One day, she sent a postcard to a friend at JPL to say she would be back in a few months. “Do you have any jobs?” she asked, knowing the answer was very much in doubt. The day she arrived back in Ohio, JPL called to say they had a job for her, a good job, if she wanted it, but she would have to make a decision that day or the next. The job opening was on the new Pathfinder project, the next spacecraft to go to Mars. She said she’d take it. Jennifer was fairly skeptical about Pathfinder, but so was JPL. “A lot of people thought it would never work. There were so many things that could go wrong, especially with the Mars environment.” Her new job didn’t seem to have official status at JPL. Even the official Mars program people kept their distance. The development of Pathfinder struck her as a skunkworks, basically. She knew what that meant: if it wasn’t working, they could take it out and shoot it and bury it and no one would be the wiser.
The nature of her job changed as the mission went along. She began by working on software, “but the neat thing about Pathfinder was that once you took a job, it was sort of a ‘where-do-you-fit-in?’ type of thing. People didn’t say, ‘That’s not your job, stay out of there.’ They allowed you to move around, so I ended up doing more integration and testing in the early stages than operations. People were always given the opportunity to move over the borders and learn more and do more.” This open-ended, go-wherever-you-fit-in approach was something very new at NASA, and at JPL, which functioned along rigid, bureaucratic lines of command. The problem with the traditional structure was that if one element was delayed, or failed, or went awry, it brought the entire system to a halt. It became accepted practice for missions to slip several years. People were confined to narrowly defined jobs, and many of their talents and interests went untapped, because they had only a single task to perform. That paradigm didn’t apply to Pathfinder. Things were more flexible. It actually was faster and better and cheaper. This was all new, and very un-NASA.
Not everyone at JPL took to this open-ended approach, but Jennifer did. She became more confident in her various roles, accustomed to change. After her experiences in Russia, she knew not to overreact to situations and to plug along until she found a solution or failed miserably. In time she developed an informal network of specialists and advisors she could trust, her go-to people. The Pathfinder cradle-to-grave approach helped a lot. People came on board at the beginning, when the hardware was delivered, and they stayed all the way through to the end of operations. On the typical NASA mission, the person responsible for delivering the hardware would say, “I’ve delivered my hardware on time,” and walk away. If the hardware happened to be a camera, and it took pictures, they felt they had achieved their goal. They didn’t care if it was impossible to operate, or if it didn’t get the right pictures. But if you worked on Pathfinder, you had to undergo a mental shift. If you designed your component incorrectly, if it was difficult to test or to operate, it was still your problem.
It was difficult to explain the new thinking, Jennifer realized. You had to experience it for yourself, and then it could make a huge impact. You would become committed to the ultimate goal, whatever it was. In Pathfinder, the goal was to get to Mars quickly and cheaply, and to get a rover to function on the Martian terrain. Things worked in a sort of non-systematic way because people attacked problems where they saw them. Eventually, they generated procedures, and she wrote the documentation, but this was not a document-heavy mission, like most NASA missions. She sat down with a couple of other people, and they asked, “What are the most likely contingencies? What’s our nominal plan at the big-picture level?” She realized this could be a wonderful opportunity to participate in the exploration of space, and that idea pleased her greatly. “I feel like God has blessed me in my career,” she once wrote, “and I would like to glorify Him by exploring His incredible creation.” So the missionary had a new mission, but even as a scientist, especially as a scientist, she still devoted herself to God.
The Pathfinder mission originated in a speech given by President George Bush in 1989 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of men – American men! – landing on the moon. NASA was in the doldrums at the time; and the occasion of the speech seemed to point up how little it had done since the halcyon days of Apollo. The Challenger disaster, which occurred more than three years before the anniversary, still loomed; when people thought of NASA, they didn’t visualize Neil Armstrong jumping onto the surface of the moon, they thought of the faces of the parents of Christa McAuliffe, the school teacher who rode aboard the Space Shuttle, looking in disbelief at the Y trail left in the sky by the catastrophic explosion.
Along came George Bush, discussing the future of space exploration. The demoralized NASA contingent could scarcely believe what they heard. Did the President mention “the permanent settlement of space”? Yes, he did. Did he also say it was time to travel “back to the moon, back to the future, and this time back to stay”? Indeed, he said that, as well. But surely he could not have said, “And then, a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet: a manned mission to Mars.” Yes! The President said that, too. Mars. The NASA bureaucrats began to ask themselves: how much was all this going to cost? No one thought you could go back to the moon and on to Mars for under 400 billion dollars; the tasks might require twice that amount. NASA’s annual budget at the time was around 13 billion. Where would the money come from? Interestingly, few doubted that the technology existed to send people to Mars, or that it could be developed quickly; if NASA had the money, they could get the job done.
George Bush’s remarks evoked John Kennedy’s famous speech in which he charged NASA with the duty of sending men to the moon. Without realizing it, Bush tapped into the agency’s other obsession, reaching Mars, an obsession that had begun in the mind of its ace rocket engineer, Wernher von Braun, during World War II. Von Braun, a member of the Nazi party, and a favorite of Hitler’s, had helped to design the V-2 missile. When he became disillusioned with the Nazi war machine, the Gestapo arrested him and sent him to jail. In his cell, he turned his attention to interplanetary travel, and Mars in particular. And it was in these strange and harsh circumstances that the kernel of what would become the American effort to explore Mars was born. In May 1945, von Braun and over a hundred other German rocket scientists surrendered to the Allies. They were swiftly transplanted to New Mexico to continue their work on rockets, this time for the United States. The German V-2 became the prototype of a new generation of American missiles, and on the strength of his engineering accomplishments for the Nazis, von Braun quickly established himself as the chief architect of the American space program’s booster rockets during the 1950s and 1960s; his designs were responsible for getting American men to the moon.
Throughout his career, von Braun was mesmerized by Mars. He published his plan to send people to Mars, the one he had conceived in jail, as a long magazine article titled “Das Marsprojekt,” which was translated into English. In 1953, it appeared as a book in the United States: The Mars Project. It became a classic, but this was not science fiction; The Mars Project contained no inspiring rhetoric about humankind’s greatest adventure. It was a how-to manual, a master plan for getting people to Mars. He used a simple slide rule to make his calculations, and its pages contained his blueprint for the actual mission, using available technology. “The logistic requirements for a large elaborate expedition to Mars are no greater than for those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theater of war,” he wrote. The key to reaching Mars, he believed, was sending a flotilla of spacecraft. “I believe it is time to explode once and for all the theory of the solitary space rocket and its little band of bold interplanetary travelers. No such lonesome, extra-orbital thermos bottle will ever escape Earth’s gravity and drift toward Mars.” Instead, in von Braun’s vision, “Each ship of the flotilla will be assembled