(dramatic music) - [Narrator] The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space with expectations that it would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

But the blurry images Hubble sent back quickly became a major crisis for America's space agency.

- [Len] Not only was the future of Hubble at stake the future of space station might be at stake.

And maybe the future NASA might be at stake.

- [Narrator] To fix Hubble's eyesight NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed an ingenious solution that, if it worked, offered the hope of turning a national embarrassment into a national source of pride.

And at the same time JPL was contending with serious troubles of its own.

Three of its spacecraft were about to declare emergencies.

And not all of them would survive.

- [Charles] The confusion was just overwhelming.

Everybody snapped into battle mode.

- [Narrator] To the Rescue JPL and the Beginnings of the Space Age, next.

(dramatic music) - [CDI] Houston, CDI.

How do you read?

- [Houston] CDI, Houston.

Good morning, Loren.

You're loud and clear.

- [Narrator] In the spring of 1990 NASA was in final preparations for the 35th mission of its Space Shuttle program.

Inside Discovery's cargo bay was what many consider the most important science instrument of the 20th century, the Hubble Space Telescope.

The telescope represented nothing less than the beginning of an entirely new chapter in astronomy science.

- [Operator] T minus 10, go for main engine start.

We are go for main engine start.

Five, four, three, two, one, and liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope.

(engines roaring) - [Narrator] Among Hubble's science instruments was the Wide Field and Planetary Camera proposed by Caltech and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Wide field stood for the camera's ability to capture broad swaths of the night sky.

The camera was also designed to be able to switch its focus over to planets inside our solar system.

The camera's descriptive but unwieldy name was soon reduced to its acronym, WFPC.

It was this camera that promised to deliver breathtaking scenes of the cosmos.

But a month following Hubble's deployment astronomers were shocked by Hubble's first light images.

- I came into my conference room on Monday morning and I had all these people sitting in the conference room from Marshall which was responsible for building Hubble with sad faces.

And they told me we had a spherical aberration on Hubble.

And I'm not an optical astronomer.

I didn't even know what it was, but I knew it wasn't good.

- [Narrator] Spherical aberration occurs when light rays do not focus sharply on a single point as intended.

The result is a blurry image.

And in the case of Hubble, a public relations disaster.

- I remember the day of the press conference.

It was June 27th, 1990.

A day that shall live in infamy for me personally 'cause I was the lucky soul at NASA headquarters that got to tell the American press about all the science we wouldn't be doing.

- Good afternoon.

Welcome to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Today we'll give you an update on the status of the Hubble Space Telescope.

- We feel right now that there's probably no real science that we can do with the wide field camera at this time.

- After that, it was just sort of chaos in terms of, you know, 'cause we had hyped, NASA had hyped the mission so much.

- [Reporter] It sounds like you're way over half the science you intended to do, you can't do.

- [Reporter] I understand you were so disappointed last night in this setback that you actually cried.

I also understand in this morning's meeting that you referred to this as the biggest failure since the Challenger blew up.

- [Reporter] Two and a half billion dollars.

How could this possibly be?

- [Narrator] While it could be reported that Hubble's issue was spheric aberration, there was no definitive answer as to what had caused the defect.

- Their initial reaction is one of frustration, of course.

And their initial reaction was they lost most of their science, if not all.

- [Narrator] The JPL science team suspected the source of the problem might be with Hubble's mirrors.

If that were true, there was a ray of hope for Hubble.

- And John Trauger, who was the person building the WFPC clone as it was called then, WFPC2, came up to me in a corner and said, you know, I think we've got to wait to make some minor adjustments to the camera we're already building that could be ready in time for the repair mission in 1993 that would fix the problem.

- It took a couple months to really sort out what was happening with Hubble.

We had an idea what it might be.

So we went down in the lab at JPL and we played with it.

We played with the model.

All right, here's a nice high tech sketch.

- [Narrator] As Trauger suspected, calculations pointed to a problem with Hubble's primary mirror.

- As you go from the center to the edge you find the surface is too low, lower than it should be by about four waves.

We knew it had been a manufacturing defect at the plant in Connecticut by a technician who put a washer in the wrong place.

- [Narrator] It would later be determined that the mirror's shape was off by a mere four microns about one 50th of the thickness of a human hair.

The result was the equivalent of getting the wrong prescription for a pair of glasses costing two and a half billion dollars.

