SELLING MARS

LOUIS Friedman, one-time rocket scientist and now, as head of the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, one of the nation’s most vocal cheerleaders for planetary exploration, had waited a long time for this moment and wanted to savor it in solitude. Launches always made him nervous, but this one, on a morning last April, was special. If it worked, it would mark the end of more than a decade of waiting for the United States to return to planetary exploration. If it didn’t, it would be just another on a list of disappointments NASA has handed to Friedman in the past 17 years.

He moved a few feet from his friends among the crowd of spectators at Cape Canaveral and positioned himself in clear view of the launch pad. Then he stared into the distance at the space shuttle Atlantis, which was scheduled momentarily to take the spacecraft Magellan into Earth orbit and then send it on its way to Venus.

As a 31-year-old engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1972, Friedman’s first supervisory job was study leader and program manager for the then-unnamed Magellan project. Had anyone told him then that he would be a grandfather by the time Magellan flew, he wouldn’t have believed them. But since the mid-1970s, he had gradually become disillusioned with the false starts and delays in the American space program.

This day, he had flown from California to Florida to watch the launch and take part in a panel discussion, a sort of celebration of America’s return to space exploration. Standing alone at the edge of the crowd as the countdown entered its last minute, he half expected another delay. An optimist about most things, he had never had much faith in the wisdom of using the space shuttle instead of conventional rockets to launch spacecraft.

At T-minus 30 seconds, the countdown stopped. A malfunction had been detected; the shuttle engines shut down. Friedman was disappointed, and he couldn’t help but immediately see the irony.

“When that thing didn’t go, and I was looking out from the causeway, I could also see a Titan (rocket) the Air Force was getting ready for another launch,” he recalls a few weeks later. “Boy, did I wish we were using that.”

A week later, the shuttle carrying Magellan successfully took off. By then, Friedman was back in his office watching the event on television with his staff at the Planetary Society. He is enough of a space groupie, he says, to enjoy any successful launch--even one that comes years late.

IN THE PLANETARY SOCIETY’S 16-room headquarters, in a turn-of-the-century Greene and Greene mansion, Louis Friedman has the smallest office. (“Size is not power,” he says.) He sits at an old oak desk above which hangs a needlepoint of Saturn stitched by his mother. When he’s not on the phone, he’s likely to be bounding downstairs to consult with his secretaries or Tim Lynch, the society’s director of programs and development. He jogs each morning to work off the calories of an occasional beer, but seeing him scurry around, one wonders if the jogging isn’t overkill.

For nearly a decade, Friedman has spent most of his waking hours as the pivotal man in an exercise in mass salesmanship: finding ways to persuade Americans--the public, politicians, bureaucrats and space scientists--to rally behind planetary exploration as they did in the 1960s, after the Soviets launched Sputnik. In the past 25 years, he has evolved from space engineer to salesman of dreams in an era of diminished dreaming. “What I want to do,” Friedman says, “is make space exploration happen. “

Under Friedman’s direction, the Planetary Society is to planetary exploration what Common Cause is to political campaigning or the Sierra Club is to conservation. But in addition to calling for a general reform of the nation’s space program, it has channeled most of its energies into promoting a single great notion: that of a joint U.S.-Soviet manned mission to Mars. The group’s leaders believe that the Mars mission--with its underpinnings of global peace through technology--is the only aspiration grand enough to drum up the public interest needed to fuel real-life star trekking. And, Friedman hopes, that grass-roots enthusiasm will eventually bubble up to influence the Washington policy-makers and budget writers who can put the civil space program back on its old, optimistic track.

As executive director, Friedman is administrator, policy-maker, publicist and even carnival barker, trying to lure passers-by inside the tent to see the exotica--in this case, the planets in Earth’s solar system. Despite his background as a card-carrying scientist, this may be the job he was born to do. “I live, breathe and eat Mars,” he says.

