title: “Lost In Space” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Mark Anglemyer”
It didn’t work out that way. Just 68 hours before Observer was to fire rockets that would slow it down enough to be captured by Mars’s gravity, flight controllers at NASNs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, saw the first indications of disaster. On-board transmitters, shut down during propulsion maneuvers, failed to power back up. Controllers furiously tapped out signals every 20 minutes. Silence. Commands to activate a backup transmitter on the golf-cart-size Observer went unacknowledged. The best flight engineers in the business worked through the nights to save the mission, practically disassembling a scale model of observer to crack the problem. At midweek, controllers waited anxiously for the craft to phone home, as it was programmed to do if it had heard nothing from the JPL for five days. Nothing.
While dejected flight controllers debated what happened to Observer–had it shot past Mars? shattered into a zillion pieces from a fuel-tank explosion?–NASA had bigger worries. A lost $720 million Mars mission here, a myopic $1.5 billion telescope there, and pretty soon it’s real money–out of the agency’s budget. Congress has already knocked off $3 billion from President Bill Clinton’s proposed five-year space budget of $80 billion and is gunning for an additional $8 billion. And although the space station has been slimmed down, it’s still a fat target for deficit hawks. The big failures “will help me dramatically with killing [it],” says Sen. Dale Bumpers.
Hopes for the $22 billion station have already foundered on the problems of the space shuttles, which would ferry up parts to assemble the craft in orbit. The launch of Discovery has been halted three times this summer. “If people want to accuse us of being too damn safe, we’ll take that,” says NASNs Mark Hess. The agency has good reason for caution: a new analysis estimates the chance of a Challenger–like tragedy at one in every 60 launches.
In a nimble bit of damage control, NASA chief Daniel Goldin named outside experts to figure out what made the Mars craft vanish. A similar panel is investigating whether shuttle delays are just bad luck or are signs of systemic problems in NASA management or engineering. NASA has also asked the Pentagon whether a fleet of Star Wars satellites could be modified and redirected toward Mars, a bid that fits Goldin’s quest to make projects “smaller, better, cheaper.” That means breaking big missions into smaller ones that take two years from concept to liftoff, rather than 20. Then, he says, “we don’t have to bet the farm on any one.” Still, it’s the nature of spaceflight to suffer some failures: “If NASA [had] only successful missions, I’d say we were trying to play it safe. We wouldn’t be making progress and would have no reason for existing.”
There’s still a chance that Observer is intact though unable to transmit. Extraterrestrial enthusiasts picketing the JPL last week had another theory: that NASA was only pretending Observer was lost to hide its discovery of Martians. In its current funk, NASA could probably use some little green men.