But knowing the precise amount of the error opened up the possibility of a remedy.

- And I said well John, are you absolutely sure about that?

'Cause I'm going in front of the cameras in like four hours, and do you want me to say anything?

He said, we're very confident, we've studied this and studied this and we're sure we can do it.

So that gave me a glimmer of hope.

So at the press conference on live TV I had to talk about all the stuff we wouldn't be doing.

But I ended the press conference saying we think we have a fix for this.

And we think it can be ready by December, 1993.

- [Narrator] In the meantime the telescope would be ridiculed everywhere.

Hubble quickly became synonymous with trouble.

- I remember giving a talk to some young kids.

They were kindergarten kids really young kids about the wonders, you know, Hubble.

And I said the word Hubble Telescope.

And it was like I was Jay Leno.

Everybody laughed.

They knew they didn't know what it meant but they knew it was funny.

- [Narrator] The pressure of saving Hubble's reputation and the bulk of its visual images rested entirely on JPL's proposed solution.

But as the lab took on this challenge it was about to be confronted with problems of its own beginning with a spacecraft on its way to our nearest planetary neighbor.

Long before Hubble, JPL was exploring the planets in our solar system beginning with Mariner 2's flyby of Venus in 1962.

And despite three decades of exploration since then intriguing questions still remain to be answered about Earth's sister planet.

- Do plate tectonics exist on Venus?

Is there any evidence of past oceans and river basins?

And perhaps most important, is there any possibility of primitive life forms existing in the distant past on Venus?

- I was a manager of that.

That took my whole career for 10 years.

In past planetary missions, we have used conventional television imaging systems to construct and acquire the basic image data.

Because of the clouds of Venus we cannot use such an instrument at Venus.

We must use a radar which can penetrate the clouds and provide the illumination necessary to get a radar image.

It was a multi purpose mission, complex, expensive.

Headquarters said you gotta cut the cost by a factor of two.

And we essentially started from scratch.

- At today's meeting, I would like to go over the advantages and disadvantages in the two types of flight paths to Venus.

- [Narrator] To save the mission, all of the science instruments except radar were eliminated.

Then the spacecraft itself was re-imagined as a patchwork of leftover parts all to be cobbled together by an industrial contractor in hopes of further reducing costs.

The components came from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, Mariner 9 that had traveled to Mars, and the Ulysses spacecraft sent out to observe the Sun.

Parts also came from Voyager, including a test model of its main antenna, which had to be brought back from the National Air and Space Museum.

Officially, the spacecraft was called Magellan.

Some engineers nicknamed it Salvage One.

But this spare parts strategy ended up being more expensive than hoped.

Then the loss of the Challenger Shuttle caused major delays, adding to Magellan's price tag.

- So we had to descope the mission again.

We had to take out all the redundancy in the spacecraft, so it was a single string, and on and on and on, lots of things.

- [Narrator] By the time of Magellan's launch in 1989 the budget had nearly doubled to half a billion dollars.

But as Magellan set sail for Venus the mood was celebratory, for this was NASA's first new planetary mission in more than a decade.

(calm music) - The spacecraft is performing just beautifully.

All systems are operational and nominal.

It couldn't be better.

- Mr. Gerpheide, can you give us an idea of the mood in the mission control center after the Magellan and the IUS separated?

- It was described to me a few minutes ago as ecstatic.

- [John] Copy that.

Tell the IUS guys they did a great job.

We have virtually zero rates from the beginning.

- We're on our way to Venus.

- Eight pulses.

Eight pulses.

Eight pulses, all the thrusters.

(laughing) I love it, I love it.

I love it.

What a beauty, what a beauty.

- So that was the highlight, because that was my job.

- [Narrator] After getting Magellan aloft John Gerpheide retired.

The job of Project Manager was handed over to Tony Spear a JPL veteran well versed in radar.

- Good morning, and thank you for coming.

It's nice to know that some of the press is still interested in space, and not all- - [Narrator] He and his young team had expected the 15 month journey to Venus would be a relatively quiet time.

But problems quickly began cropping up.

- We were looking forward to, after launch, what we called quiesce and cruise because we really didn't have a whole lot planned during the cruise period.

But unfortunately we started having problems.

And there were a lot of problems during cruise.

- [Narrator] Magellan was bombarded by three major solar flares.

The spacecraft was also suffering from overheating a serious concern given how close to the Sun Magellan had to fly.