Early one morning, he is in Lynch’s office discussing the logistics of scheduling Carl Sagan to testify before the House of Representatives on the NASA budget. Moments later, he is in his own office meeting with Angela Brown, a former Planetary Society staffer turned consultant, reviewing details for a society-sponsored festival to coincide with Voyager II’s encounter with Neptune in August. By way of JPL, Voyager’s live images of Neptune will be transmitted to the festival.

Friedman squeezes his eyes shut to contain his enthusiasm when Brown tells him a national auto maker is interested in sending Neptune images from the JPL feed to all its dealerships through its internal cable system. “Oh, I would love a downlink (in the dealerships),” he groans. “Anything we can do to get this stuff into peoples’ hands across America.”

Later still, he returns calls from the Washington Post and an aerospace trade magazine. One reporter wants a quick response from Friedman about news that the Soviets have activated a camera on a spacecraft sent to the Martian moon Phobos. Friedman raves over this development; the next day, he is the only American quoted in the story.

His workday often starts early, with phone calls from home to the East Coast or the Soviet Union, and doesn’t end until evening. One night, Friedman, red-eyed and weary, is the host at a Planetary Society reception. He has just heard a colleague in the society suggest to a visitor that America’s next space goal should be to send more astronauts to the moon to set up a base. To Friedman, the suggestion is close to heresy. It makes no sense to send more humans to the moon because the whole idea bores the public, Friedman says, his voice rising. Manned lunar missions would only drain America’s civil-space budget away from a more important, profound, exciting goal--namely, Mars.

Friedman is forceful but good-humored as he argues. He is slightly rumpled, and his mop of graying black hair hints of Harpo Marx. If he was selling something simpler, like the women’s hats his father once helped produce in New York, his charm and persistence would probably have made Friedman a rich man. This evening, though, his colleague can’t be swayed. Friedman, undeterred and indefatigable, wanders over to another knot of guests, prepared to make his argument for a mission to Mars all over again.

WHO WOULD HAVE predicted in the 1960s that a role like Friedman’s would exist, much less be considered by so many to be necessary? Then, the promotion of planetary exploration, fueled by Soviet space advances and Cold War competitiveness, was led by an American President. John F. Kennedy talked about the dreams and set the goals, rallying Americans to create grand technologies, explore the universe, land on the moon--and do it all before the Soviets could. It was called the Space Race, with all the urgency that implies.

Through the 1970s, NASA launched 69 manned and unmanned missions. It was during those boom times, in 1970, that Friedman joined JPL, after working on the technical staff of a Massachusetts aerospace firm and then earning a doctorate in astronautics and aeronautics at MIT. He immediately went to work on Mariner 10, which was launched just three years later and eventually flew by Venus and Mercury, taking pictures that gave the earthbound the first detailed knowledge of the innermost planets. When Friedman recalls the end of those heady days, he sounds almost wistful. “Then the shuttle came, and it just ruined everything.”

After Kennedy’s death, White House-level passion for planetary exploration--the key to funding--began to dry up. Interest declined with each new President and each new escalation of the dollar-draining Vietnam War. Then, in 1972, shortly after the last Apollo spacecraft landed a man on the moon, President Nixon unveiled a plan to build a space shuttle, promoted as a quicker, cheaper way to fly in space. (“You don’t go to space to be cheap,” Friedman grouses today. “You stay home to be cheap.”) Nixon rejected another of the space program options recommended by a presidential commission--sending humans to Mars, an expensive project that would be completed many years after his White House tenure.

Friedman considers Nixon’s shuttle decision a turning point. NASA budgets began to drop and planetary exploration, which a generation had come to believe would be a continuing part of American achievement, suffered. In the mid-’60s, NASA’s annual budget climbed to $26 billion (in 1988 dollars). From 1972 through last year, the agency’s total budget averaged less than a third of that, about $8 billion a year (in 1988 dollars). Within that budget, planetary exploration changed from favorite child to sad stepsister of the space shuttle. According to one study of NASA budgets, when measured in dollars adjusted for inflation, planetary funding dropped 75% between 1974 and 1978. The 1989 budget for planetary exploration (about $417 million) remains lower than it was 15 years ago, when the figures are adjusted for inflation.

