The Rock From Mars (48 page)

Goldin activated a
• Author interviews with Goldin and Huntress. It was the normal routine that, every morning, Goldin and each of his top lieutenants would be handed a three-by-five index card with that day’s schedule written on it. In Huntress’s view, a good day was one for which the card showed a lot of white space, which meant few formal meetings. But those days were rare. In order to contain the secret of the rock within the smallest possible circle, the nature of any meetings about the rock was not indicated on the little index cards.

Just as Orson Welles
•
War of the Worlds
broadcast, Halloween night 1938.

A key meeting took
• Author interviews with Huntress, Boeder, and Savage. There were a number of meetings, with a changing cast of players, and some mark the dates differently. Savage noted in his “memo for the record” a large meeting and teleconference on July 22, which included headquarters officials Huntress, Boeder, Ed Weiler, Jurgen Rahe, and Joe Boyce, with McKay and Gibson teleconferenced in from Houston, along with Johnson Space Center public affairs officers James Hartsfield, Steve Nesbitt, and Jeff Carr. Huntress’s records indicate the meeting described here took place on July 26. It is possible that both are correct.

They decided to
• Author interview with Huntress; also Michael Meyer interview with Dick, NASA archives.

Boeder explained that
• Author interviews with Boeder and Savage at NASA, and
Science
staff members; also Savage memo. NASA public affairs staff had been in touch with counterparts at
Science
to discuss the timing of the publication and a related press conference. Possible dates of publication had ranged from August 2 (NASA’s preference) to August 9 to August 16, but the final decision at the magazine was that publication was not possible earlier than August 16.

On the morning of Tuesday
• Author interviews with Goldin and Huntress. The two space officials arrived at Panetta’s office twenty minutes late, Huntress said, because a clerk had given the guard at the gate a list that misspelled his boss’s name as “Golden.” The guard was unyielding, but Goldin thundered his way into an anteroom, where he was able to call Panetta’s office and arrange a rescue.

In addition to his
• Author interviews with Goldin and Huntress, and “talking points” documents provided by Huntress.

Among White House concerns
• Also, though few people besides Clinton were aware of it yet, the president was spending some of his time in phone calls designed to extricate him from a dangerous liaison with a young former White House intern.

For Huntress, it was
• Author interview with Huntress.

The NASA men
• Author interviews with Goldin and Huntress.

On one wall
• Author interview with Gore.

Gore greeted his
• Author interviews with Goldin and Huntress. “Wait a minute” quote first cited in Mimi Swartz, “It Came from Outer Space,”
Texas Monthly
(Nov. 1996): p. 122.

The NASA officials themselves
• Author interview with Huntress.

When they threw
• NASA exobiology official Michael Meyer, in interview with Dick, NASA archives. Meyer was skeptical of the images. They were visually convincing to many, but he said, with “my background in phytoplankton—I’m used to looking at things under a microscope. I wasn’t as excited as everybody else. . . . But it was a very nice set of evidence, so you know, go with it.”

Gibson, for one
• Author interview with Gibson.

As the session
• Author interviews with McKay and Goldin.

Chris Romanek, on his
• Author interview with Romanek.

The workforce seemed
• “Interview: NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin,”
Final Frontier
(July–Aug. 1994): p. 88.

Now the Houston guys
• Author interview with Goldin. After grilling McKay and Gibson, Goldin revealed the secret of the rock to one “unauthorized” person—his terminally ill father, Louis. The elder Goldin had once earned a degree in biology but because of the Depression had been unable to get a job in the field. Now he was in a Florida hospital, dying of cancer of the spine. His son called that night and said, “Dad, I’m going to tell you some information that’s gonna knock your socks off.” He added, “Hang in there. . . . You’re going to see your son on national TV, making this announcement.” Goldin said later that the news kept the old man alive a little longer. Louis Goldin would die a few days after the press conference about the rock.

Morris saw rich
• Author interview with Rick Borchelt, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Morris’s plan was
• Author interviews with Goldin and Borchelt. See also transcript of Goldin talk at George Washington University Space Policy Institute symposium, “Life in the Universe: What Can the Martian Fossil Tell Us?” (Washington, D.C., George Washington University, Nov. 22, 1996), p. 88, in which he listed some of the hurdles: A mission to Mars would take from six hundred to one thousand days, and “we need to send somewhere between 500 and 1,000 metric tons” from Earth to Mars, depending on the approach. “Do you generate fuels and breathable air on Mars? Do you need retro rockets firing as you arrive or use a technique called aerobraking? Will you stay on the surface a month or a year and a half? What type of propulsion system will you use?” The current cost of lifting one pound to low Earth orbit was $10,000—one pound of anything. That meant the least a human expedition would cost was about $12 billion. NASA was working on technologies that (Goldin hoped) would get the project into the realm of feasibility, ultimately reducing the price tag to $200 per pound in perhaps ten years. Goldin and his team would fail in that crucial effort. In 1999, a $1 billion–plus public-and-private project to develop the X-33, a successor to the space shuttle, ran up against insurmountable technical barriers. (See Lambright,
Transforming Government,
pp. 22–24.)

Goldin had been spelling out the hurdles on the road to Mars for years. See also, for example, his Wernher von Braun Memorial Lecture, April 29, 1993: “Colonizing Space: What Is Our Goal?” by Goldin and Dr. Alex Roland. (Occasional Paper Series, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution); and Goldin’s speech delivered on February 7, 1995, at the Space Transportation Association breakfast (Arlington, Va.,
Space Trans,
March–April 1996), pp. 2–9, in which he expressed outrage that the nation had gone “for
twenty-five years
without a new rocket engine” because of space agency failures.