And the star scanner vital to determining Magellan's position kept picking up disorienting glints of light.

The reason turned out to be minute debris shedding off the side of the spacecraft.

These and other problems were overcome.

And as the day of orbit insertion approached all was going smoothly, and that gave Spear an uneasy feeling.

- This is the first week that we really haven't had that much to do.

And the guys are starting to get nervous as a matter of fact, not having anything to do.

We're sitting back, and we're closely monitoring the spacecraft.

And we have in our hip pocket contingency plans in case something goes wrong.

[indistinct] is off.

- We had a Solid Star 48 Motor.

And you just lit it and it went.

And then you were going to go into orbit or you were not.

There was a lot of nervousness from the managers about it.

- If the rocket doesn't fire, we become a flyby.

And that's no good because it will take something like 100 years before the geometries line up so that we could try again.

And I don't think I'm gonna be around 100 years from now.

(ominous music) (engine rumbling) - [Operator] At 6:27, we saw a signal.

(cheering and applauding) (upbeat music) - Good morning.

It's 10:15 California time.

And even though it's raining outside it's impossible to wipe the smiles off the faces of the people in the Magellan project, because the good news so far is that it's been all good news.

We have successfully gotten ourselves into orbit around the planet Venus.

We have successfully discarded the spent solid rocket motor casing.

And we're now prepared for a successful in-orbit checkout.

And on our way to a successful mapping.

And from the way things look, nothing will get in the way.

(laughing) - Didn't last very long.

- [Narrator] One week after orbit insertion Magellan, without warning, went silent.

- I mean maybe this was because it was a low cost mission.

I don't know, but Magellan had its share of problems.

- I was on duty as the telecom engineer at the time.

The spacecraft just, the computer just stopped functioning.

We did everything we knew how to do.

We called out frequencies.

We looked for it.

It was incredibly frightening.

- I will make a brief statement and then we'll open up for questions.

- [Narrator] The next morning a hastily organized press conference was convened to share what little was known.

- I was out in the lobby watching the press conference and I got a phone call from the guy that we call the ACE in building 230 who's sort of in charge of real time operations that said we have a signal.

We're not sure it's Magellan, but we think it is.

So I wrote it down on a piece of paper and in the middle of one of Tony's long stories that he was telling the press, I ran up to the stage.

I've just received a message.

And of course, Tony had more than a little bit of entertainer knack too and so he played the game.

And so we developed a little bit of excitement there.

And if we can bring.

Okay Steve, you have something more to say?

- Well John's gonna come over as soon as he's seen enough telemetry to tell more, but it is Magellan.

- It is Magellan.

- Both TWTs are off.

- Now this wasn't rehearsed by the way, okay.

(all laughing) - [Narrator] However disorganized a briefing no one could fault the Magellan team for not sharing all that they knew as soon as they knew it.

The good news was that the spacecraft was alive.

The bad news was that Magellan would continue off and on with petulant bouts of silence caused by an unknown software glitch.

- The faults came one right after another.

And you could barely get over the last one or recover from the last one when the next one happened.

It got particularly scary.

Actually, I think it was about the fault number four.

That's when the first walkabout happened.

And we use that term to describe the spacecraft basically just turning away and deciding not to talk to us anymore.

So it just went off and did its own thing.

We had no idea where it was pointed, what it was doing, and it was terrifying.

- It took us months to figure it out.

Again at this time, the spacecraft is healthy and is waiting for further contact and instructions from the Earth.

It was a real complication, a bug in the program.

It was in an endless loop.

And the spacecraft was just floating away just floating away.

(voices overlapping) - [Narrator] Among those in attendance at JPL during Magellan's orbit insertion event was Caltech Professor Ed Stone.

Stone was highly respected for the job he had done as the chief scientist for Voyager.

And these congratulations were for the announcement that he was about to become the next Director of JPL.

- What can you say?

We're in business, right?

In orbit, so I think we're the first of a series of events we've got coming up now the rest of this year which are getting us started on the '90s.

We have a real decades of exploration ahead of us.

- [Narrator] Stone signed up for the job believing a bright future was just ahead.

He soon would be surprised to learn that the outlook was not nearly as rosy as he had been told.

- It was a big shock, because I had thought that the opportunity was to fill this funding wedge with a lot of new, wonderful missions.

And in fact the challenge was to take no funding wedge and create, even so, these new opportunities for science.

