Paul Bialla, NASA Programs Manager for General Dynamics, expressed well the skepticism many in industry felt toward the SEI Outreach Program. "For the most part, our ideas have already been shared with NASA," he told Space News. "Throwing the door open to everyone is simply going to delay the process." 38
A Political Liability
The Outreach Program was SEI's most far-reaching contribution to Mars expedition planning, for it compiled a large body of ideas for how to send humans to Mars. In terms of implementing SEI, however, the Outreach Program amounted to a means of allowing the abortive initiative to fade quietly after it had become an obvious political liability for the Bush Administration.
Even as the Outreach Program began, SEI was mortally wounded. The Bush Administration's NASA budget request for FY 1991 was $15.1 billion, a 23 percent increase over FY 1990. This included $216 million to start SEI. Two days of NASA budget hearings in mid-March 1990 showed, however, that the Moon and Mars initiative enjoyed almost no support in Congress. By the summer of 1990, it was writ large—no matter what good ideas the Outreach Program might produce, SEI stood almost no chance of gaining congressional support.
It was a two-part problem. On the one hand, the Democrat-controlled Congress was not eager to hand the Republican Bush Administration any victories, especially after it had cast its 1988 Presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, as a spend-thrift Democrat. 39 More importantly, however, the late 1980s and early 1990s were marked by an enormous Federal debt—$3 trillion in 1990—and annual budget deficits. Budget problems alone made it unlikely that a new space initiative would be well received, even if it didn't have a rumored price tag of half a trillion dollars.
On fiscal grounds, SEI opposition was bipartisan. Bill Green (Republican-New York), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said, "[G]iven the current budget situation, I would not anticipate a significant start on Mars in the near future." 40 Robert Traxler (Democrat-Michigan), chair of the House Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Development and Independent Agencies, summed it up succinctly: "Basically, we don't have the money." 41
On 1 May 1990, President Bush called congressional leaders to the White House to lobby for SEI. Richard Darman sought to declare NASA's proposed budget increase exempt from mandatory cuts imposed by Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction legislation, and Bush proposed that aerospace technology cuts should come from the Defense budget, not from NASA. 42 The congressional response was quick in coming. On 3 May 1990, Senator Albert Gore (Democrat-Tennessee), chair of the NASA Authorization Panel, told his fellow legislators that "before discussing a mission to Mars, the Administration needs a mission to reality." 43
Bush used his 11 May commencement address at Texas A&M University to signal SEI's importance to his administration. His speech was historic—in it he became the first U.S. President to set a target date for an American expedition to Mars. "I am pleased to announce a new age of exploration," he told the crowd, "with not only a goal but also a timetable: I believe that before America celebrates the 50th anniversary of its landing on the Moon [in 2019], the American flag should be planted on Mars." 44
Congress, however, handed Bush his first clear defeat in mid-June, when a House panel eliminated all funds for SEI from the FY 1991 NASA budget. On 20 June Bush declared that he would fight for his Moon and Mars program. His Administration had, he said, "matched rhetoric with resources." The full House eliminated all SEI funds at the end of June. 45
On top of issues of party and finance were badly timed NASA problems not directly related to SEI. These raised inevitable questions about the desirability of committing the Agency to a major new initiative when it appeared it could not handle what it already had. In late June, NASA announced that the $1.5-billion Hubble Space Telescope, launched into orbit on 24 April 1990, was rendered myopic by an improperly manufactured mirror. At the same time, the Shuttle fleet was grounded by persistent hydrogen fuel leaks. The three orbiters sat on the ground for five months while NASA engineers struggled with the problem.
On the first anniversary of Bush's SEI speech, a NASA panel headed by former astronaut and spacewalker William Fisher announced that Space Station Freedom would need 6,200 hours of maintenance spacewalks before it was permanently staffed and 3,700 hours of maintenance spacewalks each year thereafter. This would cut deeply into time available for research aboard the orbiting space laboratory. 46 The Fisher Panel's findings helped lead to a new round of station redesign in 1990 and 1991. In an effort to reduce cost and complexity, the potential for Phase II expansion to the Dual Keel design was eliminated, along with the option for hangars, fueling facilities, and other Moon- and Mars-related systems. 47
Space Station Freedom thus lost virtually all hope of being useful for Mars transportation. It remained important, however, as a place to gather data on the biomedical effects of long-duration space flight as part of efforts to minimize risk to future Mars crews. Not coincidentally, Mars plans that ignored the Station, except to say that they did not intend to use it, began to proliferate. NASA internal planning, however, continued to place Space Station Freedom—or some future station—squarely on the path to Mars.
In October, House and Senate conferees agreed to an FY 1991 NASA budget of $13.9 billion. While this constituted an increase of $1.8 billion over NASA's FY 1990 budget, it included no funds for SEI. Bush bowed to the inevitable and signed the appropriation into law.
A New Initiative
By the fall of 1990, the course of piloted space flight over the next decade was taking shape. Bush had mentioned international space cooperation in his speech of 20 July 1989. SEI, however, stressed U.S. space leadership, which implied competition with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had built up an impressive space infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s. By 1990, however, with economic and political reforms underway in their country, they could no longer afford to use it.
