moderate spacecraft planetary program in the early 1980s. The NASA Advisory Council established the ad hoc Solar System Exploration Committee (SSEC) to assess the state and future of the solar system exploration program [4]. In its 1983 report, the Committee expressed its concern about the increasing time lag between planetary missions and the resultant discontinuity in the flow of new and exciting data on which the planetary science community might sustain itself. In a broad sense, the Observer series concept was a rebirth of the Planetary Explorer line fifteen years later. The Committee advocated the establishment of a line item in the budget for a series of modest, low-cost inner-system planetary missions under the name ‘Planetary Observers’, calling it a ‘level of effort program similar to the Physics and Astronomy Explorer Program’ [4, p. 6]. Such a series of frequently flying spacecraft would provide for a more continuous stream of data and a level of program stability that the program found difficult to achieve when it was battling for big-mission funds in a climate struggling to meet the burgeoning appetite of the human spaceflight program. Note that the achievement of programmatic

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

stability was also an explicit goal behind the proposal of the Planetary Explorer program. The Observer series was intended to begin with the Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter, later to be renamed Mars Observer. Unfortunately for the advocates of smaller, more frequent planetary missions, the Observer series never became a line item in the NASA budget. The pattern of the Planetary Explorers was being repeated with the Observer series. The first Observer mission, Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter, was funded as a new start in FY 1984. While plans for a Lunar Geoscience Orbiter (LGO) as a second Observer mission existed for the most part of the 1980s, after Mars Observer’s launch slip in April 1987, NASA redirected LGO funds to work on a Mars Rover Sample Return program concept [5]. Like the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Multi-probe, Mars Observer was both the first and last of its class. Although the scientific community was worried about the costs of missions in the early 1980s, they were not yet concerned about the size, nor was there a very concerted move toward more highly constrained science objectives. Rather, the science community was hoping to capitalize on a number of growing capabilities. For inner solar system exploration, the Observer series was to save on cost through the use of modified earth orbital spacecraft, taking advantage of the expertise and economies of scales incurred in the private sector. SSEC also outlined a program for lower-cost outer solar system exploration, the design and use of a modularly modifiable spacecraft bus system, called the Mariner Mark II; the Mark II was intended to cut costs by minimizing per mission spacecraft development expenditures. In addition, the Committee counted on the use of heritage technology from the expensive missions of the 1970s to help keep the Observer series under its suggested annual cost cap of $60 million (1983$) [4, p. 21]. Government policy at the time of launching all spacecraft from the Shuttle meant that spacecraft size and mass were not significant

155

concerns, since the planned Shuttle/Centaur combination was expected to provide ‘substantial weight and performance margins’ [4, p. 18]. In essence, there was less incentive to cut back on size or science objectives and more of a move toward minimizing recurring development costs associated with spacecraft fabrication. The attempt by the planetary science community to introduce a low-cost mission series into its strategic mix was not an indication of community-wide acceptance of inexpensive mission scenarios. The science community still very much wanted to go forward with flagship missions, as it felt that the achievement of the next logical scientific objectives necessitated more ambitious mission architectures, such as in situ analyses and sample return of extraterrestrial materials. Small missions were viewed as a means to plug the gaps in the data stream caused by delays and cost restrictions imposed on the community from the outside. In its assessment of the 1983 SSEC report, the Space Science Board expressed the following sentiment: The Committee recognized, albeit with regret, that it has so far been necessary to restrict the size and cost of the proposed Mars missions. Both Mars Observer and Mars Aeronomy Observer, which fall in this class, will do excellent science, but do not address the high priority scientific objectives for Mars involving intensive study of local areas of the planet via in situ studies, and detailed planning, at least, for the return of Martian material [6]. The failure of the scientific community to recognize the impact of the chosen scientific payload on the cost of a mission is most apparent in the Mars Observer mission. The initial payload selected for the mission was oversubscribed in cost, mass, and power if the Request for Proposal (RFP) guidelines are taken as a base. In fact, the selected payload had the highest estimated cost of all the proposed instrument suites for the mission. Fig. 1 shows

Fig. 1. Proposed and selected Mars Observer payloads.

156

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

Fig. 2. Mars Observer run-out costs before and after redefinition.

the distribution of proposed payloads in relation to cost, mass, and power requirements [5, p. 93]. In addition to being oversubscribed, the selected payload additionally deviated from the SSEC concept by relying too little on heritage or ‘off the shelf ’ components. In fact, all instruments save the magnetometer required significant levels of development [5, p. 92]. Cost growth was a significant risk given the requirements of the chosen payload; in fact, the selection immediately increased the projected run-out costs for the mission from $252 million to $264 million [5, p. 95]. The Challenger disaster in January 1986 created a backlog of science awaiting flight. The Mars Observer mission was pushed back from its original 1990 launch to make way for missions more forward in the queue. In order to accommodate the launch shift from 1990 into 1992, the Mars Observer Project Review Board met in July 1987: The Board expressed the opinion that the level of risk associated with instrument performance may have been appropriate when Mars Observer was the first in a series of frequent, low-cost missions, but was no longer appropriate for a mission running seven years from initial funding through launch, especially given the impact of failure, and the increased U.S. and international attention being accorded to Mars [6, p. 57]. (Originally quoted from [7].) The Mars Observer program was reconfigured to reduce risk (increase margins) and enhance the scientific return. Existing instrumentation was reconfigured to better performance and two new instruments were added to the payload. The impact of these changes was mass and cost growth that would shortly come to threaten the mission itself. Fig. 2 shows the projected run-out costs after Mars Observer redefinition in July 1987, as opposed to its original run-out estimates. Later, more accurate estimates of run-out costs projected $560 million (FY 1987$)

up to launch [6, pp. 67—69]. Even this estimate was considered to be too conservative. Escalating costs led NASA’s Office of Space Science and Applications (OSSA) to define descoping options for the mission, seek the advice of the Space Science Board [8], and ultimately eliminate two of the mission’s original eight instruments. 2.3. Cost growth and the scarcity of new starts At the same time that Mars Observer was being approved for a new start in FY 1985, the space science community was taking further steps to document the increasing difficulties it was facing over the course of the 1980s. The 1986 publication of the NASA Advisory Council’s Space and Earth Science Advisory Committee (SESAC) report, ¹he Crisis in Space and Earth Science [9], called attention to many of these difficulties. The community was increasingly concerned about the cost growth of major programs and the associated ‘crowding out’ effect this was having on the prospects for new starts and more moderate and complementary missions. The community recognized that the voracious financial appetite of first the Shuttle, and then the space station (new start funding in FY 1985) forced the agency to make hard choices to conserve funds by pushing back space science mission development funds. The subsequent impact of these delays on the space science community, however, threatened the vitality of the disciplines themselves. As of 1986, the last planetary mission, Pioneer-Venus Orbiter and Multiprobe, had been launched in 1979. Initially, the Galileo Jupiter mission had been slated for a 1982 launch. The mission was pushed back in order to make more early development funds available for the Shuttle. Moves by the Reagan Administration imposed strict caps on the funds available to NASA in FYs 1982 and 1983, forcing the agency to make difficult choices. The International Solar Polar Mission (ISPM), the Gamma Ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Galileo Jupiter mission were basically put into