And so it's a much, it's a totally different job than I imagined I would have.

(calm music) - [Narrator] Up to now planetary missions were designed to carry as many science instruments as possible.

There was no better example of this than the flagship mission to Jupiter, Galileo.

In 1986 it had been in final preparations for launch when Challenger was lost.

With the Shuttle grounded, Galileo was packed up and shipped back to Pasadena, leaving mission managers scratching their heads as to how to reach Jupiter.

- There was a period of time we didn't think this thing could go anywhere but the Smithsonian.

- [Narrator] The solution to getting Galileo off the launch pad required calling upon the forces of nature for a series of gravity assists around other planets.

That had been done before, but this time celestial mechanics required Galileo to begin its journey by starting out in the opposite direction of Jupiter.

- Oh and by the way, it goes to Venus.

Whoa, what do you mean goes to Venus?

That seemed, that seemed impossible.

And so what we've had to do is we've had to do this retro maneuver at Earth to go to Venus.

Start off in the wrong direction.

Use Venus' gravity and then two shots past the Earth.

So we have a total of three planetary gravity assists.

Our preference, of course, would be to go direct.

But the reason we're doing this is to get to Jupiter.

It's the only way we have to get to Jupiter now.

- [Operator] Galileo is on its way to another world.

It's in the hands of the best flight controllers in this world, fly safe.

(calm music) - [Narrator] Unlike Magellan, the journey to Venus was relatively uneventful for Galileo.

And just a year after its launch, Galileo was again nearing Earth, the first time ever that a robotic spacecraft was returning home.

(contemplative music) This was an opportunity to conduct measurements of our own planet and to give serious consideration to a whimsical question.

- Imagine Galileo was a spacecraft from somewhere else in space, and it's making this extremely quick pass by the Earth, all instruments recording.

What about the Earth would it detect?

And what fraction of that would be what we consider important about the Earth?

Would it detect that this is an ocean planet?

Would it detect life?

Would it detect intelligence?

Those are three interesting questions.

- [Narrator] Galileo's answers varied.

Water was clearly abundant.

And there were strong hints of biology to be seen.

As for a technologically advanced civilization there were no visible signs.

Galileo's path, just by chance, was one that flew across sparsely populated areas of the planet.

Then in a blink of an eye Galileo sailed past our planet headed outward.

Now for the first time at a safe distance from the Sun Galileo could open up its delicate antenna and begin transmitting science observations at a higher data rate.

- There were concerns about opening the high gain antenna too close to the Sun because some of the materials it was made out of might get too hot and then make the antenna not function properly.

- [Narrator] Engineers expected it would take two and a half minutes to open up the antenna.

Instead the drive motors strained for eight and then gave up.

- Did you change the stage pitch?

Kurt, you can't change the stage?

- [Operator] I'll go back to it, we'll check it.

- It didn't take a lot of analysis.

We all knew something very bad was going on at that point.

It wasn't a complicated problem.

The thing had not opened up.

- [Narrator] Without the antenna, the flow of science would be no better than a trickle, from the transmission rate of 134,000 bits per second, to a mere 10.

With meticulous attention engineers examined their backup antenna looking for clues as to what had gone wrong.

- First thought, which lasted for a few days was well, can we fix this?

And the engineers spent a lot of troubled times trying to figure out exactly what they could do to fix it.

Because it's probably not actually anything too badly wrong with it, but you couldn't get up there and shake the blasted thing and make it open.

(servo motors humming) - [Narrator] The search zeroed in on the possibility that restraint pins connected to the umbrella's ribbing had failed to release.

As to why they were stuck in a rut there were a number of theories.

Had the bumpy road trips back and forth between California and Florida caused a misalignment?

Had lubricant surrounding the pins dried out over four years of storage?

Engineers had worried that leaving the spacecraft stowed away for so long might degrade critical parts.

But no thought was given to a task as low tech as lubricating pins.

- Most of the solutions they were working on had to do with things like heating it up, cooling it off, or shaking it.

It turns out we make our spacecraft so they're not very easy to shake.

You don't want these vibrations.

We began realizing that there was probably a reasonable probability the antenna might never open.

- [Narrator] News of Galileo's stuck antenna occurred just a year after Hubble's vision problems were announced.

Next came word from Washington of budget cuts.

All of NASA, it appeared, was in danger of going bust.

(voices overlapping) - Good afternoon.

