The Rock From Mars (47 page)

In early 1995
• Author interviews with Romanek, Gibson, and McKay.

To the concern
• McKay in press conference, August 7, 1996, and in author interviews.

The instrument McKay
• Author interviews with McKay and McCoy.

When he looked at
• Author interviews with McKay, Gibson, and Romanek. The new microscope made it possible to look at freshly fractured surfaces of samples from the rock, which had never been exposed to harsh chemicals. It also made it possible to apply a thinner, more fine-grained coating from a wider menu of coating materials, thus reducing the possibility that the coating itself would create shapes that might be interpreted as indigenous.

The little band knew
• Author interviews with McKay and other team members.

McKay and the others
• Author interviews with McKay and other team members; see also McKay interview with Steven J. Dick, NASA archives.

In Palo Alto, the
• Author interviews with Zare; Zare’s written account.

A year earlier
• Author interviews with McKay and other team members, and with Huntoon. Among others informed at JSC was division chief Douglas Blanchard.

But the group had
• Author interviews with Gibson.

Outside the cone of
• Author interviews with Tim McCoy and Ralph Harvey. McCoy, curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, was a postdoc working at Johnson Space Center, in Building 31, between 1994 and 1996. Harvey, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and head of the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites, was a visiting faculty fellow at Johnson Space Center in 1996, as the McKay group was preparing to publish. He had the office next to Gibson’s in Building 31. His NASA sponsor was Gordon McKay, David’s brother. He was researching the same Martian meteorite as the McKay group and would soon become a leading critic of the McKay hypothesis.

An odd breach
• Steve McVicker, “The Xerox Files,”
Houston Press,
April 17–23, 1997.

In the run-up
• Author interviews with Gibson and other team members. See also
Newsweek
(Feb. 17, 1997), p. 56, for Gibson quote. The event was the annual meeting of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. The retraction of the paper drew both criticism and praise. Abhijit Basu, one of the people McKay had mentored in the 1970s, was now a researcher and professor who viewed the withdrawal of this paper as the proper restraint of “a true scientist.” It was his impression that McKay had withdrawn the paper because he needed more data before going public. Basu would tell the story to his students as an example of the way the process should work: through verifying and reverifying. There was no such thing as “truth” in science, he would say. It’s all conjecture—until it’s refuted.

At a gathering
• Author interview with the Smithsonian’s Tim McCoy (who worked as a postdoc in Building 31 in 1994–96). The Berlin event was a meeting of the Meteoritical Society, one of two major annual meetings of meteorite scientists, the other being the NASA-funded Lunar and Planetary Institute’s gatherings in Houston.

Later that summer
• Author interviews with Ralph Harvey and Chris Romanek.

What no outsiders
• Author interviews with McKay and other team members.

In the abstract
• Draft document, with edits, June 17, 1996, provided to the author by David Salisbury of Stanford.

On April 4, 1996
• Author interviews with Gibson and members of the staff of
Science.
Regarding Sagan’s participation, see also William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara,
Mars
(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001), pp. 295–98; and William Poundstone,
Carl Sagan
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 379.

Two years earlier
• Carl Sagan’s
Pale Blue Dot
(New York: Random House, 1994), p. 242; also cited in Poundstone,
Carl Sagan,
p. 379.

All through the summer
• Author interviews with McKay and members of his team, and
Science
staff members.

Most of the assessments
• Author interviews with Gibson and
Science
staff members.

They knew from the comments
• See David Salisbury, “Life on Mars: Reviewing the Evidence 9 Months Later,”
Stanford News Service,
May 28, 1997, at: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/1997/may28/mars.htm.

James Hartsfield, Johnson
• Author interview with James Hartsfield, of Johnson Space Center public affairs, and other NASA public affairs officers, and related memos and drafts of press releases showing edits, including draft release and memo from July 19, 1996: “Meteorite Yields Strong Evidence of Life on Early Mars.”

