(gentle music) - [Man 1] I don't think we can afford to fail.

I don't think failure should be an option.

- [Man 2] No.

Failure has to be part of the equation.

You can't have stunning science without failure.

(whooshing) - [Man 3] I think the people who have success without having failure, don't appreciate it nearly as much as those of us that have lived through the failures.

- [Man 4] The laboratory doesn't seem to acknowledge... the failed missions have kind of disappeared.

- [Woman 1] It's interesting when there is a loss, people who suddenly go away, who don't want to be associated with the failure or who don't want to set the record straight.

We want to bury our losses.

- [Man 1] I think that it's the pain we can't accept.

I think it's the personal anguish.

It's the damage to the reputation.

That fear has kept us from being even bolder than we have been.

Although we've been very bold.

- [Man 5] We hurt ourselves by describing the process in terms of winners and losers.

- [Man 6] You don't know how close you are to the edge.

The output of the successes and the failure is about an eighth of an inch apart.

(gentle music) - [Man 7] So we stumbled.

But let's go back and see what we can learn from that and try it again.

(gentle music) (soft music) (bongos) - The lab's kind of a neat place to work because it really rewards energetic, smart people.

(upbeat music) You have people in the lab that have been working here a few years and they talk about, you know, they ask: "How do you advance?"

There's two keys to success at the lab, really only two.

Credibility and visibility.

Sometimes, easily gotten, certainly easily lost.

The lab's nestled in these hills.

It's pretty, it's a big place.

A lot of walking.

(upbeat music) And you get to use these cool badges.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] In the late 1990's NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was on the verge of a new era of exploring the solar system and beyond.

(upbeat jazz music) Just ahead were six new missions, slated for launch in just six months.

An unprecedented achievement.

There were two new spacecraft to target comets.

One would test a new propulsion method that sounded right out of an episode of Star Trek.

While the second mission would be capturing particles from a comet and bringing them back to earth, something never before done.

A space telescope would search for the birth of galaxies.

For our own planet, there was a satellite to measure wind speeds across the oceans.

And for Mars, there were two new missions.

The red planet became a major destination following the discovery of a Martian rock that some believed contained fossilized microbial life.

- Something really, really huge, that's going to be taking place over the next 10 years as we send many missions to the red planet.

And usually one of the most asked questions regarding Mars is, is there life on Mars?

I think there is life out there somewhere in the universe.

I don't believe that we can be the only beings in the universe.

So I definitely think there's somebody out there watching.

(upbeat music) (water pouring) - [Narrator] These new missions were signs of how far director Ed Stone had steered JPL in a new direction.

One that emphasized smaller, less expensive, but more numerous missions.

- I had come to believe that we had done the major global exploration missions and we really needed to move on to a new frontier.

And the question is what was that frontier going to be?

- [Narrator] The new frontier had a name: Faster, better, cheaper.

It required embracing aerospace companies as partners and giving work over to them.

And agency officials were to be viewed as customers to be satisfied.

The new watch word was: make a deal and stick to it.

- If we're going to continue exploring the solar system, our engineering challenge, our science challenge is to find ways to do that at lower costs.

- [Narrator] The changes underway also included staff reductions.

Even as missions were going out the door to industry that was hungry for work following the end of the Cold War.

- We agreed to reduce the size of the staff at JPL by a thousand, over a several year period.

Well, when that was announced, it was a bombshell.

The laboratory had never voluntarily reduced the staff.

I'd like to hear from you on, what are you concerned about?

What are you worried about?

What are you fearing at this time?

It was very difficult to explain or justify to the employees.

They were concerned about their job and said, "Look, why are you doing this?

"You don't have to do this.

"My budget hasn't been cut.

Why me?"

- One of my concerns is--- - It colored everything we tried to do.

It was a grinding downsizing.

You know, every year you'd ratchet down a little more, a little more, a little more.

Back in the back there.

- What should I be doing?

Where should I be going for careers?

Things like that.

Are we going to build a spacecraft or is that industry?

Where to go and what to look for in the future, is a real confusion.

Not sure where to go with it.

- Yeah, well, you might ask, what does our customer in Washington expect of us?

All right?

- [Man 8] From my level I haven't the slightest idea about that.

(crowd laughing) - [Man 9] Faster, better, cheaper.

- Really comes back to the basic point though, that JPL, the reason there is a JPL, the reason there is a federally funded research and development center for NASA, is to do things nobody else can do.

And so we have to always keep in mind that is really the reason we're here.

And if industry can do it, then in fact it's much less appropriate for us to continue to do it.

So we have to find a way to always move forward.

But we are certainly not in an era where we can say, this is ours and therefore we get to do it.

In fact, we're being encouraged very strongly to make sure that where we can, we involve the wider community.

And that really is a challenge for us.

'Cause that means just at the time we get our arms around something, we're told, "That's great, go somewhere else.

"Do something else.

Do something new."

(engine roaring) - [Narrator] There would be no better example of doing something new than the 4th of July landing on Mars in 1997.

(pop, engine roaring) - [Man 10] The spacecraft should have passed the 600 mark.

Airbags should be inflated.

- [Narrator] Pathfinder's airbag touchdown was as unconventional as it was daring.