I wanted to have a chance to talk with you about some of the very disappointing news that was in the FY '93 budget that was released just two days ago.

As you know, I'm sure you all know by now, that budget does not include the Craft Mission, nor does it include operational money for Magellan.

We also are looking now at any effects this will have on personnel here at JPL.

We don't know yet exactly what the impact will be.

So I'm sorry to have this kind of a discussion.

It's not one that any of us would want to have.

But I think that it's something we do have to deal with and as in a constructive way as we can.

Thank you.

(voices overlapping) - [Narrator] And there was more change in the air.

Within weeks came the announcement of a new administrator for NASA.

And Dan Goldin made no secret that he intended to shake up an agency he believed was over promising and under delivering.

- Planetary missions can take a decade to plan another decade to build and another decade to get to the destination.

And God knows who's gonna be around to collect the data by the time that ends.

How can we do everything better, faster, cheaper?

We need to stretch ourselves, and be bold and take risks.

And yes, it's safe to take risks at NASA once again.

We cannot play it safe.

We've got to be bold.

And when we're bold, we'll have unbelievable results.

- [Narrator] NASA Administrator Dan Goldin would soon have another example to buttress his dislike for large and expensive spacecraft.

But Mars Observer would also be a lesson in the pitfalls of embracing bold new approaches.

- I inherited a lot of things with Mars Observer.

At the time I thought they were kind of bad ideas but I was stuck with them.

In retrospect, they turned out to be really bad ideas.

- [Reporter] We have lift off, lift off of the Titan III Rocket with the Mars Observer and America's return to the red planet.

- [Narrator] Instead of building Mars Observer from the ground up NASA, before Goldin's arrival, had directed JPL to oversee the conversion of a commercial satellite originally designed to orbit the Earth.

- [Operator] Going through the sound barrier looked very good.

- So the idea was there are pretty much routine processes now for building spacecraft for the Earth.

And why don't we pull a spacecraft off, modify it only slightly, and send it to Mars?

And we'll put our instruments on board.

We'll compete for the best instruments and we'll fly them and it'll be cheap.

- [Operator] Both solids look good.

Data coming in here to the mission director center shows we have a nominal flight.

- [Narrator] Converting an Earth satellite had looked promising on a spreadsheet.

But operating in deep space was different.

- You have to provide a science platform that will house more science instruments than an Earth orbiter.

You have to have a planetary telecommunications capability.

You have to have bigger solar array.

You have to have onboard propulsion capability to get into orbit.

The launch vehicle is not gonna put you in orbit there.

You're gonna have to do it yourself.

- [Narrator] These kinds of adaptations and changes meant that the budget for Mars Observer eventually soared to nearly a billion dollars more than five times NASA's hoped for price.

(engine rumbling) - It's December 19th.

And it's 6:00 p.m. And I'm going to the lab on a spacecraft emergency.

The spacecraft lost inertial reference.

- [Narrator] Steve Collins was one of the youngest members of the Mars Observer team.

- And we're gonna go in the lab and try and see what's going on.

- [Narrator] From the time of the launch, he had set out to make a video of this, his first mission.

- My father was a cinematographer and did a lot of documentary filmmaking.

And I grew up going on documentary film shoots.

Well, here it is.

Space Flight Operations Facility some time in the middle of the night.

Couple people here on Topex.

But it's looking pretty dark.

I remember, specifically associated with Mars Observer, him saying it doesn't matter the quality of the footage if you're there when something big happens.

Charles?

- [Charles] Yo.

Oh joy.

- [Steve] Good evening.

- [Narrator] Collin's videos are a rare and candid record of the behind the scenes work of a small, close knit group of engineers.

They were responsible for Mars Observer's attitude control system, which put simply meant keeping the spacecraft pointed in the right direction.

- People were very tolerant of it.

They got used to me having a video camera.

And for Mars Observer they decided to bring all the computers and things that they would normally put in the control room and put them in people's offices.

And so you would basically sit in your own office and operate the spacecraft.

- Are we gonna be implicated by this?

- [Narrator] Or on occasion, to relax with the latest state of the art offerings in space themed video games.

- [Steve] So this is what's really going on up there on the spacecraft, huh?

- [Charles] That's right.

- [Steve] Is this what's called joysticking a spacecraft around?

- This is the training room's worst nightmare.

- [Steve] Oh no, it's putting it into contingency mode.

This is what it looks like when you're in contingency mode.

