Mars Wars the Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative

Mars Wars The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative Thor Hogan The NASA History Series National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA History Division Office of External Relations Washington, DC August 2007 NASA SP-2007-4410 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hogan, Thor. Mars wars : the rise and fall of the Space Exploration Initiative / Thor Hogan. p. cm. -- (The NASA history series) (NASA SP-2007-4410) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Space Exploration Initiative (U.S.) 2. Space flight to Mars--Planning--History--20th century. 3. United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration--Management--History--20th century. 4. Astronautics and state--United States--History--20th century. 5. United States--Politics and government--1989-1993. 6. Outerspace--Exploration--United States--History--20th century. 7. Organizational change--United States--History--20th century. I. Title. TL789.8.U6S62 2007 629.45’530973--dc22 2007008987 Table of Contents Acknowledgements. iii Chapter 1: Introduction. 1 The Policy Stream and Punctuated Equilibrium Models. .2 Why Mars?. .5 Canals on Mars. 7 Mars in Popular Culture. .9 Mariner and Viking . 11 Chapter 2: The Origins of SEI . 15 Early Mission Planning . 16 Post-Apollo Planning. 21 Case for Mars. 25 National Commission on Space. 27 The Ride Report . .30 President Reagan and NASA’s Office of Exploration. .32 Chapter 3: Bush, Quayle, and SEI. 37 Bush-Quayle 1988. 39 Reagan-Bush Transition. 44 The Problem Stream: Providing Direction to a Directionless Agency. 47 The Policy Stream: The Ad Hoc Working Group. .57 The Political Stream: Briefing Key Actors. 64 Joining the Streams: Human Exploration of Mars Reaches the Gov. Agenda . 68 Chapter 4: The 90-Day Study. .77 Waiting for NASA. 82 SEI Takes Shape. 85 Mars Wars . 92 Chapter 5: The Battle to Save SEI. .107 Presidential Decisions. .108 SEI Hits the Road . .114 Losing Faith in NASA . 120 The Augustine and Synthesis Group Reports. 125 SEI Fades Away . .130 Chapter 6: SEI, Policy Streams, and Punctuated Equilibrium. 137 Policy Streams, SEI, and the Space Policy Community. 138 Punctuated Equilibrium, Space Policy, and SEI . .143 Chapter 7: The Lessons of SEI . 159 NASA History Series. 167 Index. 178 Acknowledgements A great many people provided me with assistance during the preparation of this book. I am particularly indebted to John Logsdon and Roger Launius for their invaluable insights regarding the history of the American space program, the role of various actors within the space policy community, and the context in which Mars exploration should be viewed. I also owe a great deal to Steve Balla and Jeff Henig, who helped me employ the political science and public policy theories that are used in this book. I would also like to thank Ray Williamson and Joe Cordes for their support and helpful comments. I am also very grateful for all the hard work contributed by Steve Dick and Steve Garber getting this book ready for publication. I would like to thank Heidi Pongratz at Maryland Composition, Angela Lane and Danny Nowlin at Stennis Space Center, and Gail Carter-Kane at NASA Head- quarters for handling the copyediting, layout, and printing of the book. Finally, I would like to thank the dedicated archivists at both the NASA History Divi- sion in Washington, D.C. and the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M – they were all crucial to the successful completion of this project. In particular, I would like to thank Colin Fries and Jane Odom at the NASA History Division and Debbie Carter, Bob Holzweiss, John Laster, Laura Spencer, and Melissa Walker at the George Bush Presidential Library. This book is dedicated to Joe Hogan, for teaching me how to dream big dreams; to Ron Beck, for believing in my potential when few others did; and to Kate Kuva- lanka, for inspiring me on a daily basis iii 1 Introduction “Why Mars? Because it is humanity’s destiny to strive, to seek, to find. And because it is America’s destiny to lead.” President George Bush, 20 July 19891 Sitting on the steps of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum on 20 July 2004, it was difficult to imagine that fifteen years earlier at this place the fiercest domestic political conflict of the first space age commenced. Bright-eyed children poured off tour buses and hurried to examine the museum’s wonders, teachers and parents close behind with digital cameras ready. They lined up to touch a four billion year-old lunar rock, clamored around the Apollo 11 Com- mand Module Columbia, and gazed up at an ungainly Lunar Module— monuments to past American triumphs in space. It was on a similarly hot and muggy Washing- ton morning that President George Bush had used this location to announce a renewed commitment to human exploration beyond Earth orbit. Even before this declaration, however, the winds of war had been swirling in the nation’s capital. On the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, President