Salisbury, for his part
• Author interviews with David Salisbury of Stanford public affairs, as well as related memos, drafts of press releases showing edits, and other documents.

In an early draft
• The phrase “circumstantial evidence” favored by Salisbury made it into a NASA Video Advisory issued on August 6, 1996, but the final wording in the lead paragraph of the joint NASA-Stanford press release of August 7 was: “A NASA research team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), Houston, TX, and at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, has found evidence that strongly suggests primitive life may have existed on Mars more than 3.6 billion years ago.”

Visiting scientist Ralph
• Author interview with Harvey.

CHAPTER SEVEN:
the grand inquisitor

Dan Goldin, the
• Accounts of the “grilling” in this chapter are based primarily on author interviews with Goldin, McKay, Gibson, Wesley Huntress, and Laurie Boeder.

Daniel Saul Goldin grew
• Author interviews with Goldin; transcripts of Goldin speeches and testimony before Congress. See also Kathy Sawyer, “The Man on the Moon: NASA Chief Dan Goldin and a Little Chaos Just Might Save the Space Program,”
Washington Post,
July 20, 1994. Goldin was born on July 23, 1940.

In 1962, when
• In 1962, Goldin earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from City College. Although he would work as a “rocket scientist,” and refer to himself that way, and would continue his learning, he never formally acquired a higher degree. He would receive many honorary doctorates from universities.

(He wasn’t all work
• Goldin Speaking at a November 22, 1996, symposium at George Washington University.

For example, his team
• Author interviews with Goldin. See also Theresa Foley, “Mr. Goldin Goes to Washington,”
Air and Space
(April–May 1995): pp. 39–40.

His prescriptions for
• Author interviews, as a
Washington Post
staff writer, with members of the space council under the first President Bush. See also Foley, “Mr. Goldin,” pp. 36–43. Before he came to NASA, Goldin was vice president and general manager of the TRW Space and Technology Group, in Redondo Beach, California.

Many people thought
• See W. Henry Lambright,
Transforming Government: Dan Goldin and the Remaking of NASA,
Report for the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government, March 2001. See also David Morrison, “Low-Rent Space,”
National Journal,
April 29, 1995, pp. 1027–32. NASA’s fiscal 1993 budget request was for $122 billion over five years; by the time of the 1995 request, that figure had fallen to $87 billion. For fiscal 1996, after prodigious efforts to meet that mark, the agency was stunned in January 1995 to receive a White House directive to cut another $5 billion. The budget process makes figures difficult to boil down, but cumulatively, the
National Journal
said, the agency had sustained a 36 percent “projected budget reduction” since 1993. That was a huge cut by any standard, and more than the agency had been led to expect and plan for.

NASA was unusual
• National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958; Walter A. McDougall,
. . . the Heavens and the Earth
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 195–96, 200, 206–7, 228.

The new man arrived
• Author interviews with members of the White House space council under the first President Bush.

Announcing himself as
• Sawyer, “The Man on the Moon.”

At the beginning, as
• Morrison, “Low-Rent Space,” p. 1028.

“Leadership is not
• Author interview with Goldin.

Goldin made the new
• Author interviews with Goldin and White House officials; Morrison, “Low-Rent Space.”

Goldin believed that a
• Author interviews with Goldin and other NASA officials. See also Sawyer, “The Man on the Moon.”

Some who got
• Author interviews with various NASA officials. They cited examples of Goldin’s inconsistencies, such as his promises to “empower” lower-level employees by delegating decisions and to encourage fearless risk taking, while instead he made decisions at the top and instilled fear. Wes Huntress, then NASA’s chief space scientist, made the Jedi and Sith comparisons in an interview with the author.

Goldin had waded
• Foley, “Mr. Goldin,” p. 38. Goldin also complained that the peer-review system at NASA was governed by those already part of the space community. “It almost guarantees that you will lop off the new ideas. It guarantees some level . . . of technical excellence in the details, but it may be mediocrity in the concepts. . . . We have to change and open up the whole process to allow new places, new faces, and revolutionary new ideas.”

