The Rock From Mars (51 page)

•                  NASA document, Oct. 2, 1996, “Vice President’s Symposium on Space Science: Strawman Plan,” that states under the heading “Policy Context,” “In early and mid-1996, the projected 5-year budget runout for the agency indicated a decline from approximately $14 billion to well less than $12 billion.” Senator Barbara Mikulski, ranking minority member of the Senate Subcommittee on VA-HUD-Independent Agencies, suggested to the administration there be “a White House summit of congressional and administration leaders” to discuss the future of the space program, the document states. “After the announcement of possible evidence for ancient life in a Martian meteorite in August, the Administration announced that a summit would be held in December to discuss priorities for the space program in an era of expanding opportunities for scientific discovery but contracting discretionary budgets.” Under “Technical Context,” the document states, “The agency is eager to take advantage of this opportunity to explain its proposed research plans and to attract support for them in the current environment of enhanced interest.”

•                  NASA memo, Nov. 8, 1996, from Alan Ladwig to more than three dozen NASA officials, noting that the presidential election was over and, in response to a Nov. 5 memo from the White House science office, outlining a series of weekly teleconferences to plan for the summit.

•                  Letter from George Brown Jr., ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, to Vice President Gore, Nov. 18, 1996, urging the administration to address the issue of NASA’s budget earlier in the process than usual—that is, at the summit planned for early January. Brown says, “I recognize that discussion of specific agency budgetary matters prior to the formal release of the Federal Budget is not normal practice, but I believe that this is a unique situation which requires the utmost candor if it is to be successful.”

•                  Memorandum for the vice president (the date noted only as “November xx, 1996”), from science adviser John Gibbons and vice presidential aide Greg Simon, stating the purpose of the December 11 White House gathering: “to hear from leaders in the U.S. science community on what priorities the U.S. space program should embrace in light of the Mars meteorite and other recent discoveries in space science.”

The group steered clear
• NASA legislative affairs office memo (e-mail), Nov. 22, 1996, stated, “The VP has asked for this [symposium] specifically so he may ‘chew on’ some of the issues surrounding this [Mars rock] discovery. . . . The symposium will not touch on budget issues in a substantive manner.”

The other men and
• A document prepared for the vice president’s symposium listing “NASA Suggested Participants,” dated Nov. 20, 1996, shows only one woman among the dozen or so people at the table, with the rest of the attendees seated nearby. A scrawled notation suggests “more women, higher caliber” people at the table.

Gould was delighted
• “Salon Interview with Gould,” Salon.com, no. 33 (Sept. 23–27, 1996).

Two years earlier
• The term
astrobiology
supplanted the term
exobiology.
Though people differed on the exact definitions, astrobiology was generally taken to be a more sweeping term, incorporating several existing disciplines and pioneering new ones. NASA defined
astrobiology
as “the study of the living universe” in its 1996 Strategic Plan. That study focuses on the relationship between the origins and evolution of life, on one hand, and the origins and evolution of planets, stars, and the cosmos as a whole, on the other. For an extended discussion of the evolution of the term’s meaning, see Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick,
The Living Universe
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 205–13.

Aside from the profound
• Steven J. Dick,
The Biological Universe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–2, 322.

Richard Zare, for one
• Author interviews with Zare, and Zare’s written commentary.

The White House
• The meeting planners had prepared lists of questions to be addressed about life’s origins, about the most promising places to search for extraterrestrial life, about the Mars rock, and about the theological, ethical, and philosophical implications. Among the latter, a proposed query in one NASA document showed the tortuous care of a staffer acutely attuned to political and religious sensibilities: “Does this exploration evict God from His/Her heavens to leave Him/Her only in the human heart?”

Just before the vice
• NASA memo from Alan Ladwig, Dec. 10, 1996.

Sagan was arguably
• William Poundstone,
Carl Sagan
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999), pp. 355, 379. An astronomer-educator had suggested naming the meteorite the Sagan rock, but because of the uncertainties about the claims and other factors, it never happened.

He had sent
• Sagan, three-page letter, Oct. 26, 1996, addressed to Gibbons and Huntress (copied to Mark S. Allen, director of the National Research Council Space Studies Board), provided to the author.

He eventually garnered
• Poundstone,
Carl Sagan,
pp. 355–58.

In one of his
• William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara,
Mars
(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001), p. 298.

A couple of weeks after
• Craig Venter, of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, collaborated with Carl R. Woese, of the University of Illinois, Urbana, who had first suggested in 1977 that certain microbes deserved their own separate branch. Other participants were from Johns Hopkins University. (See C. J. Bult et al., “Complete Genome Sequence of the Methanogenic Archaeon,
Methanococcus jannaschii,
”
Science
[Aug. 23, 1996]: pp. 1058–73.)

Now, as the Treaty
• Author interviews with Goldin, Huntress, and others.

(If anyone but the
• Matt Ridley,
Genome
(New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 12, for example, says of living things, such as rabbits: “They do not defy the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system everything tends from order towards disorder, because rabbits are not closed systems. Rabbits build packets of order and complexity called bodies but at the cost of expending large amounts of energy. In Erwin Schrödinger’s phrase, living creatures ‘drink orderliness’ from the environment.”

McKay was no
• Author interview with McKay.

The policymakers were eager
• Astrophysicists had shown that the cosmic inventory of carbon, oxygen, calcium, and iron was manufactured in the thermonuclear fires that burned in the hearts of earlier generations of stars. These microscopic building blocks of life were then distributed across space and time through another act of stellar generosity—star death by cataclysmic explosion. (Sagan was famously fond of saying, “We are all star stuff.”) Bones, blood, and the very matter with which inquiring minds contemplated the vastness and their place in it were all a legacy from the stars.