After Pioneer Venus 10 blasted off toward Venus in 1978, exploration launches stopped. Several unmanned planetary missions in development were relegated to the back burner, including Magellan, the probe of Jupiter known as Galileo and a joint European-U.S. mission to study the sun. Out of frustration, Friedman applied for and won a yearlong fellowship to work on the staff of the Senate committee that addresses space program goals and funding. It gave him a chance to reassess his career while allowing him a bird’s eye view of space policy-making in Washington.

Meanwhile, back at JPL, two prominent space scientists also were alarmed at the stagnation of NASA’s planetary program. One was Bruce Murray, then director of JPL; the other was star-astronomer Carl Sagan, a frequent visitor to the lab. Both had been gratified to see public interest build as the two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, approached Jupiter. But they were distressed that this public interest did not translate into money from Washington. President Carter told Sagan as much at the White House.

Murray and Sagan, so accustomed to looking beyond the stars, readjusted their gazes earthward. An organization to rally around planetary exploration would have to start at the grass roots, they believed. But neither had the time to start or run such a group. In spring, 1979, when Friedman visited JPL in anticipation of returning in the fall, Murray asked him to direct the new organization.

In late 1979, from his dining room table, Friedman launched the Planetary Society. It had little money, three members and a vague idea about how to attract more. The three co-founders had only their goals: to educate, to influence space policy and, perhaps, to provide funding for planetary research. And they decided they could do it all 3,000 miles from the hub of space policy-making, in Pasadena, the home not only of JPL but of Friedman and Murray, too.

By the end of its first year, the society had established the roots of a sophisticated direct-mail operation and signed up more than 20,000 members. Today, it has about 125,000 members in 104 countries and 26 part-time and full-time employees. It is the largest (by about five times) and best-known space-interest group in the world, and its annual budget exceeds $3.5 million, supported mostly by membership fees of $20 to $30 and donations.

During its first years, the Planetary Society leaders hewed to a fairly conservative line, advocating unmanned missions, testifying before committees and spearheading studies to salvage planetary programs threatened by NASA budget cuts. In 1981, Friedman organized society members in a letter-writing campaign entreating NASA to reverse its decision to stay earthbound in 1986 while Halley’s comet made one of its rare appearances. The campaign generated 10,000 letters but failed to get the government to plan a Halley’s flyby.

Chastened by this defeat, the society took more aggressive action a year later when the Senate refused to fund a NASA project that would have listened for signs of intelligent life in outer space. The Planetary Society began financing a similar project of its own. Film maker Steven Spielberg contributed $100,000 to help a Harvard scientist build and monitor a sophisticated radio system that still operates today, waiting for a signal that earthlings are not alone.

But the society’s leaders had not yet fixed upon the one grand goal that they believed would get planetary research back on track. Inspiration arrived when, in January, 1985, the society co-sponsored a symposium in Washington on the effects of space weapons on civilian use of space.

The Reagan White House was gearing up its Star Wars program. Mikhail S. Gorbachev had not yet come into power in the Soviet Union. Relations between the two countries were tense. One afternoon, 600 people crowded into a room to hear a panel that included Murray, Sagan and Roald Z. Sagdeev, then the leader of the Soviet space program. In the course of the discussion, Sagdeev suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union follow up on the cooperation displayed in the docking of the Soyuz and Apollo spacecraft 10 years earlier. What Sagan was to say next, Friedman recalls, sent a current of “electricity” through the audience.

“If you are interested in pumping the economy,” Sagan told the audience, “there are far better ways to do it (than the Strategic Defense Initiative). Think of the major cooperative programs which are fully within our technological capability and which could be done at a tiny fraction of the cost of Star Wars technology. Think about a joint U.S.-Soviet-manned, and womanned, mission to Mars.”