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

a competition for scarce funds. ISPM was severely curtailed, and the Galileo launch date was pushed into 1986. The Challenger disaster postponed the launch of the Jupiter mission further, until 1989. Even before the subsequent delay caused by this tragedy, it would have been seven years between planetary science launches; after the tragedy, an entire decade would mark an era of no NASA launches for solar system exploration. SESAC estimated that Galileo’s launch delay from 1982 to 1986 raised the mission cost from $379 to $843 million [9, p. 13]. Fig. 3 shows the percentage cost growth in selected NASA programs [10]. This cost escalation squeezed the agency budget to the point where NASA had to choose between continuing ongoing program and funding new starts; the agency chose to continue its flagship missions into which considerable investment had already been made. SESAC was concerned that the long development schedules, increasing costs, and scarcity of flight opportunities threatened the vitality of the space and earth science disciplines. Fig. 4 bears evidence of the impact of both the reliance on the shuttle for space access and the subsequent two-year delay following Challenger [9, p. 15, 17]. SESAC pointed out that adherence to the original schedule and mission parameters and access to an appropriate launch vehicle were key ingredients in keeping expenditures to intended levels [9, p. 14]. This commitment to a program’s funding through its nominal schedule was to become a central tenant of the

157

smaller, faster, cheaper approach adopted by NASA in the 1990s. For solar system exploration, the perception that new starts were to be few and far between created an environment in which scientists felt compelled to get on board (and increase the science return on) those missions that did get approved. While this is a natural response, its actual result is the creation of a feedback loop in which efforts to get on the last train leaving the station contributed to the cost growth in major programs and the crowding out effect on new starts. The feedback loop operated in full force as the planetary missions under development in the 1980s were perceived as each disciplines’ last best hope. This attitude is apparent in a 1988 Letter Report by the Space Studies Board. The Board’s Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX) was asked to review the scientific impact of the removal of various instruments from the Mars Observer missions (in order to constrain costs). In its response, COMPLEX stated that 2 reduction of present mission scope by deletion of any instrument would have seriously deleterious consequences for the return of science data. The intrinsic seriousness of this situation is further compounded, at this time and for this mission in particular, by the decade-long hiatus in the launch of all U.S. planetary missions, 2 the likelihood that this mission represents the only opportunity for

Fig. 3. Cost growth in NASA programs.

158

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

Fig. 4. Development schedules for NASA science missions.

investigation of Mars by this nation in the coming decade, and the superb individual and synergistic science capabilities of the instruments originally selected for it [8, p. 1] (emphasis added). While this perception was grounded in reality — NASA had no more Mars missions on its new start slate, and the Mars Aeronomy mission had recently been canceled — COMPLEX’s position illuminates the fears of the science community that each mission may be the last of its kind for their scientifically productive lifetimes. By the time Galileo flew in 1989, it been a decade since the last planetary mission, and the situation in the late 1980s, with the cost of the Shuttle replacement and safety overhaul program and the looming expense of the space station, seemed to indicate that the agency would very much resemble the NASA of the past decade and a half. 2.4. The Discovery program Part of NASA’s response to the loss of Challenger was a commitment to develop small payloads in order to help

maintain the vitality of the space science community [11]. Three years after Challenger, the Solar System Exploration Subcommittee (SSES) of the NASA Advisory Council asked for the establishment of a ‘small programs program’ [12]. This led to the formation of a ‘Discovery’ program science working group to explore the feasibility of a series of low-cost, small planetary missions; the first working group meeting was held in December 1989; it was followed by a second meeting in May 1990 [12]. SSES intended for the series of small planetary missions to provide [12]: f additional diversity and breadth to the planetary sciences; f rapid response to new scientific opportunities; f leverage for Solar System Exploration Division resources in combination with others; f increased stability in the infrastructure of the planetary sciences; and f more stable educational opportunities for young researchers. The rationale for the Discovery program mirrored the intention behind both the Planetary Explorers and

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

Observers. Unlike the previous two attempts at establishing a small-planetary program line-item, however, the Discovery program survived the political process and received its programmatic new start in FY 1994. The same forces that caused the stillborn delivery of the Planetary Explorers and Observers were still present in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Discovery program survived because the agency was being subjected to new forces in the early 1990s that added impetus and credibility to the arguments for smaller planetary science missions. 2.5. Summary The space science community has played an important role in shaping the modern form of smaller, faster, cheaper in NASA’s solar system exploration program. First with the Planetary Explorers, and then with the Observer concept, scientists attempted to generate support for an institutionalized means by which to ensure a continuous flow of useful scientific data in order to ensure the vitality of the scientific disciplines. The stretched development schedules, widespread cost growth, and scarcity of flight opportunities of the 1980s made the community a vocal advocate for the addition of a class of smaller planetary missions. They also recognized the educational value of shorter development schedules, as well as the ability of quick-turnaround missions to respond to unforeseen scientific opportunities. However, scientists always envisioned such a mission class as more of a supplement to the wider planetary program, which was to return the truly valuable and ground-breaking science. In other words, small missions also meant small science to the broader scientific community in the 1980s. Neither did the community appear to recognize the contribution of their own behavior to the problems of cost and schedule growth. For these reasons, the space science community forms only one vector of this analysis.

3. Public criticism of NASA NASA experienced a series of setbacks in the early 1990s that generated a steady stream of negative publicity and decreased public confidence in the agency’s manner of doing business. Problems with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Galileo Jupiter orbiter, the Mars Observer spacecraft, Shuttle delays — and even the failure of a weather spacecraft contracted by NASA — combined to create an atmosphere of public distrust that provided an opening for efforts already underway in the space science community and the National Space Council to push NASA toward less expensive space missions.

159

3.1. Hubble Space Telescope When Hubble was launched by Space Shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990, the public awaited eagerly alongside scientists for the spectacular scientific return the space telescope was expected to generate. Begun in 1977 as the first ‘Great Observatory’, Hubble was initially slated for a 1983 launch.3 Cost growth in Shuttle development, however, exacerbated internal HST program schedule problems, pushing the launch date back to 1986. The 1986 Challenger disaster delayed Hubble’s launch until 1990, causing a mission development time line over a dozen years long and, by some estimates, ultimately three times as costly as original projections [10]. By 1990, the expected scientific return was long overdue. When check-out began on the space telescope after launch, it shortly became clear that there were a number of problems with the telescope. Engineers first discovered that an improperly installed cable limited movement of an antenna [13]. Continued work revealed flawed software and vibrations in the solar arrays when the telescope passed between night and day. The publicity from these three problems, however, was minimal, since they could be corrected or compensated for with relatively little impact on the mission’s science return. Unfortunately, the discovery in June 1990 that Hubble’s main mirror — having been touted as the most precise mirror ever manufactured — was fundamentally flawed magnified all the difficulties encountered with the space telescope mission, resulting in an avalanche of negative public opinion [13]. The popular impression was that the Hubble telescope was crippled or unusable, despite the fact that its resolution, even with the flawed optics, was twice that obtainable by ground. ¸ate Night with David ¸etterman, the popular (then) NBC variety show, even dedicated one of its nightly ‘top ten’ lists to the Hubble telescope, ‘NASA’s Top Ten Excuses for the Hubble Telescope Malfunctions’; number ten was, ‘The guy at Sears promised it would work fine’, an allusion to the apparent lack of quality oversight by NASA concerning the construction and testing of the flawed mirror. The team formed to investigate where the program went wrong found that ‘NASA officials failed to provide even rudimentary supervision of technicians who three

3 HST was the first of four ‘Great Observatories’ as called for by the Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee of the National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences. The other observatories are the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO), the Advanced X-Ray Astronomy Facility (AXAF), and the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). CGRO was the second observatory started and flew in 1991. AXAF is slated for launch in late 1998, while SIRTF has begins development in FY 1998, subject to Congressional approval.