“Walking down the corridors of an observatory, you see collections of carbon atoms hunched over silicon boxes, controlling distant telescopes of iron and aluminum in an attempt to trace the origin of the very substances of which they are made,” astrophysicist Robert Kirshner wrote in “The Earth’s Elements,”
Life in the Universe,
a special issue of
Scientific American
(New York: Freeman, 1995), p. 19.

The excitement surrounding
• Huntress, July 1996, advisory memo to Goldin. As NASA prepared to inform the White House about the rock, Huntress wrote: “The Federal Government should consider supporting the idea of ‘Origins’ as a principal [Dan—i.e. Kennedy-like?] goal for the agency. There are no large immediate resource requirements since the program is current technology-limited and investments in technology development will be required before any missions can be launched; sometime early in the next decade.”

Under the heading “Political,” Huntress wrote: “Dan, your call on this one—” and then, “The president could play on the popularity of the space program, and the idea of life in outer space [as demonstrated by the current immense popularity of science fiction in print and movies], by recognizing this discovery as one of the most amazing results of his Administration. He could announce that his new Administration after the election will establish a program in NASA to search for life’s origins in this and other solar systems. America will send small inexpensive robotic missions to Mars at every opportunity to follow up on this discovery.” The seeds of the Origins program were contained in a NASA precursor called TOPS (Toward Other Planetary Systems).

As Huntress and Goldin
• One example of NASA’s concern about the budget outlook was contained in a May 20, 1996, written summary of a May 16 hearing on the fiscal year 1997 NASA budget request (NASA archives). The Subcommittee on VA-HUD-Independent Agencies of the Committee on Appropriations held the hearing. For four years NASA funding had been essentially frozen at the 1992 level; the agency had taken a 36 percent reduction in the planned budget coincident with a 40 percent increase in productivity and a reduction in its payroll for employees and contractors by 30,000 people. See also Workshop Plan for Space Science Symposium, Oct. 23, 1996 (NASA archives): in early and mid-1996, the projected five-year NASA budget runout showed a decline from about $14 billion to less than $12 billion. The agency budget had peaked in 1966, early in the Apollo program, at a figure that, after adjustment for inflation, was the equivalent of at least double the current total.

President Clinton, in
• White House Transcript, Remarks by the President, South Lawn, Aug. 7, 1996. The summit had been proposed initially at a May committee hearing by Senator Barbara Mikulski (Democrat of Maryland), whose state was home to thousands of NASA employees; see June 18, 1996, letter from Mikulski to Al Gore, expressing concern about the NASA budget outlook, referring to the “need to stand sentry to ensure that there is sustainable funding for core NASA missions in the outyear budgets” and calling for the summit “to discuss the future of space funding.” See also “Commentary: Modest Summit Expectations,” by space policy historian John Logsdon, of George Washington University,
Space News
(Dec. 9–15, 1996): p. 34.

The previous such summit on space had been held in 1993, resulting in the historic though controversial agreement to embrace Russia, America’s former Cold War adversary and chief rival in space, as a partner in constructing the international space station.

NASA and the other agencies
• In planning for the session, Gore had told advisers that he wanted to “chew on” issues surrounding the Mars rock claims, hear all the newest and best ideas for where the U.S. space program was headed, and be able to bargain in good faith with Congress during the budget battles to come. In their first meeting on the topic, on August 21, the vice president had indicated that he wanted to get fifty people (later reduced to about thirty) together. Once that had happened, the president and vice president planned to meet with the ultimate summit group (to include the president, vice president, White House science adviser, NASA’s Goldin, key administration officials, and the congressional leadership) to forge a consensus on the budget. (The attendees also agreed that there should be a premeeting with congressional staffers to “lay out best and worst case for 1-year and 5-year budget.”)

See NASA legislative affairs document (copy of e-mail), 9:30
A.M.
, Nov. 22, 1996, distributed by Jeff Lawrence; document provided by Huntress, undated, titled “Status on Space Summit”; also author interview with Rick Borchelt of White House science staff.

In late October
• “The Search for Origins: Findings of a Space Science Workshop,” October 28–30, 1996. Claude Canizares of MIT, chairman of the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board, led the workshop. Afterward, he called it “a remarkable conclave, because this very diverse group, many of whom had never met before, came to the realization that their several scientific disciplines were all converging on a core theme. . . . The study of Origins seeks answers, in scientific terms, to the fundamental questions about how we came to be, questions as old as human thought itself.”

A related event took place on November 22, when George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and other space groups sponsored a public symposium on “the cultural, intellectual and scientific significance of the recent announcement of evidence of long-ago life on Mars.” Glenn MacPherson of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who decades earlier had first classified the Mars rock as coming from an asteroid, brought the museum’s chunk of the meteorite for display. He and a security guard stayed throughout the day. An overflow crowd of 550 showed up; some had to watch on closed-circuit TV.

As part of its
• “Planning Guidance for Space Summit,” undated, prepared by NASA science office for meeting with vice president’s staff. Also, author interviews with Goldin, Huntress, and others, and various other summit documents. See also John Logsdon, “Commentary: Modest Summit Expectations.” In this case, NASA’s goal was not the limitless budget of Apollo, or even a major increase. The prize would be mere predictability: an agreement by the White House and congress to end the pattern of frustrating budgetary fits and starts, and give NASA managers sufficient stability that they could dare to plan a program and follow that plan.

The administration was grappling with
• John Logsdon, “Commentary: Modest Summit Expectations.”

The summit process served
• Michael Meyer interview with Steven Dick, NASA archives.

When the meeting
• December 11 press briefing by Gibbons and other meeting participants.