Sagan’s words so ignited the Planetary Society board members that they later adjourned with Sagdeev to a private room to discuss the idea. The Soviet scientist talked excitedly about a split-mission idea, with each country performing independent tasks that would add up to a complete manned mission to Mars. Sagdeev’s enthusiasm seemed to open new worlds of possibility. The Planetary Society had found its goal.

IN 1985, AS THE Planetary Society was becoming euphoric about Mars, NASA was entering one of its most depressing periods. The agency had spent an ever-expanding amount of time and money developing a space shuttle that, 13 years after conception, seemed far from keeping its promise to boost space commercialization by providing an oft-scheduled, reusable craft for launching satellites and spacecraft.

Its proponents, led by now-retired NASA Administrator James Fletcher, had promised that the shuttle could be built for billions of dollars less than its critics claimed. By the mid-’80s, the critics were beginning to look right. The shuttle was plagued by engineering problems, including faulty tiles and engine failures, and was still unable to meet its flight schedule. So unreliable was it that the Air Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made plans to launch their satellites from conventional rockets.

To NASA, the Planetary Society was a sometimes useful civilian adjunct, an effective promoter of planetary science, but little more. The society’s dreams of a return to the glory days of space exploration were just that to the agency--dreams easily dismissed, economically unrealistic, not on the agenda. Some of the society’s goals were shared by NASA, says NASA spokesman Charles Redmond, but the two organizations disagreed on “the timing of goals and funding.” Friedman and the Planetary Society acknowledge that their efforts in the mid-’80s had little policy effect on NASA. Relations between Fletcher and the society were tense at best.

Then came the Challenger shuttle disaster of January, 1986, and massive soul-searching at NASA. In 1987, as the agency looked for redirection, Fletcher commissioned former astronaut Sally K. Ride to recommend how the agency could regain its leadership in space. Ride sounded some of the Planetary Society’s goals when she called for NASA to expand exploration by returning to the moon with one eventual mission of landing humans on Mars. She advised moving slowly: “America should not rush headlong toward Mars; we should adopt a strategy to continue an orderly expansion outward from Earth.”

Ride’s report, coupled with growing publicity for the Mars initiative, moved Mars from the back burner to the national agenda. Friedman points out that these days, when NASA talks about going to the moon, the goal is framed as a precursor to an eventual Mars trip. He believes this would not have happened without the constant prodding of the Planetary Society.

Any space project comes about as a budgetary interaction between NASA and Congress, and on Capitol Hill, the society has had more success. For instance, it claims some credit for blocking the Reagan Administration’s plans to abandon planetary exploration in 1981. It is generally credited with pushing through legislation assuring that a conventional rocket will launch the Mars Observer, an unmanned spacecraft designed to orbit and photograph the planet, when it goes up in 1992. And now, occasionally, a resolution to support a joint U.S.-Soviet Mars venture will be introduced and voted on--so far to defeat--in Congress.

For Friedman, small victories aren’t enough. If all goes according to plan, the Planetary Society will get to Mars before NASA does. In mid-February, the society took its boldest step so far to stimulate public interest in the Mars goal. It signed an agreement that, Friedman says, will make it the first private group to participate with the Soviet Union in a space experiment.

That is why, on a recent afternoon, eight space engineers are seated around two tables pushed together in the main room of the Pasadena headquarters. They make up the team brought together by the society to develop one part of an experimental balloon that is to be built by France’s space agency. The balloon, which will float just above the surface of Mars, will be released from an unmanned Soviet spacecraft expected to be launched in 1994. For the Planetary Society, this project is more than a simple engineering challenge. It is a chance to prove that space cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States is possible. It is a symbolic way to move ahead with the Mars goal without waiting for NASA and the White House to catch up.

The engineers at the table have volunteered or been hired by the society to design a prototype of what is officially named the Surface Navigation Kontact Experiment. The SNAKE, as it has been dubbed, will be a 30-foot-long titanium guide rope that will dangle 100 feet from the balloon as it skims the surface of Mars. The SNAKE will gather dirt and pebbles from the red planet for analysis by the small instruments it will carry, which will also study the balloon’s speed and the Martian atmosphere.