160

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

times ignored tests that uncovered the crucial flaw that now plagues the $1.6 billion telescope’ [14]. This obvious shortcoming in program management for such a flagship mission created a climate of skepticism about NASA’s management in general [14]. After all, if a $1.8 billion dollar telescope was so poorly managed, what type of attention was being given to lower cost, lower profile endeavors? The poor publicity generated by the Hubble problem was exacerbated by concurrent difficulties with the Shuttle fleet. NASA experienced a three month hiatus in Shuttle flights over the summer of 1990 because of recurrent fuel system leaks. Talks that such leaks — if not resolved — could lead to a disaster mirroring Challenger [15] acted as a reminder of the NASA mismanagement to which the Challenger disaster was attributed. While NASA maintained that it had made fundamental changes in its quality control system after Challenger, the efficacy of such changes was not evident in light of both the Shuttle fleet’s grounding and Hubble’s flawed mirror. 3.2. Galileo Jupiter Orbiter and Probe NASA barely had time to recover from the poor showing of the 1990 summer when problems with another flagship mission cast NASA into a quagmire of bad publicity once again. The Galileo Jupiter Orbiter and Probe, launched in 1989, was well on its way to Jupiter before flight control engineers attempted to execute the standard maneuver that would unfurl the craft’s umbrella-like high-gain antennae; initial attempts in April 1991 were unsuccessful, and repeated efforts into 1992 failed to solve the problem [16]. The loss of the main antennae meant that the data return from the mission would be severely curtailed. Headlines in major newspapers highlighted the cost of the program, emphasizing the size of the investment at stake [16]; in the articles themselves, the term ‘Galileo’ was inevitably prefaced with the modifier ‘$1.4 billion’ [17]. There were many similarities between Galileo and Hubble. Like Hubble, Galileo had received initial development funds in the 1970s (FY 1978 new start) [1, p. 93]. Also like Hubble, Galileo had been slated for an early eighties launch (1982) only to be pushed back because of Shuttle development problems.4 Further launch delays caused by the Challenger explosion escalated program costs beyond the $1 billion mark [10].5 Most important, however, like the Hubble mirror, the problems with the

4 Initially, plans were to delay to 1984, but problems with the Inertial Upper Stage (needed to place Galileo into its proper trajectory) led to a switch in plans to use the Centaur upper stage for Galileo instead. This decision postponed launch to May 1986. The Challenger disaster in January of 1986 pushed this back to 1989. 5 Galileo cost two and a half times original estimates [10, p. 50].

antenna appeared as if they could have been prevented [16].6 While use of Galileo’s smaller antenna has allowed the spacecraft to return valuable science, the failure of its main antenna looked disturbingly similar to NASA’s 1990 problems. Once again, it seemed as of poor management and quality control led to a significant loss of investment of America’s public dollars. The perception that yet another NASA spacecraft was ‘crippled’ created an atmosphere of public criticism of NASA management. The events of the 1990 summer presaged continuing NASA spacecraft problems that made NASA increasingly vulnerable to external pressure to change its approach to solar system exploration. 3.3. Mars Observer While scientists and engineers were working out methods to maximize the science return from the disadvantaged Galileo craft, another team was preparing to launch Mars Observer (MO), NASA’s return to the red planet after a fifteen-year hiatus. Launched on 25 September 1992 aboard a Titan III rocket, Mars Observer was scheduled to enter Mars orbit in August 1993. As the spacecraft approached Mars, its operators shut down spacecraft communications in preparation for a maneuver intended to place the craft firmly in Martian orbit [18]. However, when NASA attempted to reestablish contact on 21 August 1993, Mars Observer could not be found [19]. Despite best efforts to the contrary, NASA engineers never heard from Mars Observer again. The loss was a public relations nightmare. With a estimated cost of $980 million dollars,7 Mars Observer represented NASA’s single largest robotic spacecraft failure in the agency’s 35 year history. The loss of Mars Observer seemed to be the ‘icing on the cake’ for NASA’s public image, but the cake was not a celebratory one. The front page of the ¼ashington ¹imes ran the lead headline on 25 August 1993, ‘At NASA, Red Planet or Red Faces?’ [21]. NASA became the object of jokes and cartoons. Fig. 5 is just one example of the public perception at the time. The visibility of the MO failure was increased by several other difficulties the American space program experienced in the month of August 1993. On the same

6 Similar problems with Galileo’s antenna deployment had been experienced over a decade earlier, in 1981, when the antenna initially underwent testing. Engineers believed that the problem was corrected, however, when their solution led to correct deployment in all 60 tests prior to launch. NASA was faulted, however, for failing to recognize the additional stress the spacecraft’s three year launch delay created on the antenna. While the antenna deployed properly in pre-flight tests, the harsher conditions of space reduced the efficacy of the remaining lubricant [16]. 7 Lifetime cost (design, development, launch, and operations).

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

161

Table 1

Fig. 5. An example of public opinion.

day that NASA lost contact with Mars Observer, the NOAA-13 weather satellite was also lost. Although the weather satellite was officially a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mission, the spacecraft was procured and launched by NASA. The coincidence of the simultaneous MO and NOAA-13 loss compounded the visibility of both failures. The fact that both MO and NOAA-13 were built by GE Aerospace seemed to deflect little attention from NASA’s role [22]. On top of this, the Air Force lost a Titan IV rocket on liftoff from Cape Canaveral on August 2. While the Titan IV problem was removed from NASA involvement, it was not apparent that the public differentiated at the time between civil and security space activities [20, p. 4]. Either way, the rocket failure served to heighten the public’s awareness of the cost of failures in space activity, exacerbating the response to Mars Observer’s loss later that month. Similar to the situation in the summer of 1990, repeated delays in Shuttle operations simply added insult to injury, as the Columbia orbiter was rescheduled for flight four time in two months, three times due to mechanical difficulties.8 Poll data taken over the late 1980s and early 1990s show that the early 1990s were a period a lowered public confidence in the civil space program. When asked whether funding for space exploration should be increased, decreased, or stay the same, markedly fewer people responded positively in the early 1990s than in the past. The trend is evident in the chart given in Table 1 [23].9 The marked dip in the percentage of American’s supporting increased funding, accompanied by the rise in Americans supporting cutbacks in space exploration in the early 1990s, created an environment in which NASA

8 One of the four delays was due to a meteor shower. The fifth launch date was set for 10 September 1993. Shuttle Flight, Delayed 4 Times, is Rescheduled for September 10, [22, p. A10]. 9 Poll data integrated from variety of sources. All poll data from randomly selected samples, sample size '1000 respondents, margin of error $3%.

Year!

Increase

Stay same

Decrease

1981 1982 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1993 1994 1996

27 24 24 32 30 28 19 11 17 16

38 41 53 43 48 47 40 42 39.5 53

32 31 23 23 18 24 38 38 38 25

!Questions asked differed slightly in wording.

was politically vulnerable to external pressure to change the way it did business. While it is difficult to establish a direct linkage between NASA’s failures of the early 1990s and the concurrent dip in the public’s valuing of space exploration, the blitz of media attention surrounding NASA’s difficulties creates at least a qualitative connection between lost space science opportunities and NASA’s political vulnerability. 3.4. Summary News of the Mars Observer failure came in the same month the press was giving substantial attention to several small solar system exploration missions. NASA’s new Discovery program was on the verge of gearing up to full throttle. In February 1993 NASA had selected eleven concepts for further study [24]. The first two Discovery missions, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) and Mars Pathfinder, had been grandfathered into the program and were scheduled for new starts in FY 1994 (1 October 1993, just one month after MO failed). While the Discovery program had been conceived in the late 1980s (see Section 1), the loss of Mars Observer was a punctuation mark on the need for such missions and bolstered support for the Discovery line-item, Goldin, and ‘faster, cheaper, better’ more generally.10 The press was also aware that the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization’s (known under Reagan and Bush as SDIO) Clementine mission to the Moon was preparing for a January 1994 launch. Clementine was being touted as America’s return to the Moon after two decades, and it was being carried out for an affordable $75 million dollars (as quoted by BMDO officials).11 The fact that both

10 Goldin had been a supporter of smaller science missions since his days at TRW. 11 Clementine costs as quoted by BMDO do not include the costs of instrument development, which had been funded under SDIO’s Brilliant Pebbles program.