- [Man 11] Roger, confirm signal.

(people cheering and clapping) (inspirational music) (machine buzzing) - [Narrator] And after bouncing to a halt and unfolding, a tiny rover had trundled off the Lander.

The first wheels ever to roll on Mars.

(rover buzzing) - It's my distinct pleasure to present to you the first Rover on the surface of Mars.

(people cheering) (inspirational music) - [Narrator] The combination of an airbag landing, the tiny rover and emoting engineers and scientists made for something very different than the typical NASA mission.

- Yeah, opening a new era of exploration, as in the framework of the faster, better, cheaper, actually starts tonight.

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator] Pathfinder captured the hearts of people everywhere.

And the mission quickly became the poster child for faster, better, cheaper's most forceful proponent, NASA administrator, Dan Goldin.

- But now when you get the--- - [Narrator] His ambition was to darken the skies with inexpensive, but innovative spacecraft.

And should a few of them occasionally fail, that, he had declared, was an acceptable risk.

(crowd chatting indistinctly) - I think all the elements are right here at JPL.

And I think if you have confidence in yourselves to go to the cutting edge and not be afraid, not be afraid of failure, just don't be afraid, I think great things will happen.

- [Narrator] Goldin's pronouncements were always forceful, but they could also be contradictory.

- It was such an exciting mission.

It was the first mission in the whole series of faster, better, cheaper.

I really wanted that to come through.

So I thought it would be okay to tell them, "Don't fail."

And I have to admit I did that.

But I wanted to see where the breaking point was.

- [Narrator] Risk taking was one Goldin message.

There was a second one.

What the consequences would be for not delivering missions on time and on budget.

- So he would come out and berate us for the old NASA policies and practices.

- Our record of overrun is beyond belief.

Our record of not delivering on our promises is very open.

And there's a sense of all we have to do is get it working and launch it, all is forgiven.

Hopeless.

That will never occur again.

And we'll cancel, the sick chickens and we'll prioritize.

Darwin is going to reign supreme at NASA of the future.

- And then he would jump up and down with joy at the liberties we were taking.

- Remember, question authority?

You've got to do it.

And if you're afraid, you don't belong here.

And if we at headquarters or anyone forces a contract down your throat that's stupid, how do they say it?

Just say, no.

(crowd laughing) I'm serious about that.

You better not take it, than take it, and then when a problem occurs, say, "I have an excuse."

No excuses are accepted.

Don't take shortcuts.

And if you have got a problem, say it.

And if you overrun more than 15%, we cancel it.

I want you to be sure you understand the rules.

This is how Darwin works.

- This was very tense.

And he would come here and he would scream at us.

You know, very, quite literally scream that we were not taking risks, that we were too conservative.

And you know, you walk away from that and you ask, "You know, I wonder if he's right?"

A much as you're defensive, you ask, "Was he right?"

(soft music) - [Narrator] Pushing hard on JPL was one part of Dan Goldin's plan to reinvent NASA.

The Mars rock, hinting of life elsewhere, was another.

For America's astronauts were seeking a new destination.

Any first step would be to explore Mars with robots.

And leading that effort at JPL was Donna Shirley, champion of Pathfinder's rover.

[Faintly]- Make sure they all fit together.

Something happened, and this is what happened.

This is Allan Hills 84001.

And it's had a huge impact.

Oops.

I don't know why I do that.

There's no orientation.

(all laughing) And this is what they think might be a life form, except it's a couple orders of magnitude smaller than anything that's been found on the Earth.

NASA decided, well gee, we better start looking at what all this means for the potential Mars mission.

So there was--- - [Narrator] What NASA wanted was to send a steady stream of spacecraft to Mars.

Orbiters, landers, and even missions to bring Martian rocks back to Earth.

All to be done cheaply.

- The Mars exploration program currently has $150 million a year.

That's about the size of a major motion picture.

So you can, you know, you can pay your $8 and go to a movie or you can go to Mars, whichever you like.

- [Narrator] To cope, Shirley reorganized and introduced a radical new way of conducting business.

After building a spacecraft, teams would hand over the controls to a single centralized group called Mars Surveyor that would fly all of the Mars missions.

- The biggest problem I had was getting the project managers to work together, because the system at JPL, and almost every place, is set up so that, if your project works, you're king.

If your project doesn't work, you're a goat.

And program?

What program?

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] The program also called for using industrial partners more often.

Strategy already well underway, as JPL built Pathfinder, Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver assembled an orbiter.

Mars Global Surveyor.

- We had a great team that shared the objective.

And we were going to make this launch on time and we were going to make all the requirements and we were going to do it within the cost and schedule.

The team clicked.

We had a good plan.

I think we didn't deviate from the plan.

- [Narrator] The plan for cutting costs included reducing the amount of fuel needed to go into orbit at Mars, by using a daring technique called aerobraking.

- And that requires using the solar arrays, which are on either side of the spacecraft, to essentially drag through the atmosphere of Mars, to gradually slow the orbit of the spacecraft.

(fast tempo music) - [Narrator] Aerobraking had been tried only once before at Venus, where the atmosphere was more predictable.

And it had been done as an experiment at the end of a mission, not the beginning.

(engine roaring) But these kinds of decisions were paying off in money and time.

