In phase 3, the sprint spacecraft would dock with the cargo ship in Mars orbit. Three astronauts would board the two-stage lander, undock, and land on Mars for 10 to 20 days. The crew in orbit, meanwhile, would perform scientific research, eject the sprint ship's Mars aerobrake, and transfer Earth-return propellant from the cargo vehicle. The lander crew would then return to Mars orbit in the ascent stage. On 2 August 2005, the sprint vehicle would fire its engines for a high-energy five-month sprint return to Earth.
Phase 4 would begin a few days before Earth arrival (15 January 2006 for a nominal mission). The astronauts would enter the ERV and separate from the sprint spacecraft. The ERV would aerobrake into Earth orbit while the abandoned sprint ship entered solar orbit. A station-based OTV would recover the ERV; then a Space Shuttle would return the crew to Earth.
On 26 May 1987, NASA had announced that, after finishing her study, Ride would leave NASA to become Science Fellow in the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. 33 In August, John Aaron took over the Office of Exploration. Studies begun in January 1987 to support the Ride report became the basis for piloted exploration "case studies" in FY 1988. These examined a mission to Phobos, a Mars landing mission, a lunar observatory, and a lunar outpost-to-Mars evolutionary program. All commenced with assembly of the Phase I Space Station. 34
Martin Marietta became the Office of Exploration's de facto exploration study contractor. On 15 May 1987, NASA Marshall had awarded the $1.4-million Mars Transportation and Facility Infrastructure Study contract to the company, with SAIC in "an important teaming role," and Life Systems and Eagle Engineering as subcontractors. 35 The initial contract focus was in keeping with Marshall's propulsion emphasis; as in the EMPIRE days, the Huntsville Center anticipated developing new rockets for Mars.
However, because it was the only Mars-related NASA contract when the Office of Exploration was established, it became a mechanism for funding more general Mars-related studies. The contract, which lasted until 30 April 1990, underwent 500 percent growth as new study areas were grafted on. By the time it ended, Martin Marietta had generated nearly 3,000 pages of reports. Though Martin Marietta lost the contract to Boeing when it was recompeted in late 1989, it served to create an institutional expertise base for Martin Marietta studies during the Space Exploration Initiative (1989–93). 36
Opposition
NASA started as an instrument of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, having won the race to the Moon, NASA was partly reapplied as an instrument of international détente. The 1972 Space Cooperation Agreement called for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and other cooperative space activities. A Soviet Soyuz spacecraft docked in Earth orbit with America's last Apollo spacecraft in July 1975. When the agreement was renewed in 1977, it included plans for a U.S. Shuttle docking with a Soviet Salyut space station. By 1980, however, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had undermined détente, ending virtually all talks on piloted space cooperation. 37
In 1982, the Reagan White House let the Space Cooperation Agreement lapse to protest continued Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and martial law in Poland. In the first major step toward renewed cooperation, Senator Spark Matsunaga (Democrat-Hawaii) sponsored legislation calling for renewal of the Space Cooperation Agreement. Congress passed the Matsunaga resolution, and President Reagan signed it into law in October 1984. 38
On 11 March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet Union's new leader. He set about implementing a raft of new reform policies. Making them work meant diverting resources from Cold War confrontation to domestic production. A charismatic leader representing a new generation of Soviet politicians, he encouraged many in the West by working to thaw relations with the United States.
Against this background, The Planetary Society partnered with the influential AIAA to hold the Steps to Mars conference in Washington, DC, on the tenth anniversary of Apollo-Soyuz. NASA Administrator James Beggs was on hand to hear Carl Sagan and others promote a joint United States-Soviet Mars expedition.
Sally Ride had written of the difficulty of reconciling visionary and conservative space goals. The Planetary Society Mars proposal fell into the former category. Unlike some visionary goals, however, it proposed giving Mars exploration a political purpose, just as Apollo lunar exploration had a political function in the 1960s. Beggs endorsed U.S.-Soviet space cooperation, but cautioned that "when you get down to the nitty-gritty of working out details, it's not so easy." 39
The U.S. and the Soviet Union renegotiated a new Space Cooperation Agreement in November 1986. Unlike its predecessors in 1972 and 1977, it contained no provision for cooperative piloted missions. A month later, Sagan published a prescient editorial in Aviation Week & Space Technology. The Cornell University astronomer asked, "What if sometime in the next few years a general strategic settlement with the Soviet Union is achieved . . . ? What if the level of military procurement . . . began to decline?" Sagan believed that "[I]t [was] now feasible to initiate a systematic program of exploration and discovery on the planet Mars . . . culminating in the first human footfalls on another planet" at a cost "no greater than a major strategic weapons system, and if shared by two or more nations, still less." He added that Mars was "a human adventure of high order, able to excite and inspire the most promising young people." 40
The U.S. and the Soviet Union renewed the Space Cooperation Agreement in April 1987. Emboldened, The Planetary Society circulated The Mars Declaration widely in late 1987. Declaration signatories included former NASA Administrators and Apollo-era officials, astronauts, Nobel laureates, actors, authors, politicians, university presidents and chancellors, professors, pundits, composers, artists, and others. It called for a joint U.S.-Soviet expedition to serve as a model for superpower cooperation in tackling problems on Earth, and it called Mars a "scientific bonanza" that could provide "a coherent focus and sense of purpose to a dispirited NASA" in the wake of the Challenger accident. 41
Mars, the Declaration continued, would give the U.S. Space Station a "crisp and unambiguous purpose" as an assembly point for Mars ships and as a laboratory for research into long-duration space flight. Planetary Society vice president and former JPL director Bruce Murray was outspoken on this point. Reiterating what George Low and Nixon's PSAC had stated in the early 1970s, he told the AIAA in January 1988 that "the principal logic for the [S]tation is in the context of a Mars goal." 42
Meanwhile, the "future indicators" the CIA had listed for Harrison Schmitt in 1985 had begun to occur. On 15 May 1987, the Soviet Union launched the first Energia rocket, the most powerful to leave Earth since the U.S. scrapped the Saturn V. Energia functioned perfectly, though its 80-metric-ton Polyus payload failed to achieve orbit. On 21 December 1988, cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov returned to Earth after a record 365-day stay aboard the Mir space station—long enough to have performed a one-year piloted Mars flyby.
