It took a week or so for van der Woude to corner Murray and find out what had happened. Murray was an ambitious man; within a few years he would be the director of JPL. He had wanted the map to impress Harold Brown – then president of Caltech, later secretary of Defense. Brown had thought the map wonderful and asked to show it to a guest, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, too, was impressed and commandeered the map in order to offer it as a gift to Leonid Brezhnev; in part, we can be sure, because the Soviet Union’s two missions to Mars in 1971 had failed, their pre-programming too rigid to allow diem to sit out the dust storm in orbit before getting to work, as Mariner 9 had done. And so the map had gone to the Kremlin.*
At least that’s Jurrie van der Woude’s story. Inge remembers that the map was lost, but not how. Murray says he remembers nothing of it – as does Harold Brown. Kissinger has proved elusive on the matter. So I have to doubt it. But I want it to be true. I want the first modern map of that planet to have played a role, even just a small one, in the history of this one. I want it to have reached the top. And I want it to have ended up where Jurrie says he last saw it, glimpsed in the background during a televised interview with a Russian space scientist, apparently taking pride of place on his office wall. I want it to be somewhere where it gets treated as an icon.
* There were exceptions. Experience on the moon had led the mappers to treat odd features as craters until proved otherwise, so some Martian oddities ended up drawn as craters even when they weren’t. One of these non-crater craters went on to feature as a landmark in a rather good science fiction novel, Paul McAuley’s The Secret of Life.
* It’s a nice coincidence that the father of astronomical art, Chesley Bonestell, was also much drawn to Chinese landscapes and delighted in being able to produce good enough examples of the genre to fool his friend Ansel Adams into accepting them as genuine.
* The other great cartographic products of the Mariner 9 mission, a set of ten-foot globes made at JPL through the painstaking hand-positioning of fragments of images on spherical surfaces, have a strange patchwork texture that makes them almost impossible for anyone but an expert to interpret.
* They were not the first planetary maps to get to the highest offices. Maps of the moon by the engineer James Nasmyth – better known for his steam hammer – so fascinated Prince Albert that he had Nasmyth present them to Queen Victoria, who was duly impressed.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’
On 13 February 1969, nine days before Mariner 6 set off for Mars and five months before Neil Armstrong was to step on to the dust of the Sea of Tranquillity, the newly inaugurated president, Richard Nixon, asked his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, to explore the options for a post-Apollo space programme. Agnew became enthused. When Apollo 11 made its historic landing that July, he talked of committing the nation to the goal of sending people to Mars. The report of Agnew’s Space Task Group, offered to the president in September 1969, discussed this possibility and many others – but more or less ignored the question of how much it was going to cost. Nixon could not allow himself that privilege.
In May 1971, the month Mariner 9 was launched, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) informed NASA that its budget, already significantly cut back from its mid-1960s heights, would be frozen for five years. On 5 January 1972, two months after Mariner 9 reached Mars, President Nixon authorised NASA to start work on a reusable Space Transportation System – the space shuttle. There was severe doubt – at OMB and elsewhere – as to whether this was wise; NASA’s claims that it would make space travel far cheaper were highly dubious. But it was the least ambitious thing on offer that would keep people flying into space. And people in space, even if they had nowhere particular to go once they got there, was an idea that meant something to Nixon and to many of the men around him.
From 1972 onwards the space shuttle was central to NASA’s institutional survival. A national means became the agency’s end. Almost everything else was either a distraction or, if it looked expensive, a threat. The planetary missions already approved – the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions to Jupiter and Saturn, and the Viking missions to Mars – were not in too much trouble. But missions not already accepted were delayed and scaled back. The ambitious TOPS probes to the outer solar system that JPL had been planning were replaced with enhanced, enlarged versions of the now ageing Mariner spacecraft design. In the end that did little harm – launched in 1977, the Voyagers were a spectacular success. But they were the last hurrah of the ’60s horde. Between 1979 and 1991 JPL launched only two more planetary spacecraft.*
It was in this climate of cutbacks that the Viking landers lowered themselves to the surface of Mars in 1976. For years they sampled dead soil, analysed dry winds and photographed barren landscapes at two unprepossessing sites in the planet’s northern hemisphere. In engineering terms they were a spectacular triumph. Their accompanying orbiters, meanwhile, added huge numbers of new pictures to the Mariner archive. And that was just as well, since the Viking treasury was to be the raw material for most of the next two decades of Mars research. The Viking missions were the most expensive effort in the history of planetary exploration and their single take-home message, according to most of the scientists involved, was that Mars was as lifeless seen from the surface as it had appeared to be from orbit. Expensive, dead and already the subject of overflowing data archives; to NASA budget-setters Mars looked like a pretty good place not to return to.
Which didn’t mean that scientists stopped talk about new missions to Mars. At any given time there will always be lots of ideas for missions that someone or other dearly wants to see fly. Some are little more than water-cooler chatter. Some are studied but never approved. Some are approved but then dropped. Each one that flies leaves the ashes of a dozen other dreams in its wake. The field of planetary science is full of brilliant people in their forties who have still never managed to get an instrument they defined or built on to a spacecraft, never gaining the status of a principal investigator.
In the early 1980s one of the competing dreams was a spacecraft called Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter. Its proponents admitted that, yes, it did seem that Mars was a dead planet, both biologically and geologically. Although there were arguments about how to date features on the surface – arguments which will be discussed later, along with many other scientific issues some readers probably think I’m passing over too quickly at the moment – most of the interesting events in Martian history were thought to have happened billions of years ago. But dead could be interesting and besides, Mars had only been studied from a fairly narrow point of view. Most of the data were in the form of pictures. To geologists like Hal Masursky and his crew, these pictures were great. Geologists are interested in stories about which rocks are where and how they got there. While pictures taken from orbit were not terribly good guides to the nature of the rocks, their form and arrangement – the morphology of the surface – were