The Rock From Mars (27 page)

All of this was in the minds of those gathered in the White House Treaty Room. As the damp and wintry day darkened, the planned two-hour session stretched on to almost three hours because Gore had become so engrossed in the conversation.

He was unusual among elected politicians in his ease with scientific, as well as theological and philosophical, issues. In fact, for him this exchange was a genuine treat, not political theater. This quality had proved to be a mixed blessing for his political hopes, earning him praise for his intellectual heft but also feeding the stereotype of Gore as a wooden, condescending überwonk.

As a young congressman, he had been a precocious presence on science and technology committees. In 1992, inspired by the near death of his young son in a street accident, he published
Earth in the Balance,
a best-selling book about his environmental—and spiritual—concerns. In it, he quoted Erwin Schrödinger, a pioneer in quantum physics, on the topic of how a pattern of life can emerge from a formless cluster of molecules, “escaping the decay into atomic chaos.”

Now, as the Treaty Room discussion continued, Gore departed from the prepared script and asked a question that echoed that passage from his book. “Okay, I’ve been listening to all of you on the possibility that life might actually be ubiquitous in the universe,” he said. “How does that square with the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the universe tends everywhere towards
disorder—
but we all know that life is a highly
ordered
process?”

Jeez! The vice president’s guests were caught with their answers down. They were also delighted. It was an excellent question. (If anyone but the vice president had asked, someone might have responded that the “law” he cited had to do with closed systems, and a living creature was not a closed system but one that would “drink orderliness” from its environment.)

“There was not a scientist in the room who wasn’t impressed” with Gore’s performance that day, astronomer Anneila Sargent of Caltech, one of those at the table, would remark afterward. McKay was no exception. He was struck by the fact that the vice president had taken time to give the issue so much thought, enough to develop his own ideas about it. “That guy is really smart,” McKay would tell Mary Fae when he got home and described this remarkable day.

The discussion might have resembled a philosophers’ salon. But McKay was aware that he was also witnessing the unavoidable dance of science and politics. Somebody had to try to harmonize the scientists’ world of open-ended, unpredictable inquiry and the government world of election cycles and budget plans. The link was money. The scientists needed it; politicians dispensed it.

The rapid advance of discoveries about the nature of life and the cosmos had provided context and inspiration for the McKay team as they approached the rock. Now, the NASA headquarters team carried in their pockets a blueprint—part policy statement, part marketing tool—that would build on those developments and meld their disparate threads into an ambitious, long-term government assault on nature’s deepest mysteries—profound questions previously limited to the provinces of philosophers, poets, and priests. The policy makers were eager to align themselves with the broader struggle to document the narrative that began with the genesis moment known as the big bang and continued as the thermonuclear furnaces of stars forged the elements that led to the chemistry by which the first life assembled itself.

The excitement surrounding the Mars rock seemed an ideal kick start for the strategy. From the moment NASA officials learned that
Science
had accepted the McKay paper, they maneuvered to make the most of the anticipated surge in public attention and among researchers. As Huntress and Goldin saw it, the new Origins program would give the struggling space agency a compelling purpose that would engage the public and, consequently, be of aid in the perpetual battle of the budget, which NASA had been losing badly.

President Clinton, in his comments about the claims of possible life on Mars the day of the August press conference, had announced that he would ask Gore to “convene at the White House before the end of the year a bipartisan space summit on the future of America’s space program. A significant purpose of this summit will be to discuss how America should pursue answers to the scientific questions raised by this finding.”

NASA and the other agencies organized the summit as a multistep process, with preliminary meetings on relevant topics leading up to a final rare bipartisan confab with the White House and key members of Congress. This session in the Treaty Room was supposed to be the next to last in the series.

In late October, at the request of the White House science office, NASA and the National Research Council (an arm of the National Academy of Sciences) had convened a workshop to lay the groundwork. The theme was (as Huntress had suggested) “The Search for Origins.” The National Research Council selected, and NASA approved, some three dozen biologists, planetary scientists, astronomers, and cosmologists to attend.

Among the group’s written conclusions (which highlighted NASA’s new key word in all caps):

•                  “For the first time in history, we have achieved the level of understanding and technical capability to press for answers to fundamental questions concerning our ORIGINS, our history and our context in the Universe.”

•                  “The ORIGINS quest informs, excites, and inspires the public. Its outcome may well have as profound an effect on human thought as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions.”

Running throughout the activities was an obvious awareness of a political dilemma: how to demonstrate political commitment to tackling the big, fundamental questions when there was little hope of prying loose new money to do it.

As part of its “guidance” for the summit, NASA had prepared a memo for the White House science office: “Make it clear that NASA has successfully restructured its program to focus on research and development and has [relevance] to the American public.” The agency’s stated goal was to win support for a merely
stable—
not larger—budget from 1997 to 2001 “at the $13.6–$13.8 billion level.” But a hand-scrawled notation on the page differed: “Not [illegible]
enuf!
14 at least w/o Mars initiative!” The memo went on to ask, “If budget is held to FY 1996 (vs 97!?) outyear runout, what are policy decisions on what to cut?”

Though genuinely excited about the potential implications of the Martian meteorite findings, the White House was preoccupied with the deficit. The administration was grappling with what one space policy expert described as its “uncertainty over how best to deal with the firestorm of interest unleashed by the president’s words [in connection with the Mars rock story], compared to its desire to avoid major new, expensive space commitments.”

Hopes for another major, Kennedy-style push in
human
space exploration had been as persistent as they were unrealistic. The last time anybody had tried it was in 1989, when President Bush’s proposal for a human mission to Mars had sunk without a ripple, largely because Congress found it so easy to laugh at NASA’s stolid, self-serving proposal of a $400 billion sticker price.

