Lost In Space

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

IF MARS OBSERVER WERE EVER GOING to speak again, it should have spoken to Michael Dean at 2:56 Pacific time last Wednesday afternoon. The 24-year-old flight controller is part of a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, that had been working day and night for nearly a week to rouse the mysteriously silent spacecraft. Now the only hope left was in the hands of Observer: its onboard computers had been programmed to phone home if the probe hadn't heard from Earth for five days, triggering an electronic blip that would appear on Dean's screen. Scientists could then lock on to the signal and restore communications. But the time came -- and went. And the screen remained empty.

The reason Mars Observer had gone abruptly off the air the previous Saturday evening may never be known, although engineers suspect faulty transistors in the clocks that govern all the probe's electronics. And the ship's whereabouts are anybody's guess. It could be in orbit around the Red Planet or shooting off into interplanetary space. It could have blown up. A fringe group even swears that NASA destroyed Observer to hide the existence of a Martian civilization.

Whatever the reason, the first U.S. mission to Mars in nearly two decades, a $980 million attempt to study the Martian surface and atmosphere in detail and pave the way for later missions and human exploration, is lost in space. Gone with it is another chunk of NASA's eroding reputation for technological brilliance. This year alone, the agency has slipped its deadlines on 13 space- shuttle launches, forcing it to cut flights from the schedule. It failed, after multiple attempts, to free the stuck main antenna on the Galileo probe to Jupiter. And on the same day controllers lost touch with Mars Observer, the space agency also lost contact with a newly launched, $67 million weather satellite.

The latest fiasco couldn't have come at a worse time for NASA. The agency's annual request for money to build Space Station Freedom barely cleared the House earlier this year, and while the Senate had been expected to approve the $22 billion project, support may dwindle.

More snafus may lie ahead. In December astronauts are scheduled to ride the shuttle into orbit to repair the star-crossed Hubble Space Telescope. Should the unprecedentedly complex mission go exactly as planned, NASA could regain some credibility. But if history is any guide, it probably won't. Space is a harsh and unforgiving place, where Murphy's Law is paramount. In fact, many of NASA's best public relations successes have come at the brink of failure. Engineers restored 70% of the Galileo probe's function after its main antenna failed to deploy; astronauts grabbed the Intelsat-6 satellite by hand when a less dramatic rescue technique proved useless; astronauts survived an explosion on Apollo 13 that could easily have been fatal.

Until the last minute, JPL flight controllers hoped to pull off a similar coup with Observer. But none of the probe's backup systems responded to their electronic pleas, and after Wednesday there was little hope that a response would ever come. The problem, according to space experts, is that despite elaborate backup systems, space missions have become too complex to be made foolproof. Says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University: "NASA should be doing smaller missions, more rapidly and with more limited objectives. Then if you lose one, you haven't lost everything." In fact, such a plan may already be in the works: NASA has reportedly sounded out the Pentagon about using their Clementine satellites, developed for the Star Wars program, to explore Mars. Scientists familiar with the satellites think that as many as four of the 500-lb., $75 million Clementines could be ready for launching toward Mars by November 1994.

But Logsdon also faults NASA as an organization. "The agency seems to have ; lost some of its technical sharpness," he says. "It hasn't been adequately replenished with young people over the years" -- the result of budget cuts made in the 1970s. The current head of NASA, Daniel Goldin, aims to change this, says Logsdon, "but reconstructing a middle-aged, bureaucratic organization from within is difficult."

Yet even with the best possible staff, NASA has a problem it never faced in the free-spending 1960s. Nowadays, every new mission has to be sold to a skeptical and tightfisted Congress. The agency has found that legislators -- and the aerospace contractors who lobby them -- prefer big, complex projects that promise spectacular scientific returns. These also carry the greatest risk, but NASA has understandably played down the chance of failure. Perhaps it's time for a more sophisticated approach: the men and women who run the nation's space program could take a lesson from the politicians and learn the fine art of lowering expectations.

With reporting by Ellen Germain/Washington, Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral and Tara Weingarten/Pasadena