- You would just, almost made your head spin with how rapidly the whole process worked.

- [Narrator] Mars Global Surveyor met its launch schedule and not only stayed on budget, but gave back to NASA $6 million.

- [Announcer 1] Ten nine eight seven six five four three two one.

We have ignition.

(rocket boosters thundering) (crowd cheering) - [Announcer 2] And we have lift off of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, as America begins its journey back to the red planet.

(rocket boosters roaring) (rocket boosters separating) (dramatic music) (rocket boosters whooshing) - [Announcer 3] Separation on all six solids.

- [Announcer 4] Everything is continuing according to the timeline.

- [Announcer 3] Main engine in.

Vernier chamber pressures.

All good.

(rocket engine roaring) (whooshing) (inspirational music) (engine roaring) And we have ignition.

We have started the second stage engine.

(pop, then rocket engine roaring) (dramatic music) We have spin rocket ignition.

(engine blasting) Third stage ignition.

(whoosh at separation) (dramatic music) (servo motors buzzing) - [Announcer 5] And we have confirmation that we have spacecraft separation.

Mars Global Surveyor is the first of nine US-based craft that will journey to Mars over the next decade.

- Launch was very good.

Spacecraft came off the launch vehicle and we noticed that one of the solar arrays didn't fold out into its normal position.

- Good afternoon, and welcome to the Mars Global Surveyor post-launch press conference.

- About that problem, minor problem with one of the solar array panels, what is the worst case scenario?

What happens if it doesn't get extended further?

What are you going to try to do to fix it?

If you get to Mars with it like this, do you lose anything?

Do you lose power?

What's the ramifications?

- The fact that we had a crippled solar array wing at the very beginning of the mission, which was absolutely essential to being able to do the aerobraking, really upped the stakes on figuring out what had gone wrong with the solar array deployment and trying to find a way to get it fixed.

- [Narrator] Telemetry suggested the array had not latched into place.

For the entire cruise the wing would slightly sway back and forth.

But tests on the ground pointed to a potential fix.

Once at Mars, it was possible that the pressure of aerobraking would provide the added push the panel needed to lock into place.

And in early September 1997 after a journey of 300 days and nearly 500 million miles Global Surveyor was bearing down on Mars.

For orbit insertion, as with the cruise phase of the mission, assignments were split between Pasadena and Denver.

Lockheed Martin handled the day to day monitoring and flying of the spacecraft, while JPL provided deep space communications, navigation expertise and overall management.

For project manager Glenn Cunningham the events surrounding orbit insertion made for an especially anxious time.

Four years before, at just such a moment, his Mars Observer spacecraft had vanished without a trace.

(rushing air) - [Announcer 6] All stations Mars Ops.

At this time, we should be one way light time from the burn start.

(roaring) (engine blasting) - Can we switch back to the other part for a minute?

I want to see how far we're going because we're pretty close to coming in to occultation.

(tense music) FA1, this is navigation on Mars Ops.

- [Man 12] Navigation, go ahead.

- Going into the occultation, I've taken a close look at the Doppler sequence and we have a Doppler signal of minus 50 Hertz.

(engine roaring) At this time the mission is more than we have expected, which is a good indication that the burn is proceeding very close to nominal.

Of course we won't know until we see the other side of coming out of occultation, but right now it looks like there's a slight underburn.

(engine roaring) (roaring stops) (music) - We were watching the telemetry and we had this computer visualization going along.

So as the telemetry hit the ground people were calling out, "Main engine on.

"Main engine firing."

And there's always that tense moment, when you come out from behind the planet.

(tense music) - [Woman 2] We have a signal on The SSI.

(people cheering) - [Man 13] For the first time, we have all four station--- - [Man 14] He's got all four station.

- [Man 12] HC levels are on neg.

155 to 156.

- Celebratory peanuts here.

All right.

- Glenn, MOI peanuts.

- MOI peanuts.

Okay.

(people speaking indistinctly) - [Woman 3] Thank you.

- [Man 15] Oh, we're dead on the money on that one.

All other... attitude control, telemetry looks pretty good.

(people laughing) Control of the space craft right now, [unintelligible] and body rates look good.

So, looks like we had an excellent burn.

- [Man 16] Go ahead, FLM.

- Glenn, we got a healthy spacecraft in Mars orbit, and we're go for aerobraking.

- Roger, I copy of that.

Couldn't be better.

Couldn't be better.

Thank you very, very much.

(crowd clapping) So all well and good.

We thought.

(tense music) We did a couple of drag passes.

And we noticed that the panel moved a little bit.

And one day the panel moved really significantly.

And we got really worried.

(quiet music) - One of the engineers said, "As far as the aerodynamics are concerned on the last pass, "it went past the point "where it should have latched into place."

We said, "That's not physically possible "unless the panel is actually broken."

And he said, "That's what the aerodynamics are showing."

And I said, "I need a new aerodynamicist."

The panel was physically bending, not just not latch, but it was actually out there flopping in the wind.

- There was a break in one of the hinge joints.

The risk was that it would literally snap the spacecraft solar array off at that damaged point.

So gosh, this could be, you know, mission catastrophic.