162

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

When SDIO was first formed in 1984, it had a limited staff and an uncertain future. The Strategic Defense Initiative concept — a space-based ballistic missile defense system — was largely unproven. In order to guarantee something more than a short existence (It had little institutional support from the traditional military services, having been formed independently of their jurisdic-

tions.), the organization needed to prove at least the feasibility of its premise. To better the chances of survival, such a proof of concept had to be carried out quickly and efficiently. A space intercept of a thrusting target was considered to be a good candidate for this proof, and the project was named Vector Sum. SDIO wanted the mission done within a year. The Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University was asked to ‘define a near-term flight experiment to support the concept of a boost-phase intercept, that is, destroying an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile during powered flight’ [26]. By the end of February 1985, APL’s design was chosen because it was the most schedule responsive, was treaty compliant, and relatively inexpensive [26].13 The team was given a nominal fourteen month schedule, starting from design approval on 12 April 1985 [26, p. 202]. The decision to use a Delta vehicle, and the subsequent allocation of Delta booster number 180 to the program, led to ‘Delta 180’ becoming the popular name for the program. The failure of Delta 178 on 3 May 1986 set the launch of Vector Sum back three weeks; if not for this delay, however, the program would have launched within a month and a half of its original launch date [27]. The experiment was an unqualified success, not just as proof of concept, but of management style, cost objectives, and schedule constraints. The management and cost realities of the Delta 180 program served as the foundation for a number conceptual truths derived from the program by the involved officials. First, space missions could be done quickly.14 Secondly, a hard, short schedule keeps costs from escalating. Total mission costs for Delta 180 are given as $150 million (FY 1986$); estimates for an equivalent mission on a more lenient schedule have been made for $300 to $400 million [26, p. 205]. Lt. General James Abrahamsen, the director of SDIO at the time, had first asked the Air Force space division what such a mission would cost; its answer was $0.5 to 1.0 billion, with a schedule of three to five years [28]. Third, a horizontal management style, where documentation is minimized and the chain of command is short and decisive, facilitates the

12 Under the Clinton Administration, SDIO’s name was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, or BMDO. In fact, Clementine has been called the most successful failure in the history of spaceflight. After mapping the Moon, Clementine was supposed to flyby the asteroid Geographos. During maneuvers meant to place the craft on a trajectory toward the asteroid, attitude control was lost and the spacecraft began to spin uncontrollably. The asteroid portion of the mission had to be scrapped altogether. However, BMDO officials consider the mission a success, since they were interested in the performance of the technology, and not the science return. In addition, the media gave so much attention to the first half of the mission, the ‘return to the Moon’, that the loss of the asteroid flyby barely registered with the public.

13 The design had to be compliant with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed between the United States and the USSR. The treaty forbids any functional space-based anti-ballistic missile system, as well as its hardware development. The treaty does not forbid, however, research into the concept. SDIO needed to choose its projects carefully in order to avoid breeching the treaty contrary to the Administration’s wishes. The design team chose to use the second stage of a Delta launcher as the target, as it was not considered a ballistic missile since it was restartable. 14 Actually, this was more a ‘re-discovery’ of the capability and management style that enabled the early space community to respond quickly to targets of opportunity, but had been forgotten in the age of greater complexity, management overhead, and advanced technology development efforts.

Clementine and Mars Observer were planetary missions was not lost on the public. $75 million for a lunar mapping mission and asteroid flyby (Clementine) — versus $980 million for a lost Mars mapping mission — seemed much more reasonable. The initial success of Clementine in the spring of 1994 accentuated the apparent disconnect between cost and performance of NASA’s flagship mission, Mars Observer, and the inexpensive Clementine program. Overall, the failures of the early 1990s served to make NASA vulnerable (or amenable, depending upon the point of view) to pressures to change the way it did space science, including solar system exploration.

4. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and the National Space Council During the Bush Administration, significant pressure was brought to bear on NASA by individuals associated with the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) and the National Space Council (NSC). The SDIO and NSC shared a general philosophy about space exploration and development. The Space Council applied direct pressure on NASA to change the way it did business, while SDIO provided the Council with a model for successful innovation in space mission management and architecture. The widely publicized 1994 flight of the Clementine spacecraft was the most visible BMDO ‘success’.12 However, the move toward less expensive, faster space missions using an innovative management strategy actually began a full decade earlier, with the first SDIO space effort. 4.1. Delta 180

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

achievement of both schedule and cost objectives.15 Finally, SDIO officials made a broader acknowledgment that a reasonable level of risk must be accepted to avoid unnecessary cost and schedule growth. The Delta 180 program, and its successors, Delta 181 and 183, used off-the-shelf hardware to accomplish their goals. The programs used a management style that moved forward with existing capabilities while simultaneously investing in technology to develop the advanced capabilities needed for the future [29]. The apparent advantages of this approach to project management, however, did not have a visible impact on how the civil space sector approached its own operations. It would take a BMDO-run space mission — known rather innocuously as Clementine — to make a very direct and a very public contrast between the management styles of BMDO and NASA, almost eight years after the successful completion of the Delta 180 program. 4.2. National Space Council In order to better understand how and why the Clementine mission had an impact on the structure and operations of NASA’s solar system exploration program, both the role of the National Space Council and its relationship to SDIO need to be explored. As Clementine’s origin indicates, the SDIO community was intimately tied to the National Space Council, which in turn was keenly interested in the product of NSC creation, the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI).16 The Space Council was very familiar with the work of SDIO. The Council was reestablished under President Bush to provide for space much the same cohesion that the National Security Council did for matters under its purview. Chaired by Vice President Dan Quayle, the Space Council consisted of a number of key Cabinet members, agency heads, and staff. Mark Albrecht was named Executive Secretary, while Colonel Simon ‘Pete’ Worden served on staff. Albrecht had formerly served as a lead staffer for security issues under Senator Pete Wilson (1983—1989), and as an analyst in strategic defense studies for a private organization (1981—1983). Worden had served as an assistant on the 1983 Fletcher study that had led to the establishment of SDIO. Also on staff in 1989 was Stuart Nozette, who had worked with SDIO from 1986—1988 [35]. The Space Council was very much behind the Space Exploration Initiative. This enthusiasm for SEI was shared by then-Deputy for Technology at SDIO, 15 For a complete description of the management style used in the Delta 180 program, see [27, p. 8]. 16 The Space Exploration Initiative was an effort proposed under the Bush Administration to expand human exploration of the solar system, primarily with a (crewed) return to the Moon and human mission to Mars.