Bush had stood atop these very steps and proposed a long-range exploration plan that included the successful construction of an orbital space station, a permanent return to the Moon, and a human mission to Mars—this enterprise became known as the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). The president charged the newly rees- tablished National Space Council with providing concrete alternatives for meeting these objectives. To provide overall focus for the new initiative, Bush later set a 30- year goal for a crewed landing on Mars. If met, humans would be walking on the red 1 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 20 July 1989, Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing [http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/papers/] (accessed 18 May 2002). 1 Mars Wars planet by 2019, which would be the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Within a few short years after President Bush’s Kennedyesque announcement, however, the initiative had faded into history—the victim of a flawed policy process and a political war fought on several different fronts. The failure of SEI, combined with problems ranging from the Hubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror to space shuttle fuel leaks to space station budget problems, badly damaged the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) image and prompted dramatic changes in the American space program. The rise of SEI and its eventual demise represents one of the landmark episodes in the history of the American space program—ranking with the creation of NASA, the decision to go to the Moon, the post-Apollo planning process, and the space station decision. The story of this failed initiative is one shaped by key protagonists and critical battles. It is a tale of organizational, cultural, and personal confron- tation. Organizational skirmishes involved the Space Council versus NASA, the White House versus congressional appropriators, and the Johnson Space Center versus the rest of the space agency—all seeking control of the national space policy process. Cultural struggles pitted the increasingly conservative engineering ethos of NASA against the “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy of a Space Council looking for innovative solutions to technical problems. Personality clashes matched Vice President Dan Quayle and Space Council Executive Secretary Mark Albrecht against NASA Administrator Dick Truly and Johnson Space Center Director Aaron Cohen. In the final analysis, the demise of SEI was a classic example of a defective decision-making process—one that lacked adequate high-level policy guidance, failed to address critical fiscal constraints, developed inadequate programmatic alternatives, and garnered no congressional support. Some space policy experts have argued that SEI was doomed to fail, due primarily to the immense budgetary pressures facing the nation during the early 1990s.2 This book will argue, however, that the failure of the initiative was not predetermined; instead, it was the result of a deeply flawed policy process that failed to develop (or even consider) policy options that may have been politically acceptable given the existing political environment. The Policy Stream and Punctuated Equilibrium Models To make the case that the failure of SEI was not inevitable, this study employs two theoretical models to guide the narrative analysis of how the initiative reached 2 Dwayne A. Day, “Doomed to Fail: The Birth and Death of the Space Exploration Initiative,” Spaceflight (March 1995), pp. 79-83; John Pike, “But what is the True Rationale for Human Spaceflight?,” Space Policy (August 1994), pp. 217-222. 2 Chapter 1: Introduction the government agenda and what factors led to its ultimate demise. John Kingdon’s Policy Streams Model describes how problems come to the attention of policy makers, how agendas are set, how policy alternatives are generated, and why policy windows open.3 This theory will be utilized to develop the story of SEI’s rise and fall, and will more specifically be used to assess who the important actors are within the space policy community. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones’s Punctuated Equilibrium Model depicts the policy process as comprising long periods of stability, which are interrupted by predictable periods of instability that lead to major policy changes.4 This model will be utilized to provide a better understanding of the larger trends that led to SEI’s promotion to the government agenda and may explain its eventual downfall.5 These two models contributed a number of descriptive statistics that were used to develop a collection of lessons learned from the SEI experience. In 1972, Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen introduced Garbage Can Theory in an article describing what they called “organized anarchies.” The authors emphasized the chaotic character of organizations as loose collections of ideas as opposed to rational, coherent structures.

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