Mikhail Gorbachev first publicly called for a joint U.S.-Soviet Mars mission as Titov and Manarov boarded Mir in December 1987. He told the Washington Post and Newsweek before the May 1988 Moscow summit that he would "offer to President Reagan cooperation in the organization of a joint flight to Mars. That would be worthy of the Soviet and American people." 43 On 24 May 1988, Pravda carried an article by Soviet space flight leaders Yuri Semyonov, Leonid Gorshkov, and Vladimir Glushko calling for a joint Mars mission. 44 Little progress was made toward Mars at the Moscow Summit, but major strides were taken toward ending the Cold War. Time magazine's cover for 18 July 1988 showed a Viking photo of Mars with U.S. and Soviet flags and the legend "Onward to Mars."
Halfway through Titov and Manarov's year-long stay on Mir (7 July 1988), the Soviet Phobos 1 Mars probe lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Proton rocket. Phobos 2 lifted off on 12 July. The twin probes featured involvement by more than a dozen countries, including the United States. They were designed to orbit Mars and explore their namesake moon Phobos. After rendezvous with the pockmarked little moon, they would drop a "hopper" rover and a small lander.
In retrospect, however, the probes were the Soviet Mars program in miniature—they got off to a triumphant start, then sputtered. On 31 August 1988, operators at the Flight Control Center in Kaliningrad, near Moscow, sent the Phobos 1 Mars spacecraft an erroneous radio command that caused it to lose attitude control and turn its solar arrays away from the Sun. Starved for power, Phobos 1 failed just two months into its 200-day flight to Mars. Phobos 2 reached Mars orbit on 29 January 1989. The spacecraft returned useful data on Mars and Phobos; however, it failed in late March as it neared the long-anticipated Phobos rendezvous.
At 6.5 metric tons each, the Phobos probes were the heaviest Mars probes ever to leave Earth orbit. They took advantage of the minimum-energy launch opportunity associated with the September 1988 Mars opposition, the best since 1971.
Mars glowed bright orange-red in Earth's skies as the Space Shuttle Discovery was rolled to its Florida launch pad for the first Shuttle flight since Challenger. On 29 September 1988, as Earth overtook Mars in its orbit and pulled ahead, Discovery lifted off on the 26th flight of the Space Shuttle Program. The four-day, five-crew STS-26 flight ended a 33-month hiatus in U.S. piloted space flight—the longest since the 1975-1981 Shuttle development period. By the time STS-27 launched in December, Mars was fading fast and the U.S. Space Shuttle was no longer the world's only reusable piloted spacecraft. The second Energia rocket had launched on 15 November 1988 with a Buran shuttle on its back for an unpiloted test flight.
The Mars planning community, though still small and with few resources, was in ferment. New leadership in the Soviet Union, the expanding Soviet space program, and the thawing of U.S.-Soviet relations, coupled with America's return to piloted space flight and growing public awareness of Mars, seemed to create an opportunity. As will be seen in the next chapter, newly elected President George Bush would take up the mantle of President Kennedy and declare for Mars. Though a failure, his initiative would not be without significant results.
Chapter 9: Space Exploration Initiative
The study and programmatic assessment described . . . have shown that the [Space] Exploration Initiative is indeed a feasible approach to achieving the President's goal . . . . The last half of the 20th century and the first half of the 21st century will almost certainly be remembered as the era when humans broke the bonds that bound them to Earth and set forth on a journey into space . . . . Historians will further note that the journey to expand the human presence into the solar system began in earnest on July 20, 1989, the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. (The 90-Day Study, 1989) 1
Space Wraith
Viewed as a space program, as it was intended to be, the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) was a failure. Viewed as an "idea generator" for Mars exploration planning, however, SEI was a success—some concepts it fostered dramatically reshaped subsequent planning efforts. 2 It was also successful as a painful but necessary growth process. SEI relieved NASA of weighty historical baggage. It weaned large segments of the Agency from its faith in the efficacy of Kennedyesque Presidential proclamations, and it further weakened the pull the station-Moon-Mars progression exerted on senior NASA managers, a process that had first seen high-level expression at NASA in the 1987 Ride report.