163

Michael Griffin, who had been associated with SDIO’s work as a systems project engineer for the Delta series of missions. Having been brought into the position of SDIO Deputy for Technology in January 1989 [28], Griffin was a strong supporter of the horizontal management style used in the Delta projects. Worden introduced Griffin to Albrecht, helping to establish a working relationship between SDIO and the Space Council, while highlighting SDIO’s manner of doing business in contrast to NASA. After Bush announced SEI in July of 1989, Griffin wrote to Albrecht concerning the style of management Griffin felt would be needed to make SEI a success [28]. Griffin subsequently worked behind the scenes with NSC to get SEI moving; he acted a reviewer for the NASA 90-Day Study — NASA’s initial mission architecture proposal in response to SEI — and served on the Senior Advisory Board for the Synthesis report that followed [28, 30]. Through all this, the National Space Council and SDIO came to share a general philosophy about space exploration that favored fast-response, low-cost mission alternatives. Fast and low-cost, in essence, made a mission ‘better’. [The ‘better’ in the phrase ‘faster, cheaper, better’, was added by NSC staff so that there was no misunderstanding that faster and cheaper was in fact better. When asked when the phrase was actually first used, personnel involved at the time give a variety of answers. What does seem to be agreed upon, however, was that the first public use of the phrase took place in a speech written by NSC staff and given by Quayle in late Spring of 1990 [31, 35]. While the Space Council looked over one shoulder and saw SDIO and a new way of doing business, it looked over its other shoulder and saw a NASA floundering for direction. The failures of the early 1990s had failed to make a dent in the NASA culture. This intransigence was accented early on, even before many of the early 1990s failures, in NASA’s response to SEI. While the Space Council originally thought NASA would embrace the Exploration Initiative, the 90-Day Study recommendations were criticized as costly, slow, unimaginative, and rigid. All scenarios revolved around the initial completion of the Space Station, and the options NASA offered were merely more a matter of pace than architecture alternatives. In a letter reviewing the NASA study, Griffin likened NASA’s approach to SEI as ‘three yards and a cloud of dust’ [32]. The 90-Day Study convinced the Space Council that some sort of cultural change would have to take place at NASA if SEI were to succeed. The Space Council first attempted to change NASA’s culture from the bottom up, by presenting the agency with alternative SEI architectures. A study team headed by Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was brought in more or less as a stalking horse, to present a radical alternative to NASA’s 90-Day Study [28, 31]. The result was the Great Exploration Initiative that proposed to use inflatable space structures, cost over an order of magnitude less than the NASA alternative,

164

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

and happen at three times the pace [33]. NASA’s reaction to the Great Exploration Initiative was evasive and essentially negative.17 The Space Council began to believe that a cultural change at NASA would need to begin from the top down [31]. A cultural change needed an advocate at the highest levels of the agency, an advocacy that NASA Administrator Richard Truly was not prepared to give. Truly, a former Shuttle astronaut, was perceived by the Council as too closely tied to the old way of doing business and as a barrier to change. The National Space Council wanted to bring in a new Administrator. Colonel Worden related that the NSC suggested Truly’s removal as early as Summer of 1990, but internal politicking in the Administration kept the Council from removing Truly until early 1992 [31]. The Space Council wanted to introduce a NASA Administrator that would advance the aggressive and innovative style of management embodied by SDIO space efforts and believed necessary for SEI. The Space Council’s first choice for Truly’s replacement was Lt. General James Abrahamson, former SDIO Director [31]. At the time, however, senior Democratic Senators Albert Gore and Barbara Mikulski made it clear that they would oppose General Abrahamson’s nomination. A candidate with less political connection to the Republican administrations of the 1980s was needed to head the nation’s civil space agency. Daniel Goldin, a registered Democrat and senior manager at TRW, was put forward as a more viable candidate. A proponent of less expensive spacecraft, Goldin’s rather apolitical history, and his background as a NASA engineer in the 1960s, made him a more likely candidate for Senate confirmation, and Goldin was confirmed as NASA Administrator in March 1992. Goldin’s influence on NASA’s solar system exploration program is explored in Section IV. 4.3. Clementine The Clementine mission was the product of a number of actors in the SDIO community, but was not entirely driven by SDIO requirements. The concept for Clementine originated from casual discussions in September of 1989 between Stuart Nozette, who later became the Clementine Deputy Mission Director, Geoffrey Tudor, a congressional staffer at the time, and Colonel Worden, who was on staff for the National Space Council. The context for their conversation was NASA’s approach to

17 NASA’s responses to the Great Exploration Initiative can be found in the integrated document: Roderick Hyde, Muriel Yuki Ishikawa, Lowell Wood, NASA Assessment of the ¸¸N¸ Space Exploration Proposal, and ¸¸N¸ Responses, LLNL Doc. No. SS 90-9, 15 January 1990. The authorship and date of the NASA-attributed assessment are not known.

SEI. Nozette characterized Clementine as ‘a way to flight qualify recently developed technology and, at the same time, demonstrate to the civilian community the great strides made by the Department of Defense and SDIO in lower cost advanced space technology’ [34]. The mission’s name was chosen as symbolic of the group’s belief in the in situ ‘resource mining’ concept for the efficient pursuit of the SEI program. The advanced technology components to be tested by Clementine had been developed for the SDIO Brilliant Pebbles program.18 While such a flight demonstration could be conducted in orbit, the multi-faceted objectives of its concept led to a preliminary mission architecture for a deep space mission. Clementine was, in effect, proving the technology for SDIO and for the Space Exploration Initiative. Because of the deep space requirement, SDIO needed involvement from NASA, since NASA was the agency with the lead charter for space exploration [35]. Michael Griffin, then-Director for Technology within SDIO, indicated he would need a letter from NASA asking SDIO to work with the civilian space agency on the concept [35]. In a 25 September 1990 letter to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, Donald Atwood, NASA Administrator Richard Truly suggested that DOD and NASA conduct joint discussions on the possible use of Brilliant Pebbles technology for deep space science applications, including a near-Earth asteroid mission. Subsequent discussions between SDIO personnel, NASA offices and science working groups, and even the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council resulted in a mission architecture consisting of a Delta-class launch, followed by a lunar mapping phase, and to be finished off by a flyby of the near-Earth asteroid 1620 Geographos.19 While discussions about Clementine’s mission elements were going on, two personnel changes took place that contributed to the flow of information and cultural change going on in the space community at this time. In September of 1991 Michael Griffin was brought into NASA to become the Associate Administrator for the

18 Brilliant Pebbles a design for an array of small, inexpensive satellites meant to target and intercept limited ICBM strikes before re-entry phase. The program is designed to provide a survivable system (since there are many in orbit at a time) at relatively low cost (large production lines and relatively simple systems for each kamikaze-like interceptor). 19 A ninety day study was conducted between January 29 and April 30, 1991. See Solar System Exploration Division, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ‘Joint SDIO/NASA Study of SDIO Technology: Applications to NASA Solar System Exploration’, presentation to Dr. Michael Griffin (SDIO) and Dr. Wesley Huntress (NASA), 30 April 1991. Also see Space Studies Board, National Research Council, ‘Letter Report to Drs. Simon P. Worden (SDIO) and Wesley Huntress (NASA), Scientific Assessment of the Proposed Clementine Mission’, Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration, 21 August 1991.

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

newly established Office of Exploration. One month later, Colonel Worden moved from the Space Council to take Griffin’s place as Deputy for Technology at SDIO. By December of that year, approximately $20 million dollars was reallocated in SDIO to begin building Clementine hardware [31]. Clementine was launched on 25 January 1994 by a Titan IIG converted ballistic missile. The spacecraft had a total dry mass of 227 kg; when the craft was fueled, its launch mass was approximately 450 kg [36]. While the Clementine mission used many advanced technology components, all were ready for incorporation into the spacecraft when mission development started; they were, in essence, ‘off the shelf ’. Clementine successfully completed the lunar-mapping portion of its mission by the beginning of May 1994. However, during maneuvers intended to send the spacecraft on its way toward Geographos, a software error caused the craft to spin out of control; the asteroid flyby portion of the mission was aborted, and the science return cut short. Relatively less attention was afforded to the loss of the Geographos flyby, however, than was given the mission’s success at the Moon after a twenty-two year American hiatus in lunar exploration. Even before its launch the Clementine mission had accomplished at least a portion of its original charter, to bring attention to the SDIO way of doing business and the potential that SDIO-developed advanced technology held for civil space applications. Costing only $80 million 1992 dollars (including launch and operations), and with a total development time of only 25 months,20 Clementine was touted as a prime example of a ‘faster, cheaper, better’ space mission. Coming less than one year after NASA lost contact with Mars Observer, the relative success of a non-NASA, inexpensive planetary mission was held up as an example from which NASA could learn. 4.4. Summary SDIO and the National Space Council acted more or less in concert to try to change the way NASA did business. Close working relationships among Council and SDIO staff led to a shared philosophy with regards to effective space program management and mission architecture. This SDIO/NSC community was able to exert tremendous pressure and influence on NASA

20 Cost figures quoted by Ballistic Mission Defense Organization do not include instrument development expoenditures, which were costed under the Brilliant Pebbles program. Total development time is counted here as the number of months from the allocation of development funds through launch. SDIO allocated specific funds to the Clementine program (known formerly within SDIO as the Deep Space Program Science Experiment) in December 1991 [35].

