THE SOUND OF SILENCE

December 7, 1999
		After this background report, Gwen Ifill discusses with science experts the future of space missions, after NASA's Mars Polar Lander failed to make contact with Earth.

Online NewsHour Special Report: The Mars Polar Lander special focus Aug. 26, 1999: Chandra Observatory, has relayed spectacular images of exploding stars to NASA Online NewsHour Special Report: One Giant Leap multimedia July 20, 1999: The 30th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. Dec. 8, 1998: An Online Q and A: The International Space Station Nov. 20, 1998: Russians send the first component of the International Space Station into orbit. March 6, 1998: NASA scientist Alan Binder discusses the new discovery of water on the moon. Feb. 27, 1998: Is the universe evolving more rapidly now than it has in the past? Dec. 31, 1997: The Hubble Telescope's clear images reach Earth. Oct. 15, 1997: NASA begins its seven year mission to explore Saturn. Oct. 2, 1997: Forty years after Sputnik first circled the Earth, historians examine its impact. Sept. 30, 1997: An interview with Mir astronauts. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Science   NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Polar Lander's Official Deep Space 2 Mars Volaties and Climate Surveyor	GWEN IFILL: For more on the fallout from the latest failed mission to Mars, we're joined by Lori Garver, NASA's associate administrator for policy and plans, John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and Liam Sarsfield, a senior fellow at the RAND Science and Technology Policy Institute. Ms. Garver what was the apparent failure of this latest mission mean for the future of Mars exploration? LORI GARVER: I think humanity is a species that is destined to explore and that we will continue to explore Mars. NASA is committed to investigating these two spacecraft mishaps to find out all we can to incorporate lessons learned into future exploration efforts. GWEN IFILL: Right now you heard and you saw in the opening piece by Jeff Kaye that the criticism of the faster, better, cheaper method of mounting missions. Could you explain to us what that is and how it came to be part of policy?
	Faster, cheaper, better?
	LORI GARVER: Faster, better, cheaper is a philosophy that dates back to the early 1990's in the Bush and Quayle administration. We have been having missions for the last 10 years more like ten a year rather than one every ten years. The large spacecraft -- we call them Battle Star Galacticas -- used to be a billion dollar missions minimum; sometimes a couple of billion dollars. And would take people their entire careers through development and in fact we might have even lost them, like we did in the case of Mars Observer. So if you look, had we continued under that philosophy, we would not have had another mission - since the loss of Mars Observer - when, in fact, we've had two successful Mars missions. We would have lost a whole billion instead of several hundreds of millions. Nevertheless we're taking this extremely seriously and I think we'll look up to set up an infrastructure on Mars perhaps rather than just the smaller missions every couple of years. GWEN IFILL: Mr. Logsdon, what lessons can you taken if any at all from this kind of a failure? JOHN LOGSDON: Well, I think the lesson may be that we can try to do things too cheaply. The basic philosophy of doing things faster and better of course is not flawed but maybe not quite so cheaply. There are things that could have been on this mission that weren't -- that at a minimum could tell us what happened. So I think it's getting the balance between risk and the cost of the missions right and I think, the lesson may be we got too far in cost reduction and accepted a few too many risks. GWEN IFILL: The question might be how cheap is cheap? JOHN LOGSDON: Yes. GWEN IFILL: Mr. Sarsfield, human error, human miscalculation, are these just the breaks, or is this something that you could expect in a mission like this? LIAM SARSFIELD: To some extent yes but I think there is a fundamental lack of resources that John was alluding to. We have we've cut the programs far too deeply and we are introducing risk. What is failing is not the technology on these missions. There are design errors, operator errors, management errors, and I think they fairly, it's fairly clear indication that we're operating these programs in far too leanly, and we're asking NASA - we have to remember, we're asking NASA to do an awful lot. We're asking an agency on a lean and flat budget to build a space station, to safely operate the space shuttle and to maintain U.S. leadership in aeronautics and space. And that's a pretty tall order. GWEN IFILL: But NASA doesn't seem to be complaining. Instead, they say we're just doing more with less, you don't think that is true? LIAM SARSFIELD: No, I think they certainly have moved in that direction. I applaud faster, better, cheaper practices, but I also think, you know, if you look at the statistics, we're losing one out of three. I think that is too high. I think we can do better. GWEN IFILL: Ms. Garver, a chance to respond. LORI GARVER: I think NASA feels that that is too high as well. And we definitely need to look into the root causes of these. We're looking at developing an infrastructure on Mars where we might have more communication and navigation. So that when you send missions, you're better able to manage the program. For the cheaper better faster philosophy, cheaper is really an independent variable. Better and faster are the drivers, and there are certainly the possibility that we have not, we have been trying to do too much with too little.