- [Narrator] To protect the spacecraft it was commanded up out of the atmosphere.

The move bought the engineer's time but it also created a new problem.

- We knew we were actually very much racing the clock at that point.

We did have another gotcha.

We realized that if we didn't get restarted aerobraking, we would get to a condition where the orbit around the planet would leave us in the shadow of Mars for more than eight or 10 hours, when the spacecraft had really only been designed to survive about a one to two hour eclipse.

- [Narrator] And if that were to happen, the batteries would eventually cease charging and slowly, Global Surveyor would freeze and die.

- Good morning, and thank you for joining us at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has been an orbit around Mars for about two months now.

Several members of the team are here this morning to give you an update on the mission.

- We believe that we have identified a secondary failure in the solar array.

This little model of the panel shows you the 20 degree kink, so to speak, between the yoke and the inboard panel, where the damper arm was caught.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The solar panels were designed to swivel.

Rotating the broken wing might reinforce the panel enough to endure the stress of aerobraking.

(suspenseful music) But all of the delays had made shambles of the orbit plots that had been painstakingly calculated based on the need of science instruments to see the Martian surface in daylight.

- To do the science it was designed to do needed to not only get from the big orbit, initial capture orbit, down to the science orbit, but it needed to do it in a certain amount of time so that the lighting conditions were appropriate for all the science instruments that we had on board.

If the lighting wasn't right, a lot of the science instruments were not going to work.

- [Narrator] An entirely new sunlit orbit plan had to be created on the fly.

Then slowly, the spacecraft was dropped back into the Martian atmosphere.

The crippled solar panel held.

(suspenseful music) In the days that followed came more encouraging news.

Science discoveries.

There were faint signs of an ancient magnetic field and images of geological features to out-rival some of the most spectacular places found on Earth.

But there was a price to pay in having saved the mission.

Aerobraking was originally scheduled for four months.

It would now consume a year and a half.

And that meant added strains on budgets and people at a time when two more missions were about to fly.

They too would require urgent attention.

And for every day that passed on their journey to Mars the breaking point for faster, better, cheaper drew nearer and nearer.

(suspenseful music) There are many reasons for the grip Mars has on the human imagination.

Its mysteries beckon in part because of what our planets have shared in common.

In the distant past, Mars appears to have been much warmer.

A place where water of great quantities once flowed on the surface.

But where did it go?

And why?

Some scientists think the answers to these questions might be found in the Martian atmosphere.

- All of the geologic evidence that we see on the planet from early data from Mars suggested that it was once very wet and therefore apparently warm.

Well, the atmosphere role in this story is well, where did the atmosphere go?

Why is it so dry?

Why is it so cold?

How did the climate originally start out as wet and warm?

We couldn't explain that early on.

And we couldn't understand why the atmosphere changed so radically.

How had the evolution of the planet got it to where it is today?

By Dave McKittle--- - [Narrator] Dan McCleese devoted his science career to trying to answer these questions.

He worked for more than a decade, for the chance to fly a science instrument on the Mars Observer mission.

The spacecraft that was lost just before reaching Mars in 1993.

- What those tell us--- I knew my career and those of all of my science colleagues who, some of whom I had hired to begin work at JPL on that experiment, that we were all now looking at a very uncertain future.

It was going to be every man for himself trying to get your investigation flown.

And now the question was who was going to be in the lifeboat when it pushed off from the wreck?

- [Narrator] McCleese had to wait five more years before his life boat arrived.

Mars Climate Orbiter was billed as the first interplanetary weather satellite.

McCleese's science instrument, built to detect water vapor and carbon dioxide, was the main payload.

It was heavy, required substantial power, and was highly sensitive to heat radiating from the spacecraft.

All of these factors had to be reckoned with by engineers designing the spacecraft.

The result bore no resemblance to Mars Global Surveyor.

Climate Orbiter's shape was asymmetrical, having only a single solar panel, that was to be flown mostly off to one side.

It was only one of two missions that were to be launched in 1998, the reason why they are sometimes jointly to referred to as Mars 98.

Mars Polar Lander was a throwback to the 1970s Viking missions that used rockets to reach the Martian surface.

(rocket blasting) The budgets for the two Viking missions had been more than a billion dollars.

And even more astonishing from a budget perspective was that JPL and industrial partner Lockheed Martin had signed up to build and fly these two spacecraft for the price of Mars Global Surveyor.

It's commonly believed that this two-for-the-cost-of-one idea originated at NASA.

But the agency's then associate administrator of space science, Wes Huntress, calls that folklore.

The original proposal he says came from Lockheed Martin.

- I was facing a decision about what to do for that flight opportunity.

Are we going to do another orbiter?

Are we going to do a lander?

The science community was at odds as to which they wanted.

Some wanted an orbiter, some wanted a lander.

And at the time I thought, "Well, I've only got money to do really one mission "of the cost of Mars Global Surveyor."

So while worried about what decision I'm going to make, Lockheed Martin came in and said, "We can do two.

"I think we can do a lander and we can do the orbiter, "if we take advantage of certain ways "in which we build our spacecraft and build them together, "you know, so we're not building one spacecraft over here "and one over here.

"If we could do some things in construction, "so that we could keep the cost down and do two."

Sold.