165

through the Council’s position in the Administration, the visibility of the Clementine mission, and the attention that was subsequently paid to SDIO/BMDO’s management of space missions. The existence of the National Space Council from 1989 through 1992 played an important role in legitimizing the faster, cheaper, better approach to space missions. The product of NSC creation, SEI, played a large part in calling attention to NASA’s intransigence and unwillingness to consider ideas from the wider community. This in turn gave cause to highlight many of the innovations in mission management and program structure for which SDIO was responsible. It is uncertain whether the innovations of SDIO would have been granted the legitimacy they did receive if their efforts were not so publicly backed by the cabinet-level Space Council. The public conflict between NASA and the Space Council also increased the news-worthiness of many of NASA’s difficulties in the early 1990s, providing the SDIO/NSC community with the leverage it needed to influence the civil space community. The appointment of Daniel Goldin as NASA Administrator in the Spring of 1992 provided a vehicle for the survival of the faster, cheaper, better (to become smaller, faster, cheaper) through the change in Presidential Administrations.

5. The leadership of Daniel Goldin Daniel Goldin was chosen to succeed Richard Truly as NASA Administrator because his philosophy and background were believed to be compatible with the ideology espoused by the National Space Council [31]. At the same time, his rather apolitical background made him a viable candidate, able to survive the Senate confirmation process. What the National Space Council got with the appointment of Dan Goldin was an outspoken Administrator — one who would survive the change in Presidential Administrations to carry forward the push for less expensive, more moderate space science missions. Goldin came from a background in robotic spacecraft. His twenty-five years at TRW were spent building a variety of spy, early warning, and communications satellites, as well as scientific craft like NASA’s Compton GammaRay Observatory [37]. He was named general manager of TRW’s Space and Technology Group in 1987, a position which he held until his appointment as Administrator in March of 1992. In many respects, Goldin was the polar opposite of Truly, who was a Shuttle-era astronaut brought in to get the Space Transportation System back on track after Challenger. Goldin was well-acquainted with the work of SDIO and the National Space Council before coming to NASA. Goldin’s group at TRW had been working on SDIO’s Brilliant Pebbles program [35]. He also had a good

166

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

relationship with the Space Council. At one point Goldin’s TRW team wanted to present a paper at an international conference on TRW’s designs for a series of small, inexpensive spacecraft [38]. It is said that vested interests in larger programs intervened, and NASA officials (Worden indicates Associate Administrator for Space Science and Applications, Leonard Fisk) made it known to Goldin that his group would be disadvantaged in future bids for NASA contracts if he continued to be so vocal about small satellite missions [31]. Goldin made sure the National Space Council was apprised of the situation [31]. Goldin’s advocacy of less expensive space missions, however, predates his Space Council connection; in fact, Goldin had for some years advocated the foundations for his preferred version of the ‘faster, cheaper, better’ mantra, ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ spacecraft. In an address dating from October 1988, Goldin stated: Experimental spacecraft launched ten to twenty years ago weighed hundreds of pounds and cost tens of millions of dollars. Spacecraft under design today weigh tens of thousands of pounds 2 and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars if something is not done2 . The need to cut the federal deficit is greatly reducing the funds available for space systems2will we rise to the occasion and deliver affordable systems our nation needs or will we shrink from the challenge, conduct business as usual, and allow costs to grow to the point where critical systems are unaffordable? 2 there is only one answer; deliver more for less! [39]. Goldin indicates in this speech a bias against large, heavy space systems. While Goldin was using this characterization as representative of the large, expensive space systems, large and heavy does not, in truth, make a spacecraft expensive. ‘Fatsats’ have been promoted as a low-cost alternative; the reasoning is analogous to why desk-top computers cost less than laptops. It takes more engineering skill and time to create a closely knit laptop than is does to make the cruder desktop version. A disproportionate fraction of resources is often spent achieving stringent specifications, including weight margins, that often far surpass the point of highest marginal return21. In fact, the Delta 180 craft was in the 3000 kg range, not at all designed to be light, but to be inexpensive and easy to integrate. The drive toward high-technology, low-weight spacecraft is not necessarily consistent with low cost objectives. The issue of whether smaller can

21 For a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of ‘Fatsats’, see Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States, Affordable Spacecraft: Design and Launch Alternatives — Background Paper, OTA-BP-ISC-60, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.

be both cheaper and more advanced technologically lies in the program management.22 Goldin’s reference to large craft is more a reflection on the size of the scientific payload and the almost antiquated technology used in many of the 1980s space science craft. The use of the most advanced technology could reduce both the mass and cost of science missions. The availability of advanced technology is connected in turn to short development schedules and concurrent, ongoing technology development efforts made independent of specific science missions. Goldin came to NASA with an intent to radically change the organization. Within three months of assuming office Goldin ordered set of agency program reviews designed to address, among other things, the cost savings mandated by a relatively austere NASA budget outlook [see Section V]. By October 1992 Goldin announced a package of wide-ranging managerial changes at the agency designed to address ‘cost overruns, isolation from the outside world, duplication of effort, a lack of focus on new priorities, and lack of management accountability’ [40]. Included in the changes was a break-up of the Office of Space Science and Applications, creating — in part — out of the rubble three separate science offices, each with its own Associate Administrator. Goldin was, effectively, breaking up a power base that had the potential to thwart his reform efforts. He moved the then-OSSA Associate Administrator, Leonard Fisk, to a newly created position of NASA Chief Scientist, a position with much prestige but no budget line item. While some of his managerial changes were put on hold due to Congressional opposition and the Presidential Administration changeover, Goldin’s intention to transform, at least in part, the way NASA did business was clear from the outset. When it came to the planetary program, Goldin was vehement in his position that NASA could no longer afford to plan for Cassini-class missions. Instead of excusing the agency, Goldin publicly denounced the mind set and management structure which had led to multibillion dollar spacecraft. In remarks made to the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Research Council, Goldin walked the Board through the true cost of the Cassini program, We used to launch a few spacecraft a year, we are now down to 1 spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Lab, 22 The issue lies in how the technology is integrated into the flight program. Rapid development schedule, lower cost missions by definition do not have the resources or time to validate new technology. However, the creation of an activity which consciously spaceflight qualifies advanced technology and then places the technology ‘on the shelf ’ for use by the science-oriented missions can ostensibly enable these ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ missions to use the more advanced technology to make them selves both smaller and less expensive. How successful NASA has been at this with the New Millennium program and other technology initiatives remains to be seen.