Clinton and Gore were not about to follow that path.

But well-founded research on the compelling question of extraterrestrial life was another matter. The summit process served to underline the fact that, as Michael Meyer, the top NASA exobiology official, put it, “this is not crazy research but, in fact, has become cutting edge with mainstream scientists.”

When the meeting finally broke up, waiting reporters wanted to know about the resulting plan for action. The media wanted news, not schmooze—but from their perspective, the latter was all they got. White House science adviser John Gibbons commented that the event had provided “a good deal of flavor and perspective” for the vice president, and should help administration officials be more definitive in their testimony before Congress. The group around the table had concluded that Goldin and NASA were on the right track, he said, “to do more with the same dollars.”

The vice president issued a statement calling NASA’s new Origins program “a vital contribution to our national and global pursuit of knowledge.” He would prove to be a staunch supporter.

An ebullient Dan Goldin, his voice tight with emotion, called the event “a highlight of my career in Washington.” He said it was in harmony with NASA’s new approach: in the past, NASA had defined itself by the engineering temples it wanted to build and then picked the questions to fit. That was about to change, Goldin vowed. The overarching great questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos would henceforth determine the engineering instruments to be built, not the other way around. Budgets and engineers and infrastructures were finally going to labor in the service of the science.

As 1997 approached, the American space program seemed to be moving out of its long purgatory. Now the United States, with other nations, was beginning a new thrust, to dispatch flotillas of spacecraft to Mars, to other planets, to comets, asteroids, and moons. Engineers were poised to finally get the long-planned and ever-controversial space station off the drawing board and into orbit—its ultimate purpose to serve as a springboard to human exploration of Mars and beyond. At this moment, it seemed that space exploration was becoming exciting and vital again.

Within two months, the “space summiteers” would lop off their final meeting, saying it was unnecessary. The goal of the event—to assure NASA of “stable and sustainable” funding—was already in hand. The White House and Congress would allow the agency to beat the Washington expectations game by getting if not an increase, more money than anticipated. The agency would halt its steep five-year slide downward with a budget pegged at around $13 billion running out to fiscal year 2001 or 2002—better than the budget targets of under $12 billion that the Office of Management and Budget had threatened for months.

And in the realm of space science (as opposed to human spaceflight and other categories), the budget would increase over the coming years, as NASA shifted funding internally.

Around Johnson Space Center, at least, McKay, Gibson, and Thomas-Keprta would be honored for their role in bringing public attention, an improved funding outlook, and other benefits to the realm of solar system research. They had never felt themselves motivated by such concerns. At first, when people accused them of exaggerating their claims about the rock in order to enhance NASA’s bottom line, they felt surprised, and they would always feel stomach-knotting twinges of dismay and anger.

Those who accused NASA of trying to get political mileage out of the Mars rock were correct on the facts. But far from being defensive, Goldin, Huntress, and other agency officials expressed pride in their approach and their accomplishment. They felt they were doing just what they were paid to do—coming up with a set of projects that appealed to taxpayers, that would bring credit to the country and benefit the human race. If NASA did well in the bargain, well, so be it.

The administration’s decision to make the new Origins initiative the centerpiece of its NASA funding request was the response many space scientists had hoped for, the right follow-up to recent discoveries. Buoyed by public excitement over the rock, Origins would make biological research an integral part of the space program in an unprecedented way. It would boost the number of biologists winning NASA grants and catalyze the ascendancy of an emerging field of study newly named astrobiology. It encompassed the interplay of life and planets and the universe and how they evolve together, and it required the melding of many different fields of expertise.

Matters of budget, policy, and metaphysics aside, for McKay, the Treaty Room session was a moment to be savored. It was a gestalt experience, he thought, enjoyable at the visceral as well as the intellectual level, and very heady. The mild-mannered geologist from Houston was sorry when the gathering broke up and it was time to head out into the chill and blustery dark.

Pathfinder bounced onto the Martian surface on the Fourth of July 1997, marking a triumphant return of American robots after a decades-long absence. In the pipeline well before the announcement of the Mars rock claims the previous summer, the mission was designed not to do science but to test technological capability. Pathfinder’s assignment was basically to cruise the dusty surface and sniff rocks. It traveled no more than the length of a typical auditorium and would produce no significant change in the human view of Mars. And yet the mission was wildly popular, and succeeded far beyond its modest goals.

A vast worldwide audience watched the adventures of the loose-jointed pet-sized robot unfold live on the young Internet. The adventure reintroduced people to the forgotten pizzazz of “touching” and exploring another world.

With a view to the Goldin regime’s emphasis on risk taking, groundbreaking research, and efficient, clever management, the space program had geared up for the second great assault on the red planet in the history of the space age. U.S. missions—often in collaboration with Russia and other space-faring nations—would be dispatched at every opportunity: roughly every twenty-six months when the planets were in favorable alignment. Pathfinder was the opening salvo.

Planners had to consider how the findings in the Mars rock affected those future missions. As the controversy over the rock waxed and waned, and as the McKay core group pressed its hunt for more data, some planetary scientists concentrated on the aspects of the rock’s meaning that were not in dispute. What tales did it tell most clearly about the young Mars? The implications were huge even without claims about biology. The rock’s fascinating geochemical signatures seemed to restore the rich potential for biology in the Martian past that the 1970s Viking landers had eviscerated. No matter who won the “pro-life”/“anti-life” battle over the rock, the allure of the extraterrestrial was back. And the arguments about the selection of landing spots and sample types for the Mars missions took on a new edge.