- [Narrator] Donna Shirley's reaction was not nearly as enthusiastic, but JPL signed on knowing that if it didn't, some other place would.

- Here's, you can see how crowded the schedule is.

We are beginning to understand how hard it is to turn out production line spacecraft on this kind of timetable, especially for tough jobs like landing on Mars.

- [Narrator] Two missions for the cost of one was taking faster, better, cheaper to an entirely new level, giving pause to even gung-ho Pathfinder engineers.

- I remember people bragging early on that, said, "Yeah, we're going to do two "for the price of one."

And I thought, "Good God, is that really doable?"

(soft music) - [Narrator] John McNamee was picked as overall manager of the two missions, though he had to be talked into taking the job.

McNamee started out his career in construction, but he went back to college and earned a PhD in aerospace engineering.

Early on at JPL he was seen as an up and comer.

He had been in charge of mission design for Pathfinder and was known for his no-nonsense style and being a tough negotiator.

- You can't afford to spend time with hundreds of people in rooms for hours and hours, days and days, trying to figure out what to do.

You take as much data as you have.

You make a decision quickly and you move on.

And you only revisit a decision, if, you know, the preponderance of the evidence says you really screwed up.

We certainly made someone--- - [Narrator] To have any hopes of success McNamee was convinced he would have to run an even leaner and meaner team than even Pathfinder had been.

- John McNamee took it to an even more extreme level.

In the sense that he's, you know, the JPL fingerprints on Mars 98 were relatively light.

This was a, we're going to let Lockheed Martin do it the way they want to do it.

And that itself was a challenge to the JPL culture, because like, well, what do you mean?

We're going to not understand what these guys are doing.

And it's still got a JPL mission, why don't we have people overseeing what they're doing?

And John was very adamant about the fact that he didn't want to do that.

He couldn't afford that, that the only way to accomplish this was to let Lockheed do it the way they wanted to.

(people speaking indistinctly) - [Narrator] This hands off approach was not welcomed by a number of JPL engineers.

Most were accustomed to peering over the shoulders of contractors as part of their responsibility to assure mission success.

This cultural divide born during Pathfinder continued to widen and deepen.

- I don't know whether we were consciously doing it at that time but we really were creating a separate culture.

And there were two cultures.

I can remember walking around one day, one evening in building 230, I think it was.

It was after hours and most of the doors were locked and I was looking for a paper clip or a piece of paper or pencil.

And I knocked on one door and somebody behind the door says, "Yes."

And I said, "I need a pencil or a paper clip."

And the voice said, "Are you a Martian?"

I said, "No."

And then they opened the door.

So, I mean, there were, there was a group of people that were very, very unhappy that this divergence was taking place.

- [Narrator] No one understood both sides of JPL's cultural divide better than John Casani.

He had been in charge of flagship missions like Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini.

But he was now encouraging the lab to adapt to faster, better, cheaper.

He was also serving on review boards to monitor the progress of the Mars 98 missions.

Casani saw serious engineering challenges to be sure, but no showstoppers.

- I honestly can't say that I was terribly concerned about the mission, but what I didn't have a perspective of during that period of time is just how thin we were in terms of people working on the project.

Most of the work was being done at Lockheed Martin.

And so, you know, let's say you're on a review board and you sit in the review room.

You don't see what is actually is going on.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] As for make a deal and stick with it, that concept was not proving to be a two-way street as NASA began adding on unanticipated, and from the project's perspective, unwanted cargo.

For the orbiter, there was only the addition of a camera.

But for the lander, the requirements creep became a source of ongoing disagreements.

(legs snapping into place) First, a descent imager was added.

Then came pressure to include a science instrument from Russia.

The gesture meant to encourage cooperation with a former Cold War foe.

That was followed by lobbying for a stowaway inside the Russian instrument, a microphone to listen to the sounds of Mars.

The biggest battle was over two other hitchhikers, a pair of basketball sized penetrators that NASA viewed as a new technology demonstration.

They were to be released just before the Lander's entry into the Martian atmosphere.

Then they would free fall all the way to the surface, hitting the ground with a force equal to 60,000Gs.

If still in one piece, the probes would search for traces of water ice and serve as precursors to one day scattering other miniature monitors all across Mars.

This experiment, named Deep Space Two, was also assigned to JPL.

Chosen to lead the effort was Sarah Gavit.

- And electrical aspects of our design.

There are a lot of challenges in designing a system that will survive a crash landing.

We started off very early on the mission with a very aggressive test program.

(exploding) To truly have tested it, we probably would have needed a thousand probes that you fired in, under a variety of environmental conditions.

We didn't have the luxury of doing that.

And so we did have to take some shortcuts in the testing area.

- [Narrator] Deep Space Two's breakneck schedule demanded making decisions about risks that no ordinary mission would contemplate.

And when this experiment was elevated to project status expectations for success were raised, too.

- Sean McNamee did not want the Deep Space Two probes on his space craft.

And I don't blame him.

We were just going to make his mission heavier and a little bit more complicated.

- [Narrator] McNamee was unable to keep Deep Space Two or most of the other add on payloads off the Lander.

And a year from launch he saw an even greater threat looming.

This one from inside JPL.