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

called Cassini, that’s the only planetary program that we have and that’s on the verge of cancellation. That program is 4 billion dollars. Did you hear that? 4 billion dollars. Now, how does it get advertised? It’s advertised as 1.4 billion dollars 2 . But then they want 1.4 billion dollars for mission operations and data analysis. That’s 2.8. The Europeans are making this lovely probe that’s going to go into Titan and that’s 800 million dollars. So, now we are up 3.6 billion dollars and then the Titan IV is 400 million, that’s 4 billion dollars before the first change notice comes through. We are going to launch that in a decade from now, if we are lucky, and that is the planetary program of the United States of America [41]. To draw a significant contrast, later in the same speech Goldin exalted the work of a few engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who were working on the Pluto Fast Flyby concept, a significant departure from the original Pluto mission concepts that were even then competing for attention.23 The summer of 1992 began the FY 1994 budget season. The NASA FY 1994 budget proposal included a number of initiatives designed to push smaller spacecraft with more advanced technology and more rapid development schedules [42]. f small spacecraft technology and applications — a program to push ultra-lite, low cost satellite and instrument technology in conjunction with increased graduate training; f new small Earth probes and global monitoring — intended to be a component of the Mission to Planet Earth program, filling in data gaps while taking advantage of the small spacecraft technology developed in NASA technology programs; f Technology Research Institutes — consortia with industry and universities designed to facilitate the flow of new technology, commercialization efforts, and the transfer of technology to and from NASA; and f the Discovery program — a series of relatively low cost planetary missions intended to maximize on NASA technology development efforts to achieve cost and performance objectives. Given Goldin’s history of advocating incorporation of advanced technology into space systems, his influence shows heavily in these budget initiatives. While the Dis-

23 The 1986 Space Science Board report, A Strategy for the Exploration of the Outer Planets: 1986—1996, identified the Pluto/Charon system as a likely and logical long-term candidate for a flyby reconnaissance mission. Since then, NASA plans for a Pluto mission have been repeatedly redesigned. Each iteration has been geared toward producing a mission architecture that could be accomplished more rapidly, and at less cost, than its predecessors.

167

covery concept had been in development since the 1989 (see Section I), Goldin’s outspoken advocacy for the principles behind the program helped Discovery get its new start in FY 1994 instead of the originally planned FY 1996 [43]. The inclusion of the technology development and flight demonstration programs was designed to allow the most advanced hardware to be ‘put on the shelf ’, where it would be easily accessible for use by the Discovery program and the small earth probes, among other applications. This would allow the civil space agency to follow the program ‘methodology’ espoused by SDIO and the National Space Council under Bush: parallel program structures that utilize available hardware for current opportunities while simultaneously developing the advanced technology to improve capabilities for the missions that follow. 5.1. Summary Dan Goldin’s arrival at NASA in April of 1992 was the result of the National Space Council’s attempt to effect agency change from the top down. The public’s perception of NASA at the time led to popular support for Goldin’s hard-charging management style. Despite some misgivings voiced by detractors, Goldin’s ‘shake-up’ of the agency was a necessary step toward revitalizing the nation’s civil space agency and re-focusing its efforts on delivering a robust and diverse program of space science and exploration. Goldin’s retention by the Clinton Administration is testament to acceptance of his changes. Goldin’s advanced technology push resonated well with the public’s perception of NASA as a leading-edge research and development institution. Because of this perception, the modification of ‘faster, cheaper, better’ to ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ has served the agency well as more representative of the advanced technology push. Finally, Goldin has, so far, successfully thread the agency through issues concerning the space station; a collapse of this NASA initiative would have, I believe, an unfavorable effect on the agency’s other programs, including as solar system exploration. The size of the science budget has waxed and waned with the overall agency budget, and a cancellation of the space station would — in all likelihood — result in that money being diverted out of the space agency to other programs. Overall, Goldin has provided an identifiable leadership that has both sustained and shaped the smaller, faster, cheaper philosophy for solar system exploration.

6. Diminishing budget projections Despite the efficacy of Daniel Goldin’s leadership, the pressure from the National Space Council and SDIO, the poor publicity received by the civil space agency, and the desire by the space science community itself for

168

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

more frequent planetary missions, it remains questionable whether smaller, faster, cheaper planetary missions would have become reality without the looming specter of significant NASA budget cuts. The increasingly unfavorable out-year funding profile for the space sciences in the early 1990s forced the planetary science community to restructure its solar system exploration program to fit within the increasingly constrained budget guidelines. Since 1991 NASA has faced progressively lower rates of anticipated budget growth as projected by the annual out-year funding profile in the President’s budget. Fig. 6 shows the out-year funding profiles for NASA’s budget, as given in FY 1993 through 1998 [44]. For each year, the budget outlook for NASA as a whole has been reflected in the numbers for the Office of Space Science (Fig. 7) [45]. In terms of actual money appropriated, funding for space physics, astrophysics, and planetary science reached a peak of $1.7 billion dollars in FY 1992 and declined in constant dollars to $1.5 billion in FY 1996 [45, p. 7]. The tight budget outlook increased support in the space science community itself for small planetary missions. As it was originally proposed, the Discovery series was intended to complement the data return from larger flagship planetary missions; as such, its constituency was

limited. With the increasingly tight budget outlook, it appeared for a while that the Discovery series would be all that the planetary program was capable of supporting. This situation encouraged a greater proportion of the planetary community to show interest in and support the Discovery series than might have otherwise been the case. The out-year funding profile as outlined in the Administration’s FY 1993 budget led NASA to reassess where the agency placed its emphasis. In his statement before the House Subcommittee on Space, NASA Associate Administrator for OSSA, Leonard Fisk, note that ‘[NASA] substantially revised this year’s plan to place highest priority on small and intermediate missions that are realistically affordable, but are still responsive to science priorities’ [46]. No new starts for space science were funded under the FY 1993 budget, but funding was included for conceptual studies for the Discovery series. The survival of the small over the large missions in the 1990s marks a significant departure from past practice at NASA. In previous eras of budget crunches, NASA was more likely to cut back on the small, ‘complementary’ programs in favor of preserving its large ‘primary’ missions (recall the fate of both the Planetary Explorers and Observers). Therefore the question is, why was it

Fig. 6. Out-year funding projections for NASA.

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

169

Fig. 7. OSS as a portion of NASA’s budget.

different this time around? The size of the budget cuts in the early 1980s were just as large as those imposed in the 1990s, yet NASA merely drew out its large missions instead of aggressively pursuing low-cost alternatives (see Section 1). The factors providing the difference this time around are those forces and/or trends outlined in Sections 1—4.

7. Conclusion The current emphasis on smaller, faster, cheaper spacecraft for solar system exploration is the product of a number of interacting — even interdependent — factors. No single element of this analysis can be said to have been influential enough in its own right to have singlehandedly moved NASA toward the SFC approach. Rather, the current SFC concept as applied to NASA’s solar system exploration program can be viewed as the vector sum of: (1) the space science community’s desire for more frequent planetary missions to plug the data gaps, educated the next generation of scientists, provide missions to targets of opportunity, and enable programmatic flexibility in times of budgetary crisis; (2) the poor publicity garnered by NASA in the early 1990s and the resultant atmosphere of public criticism (creating an opportunity for reform); (3) The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and the National Space Council community’s desire to advance the Space Exploration Initiative and its perception that the NASA culture at the time represented a barrier to the effective pursuit of space exploration;

(4) the effective leadership of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin; and (5) the diminishing budget profile for space sciences in the early 1990s. The planetary science community’s desire for a small mission budget line has been consistent over the history of the civil space program. However, advocacy for such a line item took second place to the support of flagship missions for much the seventies, eighties, and even early nineties. Because of such, both the Planetary Explorers and Planetary Observers failed to become established programs. The rationale behind the Discovery program as it was proposed in 1989 was very much the same rationale as had existed for both the Explorer and Observer series. The Discovery program was viewed as supplemental planetary science meant to fill in the data gaps between flagship missions, and not as an equal component of NASA’s ‘ground-breaking’ planetary program. Neither was the budget situation of the 1990s much different than that which the space science community had experienced in the past. Budget crunches in both the seventies and the eighties forces out new starts from the planetary program as the agency chose to pursue existing flagship missions at the expense of more moderate alternatives such as those embodied in the Explorer and Observer concepts. In the nineties, however, when the budget squeezed it was the Discover concept that survived while programs such as the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby were canceled. The planetary science community had not decreased its advocacy for larger missions; NASA behaved differently in the 1990s because it was subject to additional forces that added impetus and credibility to the arguments for smaller, faster, cheaper planetary missions.