The society has agreed to finance production of the SNAKE through its first prototype; Friedman figures that the first two years of development will cost $450,000, one-third to one-fifth of what it would cost if a government agency was conducting the project. The society has already garnered $75,000 in donations from one mailing to its members. A private foundation has donated $30,000.

The meeting goes slowly. By the time it ends, after 8 p.m., the youngest engineer, Jim Cantrell, a graduate student at Utah State University, has volunteered to make the first prototype in his garage. He builds race cars on weekends, he says, so he has the necessary tools. They agree to meet in August in the Mojave Desert to test Cantrell’s creation before they deliver it to France in September.

A 1988 TIME MAGAZINE poll reported that 72% of Americans believe that a joint U.S.-Soviet Mars mission is a good idea; newspapers editorialize in support of it; the Planetary Society even got 250 celebrities, from former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick to Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, to sign its “Mars Declaration,” an 800-word statement published last year calling for human exploration of Mars. Even Redmond, at NASA, admits its appeal: Everyone at the space agency, he says, thinks it would “be a great thing to do.” Then come the caveats. Is basing a mission on cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union ridiculously optimistic? “Making Mars (exploration) dependent on peace on earth undermines the chance of going to Mars,” says John Logsdon, a Planetary Society advisory board member who directs the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. And Redmond says that NASA is concerned that it does not have the technological know-how to send people to Mars.

Most naysayers, though, talk money. By Friedman’s estimate, the joint mission would cost $60 billion. Redmond says $100 billion is a conservative estimate. To get to Mars, he says, and complete other existing projects, NASA would have to squeeze at least $20 billion a year from Congress over 10 years. Today, the agency is barely able to get $12 billion annually. Considering competing budget demands and the U.S. deficit, he says, the needed level of funding is unlikely.

Scientists have another question about the economics. “There’s sort of a knee-jerk enthusiasm for a grand mission, and I join in that to some degree,” says physicist James Van Allen, a member of the Planetary Society’s advisory board and discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds Earth. However, he sees the Mars mission as a “vastly expensive undertaking” that would “seriously handicap” valuable unmanned projects.

The criticisms cause Friedman to launch into his best salesman persona, slightly irritated because the naysayers just don’t understand. It’s a chicken-and-egg proposition, he says. Just as the moon goal of the 1960s helped generate financing for other planetary projects, he says, so, too, would the Mars goal enhance all planetary exploration. We set the moon as a goal, he argues, before the technology existed to take men there. As for the wisdom of linking an exploration goal to unstable earthly relations, Friedman is pragmatic and optimistic there, too. A human mission to Mars, with its huge price tag and risks, can only be justified if it serves a strong national purpose, he says.

And when it comes to the price, the society has a strategy that actually matches NASA’s. Redmond says that the only way to obtain the funding is with presidential backing. Friedman is asking that all 130,000 signers of the Mars Declaration write to President Bush before July 20, the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, urging him to support the Mars goal. However, Friedman concedes that if even this anniversary cannot inspire Bush to acknowledge the Mars initiative, “the whole momentum will be lost” for at least the next four years. But patience and persistence are part of Friedman’s strategy, too. The challenge for the Planetary Society in a changing world is to keep the verve in the Mars initiative. And if Friedman fails? What if, in the end, he cannot sell the Mars vision to the White House or Congress or NASA? Will it all have been a waste?

Friedman is sitting over a lunch of beer and bratwurst at a Pasadena restaurant as he considers this. He pauses for a moment and then begins talking about John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause who, early on, provided Friedman with key advice on how to set up a public-interest group. “Reform is never completed. You never succeed,” Friedman says, paraphrasing Gardner. “It’s a process. It goes on and on and on and on. We always look at our goal as long range. We always keep hope alive.”