The centralized team that was to fly the two spacecraft were still busy finishing aerobraking for Global Surveyor.

"Where," McNamee asked, "was a detailed schedule for the new Mars missions?

"When would staff have the time to learn to operate "the two spacecraft?"

As for the suggestion of delaying training until time of launch, that McNamee declared, was a fatally flawed idea.

(soft music) - And it was just this continual, what I call the death of a thousand cuts.

And I just realized that really bad things were gonna happen and I was watching people suffer.

The program was out of control.

There was no way to fix it.

No one would listen.

I was so concerned about it, that I actually retired.

I just couldn't stand it.

And people were killing themselves and they were absolutely killing themselves trying to make this work.

And so the day I made the decision to leave was pretty much the nadir of working at JPL, which is very sad because you hate to go out on that note.

But we had a great retirement party.

So that worked out.

(crowd clapping) (camera clicking) - [Narrator] Besides official proclamations of a job well done, Shirley's retirement party featured humorous skits in keeping with the JPL tradition of its day.

Then as part of letting go Shirley began passing away items from her office.

- We can do that.

Is Dan McCleese around?

Okay Dan.

Now, Dan asked me for this and nobody wants to call Mars more than Dan.

(crowd laughing) - [Narrator] Shirley's final gift was a not so subtle dig at those she believed still were not heeding her warnings.

(crowd laughing) - It's a copy of the book that's only published on the internet.

It's called "Managing Creativity", and I modified the title to "Managing Creativity, A Practical Guide Inventing, Building, Producing Innovative Products" or, "A Prophet Is Without Honor In Her Own Country".

(crowd laughing and clapping) (suspenseful music) (men speaking indistinctly) - [Narrator] Three months later, Mars Climate Orbiter was being readied for launch with Mars Polar Lander scheduled right behind.

A list of problems continued all the way onto the pad.

Some software had to be loaded at the last minute without being put through the full rigors of testing.

It was a risk the project was willing to take as the alternative was to delay the mission by two years.

- [Man 17] John, ready to go?

- [Man 18] Please, this way.

Good to go.

See Chief, we've got some good weather.

- [Narrator] A review board of hardnosed veterans also delivered the verdict that the two missions were ready to fly.

The JPL-Lockheed team had done what many thought impossible.

They had built two spacecraft for the price of one and delivered them on time and on budget.

- For me personally, 15 years ago I was hammering nails in a hundred degree heat on a roof in Texas.

So I am very excited to be doing what I'm doing right now as opposed to that.

- Greg Komodi, Aviation Week.

Kind of a broader question on the lower cost missions.

Are you guys going to maybe go back and do an operational scrub of any sort beyond what you would anyway?

- I do not think spending huge amounts of money necessarily guarantees success.

And we have examples of that.

And I think the thing to remember is that the complex nature of this business sometimes does come back and get you with little problems.

And I said this before, the surprising thing is not that we have scares or problems, the surprising thing is that we have so few of them.

It's a very difficult business.

- [Announcer 7] RTO report.

Ready to go for launch.

- [Female Announcer] Ready to go for launch.

(rocket boosters blasting) - [Man 19] And we have lift off of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter as we continue to explore the mysteries of the red planet.

(rocket boosters blasting) - [Woman 4] We have ignition.

We have lift off of the Delta Two rocket carrying Mars Polar Lander NASA's first visit to the red planet's southern pole.

(rocket engine roaring) - [Man 20] View from the second stage of the Boeing Delta two vehicle.

(people speaking indistinctly) - Here's the rain cloud, we're flying through.

(rocket engine roaring) - [Man 21] Pass through mach one, coming up on max Q.

(rocket engine roaring) (dramatic music) Main engine, both verniers continue to burn well.

- [Man 22] We expect to see these boosters burn out in jettison.

We have jettison of the solids.

(rocket engine roaring) Again, a beautiful view from the second stage of the Delta vehicle.

(rocket engine roaring) And we have main engine cutoff.

- [Man 23] Main engine is cutoff.

- [Man 24] The progress of launch everything continues to go right on schedule.

(dramatic music) No issues or concerns are being addressed at this time.

(dramatic music) (soft music) - [Narrator] Four months after the launch of the two Mars 98 missions an elated Ed Stone presided over JPL's annual State of the Lab Address.

- Well, it's hard for me to imagine a more exciting time than the era we're in right now.

Six launches in six months.

Never before in the laboratory's history.

It is great.

It's great.

Well, not only are these wonderful missions, but--- - [Narrator] For nearly a decade, Stone had worked tirelessly to adjust the culture of JPL, to transform the nature of the lab's missions and to fundamentally alter how the staff performed its work.

And now all of that effort was coming to a head.

- I've been working at JPL, on a part time basis at least, since 1972, starting with Voyager.

And I can't remember a time that's more exciting than this one.

I really, literally cannot.

Even though the Voyager encounters were wonderful, they were spikes.

What we have now is a continuum.

- [Narrator] Not just two days after his address, one of those six missions, a space telescope built by a university partner, failed.

An event set in motion when its cover ejected prematurely.

The two new missions on their way to Mars were struggling too.

Both were experiencing problems related to sunlight conditions... the result of design flaws.

The solutions required flying the spacecraft in different orientations than originally planned.