On August 2, Rowlands
• Joel Achenbach,
Captured by Aliens
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 136. See also Howard Kurtz, “The Hooker, Line and Sinker,”
Washington Post,
September 4, 1996, p. B1, at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/scandal/morris.htm.

CHAPTER EIGHT:
“klaatu barada nikto”

The McKays had come
• The account of the McKay family foray into the hill country is based on author interviews with David McKay and Mary Fae McKay.

Everett Gibson, back
• Author interview with Gibson. Pillinger was phoning from the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.

For one thing, the
• Author interview with Rick Borchelt, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; also e-mail from Borchelt, Oct. 25, 2001.

But the first person
• Author interviews with Leonard David.

An unabashed space
• David worked both as a journalist and also, at various times, for the government. His work has been published in the
Financial Times, Sky and Telescope, Astronomy, Space News, Aerospace America,
and other publications. Among his numerous other affiliations, he was editor of the National Space Society’s
Ad Astra
and
Space World
magazines. In the mid-1980s, he was director of research for the National Commission on Space. For NASA, he wrote for the publication
Spinoff,
and he conducted interviews and wrote scripts for NASA radio programming. He also worked on public NASA exhibits.

For months now
• For an analysis of how the story became public, see Vincent Kiernan, “The Mars Meteorite: A Case Study in Controls on Dissemination of Science News,”
Public Understanding of Science,
vol. 9 (2000): pp. 15–41.

A few months after
• Author interviews with Leonard David; see also John Kerridge interview with Steven Dick, NASA archives.

Kerridge and others
• John Kerridge interview with Steven Dick, NASA archives, pp. 9–15.

As July turned to
• Author interviews with David and Savage; also Savage memo.

The NASA headquarters
• Author interviews with Goldin, Huntress, Savage, Boeder, and others.

The NASA group had
• Hartsfield e-mail, July 17, 1996, to public affairs officials at Johnson Space Center noted that the McKay-Gibson paper had just been accepted by
Science
and that NASA headquarters had approved a “tentative plan” to hold “a press conference on August 5, 6 or 7.” At the same time, it stated that the publication date was “currently believed to be August 16.” NASA headquarters was insisting that the press conference be held in Washington, not at Johnson Space Center. Hartsfield noted that among other preparations, he was readying photos and “video B-roll” (background material for television) of the meteorite lab and the meteorite itself in Building 31, and of McKay and Gibson at work on the more advanced microscope in Building 13. At that point, technicians were working to develop animation showing the hypothetical history of the meteorite as proposed by McKay et al.

Nan Broadbent, communications
• Author interview with Broadbent.

The magazine receives
• The magazine’s conditions of acceptance call for papers that reveal “a novel concept of broad importance to the scientific community,” which has never previously been disclosed to the public, and which is likely to stimulate further investigation and debate, according to AAAS Web site instructions for first-time authors. The paper then has to be approved by a member of the AAAS Board of Reviewing Editors, made up of around one hundred leading, active scientists. Finally, the manuscript goes to anonymous peer reviewers selected for their expertise in the field. (With the advent of the Internet,
Science
and other journals were developing ways of stepping up the pace on selected papers by such means as rapid electronic publication.)

Journalists consider these
• Deborah Blum and Mary Knudson, eds.,
A Field Guide for Science Writers
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 10.

Ordinarily, the orchestrated
• Some scientists simply elected not to publish their papers in journals whose constraints they found onerous. This often meant turning to outlets with less prestige and influence and in some cases a less rigorous process of peer review. (Geoffrey Marcy, one of the leading discoverers of extrasolar planets, had the moxie and credibility to make this form of rebellion work for him.) In the end, whatever the outlet, the information became fodder for the machinery by which the science world did its self-policing. For a brief discussion of the embargo system as it worked in this and one other celebrated case, see Eliot Marshall, “Embargoes: Too Hot to Hold: Life on Mars and Cloned Sheep Couldn’t Be Kept Under Wraps,”
Science
, vol. 282 (Oct. 30, 1998): p. 862. For
Science
magazine’s own description of its philosophy on the matter, see editorial in the same issue: Floyd E. Bloom, “Embracing the Embargo,” p. 877.

In any case, journalists
• Most of the research that made headlines and seemed to trumpet certainty was, to varying degrees, tentative. So when
was
a development ripe for public consumption? Was it when the researcher first completed the experiment? When the paper describing the results made it through the review process and got accepted by a journal? When the journal published it? When it was tested and supported in subsequent experiments by other groups? After specialists in the field accepted it by broad consensus?

The answer was any and all of the above, according to Boyce Rensberger, director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT and former science editor of
The
Washington Post
(in an interview with the author). The scientist doing the work, or a journalist who found out about it, could elect to tell the world at any of these stages. In the normal course of events, the uncertainty connected with the research results would diminish, and the credibility of the assertions would increase, as the work passed successfully through each wicket. Ideally, any journalist reporting on the matter would forthrightly disclose—even emphasize—the degree of uncertainty. This sliding uncertainty scale, however, was often a source of confusion for citizens, bombarded as they were with new “discoveries” that were hailed one day and discarded the next. People were seeing snapshots of a mostly hidden process captured at varying stages.

Dick Zare, for example
• Author interviews with Zare.

Some at the Foundation
• Author interviews with Scott Borg, head of polar programs at the National Science Foundation, and Curt Suplee, director of the foundation’s public affairs.

Like the scientists in
• Author interview with Broadbent; see also Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” p. 22.

One morning a few
• Author interview with Broadbent.

In early summer
• Author interviews with Broadbent and Borchelt; see also Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” pp. 22–24.