As early as March 1990, Bush had directed the National Space Council to pursue space cooperation with the Soviets in an effort to encourage and support Mikhail Gorbachev's on-going reforms. On 8 July 1990, Bush agreed to let U.S. commercial satellites fly on Soviet rockets. On 25 July 1990, the United States and Soviet Union agreed to fly a NASA Mission to Planet Earth instrument on a Soviet satellite scheduled for launch in 1991. In October 1990, Quayle told reporters that "we are in serious discussions with the Soviet Union" on flying an American astronaut on Mir and a Soviet cosmonaut on the Shuttle. 48
Yuri Semyonov, director of NPO Energia, the leading Soviet astronautics design bureau, promoted joint U.S.-Soviet piloted Mars exploration at space conferences in Montreal in 1990 and Houston in 1991. 49 Would-be Mars explorers saw in this an opportunity. At the Case for Mars IV conference in June 1990, for example, Benton Clark suggested using the Energia heavy-lift rocket to transport Mars spacecraft propellants to orbit. "Use of the Soviet booster would," he declared, "make the dependency between the cooperating countries simple and straightforward." 50 This represented a dramatic shift from the early 1980s, when Harrison Schmitt pushed for the LANL/NASA Manned Mars Missions study to help counter Soviet Mars moves.
In July 1990, Semyonov and Leonid Gorshkov, head of Energia's orbital stations department, published an article on Energia's Mars plans in the Soviet popular-audience publication Science in the USSR. 51 The configuration of the Mars spacecraft depended, they wrote, on the choice of "powerplant." They rejected chemical propulsion, saying that an all-chemical Mars ship would weigh upwards of 2,000 metric tons at Earth-orbit departure. A nuclear-thermal rocket Mars ship would weigh about 800 metric tons. More promising, however, were solar-electric or nuclear-electric propulsion systems which could reduce ship mass to between 350 and 400 metric tons.
Semyonov and Gorshkov wrote that Soviet "aerospace technology is advanced enough to make a mission to Mars a reality," then summarized existing Soviet capabilities. In addition to the Energia rocket ("capable of lofting into Earth orbit whole sections of a spacecraft for final assembly"), the Soviet Union had "perfected the automatic docking procedures for putting together a spacecraft from sections in orbit" through more than 50 flights of automated Progress freighters to space stations. Semyonov and Gorshkov claimed that "[m]ost of the problems that would be faced by a crew on a long voyage to Mars in zero-gravity have been resolved" through 20 years of Soviet space station flights "in an environment very similar, if not identical, to that of a Mars mission." Finally, they reported that "electric . . . engines of the required parameters have been flawlessly performing on Earth." 52
In 1991, Energia released a Mars expedition report reflecting "the expediency to take into account . . . world public opinion, which [is] against the launch of nuclear power"—an aversion reinforced by the Soviet Union's own April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown. 53 NPO Energia's 355-metric-ton solar-electric Mars spacecraft would reach Earth orbit in sections strapped to the sides of five Energia heavy-lift rockets. The designers envisioned a pair of 40,000-square-meter solar panels supplying 7.6 megawatts of electricity at Earth's distance from the Sun and 3.5 megawatts at Mars.
The crew section of Energia's Mars ship design included two cylindrical modules linked end to end. The large living module would contain a "vitamin greenhouse" and individual cabins for four cosmonauts. Water tanks would surround the cabins to shield them from radiation. Over the course of the expedition the water would be gradually consumed and replaced by "waste bricks." An airlock for spacewalks and electric motors for pointing the solar arrays would separate the living module from a smaller control/laboratory module. The spacecraft's lithium-propellant electric propulsion system would be housed in twin modules attached to the sides of the control/lab module.
According to the report, Soviet designers had studied conical piloted Mars landers outwardly similar to the NAR MEM from 1969 to 1971. 54 Their 1991 Mars Landing Vehicle was, however, a cylinder with a conical forward section, a shape selected in part because it fit within the Energia rocket's payload envelope. The two-person lander's cylindrical section would house an ascent stage with a docking unit on top. The 60-metric-ton Mars Landing Vehicle would land horizontally. The cosmonauts would live in the lander's forward cone while on the Martian surface. After a week on Mars, the cosmonauts would blast off in the ascent stage to rejoin their comrades aboard the orbiting Mars ship.
At journey's end, the crew would separate from the Mars ship in the 10-metric-ton Earth Return Vehicle, a conical reentry module resembling the Apollo CM. The Earth Return Vehicle was designed for land landing—like the Soyuz space station transport, it would include solid-fueled soft-landing rockets under its ablative heat shield.
Bush and Gorbachev formally agreed at their July 1991 summit meeting to fly an American astronaut to Mir and a Soviet cosmonaut on the Space Shuttle. Less than two weeks later, in August 1991, communist hardliners launched an abortive coup d'etat against Gorbachev, triggering the collapse of the Soviet Union. The following summer, Bush confirmed the July 1991 cooperation agreements with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The first Russian cosmonauts arrived in Houston for Space Shuttle flight training in November 1992.
Space cooperation expanded dramatically under President William Clinton beginning in 1993. Space Station Freedom was redesigned as the International Space Station, which incorporated Russian hardware originally built for the Soviet Mir-2 space station. Mars-related cooperation, however, remained small in scale. For example, NASA Lewis researchers worked with Russian engineers on electric thrusters.