He dismantled the
• Foley, “Mr. Goldin,” pp. 36–43.

He railed against
• Author interviews with Goldin; see also Goldin’s speech, “A New Trajectory for NASA” (Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, Oct. 15, 1996; reprinted by the George C. Marshall Institute). See also a January 6, 1999, deposition filed in U.S. Court of Federal Claims,
Northrop Grumman Corp. v. the U.S.
(provided by NASA Watch; see Web site: http://www.spaceref.com/nasa/sseic/01.06.99.goldin.htm). Goldin said he had felt “shock and utter disgust” in the summer of 1992, as the new administrator, when he discovered contractor managers who “were only committed to the protection of their empires and their jobs and not committed to the end product for the United States government. . . . The inmates were running the asylum, . . . and everybody was vying for their own piece of the pie.” Goldin concluded that “you cannot straighten out this kind of a mess with nice meetings, with teacups and doilies. . . . It was ugly, it was miserable, it was problematic, but it was without malice aforethought” on Goldin’s part. At another point, Goldin said, “This is my life, this program. And I gave up my position in industry because I was so worried about this. . . . I was not just frustrated with industry, but I was frustrated with industry and myself. As hard as I was on everybody else, I was harder on myself because I felt I could not move as fast as I should have.”

Goldin and his top lieutenants
• January 6, 1999, deposition filed in U.S. Court of Federal Claims,
Northrop Grumman Corp. v. the U.S.
Goldin said that when he first took office, he discovered the shuttle was taking off in “conditions where that shuttle could have blown up on the launch pad. The contractors were making a tremendous fee . . . and every time there was a problem, they would add more inspectors.” He brought in a legendary NASA hand, George Abbey, whom he credited with making the shuttle three or four times more reliable and yet reducing spending by a billion a year.

As for the embattled
• The controversial plan involved a historic, White House–approved merger of the American and Russian spaceflight programs—former Cold War rivals joined in new purpose. Goldin’s approach was partially vindicated in 1998, when the first components of the orbital research laboratory finally at least made it into low Earth orbit. On the day Goldin interrogated McKay and Gibson, U.S. astronaut Shannon Lucid was aboard the Russian facility
Mir
in orbit with two Russian cosmonauts.

In August 1993
• Author interviews with Goldin; Morrison, “Low-Rent Space,” p. 1029; Foley, “Mr. Goldin,” pp. 38, 40; Lambright,
Transforming Government,
p. 20.

Goldin acknowledged that
• Author interview with Goldin.

Goldin’s personal vision
• Goldin articulated his hopes for the long term on numerous public occasions, including a speech to the American Geophysical Union, May 26, 1994.

In these advances
• Author interviews with Goldin and Wes Huntress, and internal NASA memos and planning documents provided by Huntress.

Having already gone
• NASA’s science office had been cut from about 120 to 65 people.

Some at headquarters
• John Kerridge interview with Steven Dick, NASA archives.

On July 12, 1996
• Author interview with Huntress; Don Savage, NASA public affairs officer, “memo for the record.” The records of McKay and Gibson, like those of
Science,
indicate that the magazine informed them of the paper’s acceptance on July 16. Don Savage’s memo indicates, however, that NASA science official Edward Weiler called him at home earlier, on July 12, to tell him of “possible publication in
Science.”
Weiler told the author he does not recall who at
Science
called him.

Although this may seem a minor point, the flow of information is always interesting to some. Asked about the notification,
Science
magazine deputy editor Brooks Hansen told the author in an e-mail, “The printed accept date on the paper is 16 July, and that is when we (the editorial office) would have informed the authors of formal acceptance. . . . The editorial office of
Science
does not routinely inform author’s institutions of decisions, and not several days in advance of informing the authors.” However, he said, the magazine or the public affairs office might in certain cases (“where the authors have requested or facilitated” such a move) discuss press relations with the author’s institutions while a paper’s acceptance is still pending.