Exploring Mars by Scott Hubbard

Author:Scott Hubbard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

CHAPTER EIGHT

Getting the Word Out

If the story appears simple or straightforward in any way, don’t be fooled. It wasn’t. On the one hand, Firouz Naderi and I were in sync developing the program systems engineering approach, and the science community was embracing the elegance of “follow the water.” However, never underestimate the ability of Washington politics and the aspirations of an optimistic and ambitious administrator to muddy waters that are threatening to appear crystal clear. Slogging through the Washington process is, by its very nature, repetitive, frustrating, often circular, and seemingly endless. There were times when I began to question if, having gotten so many things right, as far as I was concerned, we would ever be able to implement the plan to the satisfaction of the various bureaucrats involved. Still, the process— laborious, repetitive, and meeting intensive—is there when one is spending federal taxpayer dollars, and amazingly, in the end, it may actually have served its purpose.

All of my restructuring activity, including the team at JPL and my NASA HQ team, was ultimately aimed at obtaining approval from the administration for a new mission queue, a new technology investment, and, finally, a new budget to make all that a reality. Getting the agreement of the key gatekeeper, Steve Isakowitz, at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was not an overnight event. As soon as I was named program director, there were e-mail discussions between Ed Weiler and Isakowitz. My first face-to-face encounter with Steve Isakowitz and his lieutenants, Brant Sponberg and Doug Comstock, came on May 12, 2000. After that meeting I received a long list of questions and examples from Sponberg of what they would like us to produce. These included things like, “What are the compelling science goals? What is the integrated mission set? How do you distribute risk across multiple platforms?,” and on and on. Isakowitz and Sponberg noted that we needed to embrace the 1996 national space policy goals of a sustained program to support a robotic presence on the surface of Mars. Sponberg also had a large number of questions about what kind of technology investments would be required and how to measure whether or not you’re successful. He concluded his list of interrogations with a comment about making sure that whatever we did would engage the public and educators through direct and interactive means. Because OMB is the ultimate gatekeeper for putting budgets in and submitting them with the rest of the president’s budget to Congress, its opinions are very important. There was clearly a lot to juggle, but actually I was relieved to find that their questions and concerns were good ones and reflected a lot of the thinking we had already been doing.

The timing of all this work was fast and furious, and various activities were interwoven with others. None of us had the luxury of uninterrupted pursuit of carefully planned actions. The JPL meeting in early May was followed by an international trip, then the decision meeting on the 2003 mission.

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