- [Narrator] But as Mars neared, the fun and games ended.

Next up was Mars orbit insertion.

- [Steve] Ready Charles?

- Ready for what?

To be immortalized?

- [Steve] Yeah, MOI.

(calm music) - In this picture, Mars has a clearest atmosphere that any mission to Mars has ever seen.

And I think every day for the next week our hearts will be beating a little bit faster.

On Sunday we have a very critical event which is the pressurization of the fuel tank.

If something were to go wrong with the pressurization either the tanks, for some reason, get overpressurized or they don't get pressurized at all we cannot perform the Mars orbit insertion burn.

So this is a very critical activity which will occur.

- [Narrator] Pressurizing the fuel tanks had long been a worry.

There was a history of leaks involving the regulators of the fuel lines on other missions.

And there were tradeoffs between pressuring the tank soon after launch or later before orbit insertion.

Engineers chose the second option.

- The critical decision was that we would do this pressurization of the tanks in the blind.

And we wouldn't have telemetry going at the time that we did the tank pressurization, we opened these valves.

(line popping) (gases venting) - [Engineer] Okay, they said to put a downlink in SSI.

- What?

- What?

- [Charles] Says who?

- [Engineer] In SSI?

- [Engineer] No.

- So the immediate response to not having communications with the spacecraft is ah it's probably just another simple problem.

It'll take them a half hour to get it figured out and we'll be fine.

- Whatever they're doing now ain't working.

- [Engineer] I'd like to clarify a statement you made earlier.

Did you get a signal early on?

- I think after about an hour and a half or so we declared a spacecraft emergency.

And there was just nothing, just nothing.

(phone ringing) - Yeah?

(indistinct) - Scary, scary stuff.

- We lost one right now.

When we turn the other one on at 3:30 this whole thing's happening again.

Whatever happened the first time, we've gotta- - [Engineer] We've gotta command in right now.

- Confusion was just overwhelming but everybody jus kind of snapped into battle mode.

I'm just saying.

Let's talk about the facts.

Let's just talk about the facts.

Because this is, we're in one of two situations.

The beam is on.

We cordoned off one conference room went up to the white board, started listing all of the things that could have gone wrong and started to brainstorm what these different scenarios would have meant.

We're on the Earth, we've got high gain, everything's fine.

Those are the two situations before us.

- It was a little scary.

We went under the assumption that for some reason because the spacecraft had operated so well during cruise that maybe there was some glitch in the sequence or some glitch in the command processing equipment that prevented the transmitter from turning back on.

Spacecraft's probably working just fine; it's just not talking to us.

- Until after, and if we happen to be in safe mode we've lost six and a half hours.

Is that significant?

- It is significant, 10%.

- [Engineer] 10% percent of the time down the line.

- All the time knowing that because this is a solar powered spacecraft that if the solar panels aren't pointed at the Sun you're draining the battery.

And eventually you won't get any signal back, even if it could operate, because your battery is dead.

- It's 4:30 in the morning on August 23rd.

And we still haven't received any word back from the spacecraft.

A lot of people are walking around without any idea really of what to do.

It's really, really tough.

- But a sort of unusual thing happens in that circumstance, which is a sense of optimism.

Because the flight team knows that if it was a catastrophic failure, there's nothing they can do.

And so you start thinking instead, on an optimistic path.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Not willing to believe the worst and hoping for the best, JPL's plans to provide live TV coverage of the orbit insertion event went ahead.

- We have had a problem over the weekend, what we believe to be a communications failure, in which Mars Observer has not been downlinking or radio transmitting information to us.

And this is Charles Whetsel, who we're going to talk to about what we're gonna see with the signal.

Hi Charles.

- Hi Steve.

- I was the on-console guy who could be interviewed.

And so I had all of the telemetry displays up on the workstation, and I had sort of been picked as the operations guy that would be interviewed back and forth as the day was going on and show what telemetry we were getting or we would have been getting and how the systems were behaving which we weren't at the time.

But it was definitely a very awkward type of interview.

- [Steve] Okay specifically, you have a graph there which will show us what happens when we actually get signal back, right?

- That's correct.

There's no data on this window yet.

We're hoping that for the first time since Saturday we'll lock up on a radio signal, and that'll show the signal level here in this window right now.

- [Station Manager] Station Manager, go ahead.

- [Engineer] Okay, we've come up negative on our search for signal two way, one way, channel 16, and channel 20.

