The Rock From Mars (16 page)

The McKay team made all the requested revisions. They knew from the comments of the reviewers that the tiny wormlike and egg-shaped features proposed as microfossils would likely be the weak link in their skein of evidence.

On July 16, 1996, McKay got word that the paper had passed muster.
Science
would publish it in August. This was it. The team was about to take the leap into the light. They thought they were firmly braced for what would come.

Whenever he paused to consider the probable public reaction, McKay concentrated on the tribe: his peers, experts who would pore over the details in the paper. He had evaluated the weak and strong points of his argument from that perspective, tried to guess who would attack and with what kind of firepower, as well as who would support him. He figured the story would probably make the newspapers but not be a huge deal.

McKay had read in a self-help book that when taking a risk, it is useful to have the support of a sponsor or colleague—someone with the stature to defend and support you. To fill that role, McKay came to regard Dick Zare as ideal—someone whose reputation was impeccable, who (it was said) was short-listed for the Nobel. McKay felt pleased and somewhat comforted to have him as a coauthor.

Once
Science
accepted the paper, life around Building 31 got even stranger. McKay and Gibson disappeared from the premises for days and came back wearing little beepers and looking drained. Word was they had been to NASA headquarters in Washington, talking to the brass and getting some kind of naked-lightbulb treatment over their impending publication.

The paper’s acceptance triggered another round of dueling rewrites, this time between public affairs people at the Houston space center (and later at NASA headquarters) and Stanford University.

James Hartsfield, Johnson Space Center’s point man on the Mars rock story, considered his involvement very likely the most important thing he would do in his life. When he got the assignment, he worked virtually night and day for three days preparing an initial draft of the press release that would herald the paper’s public debut. His role as he saw it was to tell the story in simple terms that a broad audience could understand. The editing suggestions that came back from David Salisbury, his counterpart at Stanford, seemed to him overly academic and complicated.

Salisbury, for his part, thought the NASA folks tended to sensationalize the research a bit, overemphasize the microscope images, and underplay the role of Stanford. In an early draft of the press release, NASA called the evidence of possible primitive life on Mars “compelling.” Stanford wanted to soften the language to say the evidence “strongly suggests.” By July 29, Salisbury had replaced that with “compelling circumstantial evidence.”

NASA wanted to single out Zarelab’s detection of the PAHs as “most important.” Stanford preferred to emphasize that all the lines of evidence fit together to make a strong case. NASA proposed that they say: “Some remains of the microscopic organisms were fossilized in the carbonate, in a fashion similar to the formation of fossils in limestone on Earth.” Stanford objected: “Too positive about the fossils, need to be consistent in describing these forms as possible fossils.” And so it went.

One torpid July day, Chris Romanek found himself lying on a Galveston beach drinking beer with friends from his days at Texas A&M—structural geologists working for the oil industry. He showed them the secret paper that would shortly become public. They were incredulous. “Chris, do you know what you’re saying here? I can’t believe you’re going to publish this.” The attitude was: “My buddy Chris is writing a paper saying he discovered life on Mars?!” Romanek was not exactly one of the world’s premier specialists in the field. Still, neither Romanek nor his friends thought anybody would make a big deal of it.

Back at the space center, the tensions between the anxious collaborators and their excluded, suspicious coworkers sparked again on one of the dog days of early August.

On this steamy high noon, a group of scientists and students from Building 31, including two from the McKay group, were heading out for lunch. Visiting scientist Ralph Harvey noticed a sign explaining that NASA was planning to fumigate the building on such and such a date because of a persistent cockroach problem.

Harvey turned to Kathie Thomas and said, with mock alarm, “Oh, my God, is this your fault? Did you let something get out?”

The whole crowd laughed, except the McKay duo. Seeing the tense looks on their faces, Harvey wondered fleetingly whether they were peeved—or scared.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE GRAND INQUISITOR

D
AVID
M
C
K
AY AND
Everett Gibson sat in leather wing chairs big enough to make almost anybody feel small. It was Wednesday, July 31, 1996, and they were on the top floor of NASA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, a few blocks southwest of the U.S. Capitol dome.