- Oh my gosh.

It just seemed like there was, it was another one of those periods where one thing after another went wrong.

I mean, every day, we struggled.

We ended up essentially putting the MCO in a semi-comatose state so we could get through the launch of Mars Polar Lander and get it going okay.

And then we said, "Okay, then we'll come back "and we'll deal with the issues that we had on MCO."

Mars Polar Lander had its own issues shortly after launch.

So we coped with that.

The spring and summer of 1999 was like the most intense period of my entire life.

And I later realized that was only the beginning.

- [Narrator] The journey to a planet is usually considered the quiet time of a mission.

But that was not the case for Mars Climate Orbiter due to its shape.

(soft music) With the solar panels swung to one side radiation pressure from the sun was causing the spacecraft to slightly rotate.

- It was actually feeling the solar wind the solar radiation pressure.

And that's kind of blowing it off course, a little bit like a sailboat off to the side, and you have to know that.

But of course, there's no good way to know that.

You have to guess what the reflectivity is of the foil and how much area is shadowed and exactly what's going on there.

- [Narrator] To correct for unwanted motion small gyroscopes called reaction wheels were spun up.

(wheels buzzing) But eventually they began spinning too fast.

Then yet another force, in the form of thrusters, were used to de-saturate or de-spin the reaction wheels.

- And you have to know how long did they fire thrusters and how much force was applied.

And a mistake in any of those means it could be, you could be kilometers off course because those things build up over hours, days, weeks, and months on the way to Mars.

And you can actually get quite far off course if you don't know exactly what's happening.

- [Narrator] Climate Orbiter's thrusters had to be fired every 17 hours.

An unanticipated chore that added more pressure on a team that had been stripped down to a skeleton crew.

Only one full time navigator was assigned to the mission.

And during the first four months of crews navigation data from the spacecraft was not even usable because of a software error.

When that problem was fixed something seemed slightly amiss in the predicted plots.

- We knew there were some funny things going on with the navigation products.

It was in that gray area between, it wasn't bad to the point of you have to do something about this now or the mission's over.

It wasn't just fine, and so often, you know, when there are one problem after another I found at my own role you really have to judiciously prioritize.

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] The navigator and his supervisor expressed their puzzlement in phone calls, emails, and even face to face meetings.

But a formal report was never submitted.

And the source of the small discrepancies was never tracked down.

- I think we failed to properly record it as an incident surprise anomaly.

That was probably the devastating step because it was a, it was an issue that was recognized.

I remembered talking about it in the staff meeting, that the trajectory wasn't performing as expected.

And I just don't know why we never entered it into the system the right way.

- [Narrator] Over time, these navigation worries came to be viewed as something of a theoretical irritant.

For while the course plotting of a spacecraft can rightly be called rocket science, it is surprisingly not an exact science.

- And of course, you know, there's no GPS out there.

There's really no way to know where you are except tracking with the big deep space network antennas.

But that's only in the line between you and me.

So it's only one component of the three dimensions that the spacecraft is in.

And so by measuring only one component you sort of have to unfold through understanding orbital mechanics and understanding what the spacecraft is doing, exactly where it is.

And it turns out that's a pretty complicated process.

(suspenseful music) - So in a sense you're trying to figure out where this thing is in this cloud out here.

And all you can do is know, well it's right here.

But it could be right here and going this fast, or it could be right here and going this fast.

You don't know that this way, right, that this way, you only can do by building up over time.

Well it was here, and then we think it was here and you begin to eventually converge in on it.

And, but that takes months.

The thing that helps you is that it's not just randomly moving.

It's in orbit around the sun.

And so it has to be moving in a predictable way, except for the times in which something else is pushing on it.

And the something else that's pushing on it are these little thrusters that are on the spacecraft.

And those are things which are difficult to predict.

- [Narrator] Two months before arrival at Mars rose another problem.

During a trajectory course maneuver the spacecraft's solar panels seem to have jammed.

A problem that if not fixed would doom the mission.

- So it was a, you know, all hands on deck.

We've got to fix this problem now, or it's over.

That was going on at the same time the problem that eventually killed us was manifesting itself.

- [Narrator] The solar panel snag was solved but the solution took the better part of a month leaving undone other scheduled work.

By now, the navigators were deeply worried as predictions still weren't converging.

To address their concerns the altitude aim point was raised to over 200 kilometers.

(suspenseful music) But after the maneuver was performed new plot showed the aim point was 72 kilometers lower than expected.

(suspenseful music) With tensions running high the navigation team leader argued for yet another maneuver to push the spacecraft even higher.

- People were used to the navigators, basically saying, if they didn't understand where it was super precisely, you know, it was like, "Well, they always have so much margin.

"Those guys are, you know, they never miss anything."

And when they were trying to communicate "No, really, we really don't understand "where this trajectory is going.

"We're seeing things in the data "that don't make sense to us."

The message that was received was very different, I think, than the message that they were trying to communicate.

This was another one of those cases of not knowing how close to the edge we were on this particular mission.

- [Narrator] Given the concerns a small subset of a review board met by telephone to consider an emergency maneuver.

No navigator was invited.

The outcome was to press on as planned.