I guess it's time for plan B.

- [Station Manager] Okay, copy.

- [Engineer] DSN will continue to search.

- [Station Manager] Copy.

- [Steve] Charles, we're going to stay with you.

And the minute that you hear anything feel free to break in on what we're saying, okay.

But certainly thank you for your attention.

Keep your eyes peeled.

- Okay.

Thanks a lot, Steve.

- [Steve] Thanks.

- The idea was that it wasn't lost that it had automatically gone into orbit and that what we needed to do was to keep sending commands to it, so that it would behave properly and begin to send back information.

It just was so protracted that the pain just continued and continued.

- Who was the famous pilot?

Chuck Yeager.

I feel like Chuck Yeager in his slow Tennessee accent.

Well their goes plan A.

Their goes plan B.

Okay, plan C. Arm and go to contingency mode.

Whose idea was it to pressurize three days before MOI?

- [Narrator] There were now demonstrators at the gate of the lab.

Inspired by this image from the previous mission to Mars they were convinced that Mars Observer's silence was part of a government cover up to hide from the public knowledge of an ancient Martian civilization.

- There were people standing on the corner of the entrance to JPL with signs saying Mars Observer is a cover up.

To have to drive past those protesters into work was like adding insult to injury.

(contemplative music) - [Reporter] Last night, you made the statement that you and your engineers have a strong emotional attachment toward the Observer project.

Today's lack of communication with the probe how has that affected the emotions there?

- Well, we're still working really hard.

- [Reporter] Do you say though, we give up?

- We have not given up.

- We know they're are- - [Reporter] I know that but at which point do you say- - We know there are more questions but Glenn does have to get back to the operations area.

- And I recall one day, after maybe day five or six of saying to the national media, it's gonna be okay.

We got the greatest people working on this thing.

We're gonna figure it out.

I remember John Casani intercepting me as I'm walking out the door, and he said Glenn, one of these days you're gonna have to admit to yourself that it's gone.

- We've experienced a great disappointment this week with the loss of communications from Mars Observer.

The laboratory hasn't had a total loss of a spacecraft in 22 years.

We have confronted difficulties with other spacecraft: Galileo's antenna, Magellan's transmitter, Voyager 2's faulty command receiver and jammed scan platform.

But the ingenuity of JPL engineers has always allowed us to recover a scientifically valuable mission.

That record of success has made the sending of complex machines across the solar system seem easy and less risky than it really is.

(contemplative music) - [Narrator] While there was nothing more to be done for a rescue at Mars, there was hope for Hubble, and much of that hope rested on a team of JPL scientists and engineers who were feeling the pressure of the high stakes at play.

- It had a huge amount of visibility.

Dan Goldin who was administrator at the time was famous for saying that he wanted to take more risk and that it was okay for things to fail.

And when he was looking at, WFPC-2 in the high bay sort of whispered to three or four of us that all that business about letting things fail does not apply to you.

This cannot fail.

This is the agency's reputation on the line here.

- And it turns out that it was almost entirely fixable by changing the shape of some tiny mirrors no bigger than a nickel inside the camera.

So what we ended up doing was taking our optics apart.

Replacing these nickel-sized mirrors with new ones that were out of shape exactly opposite to the shape error in the primary mirror.

Putting it all back together.

- [Narrator] As a math problem, the solution was simple.

As a practical matter it was a profound engineering challenge.

The science team also wanted to add on the ability to adjust the cameras small mirrors by remote control to guarantee that this time Hubble would yield sharp images.

That meant embracing an unproven technology that just happened to be the specialty of a recently hired JPL engineer.

- And so through my door entered John Trauger.

And he approached me about the possibility of using this type of technology for a very compact mirror mechanism.

And not knowing any better I said of course you can do that.

- [Narrator] Not everyone on the engineering team was convinced.

Some of them saw Fanson as an interloper who had taken sides with the science team.

And that placed him right in the middle of a tense standoff.

And I remember one of the scientists was red faced and was actually pounding his fist on the table saying that he felt that the project team was being disingenuous in its presentation of what was possible.

I've never been in a meeting like that before or since.

But tensions were running very high.

At one point I was excused from the meeting while this was going on, until things calmed down.

- In a project like this everyone's career depends on success.

Everyone ultimately has to work together.

It's a human, you know it's a really interesting dilemma.