Dan Goldin, the NASA boss, glared across his desk as he pounded them with yet another question in his muscular South Bronx baritone. They had originally been scheduled to meet with him for thirty minutes. Instead, he had been grilling them for three punishing hours. He was the Grand Inquisitor of Space, his eyes glinting with a sinister light—or so he wanted them to believe. Goldin had spent the previous day at the White House, going over the implications of the claims about the meteorite from Mars with the president and vice president. The reactions there had excited Goldin, made him feel in his gut what he already knew in his head to be the true dimensions of the looming revelation.

From the moment his lieutenants had informed him that NASA civil servants in Houston were proposing a hypothesis about possible life on ancient Mars, Goldin had been mindful of its explosive aspects, its “giggle factor” potential, and the fact that this was happening in an election year. He had decided it was crucial for him to hear the whole story from the instigators themselves, face-to-face and in detail.

In addition to understanding a thing or two about rocket science, Goldin had studied management techniques and prided himself on his ability to shove people out of their psychological comfort zone. He would subject his targets to a flamethrower blast of intimidation—the Goldin Grill—designed to test human mettle while demonstrating who was in charge. Most people caved or, as he put it, “wiltered.”

On this occasion, Goldin had taken the scientists from Houston on a methodical intellectual odyssey back to first principles; he pushed to know their thinking, their logic, all the steps that had led to their astonishing claim. He would end up with twenty-seven pages of scribbled notes. And in his head, he was silently grading the answers they gave him—their delivery and tone as well as the quality of their evidence. Goldin had been “staring into them,” as he would say, trying to penetrate their souls to see what stuff they were made of.

Goldin was aware that he might soon be sharing a stage with them as they confronted a global audience and the clamoring media. His reputation and his credibility, as well as NASA’s, would be on the line along with theirs. He had to know who they were, and how they had reached this point.

Now, after three hours of the Grill, he was satisfied. These folks were holding up.

Goldin was especially taken with the magnetic crystals. He had done a lot of work with magnetic materials in his earlier days, and this was where he thought the team demonstrated real strength. He probed intensely on that one, giving that argument an “A plus.”

As the room emptied, he took more time to let it all sink in. If McKay and the others were wrong, he reminded himself one more time, a misstep could shatter the space agency’s credibility (and his), almost as severely as an exploding space shuttle.

And if they were on to something real? The implications were almost beyond imagining; so were the opportunities. Almost.

For Goldin, the issue on the table that day went deeper than policy, politics, or personal ambition. McKay and Gibson had touched a theme that triggered something akin to music in his romantic soul. At age fifty-six, he was feeling the resurgence of a longing that had its roots back in his childhood, in one of those indelible emotional attachments to a waking dream.

Daniel Saul Goldin grew up in a house across the street from Public School 93 in the South Bronx, in a working-class neighborhood of Jewish and Italian families. By the time he walked into first grade there, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had captured his heart. At the Wood Theater on Westchester Avenue, he sat in the Saturday dark and watched Flash (Buster Crabbe) struggle against the alliterative Ming the Merciless on the planets Mongo and Mars, and he followed the adventures as Buck (again Buster Crabbe) blasted off to Saturn for reinforcements in his fight against the tyrant Killer Kane.

His course through life hinged upon a flaw in his own eyeballs, an elongation. He had progressive myopia, and a doctor had told his mother that if Daniel played contact sports, he could go blind. At times, Goldin felt he must have been born wearing eyeglasses. But however devastating the affliction had seemed for a rambunctious boy, his grown-up self concluded that it had been a lucky break. Goldin felt certain that his life was richer as a result. While the other kids were shooting baskets across the street on the school court, he was indoors reading, or listening to Milton Cross and the Saturday afternoon broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera, or going to museums. He had also found a talent for building model airplanes.

