I began this work about a year after moving to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from the NASA Langley Research Center, where I had been a contract historian. JPL had not had a staff historian since the mid-1970s, and during 2004, Blaine Baggett, director of the Office of Communication and Education at JPL, and Charles Elachi, JPL director, decided to hire me. I have them to thank for supporting this work. I also need to thank Margo Young and Robert Powers, former and current heads of JPL’s library and archives section, for their assistance, as well as Julie Cooper, JPL’s archivist; Mary Beshid, Susan Hendrickson, and Kay Schardein, its records managers; and project librarians Julie Reiz, Brent Shockley, and Suzanne Sinclair. Video librarian Sherri Rowe-Lopez provided rapid access to JPL’s huge collection of audio-visual material. And thanks also to Mickey Honchell, JPL’s interlibrary loan librarian, for handling myriad odd requests with alacrity.
This narrative has been woven from a variety of technical and scientific documents, from media accounts, and from extensive interviews with JPL engineers, managers, and scientists. The interviewees are too numerous to thank individually, but several of them read and critiqued all or part of the book. Thanks to Blaine Baggett, John Callas, Glenn Cunningham, Barry Goldstein, Matthew Golombek, Fuk Li, Robert M. Manning, Daniel J. McCleese, Brian Muirhead, George Pace, and Guy Webster for the extensive and valuable comments. All errors that remain are, of course, my own.
This is a JPL-centric history of Mars exploration, as the Laboratory has been the lead center (though the term has fallen from use) for Mars exploration since the late 1980s. But the Mars Observer, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Phoenix missions were carried out primarily by what are called “systems contractors” in the aerospace business. For all but Mars Observer, the systems contractor was Lockheed Martin’s Astronautics group in Colorado. LMA, as it is known colloquially, allowed me to interview several of its senior engineers and managers for this history, and thanks go to Edward Euler, Steven Jolly, Claude “Bud” McAnally, Parker Stafford, and Loren Zumwalt, for their time and interest in this project. I also gained great insight from an interview with Pioneer Aerospace’s parachute expert, Allen Witkowsky, whom I met accidently one evening at Lucky Baldwin’s in Pasadena.
At the NASA History Office in Washington, chief historians Steven Dick and Bill Barry, and their deputy, Steve Garber, supported this work through many twists and turns. Jane Odom, the NASA chief archivist, and her staff archivists Colin Fries, John Hargenrader, and Elizabeth Suckow, provided access to materials from early in this period. Former NASA chief historian and long-time friend Roger Launius supported this endeavor in myriad ways, as well.
My acquisitions editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, Bob Brugger, patiently awaited this manuscript, which took a couple years longer and several more chapters than originally planned, and handled its production with aplomb; and I want to thank the Press staff for preparing a beautiful volume.
Finally, several individuals at JPL gave me access to personal files that filled various-size holes in my research. JPL’s current director, Charles Elachi, granted me access to some files from his tenure as head of the old Space and Earth Science Projects Directorate (SESPD); chief scientist Daniel McCleese provided records earlier in the 2000s; Samuel Thurman offered a large digital collection of his records from the Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander projects; Robert M. Manning and Tommaso Rivellini lent records of the Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rover, and Mars Smart Lander projects as well as the “Bubble Team” studies of 2000; Mark Adler shared his original Mars Mobile Pathfinder proposal; and Donna Shirley, retired Mars program director, gave access to her records of those years. All of these documents are archived in an electronic repository at JPL known as the Historian’s Mars Exploration Collection. This history would be far poorer without them.
While this book is the product of many years’ research at JPL and was read and critiqued by many people there, it represents my opinions and interpretations alone, not those of JPL, the California Institute of Technology, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was released for public audiences under URS234014.