- This being my first flight delivery assignment at JPL I had the advantage of ignorance.

So I hadn't been, I wasn't experienced enough to know that what I was setting out to do should not be possible to do on the timeframe that we were doing it.

And we just worked enormous hours.

There were many nights of sleeping on a cot not knowing whether it was daylight or dark outside.

It was a maximum effort.

- [Narrator] One vivid example of a maximum effort was finding a solution to cleaning WFPC's mirrors with liquids, without damaging other parts of the camera.

- And so it occurred to me that if we could find a really large size condom, we could roll the condom up over the housing, up against the outer edge of the mirror, and seal around the mirror.

And then you could wash the front surface.

- [Narrator] To Fanson's surprise the manufacturer refused to endorse its products for any use other than for what it was originally intended.

In desperate straits Fanson's next stop was the emergency room.

- So here I am in the supply room in the emergency room, and came across a particular type of surgeon's glove that had just about the right size.

Latex surgeon's gloves that we could roll up over the housing and seal around the outer edge of the mirror so that then could do the cleaning of the mirror surface and do the coating.

We had to tackle these problems.

This is what engineers do, right?

You have to figure out a way to tackle the problem that's in your path.

- [Operator] Endeavor, you've got a go for capture.

- [Narrator] The Hubble rescue mission launched into space on December 2, 1993.

Onboard Endeavor were a crew of seven, the WFPC camera two, and the corrective optics package called CoStar to fix three of Hubble's other science instruments.

- [Astronaut] Houston, Endeavor has a firm handshake with Mr. Hubble's telescope.

- [Narrator] Rescuing Hubble would require 11 days in orbit and a record setting five space walks.

- [Astronaut] So Houston, we are inspired, we are ready.

Let's go fix this thing.

- [Narrator] No previous shuttle mission had ever been so complex.

- [Astronaut] Going straight on up.

So it's now good.

I'm gonna let go.

- The astronauts had practiced moving our camera around.

They'd been to JPL a number of times to look at it look at every little fixture, every latch and in particular to be very, very, very cautious about the one exposed piece of optics that we had in our camera.

Extremely vulnerable.

If you bumped into it, it would end our mission.

- [Astronaut] Going nice and easy.

Looks beautiful.

- [Operator] And Houston copies, good news.

- I would say the most surprising thing about this experience was that there were no surprises.

Everything went just about exactly the way we thought it would.

- [Astronaut] You can do things in zero G that you would never dream of, right?

- [Astronaut] Yes sir.

(calm music) - [Narrator] Five days after Endeavor's return to Earth a small group of astronomers and engineers gathered out of public view, nervously awaiting the transmission of WFPC's first image.

(contemplative music) (all cheering) - One bright.

- Right there.

Whoa, we did it.

- Wait wait, wait wait.

Bring it out, bring it out.

- [Jim] And what we saw was a bright star that was well corrected.

We knew immediately that we had done it.

(all cheering and applauding) - [Engineer] This is the first image of many to come.

- [All] Cheers, cheers.

(all applauding) - We'd done everything that we thought we had to do to prove to ourselves that it was going to work.

But there's no substitute for seeing that it actually did work.

(contemplative music) (calm music) - [Narrator] WFPC-2 is known today as the camera that saved Hubble.

It operated for more than 15 years before being replaced by a third generation camera in 2009.

But rather than being tossed aside astronauts brought WFPC2 home.

A nationwide victory lap included a celebratory stop at JPL, the place of its creation.

It is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum.

As WFPC2 was taking its first images Galileo was a year away from Jupiter its stuck antenna permanently frozen in place.

But ingenious JPL engineers would find ways around the problem.

A bounty of science discoveries was just ahead for Galileo.

Magellan, despite fits and starts, succeeded in creating a radar map of 98% of Venus's surface.

As the mission was ending, controllers commanded the spacecraft to plunge into the planet to gain knowledge about its atmosphere.

Mars Observer was never heard from again.

The most likely cause of the loss was a rupture of a fuel line during pressurization of the propulsion system causing an explosion and sending the spacecraft into a catastrophic spin.

Whether the doomed spacecraft went into orbit around Mars or flew past the planet and now circles the Sun no one knows.

And Mars would become the testing ground to see if the space agency could actually create missions that were faster, better and cheaper.

The answer would not come easily.

And for JPL especially there would be a heavy price to pay.

(roaring) (calm music) (ethereal music)