As the Cold War lit a fire under the American space program, the myopic boy from the Bronx went on to study mechanical engineering at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. In 1962, when he was close to graduating, a recruiter from NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland came to the campus and hooked Goldin by displaying some pictures of an advanced spacecraft design intended to go to Mars. To go to Mars! It was his childhood fantasy coming to life. Equipped with a bachelor’s degree (the highest degree he would formally earn), he went to work for NASA at about the time John Glenn made the first U.S. manned orbital flight.

The young engineer, with his penchant for long hours and an exhaustive pace, was soon enticed away from NASA by the aerospace company TRW, near Los Angeles. By that time, Goldin and his wife, Judy, had two young daughters.

As Goldin rose through the company ranks over the next twenty-five years, he disappeared into top secret weapons programs. (He wasn’t all work and no play, however: he kept a surfboard in the TRW lab for lunch-hour outings to the beach.) Along the way, he built a reputation as an efficiency expert. As his company worked on NASA projects, he developed passionate opinions about what was wrong with the American space program and how to fix it. For example, his team planned to make a public presentation on TRW’s concept for a new line of small, lightweight spacecraft. Before the event, one of his superiors got an angry call from a NASA official who warned that the TRW proposal threatened vested interests—builders of the massive, instrument-packed billion-dollar babies then favored at the space agency, big-ticket research spacecraft to which Goldin and others referred, derisively, as Battlestar Galacticas. These galoots could take a decade to build and launch, eating up whole careers before a payoff arrived in the form of data flowing back from space. Galacticas were so huge and expensive they could not afford to fail—yet fail they sometimes did.

Goldin let it be known that he was infuriated by that NASA reaction. He was certain the agency’s approach was bad for the space program and bad for the country. It was one more sign that, during the 1970s and 1980s, the once agile outfit that had sent men to the moon had hunkered into the hidebound and defensive mentality of a bureaucratic fortress.

For Goldin, this decline was about more than just rockets and Buck Rogers. To him, the American effort to explore space was a kind of mine canary for the national character, and he saw both of them faltering, becoming fainthearted, risk averse, mired in the drive to “survive and consume” instead of imagining, creating, and building.

His prescriptions for change—delivered sometimes in fiery public lectures—impressed key officials in the White House–led National Space Council. The first President Bush fired Goldin’s predecessor and, in April 1992, appointed the fiery reformer as the ninth NASA administrator. To Goldin, it felt like poetic justice.

What happened next created the atmospherics, the context, into which McKay and Gibson would be lobbing their geochemical bombshell.

Many people thought Goldin was wading into professional quicksand at NASA. In 1991, the Soviet empire had dissolved, and along with it the last of the Cold War rationale that had sustained the struggling space agency. At the same time, space leaders were limited in their ability to push for new projects because of a cap on federal spending.

These external factors aggravated NASA’s managerial shortcomings and contributed to the succession of problems and failures, which included the flaw built into the Hubble telescope, the loss of a billion-dollar spacecraft at Mars, the political fumbling of Bush’s proposed human-exploration initiative, and the congressional threat to kill the planned space station. NASA had become a political embarrassment.

NASA was unusual in government, in that its charge from Congress and the White House was to enhance American prestige in the world by doing dazzling, difficult, and dangerous things—particularly difficult and dangerous things that no one had ever done before—and on top of that to do this high-wire act in full public view. This agency’s job, in short, was the antithesis of the bureaucratic impulse. In addition, since the Apollo glory days, NASA had been expected to do this work on a budget that was at once both shrinking and unpredictable.

The new man arrived in Washington with a strong mandate from the White House space council to get the mess in hand, to make the space bureaucracy responsive and effective again.

Goldin’s appeal was not limited to the Republican White House. During his Senate confirmation hearings, then-senator Al Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, said, “I detect a backbone in this nominee.” In 1992, after Bill Clinton and Gore took the White House, they would keep Goldin on.

