Managing Martians by Donna Shirley

Author:Donna Shirley [Shirley, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75683-1
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2010-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Tony Spear, the project manager of Pathfinder, is a ruddy, barrel-chested man who walks the JPL halls with a fist full of pencils to record ideas that occur spontaneously to him under any circumstance. In the middle of a meeting with high-level managers from JPL and NASA, I’ve seen his eyes light as he gets an insight into some problem that he’s been concerned with and rapidly jots notes and sketches, oblivious to the glares of others.

Tony is charismatic and inspiring, qualities that certainly were essential to bringing together the Pathfinder team. As a person who he saw as in the way of his achieving success with Pathfinder, I was not inspired. My job was to get him to do something he didn’t want to do—fly the rover. In that first tempestuous year before Tony finally accepted the fact that the rover—my rover—was going to Mars on his spacecraft, our yelling matches occasionally spilled out into the hallways of Building 230, making our colleagues exceedingly uncomfortable. Our personality conflict was so intertwined with the project’s management problems that it was difficult for me to separate his attempts to kick the rover off Pathfinder from his desire to never see me in his office again.

Our first intense skirmish came when Tony decided he was going to build a rover of his own to avoid flying ours.

When Mars Rover Sample Return died, the Mars science community scrambled to develop a cheaper way to get to the planet. As the NASA bureaucracy batted around ideas for the next mission, one concept emerged as the clear favorite. The weather scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center took the fairly old idea of a network of Mars weather stations and gave it a new twist: simplicity. Instead of multiple instruments on a few Viking-size landers there would be just one instrument—a weather station. Ames sold the MESUR concept to NASA by offering up an absurdly low cost estimate. Even with twelve to twenty weather stations, Ames said, MESUR would only cost $200 million. NASA enthusiastically supported this ridiculous figure—in fact held it up as an example to the other space science labs—and was considering allocating money for Ames to develop MESUR.

In 1991 JPL recovered MESUR in an intra-agency political battle by pointing to our charter and our vast experience in managing planetary exploration projects. We wouldn’t commit to a $200 million pricetag, however, until we established if that figure was realistic. Tony had recently finished leading the operations for the Magellan project, which used radar to map the heat-blasted surface of Venus. Since then Tony had been studying ways to implement Better, Faster, Cheaper missions which made him the logical person to look at MESUR. By 1992, just at the point when I was looking for a ride to Mars for the microrover, Tony was in charge of both MESUR and Pathfinder.

The rover wasn’t the only wannabe hitchhiker on Pathfinder. The seismologists and the geologists, who had hoped to load the Mars Rover Sample Return rover down with instruments, were looking at MESUR and Pathfinder in a whole new light.

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