NASA Failures Prompt Vow of Program Reform
In the wake of the almost certain loss of the Mars Polar Lander, senior NASA officials Tuesday vowed a complete overhaul of the U.S interplanetary exploration program, including postponement or even cancellation of missions already in development.
“Clearly something is wrong, and we have to understand it,” NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin said Tuesday. “It is conceivable that we will completely change our approach. . . . Everything is on the table.”
The reassessment will be done in tandem with an exhaustive investigation into the failure of the Mars Polar Lander and its two auxiliary Deep Space 2 probes, which have not been heard from since they descended into the martian atmosphere Friday.
Under scrutiny will be NASA’s space-on-a-shoestring mandate of “faster, better, cheaper” that has set the boundaries for unmanned space exploration, including the current Mars effort. Several independent space analysts said that NASA has been required to reduce costs so drastically that the space agency’s probes are now less reliable and more prone to failure.
Flight operations engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena played their “last ace” Tuesday when their final realistic communications attempt failed, said Polar Lander project manager Richard Cook. The team will continue to try periodically with a variety of engineering ploys for another two weeks, but any chance of contacting the spacecraft is now “remote,” Cook said.
Loss of the $165-million spacecraft and its $29.2-million probes is “a crushing blow,” said Edward Weiler, deputy director of NASA’s Office of Space Sciences.
“It is a big disappointment,” said JPL director Edward Stone. “Clearly, we need to look at what we can learn and restructure the program.”
As a result of the latest failure and that of the Mars Climate Orbiter in September, NASA will begin a “major rethinking” of the pace of spacecraft development, budgets and launch rates, Weiler said. The agency will also reassess the fundamental engineering assumptions underlying its exploration of the solar system.
“These two failures in the Mars program have given us a wake-up call and we are going to respond to it,” Weiler said.
In all, the agency’s entire $356.8-million program of Mars exploration planned for this year has failed, encompassing a squad of robotic craft that were to have formed a second wave of long-term research on the Red Planet.
The $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter was thrown off course and into oblivion by a navigation error as it began to orbit Mars. The orbiter and the lander were meant to work together in a systematic exploration of the martian climate.
The failed spacecraft both were managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics.
In the coming week, formal investigation boards will be appointed at JPL and at NASA. Congress is also likely to convene a hearing on the failures.
Within several weeks, NASA administrators are expected to decide whether to proceed with plans to launch another landing craft and orbiter to Mars in 2001. At least three other major Mars missions in the works for later in the decade could also be drastically revised and delayed.
“I am not convinced that we will go forward with 2001. Right now, I have no confidence that it will be a successful mission,” Weiler said. “Let’s take off the shackles of schedule and launch dates. Let’s not artificially constrain ourselves. With two failures, there must have been a flaw.”
Certainly in the aftermath of the Polar Lander loss, several JPL managers and independent space policy analysts suggested Tuesday that the flaw was more a matter of federal budget cuts and management policies than aerospace engineering.
“We may be trying to do too much with too little money,” said director of JPL’s systems management Norman Haynes. “NASA has been very insistent. A lot of decisions were forced to be made because of the constraints put on the mission.”
Since the disappearance of the $1-billion Mars Observer as it neared the fourth planet in 1993, the space agency has pursued a management philosophy that attempted to reduce the costs of interplanetary exploration while also launching missions more quickly.
It was an effort to balance an ambitious program of space science against declining budgets and waning political support. NASA researchers also wanted to put their experiments on many spacecraft, so that the loss of any one of them would not be quite so catastrophic.
“We can’t really go back to the older era” of fewer, more expensive missions, Cook said. In such a scenario, there would be “a lot more to lose” if a mission failed, he said.
“We are learning how to manage in this new environment,” Stone said. “It is a totally new approach.” He noted that JPL has been able to develop and launch six recent interplanetary missions for roughly the cost of the Mars Observer program. The Mars Polar Lander cost just half of the successful Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 and barely a tenth of the first successful U.S. Mars landings in 1976.
In light of recent failures, some experts are now worried that the space agency and JPL are trying to do too much with too little.
In the aftermath of the Mars Climate Orbiter loss, a NASA accident review board concluded that management inattention and overconfidence at JPL contributed to a fatal error in arithmetic that doomed the craft earlier this year.
The investigation also turned up potentially fatal problems with the Polar Lander. To fix them before the robotic lander reached Mars last week, JPL pressed 37 additional engineers and navigators into service and spent an extra $2 million.
At the same time, a separate audit by NASA’s inspector general criticized JPL for not paying enough attention to the problems at Lockheed and its other contractors in the space agency’s Mars ’98 exploration program, which included both the Orbiter and the Lander Mars probes.
Lockheed has been involved in several other major civilian and military spaceflight failures this year that stemmed from an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement, and poor quality control.
In the case of the Mars Climate Orbiter, Lockheed engineers prepared crucial computer files in English units instead of the proper metric units. The resulting navigation errors were large enough to send the craft plunging off course to its destruction.
This time, investigators will begin by looking at several technical issues, including ways to ensure better communications with spacecraft during critical maneuvers. They will also examine whether more can be learned about the martian terrain before committing to a landing.
But the agency also has vowed to look at how it is managing exploration of the solar system.
“Both the White House and Congress are going to demand accountability,” said John Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University.
“I think the approach of frequent, small missions is fundamentally sound,” Logsdon said. “It seems we have erred too much in reducing costs while also accepting greater risks.”
But “let’s point the finger where it belongs: It is the unwillingness of the Clinton administration to give the agency adequate funding. This is all driven by inadequate funds.”
John Pike, space policy director for the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based policy group, said the drive to lower costs forced agency engineers to cut one too many corners.
“It is not as though the people at JPL have suddenly developed an attack of the stupids. You get what you pay for and we are trying to do it on the cheap. Space is enormously unforgiving, the most unforgiving environment there is,” Pike said. “You can’t fudge it in space.”
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What Price Mars?
With the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, NASA’s entire $356.8-million Mars exploration effort for this year has failed, prompting a reassessment of the agency’s approach to interplanetary exploration.