Announcing himself as a man on a mission and an idealist, Goldin walked into the morass with “so much brass he clanked.” Goldin didn’t look like NASA. He wore bespoke suits, with flashy modern tailoring, expensive ties, and, sometimes, cowboy boots. Goldin didn’t
sound
like NASA. The agency’s previous leaders had tended to communicate in jargon, often with the leisurely accents of the NASA “crescent,” the sun-belt swath where the major NASA facilities were hammocked between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Not Goldin. Not only did he have the Bronx-Pacino patois (with a half cup of actor Paul Reiser in the delivery); he showed his emotions and pushed hot buttons. He got right up in people’s faces. His public talks could veer from chilling warnings aimed at balky contractors to ruminations about the “neo-Malthusians” who saw forward momentum on some key space project as nothing but “pork,” to flights of fancy about a future in which we could “turn over the keys to a real Starship Enterprise” to our grandchildren.

At the beginning, as the
National Journal
put it, the “crew-cut, pocket-protected old cranks” at headquarters snickered indulgently. Here came this wide-eyed outsider with a briefcase full of trendy management theory (“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”). How far could this guy get?

Driven by his fine-honed sense of personal outrage, the new chief proved to be both riveting and frightening. He made decisions, took risks, picked a direction, and charged off. He stood out in the Washington ecosystem for his absolute willingness to make enemies. “Leadership is not being loved,” he would say. “Leadership is doing the right thing.”

At the outset, Goldin adopted a warp-speed schedule. He would often begin at four-thirty
A
.
M
. or so with a workout on his eighteen-speed ultralight Klein bicycle over the bike paths that curved along the Potomac near the Watergate, where he had taken an apartment. He would show up in his office in the predawn darkness and work until eleven
P
.
M
., arriving just as early the next morning, with notes or instructions for his staff that he had prepared overnight.

Goldin plunged into a total-immersion education on his new empire. On Saturdays and Sundays, he would summon experts to brief him on its various arcane activities. In public outreach, he came on like the Elmer Gantry of space, visiting sixty cities in two years, holding town meetings, and talking regularly to schoolchildren.

Now, after four years on the job—to the relief of some and the consternation of others—this volatile personality had conquered the NASA bureaucracy in a way that Washington had seldom seen. Goldin made the new NASA a model for the Gore-led campaign to “reinvent” government, and Goldin became a poster boy for can-do management.

But many people despised him for what he had done, or for the
way
he had done it, especially people whose work took them inside what might be called the Goldin “blast danger zone.” Goldin believed that a measured ration of chaos was a useful tool for bonding a team as well as for discombobulating potential adversaries whose fiefdoms—“rice bowls” or “sandboxes” in NASA-speak—were to be dismantled or shaken up under the new order. Captain Chaos, some called him. He introduced a system of documenting procedures that, some said, made employees’ lives miserable and was too rigid for an innovative agency. Some who got the Goldin push out of their jobs, and others as well, maintained that the administrator could be brutal, and that he lied, or misled, sometimes doing the direct opposite of what he had promised. Wes Huntress, years later, would compare him to both the good guys and bad guys in the
Star Wars
movies, saying, “Dan the man was a Jedi. Dan the administrator was a Sith.”

Goldin had waded into the bureaucratic equivalent of street brawls over issues ranging from engineering philosophy (“lose the fat, keep the muscle”) to a crusade for hiring women and black people. He asserted that the culture of space had become “too stale, male and pale.” He sought out risk takers, “non-linear thinkers,” those in whom he found intellectual brilliance and a “fire in the eyes.”

He dismantled the main headquarters science office, got rid of about half the directors at NASA’s centers across the country, and put NASA’s clubby aerospace contractors on notice that the tradition of cost overruns (typically about 75 percent higher than contracted for in those days) would no longer be tolerated. He railed against the “iron triangle,” a phrase used to describe the Washington-centered alliance of federal bureaucrats, aerospace lobbyists, and congressional staff who conspired self-servingly to thwart the desires of the White House and the tax-paying public.