170

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

The poor showing by NASA in the early 1990s generated a broad swath of negative publicity and even open criticism of the way NASA did business. The National Space Council and SDIO communities presented themselves and their ideas as the solution to NASA’s problems. The position of the Space Council as a Cabinetlevel entity gave the body a legitimacy and influence that enabled it to exert considerable pressure on NASA is support of its won agenda. Public criticism of NASA at the time allowed the NSC to go after the civil space agency with relative immunity. Despite the Space Council’s dissolution at the hands of the Clinton Administration in January 1993, its influence in the NASA Administrator the Council had managed to get appointed just ten months earlier. Also an advocate of smaller, faster, cheaper space missions, Administrator Goldin used the public’s criticism of NASA to build support for his own agenda to turn the agency around. While Goldin bowed to the Clinton Administration’s aversion to SEI, the mantra of smaller, faster, cheaper was still vigorously applied to NASA’s ongoing programs, including solar system exploration. The planetary community now finds itself with a slate of missions that consists only of smaller, faster, cheaper efforts for solar system exploration. The launch of Cassini in late 1998 marked the end of an era of multi-billion dollar planetary science missions. Even if the Mars Surveyor program alters its mission plan to include some Delta-class launches in order to accommodate more capable sample return architectures, the move would still bring the program far short of the cost and size of Cassini-class platforms (not to mention development schedule). The US civil space agency appears to have successfully institutionalized the smaller, faster, cheaper approach to solar system exploration. The relative success of that approach is yet to be determined. References [1] Institute for Defense Analysis. A representative survey of U.S. space systems and methods for estimating their costs. 1992;D1182:83, 89. [2] Space Science Board, National Research Council. Planetary exploration 1968—1975, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1967:5. [3] Space Studies Board, National Research Council. The role of small missions in planetary and lunar exploration. Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996, p. 6. [4] Solar System Exploration Committee, NASA Advisory Council. Planetary exploration through the year 2000: a core program, executive summary. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1983:5. [5] Polk, C. Mars observer project history. JPL D-8095, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, December 1990:50. [6] Space Studies Board, National Research Council. Letter Report to Dr. Geoffrey A. Briggs, Director, Solar System Exploration Division, NASA, Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration, 14 May 1986:2.

[7] Mars Observer Project Management Report, JPL D-1104, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, July 23, 1987:1c. [8] Space Science Board, National Research Council. Letter Report to Geoffrey Briggs, Director, Solar System Exploration Division. NASA, Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration, 12 July 1988. [9] Space and Earth Science Advisory committee, NASA Advisory Council. The crisis in space and earth science. Washington, DC, 1986. [10] Institute for Defense Analysis. A perspective on acquisition of NASA space systems. IDA Document D-1224, December 1992:50. [11] Office of Space Science and Applications, National Aeronautics and space Administration. ‘Outlook material’, presentation to the space studies board. 8 August 1986:9. [12] Brown, RA. Solar System Exploration Division, NASA. Presentation to the committee on planetary and lunar exploration. Space Studies Board, National Research Council, 7 March 1990. [13] Hubble mirror probe may take 6 months, Spacewatch. United States Space Foundation, August 1990:6. [14] Booth, W. Hubble Report Faults Builder, NASA. Washington Post 28 November 1990. [15] Fuel leaks push shuttle launches back to september. Spacewatch. United States Space Foundation, August 1990:1. [16] Sawer, K. $1.4 Billion galileo mission appears crippled. Washington Post, 18 December 1991:A3. [17] Sawer, K. Galileo antenna apparently still stuck. Washington Post 17 December 1991. [18] Crensen, M. Cast adrift: researchers try to regroup after disappearance of mars observer. Dallas Morning News, 13 December 1993:8D. [19] David, L. The sounds of silence: NASA encounters a non-recoverable’ situation. Ad Astra 1993:21. [20] Smith, MS. Congressional Research Service, NASA’s mars observer probe: implications of its loss. The library of Congress, 20 September 1993:2. [21] Siegel, L. At NASA, red planet or red faces? Washington Times, 25 August 1993:A1. [22] Mintz, J. Acquiring a large set of headaches. Washington Post, 27 August 1993:A1. [23] Logsdon, JM. The U.S. space program: patterns of public opinion. February 1998. [24] Asker, JR. NASA, Pentagon advance small science missions. Aviation Week and Space Technology 1 March 1993:48. [25] Cowen, RC. Future in space: smaller, cheaper. The Christian Science Monitor 4 November 1992:14. [26] Couglin, TB, Crawford, LJ, Dassoulas, J, Griffin, MD, Partridge, PE, Peterson, M. Strategic defense initiative. Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 1 November 1992:200. [27] Griffin, MD, Rendine, MD. Delta 180/vector sum: the first powered space intercept. Paper presented at the AIAA 26th Aerospace Sciences Meeting, Reno, Nevada, 11—14 January 1988:10. [28] Griffin, MD. Personal interview with the author, 12 March 1997. [29] Griffin, MD. Deputy for Technology, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. Letter to Dr. Aaron Cohen, Director, Johnson Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1 November 1989:3. [30] Stafford, TP. Chair, synthesis group on America’s space exploration initiative. America at the Threshold, 3 May 1991. [31] Colonel Worden, SP. Personal interview with the author, 17 March 1997. [32] Griffin, M. Deputy for Technology, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. Letter to Colonel S. Peter Worden, USAF, National Space Council, 11 December 1989. [33] Hyde, R, Ishikawa, MY, Wood, L. The great exploration initiative for the human exploration initiative, briefing presented to the

S.A. Roy / Space Policy 14 (1998) 153—171

[34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40]

National Research Council Space Exploration Initiative Study. Washington, DC, 17 January 1990. Nozette, S. Clementine Deputy Mission Director, from ‘A Clementine Collection’. Naval Research Laboratory, 1994. Nozette, S. Personal interview with the author, 17 March 1997. Nozette, S. et al. ‘The Clementine mission to the moon: scientific overview’. Pre-publication draft, 1994. Priest, D. TRW executive named to head NASA. Washington Post 12 March 1992:A4. Sawer, K. The man of the moon. Washington Post 1 August 1994:B2. Goldin, DS. Address to 11th aerospace testing seminar. 10 October 1988. Sawer, K. NASA registers turbulence over new chief ’s changes. Washington Post 17 October 1992.

171

[41] Goldin, DS. Remarks to the aeronautics and space engineering board. National Research Council, 1 October 1992. [42] Goldin, DS. Statement before the subcommittee on space, committee on science, space, and technology. US. House of Representatives, 20 April 1993:6. [43] Pilcher, C. Personal interview with the author, 14 March 1997. [44] NASA presentation materials, 1997. [45] Sarsfield, L. Critical Technologies Institute, RAND Corporation, Federal investments in small spacecraft. DRU-1494-OSTP, September 1996:10. [46] Fisk, LA. Associate Administrator for Space Science and Applications, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Statement before the subcommittee on space, committee on science, space and technology. US House of Representative, 27 February 1992:3.