	NASA's internal needs
	GWEN IFILL: Mr. Logdon, if you had a chance -- which you do now -- to ask NASA a question about what the decisions that lead to missions such as these or the outcome of mission like these, what question would you ask Ms. Garver? JOHN LOGSDON: Well, I think the fundamental issue is what your Christmas wish would be for the next year's budget. My own view is that NASA - as Liam said -- is being asked too to do too much for too little. Now, Lori can't say, as a member of the administration, that it would be nice for NASA to have a billion or two billion dollars a year more. But if you did, what would you -- if OMB and the President were that generous, what would you do with some extra resources? LORI GARVER: Well, I think it's quite clear that one of the things we would do would be to reduce the cost of space transportation to and from low Earth orbit. If we were able to reduce that cost, these kinds of missions could happen more often. It's something that NASA has been trying to do for years and we really need to invest some more money in that. The human space flight program is incredibly important to us. All of these robotics, spacecraft, missions, are really about precursors to sending humans back to the Moon and to Mars. And I think there is a robust program NASA is willing to give back to the taxpayer and to give the taxpayer the best value. But if they see that we need more to make this program successful, I think their dollar would be well spent at NASA. GWEN IFILL: Mr. Sarsfield, the same opportunity to ask Ms. Garver a question. LIAM SARSFIELD: Well, one of my concerns, and I'd like Lori to respond to it, is how can NASA ask the contractor community - it's done this many times -- to build some of these very exotic spacecraft - cutting edge spacecraft -- on really fixed price budgets. From my perspective, the commercial sector - the private sector that builds these spacecraft is being asked really to develop a spacecraft the way you or I would buy a car. And there is so much that is unknown up front. And when we attempt to do, that it seems to me that we introduce a lot of unnecessary risk. So I would ask Lori how she would take a look at reforming some of the procurements on these programs to lower the risk. LORI GARVER: That's one of the questions we will absolutely address in our review. We've been moving towards has the whole government performance-based contracting trying to motivate contractors to work within the budgets. I think that's an area that needs further development. NASA has been on the cutting edge of trying to get fixed based cost contracting and we may need to look at other incentives to provide commercial companies who work with NASA the ability to have more flexibility. GWEN IFILL: You are NASA's liaison to the REGO -- LORI GARVER: Reinventing government initiative. GWEN IFILL: And some people point to that as part of the problem that maybe the cost cutting which was so prized in this administration has resulted in bad decisions being made for expensive projects. LORI GARVER: Well, again NASA's cost cutting is really driven by our plans to do things in a more streamlined way, with less people, get rid of the bureaucracy. That's what REGO and reinventing government is all about. A dependent variable of that would be that things will cost less. We have been in a situation restrained, constrained budget environment which has caused us to have to do both at once. That's probably the problem. I don't think you can blame reinventing government. That's something that we've all seen a lot of successes over. You look at many of our NASA missions, lunar prospector for less than $65 million, Department of Defense to the Clementine mission to the Moon for $50 million. Those are all parts of reinventing government that you wouldn't want to constrain. But when the budget's declined too much, we may have to relook at just how much we can do within those dollars.
	Reviewing NASA's approach to space missions
	GWEN IFILL: Mr. Logdon, we might never know why this mission was lost. This is one of the great mysteries of this whole thing. We're used to being able to finding black boxes and saying this is why. So, how do you begin to come up with a cure for disease when you don't even have a diagnosis? JOHN LOGSDON: Well, this is one mission. I think the problem goes deeper and NASA announced that it's going to take two or three step back and do a sweeping review both internally and externally of how it's going about its planetary program. And I think that is more important than pinpointing the cause of this specific failure. The one troublesome part is that the 2001 Lander, the next mission scheduled to land on Mars, is basically the same design, so it would really be nice to know what happened so that if there was a technical problem we could fix it. GWEN IFILL: That's a big question, which is you do have Landers scheduled for 2001 and 2003. When exactly do you, how do you stop and reevaluate when you don't know what you are reevaluating? LORI GARVER: Well, right now, NASA has decided we'll stop while we reevaluate, and we are looking over the next couple of weeks to see if we can find more about the loss of the spacecraft in this mission. There is a possibility that we will reconsider launching in April of 01, the 2001 Mars mission. If we cannot find out that there was a problem here that won't be a problem on the future mission, I would think we will reconsider it. One of the good things about better, faster cheaper is you can really quite quickly infuse new technologies, we can do that on future missions given a couple of years. GWEN IFILL: Mr. Sarsfield, if NASA has to reexamine what they've been doing on this mission or others or just generally their whole mission, should they be reconsidering whether to explore Mars at all? LIAM SARSFIELD: No, I don't think so. I think Mars is a critical element of the overall program. I would encourage NASA, though, if they're going to review faster, better, cheaper as an engineering practice and what that really means, it shouldn't just be the planetary program. It should be all of the NASA programs. NASA is not really building too many spacecraft other than small spacecraft these days. And the deep space missions are one kind of mission but there has also been failure in Earth missions, in astrophysics missions. It needs to be a sweeping re-examination. I would also say that the pace of science needs to be very carefully evaluated. We live in a world now where we measure things. It is a metrics driven government and there is a danger of NASA being driven by the metric rule. What is determining the pace of Mars exploration? Is it the true will of the science community, or does NASA have to maintain this pace based on its desire and need to respond to the metrics and measurements of government?
	Stretched too thin?
	GWEN IFILL: Mr. Logdon, let's pick up on this point and talk about tradeoffs. Is there a trade-off that is being made if a manned shuttle mission costs more than a mission to Mars, it seems to me that somehow there is a trade-off here maybe they are save money in the way they should? JOHN LOGSDON: NASA is being asked to do a lot of different things. It's being asked to build a complex international space station along with 16 partner countries. It's being asked to use the shuttle to fix the Hubble telescope next week and use it for transportation to the stations; being asked to advance new technology for launch and conduct a program of space and earth science. And the country seems to want all of that done. There doesn't seem any willingness any place that I hear to stop any of those things. Some are critical to the future. Some are today's programs. So you are asking to make trades against some uncertain criteria. There are different figures of merit -- different values in all of those enterprises. And we seem to want NASA to do them all. GWEN IFILL: So, given that, briefly, Mr. Sarsfield, what do you think is the future of exploration in Mars -- to Mars? LIAM SARSFIELD: I think it's very bright. I think we need to pause to study, lick our wounds a little bit -- hopefully plus up some of these programs, add a little bit of resources back - because I'm convinced most of the errors have occurred simply because people are moving too fast. GWEN IFILL: And, Ms. Garver, the same question to you. LORI GARVER: NASA has a lot of plans. We'll take a breath here -- look at our future -- and we plan to be become with a robust program. GWEN IFILL: Thank you all very much for joining us