While the navigation solutions were worrisome they still showed the spacecraft having twice the altitude needed to safely go into orbit.

Last minute changes, the reasoning went, might introduce new dangers.

Among those on the phone call was Richard Cook.

- Oddly, a lot of the senior leadership of the development project and the operations project both had navigation backgrounds.

And so, or all had navigation backgrounds.

And I think that created this model that this is something that we know how to do.

And that there was not, you know, clearly proper paranoia is one of the things that we believe in very strongly around here.

I think that because of that comfort with the underlying technical problem coming from the management there was just not enough paranoia.

And instead of if anything, there was the opposite which is you guys are too conservative, you know, you'll be, it'll be okay because it's always okay.

(tense music) - [Narrator] Two weeks before the decision not to conduct an emergency maneuver Climate Orbiter saw this image of Mars.

It would be the first and only one the spacecraft would ever see.

- [Man 25] Good morning, this is Mars Climate Orbiter in Mission Control of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

JPL is an operating division of the California--- - [Narrator] JPL's live TV coverage of the orbit insertion of Climate Orbiter began in the early hours of September 23rd, 1999.

Given the hour, there were only a handful of people in the small mission support area for what many believed would be a routine event.

- [Man 26] Team resides and is watching all the telemetry come on in.

At the Lockheed Martin center, they do the actual commanding.

- [Woman 5] TelePrompter is go.

- [Man 27] I just want to let you know the stations look like they're in lock at the appropriate level, and everything's nominal.

- [Narrator] In charge of the JPL crew was Flight Operations Manager Sam Thurmond.

John McNamee was there too.

He was now working on a different mission, but he had continued to be in close touch and his opinion still mattered.

Looking on from just outside the room was Glenn Cunningham.

He had recently retired, but found it hard to stay away.

Moving into Cunningham's role with responsibility for flight operations for all of the Mars missions was Richard Cook.

- [Woman 6] All systems continuing to report nominal as we head into MOI.

- The altitude was still, in the days up to arrival, was still hanging around the 150, 160 kilometer range.

And so everyone was like "Yeah, it's going to be lower than we want but still okay."

There was one last update of the altitude.

And that was at about probably midnight or one o'clock, where the data all the way up to that point was used to calculate a new idea of what the altitude was.

And it dropped to 110 kilometers, which was frightening.

But I think, you know, we still felt like that was above the survival limit of the spacecraft.

(rocket engine roaring) - Systems, FLM.

- FLM systems.

Go ahead.

- [Man 28] Hey, can you ask telecom to forward a predicted AGC level once we are in the burn attitude?

- [Woman 7] Will do.

Standby.

(engine blasting) - [Woman 8] All stations, with Mars accord.

This is APO systems.

This is time for the commanding of the onboard sequence.

- Hey.

Yes.

- Yes.

Okay.

- [Woman 9] Then again would be a loss of signal with occultation start at 9:05:41.

That would be MOI--- - You could relate almost exactly the time at which we lost lock on the signal as the spacecraft went behind Mars and what altitude the closest approach was going to be.

- Okay, station 43 reports that they dropped receiver lock at 09:04:56.

The last signal seen in the FFT was at 09:05:02.

- [Man 29] Roger that.

Thank you.

- We got LOS unusually early and I looked to go mark the spot on that graph of where it occurred to see what the flyby altitude would be and it was almost off the page.

(engine roaring) So at that point I remember thinking "Uh oh, we really got a problem here."

(men speaking indistinctly) - [Man 30] Yes, sir.

Could you call me into 79134?

- [Man 31] Roger.

- [Narrator] The loss of signal had occurred 39 seconds earlier than predicted.

And that was not good news.

- See what you guys can do.

Okay.

Thanks Steve.

- So then we had about, I think it was about 20 minutes.

We had to wait out the burn itself and then, you know, look to reacquire.

- [Woman 10] Attitude.

This is systems.

- [Woman 11] Systems attitude.

Random data's complete.

- [Woman 10] Copy, thank you.

- [Journalist 1] Joining us is Dr. Dan McCleese.

This is a big deal for you here.

You've got one of the two science instruments on board the spacecraft.

Yeah, this is very exciting.

- Yeah, that's right.

I was on a microphone and I was going through the sequence of events.

Looking at the clock, looking at the timeline and listening to what the operations people were saying, was happening on the spacecraft.

- [Woman 12] We're standing by for exit of occultation.

Scheduled to be at 9:26:56.

- Well, we don't even know what a typical Martian year is like from the perspective of weather.

And as I was talking through, near the moment we would have been in orbit correctly, it was clear that something was very wrong.

(suspenseful music) I didn't know what to say on live TV so I just walked away from the microphone.

I walked into the room where the telemetry was coming down from the spacecraft and people were saying, "It looks like we're going in close.

"Looks like we're closer than we thought we would be."

And I'm saying, "There's an atmosphere.

"This is not the moon.

We are not going to make it."

- [Man 32] Okay, waiting for acquisition of signal.

Okay.

Let's listen and see if we get AOS.

- And everybody's going "Oh, if we just can get past the entry point "we'll see if we come out the other side."

And I just couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe that people were even imagining such a possibility.

(suspenseful music) I knew it was over.

Twice unlucky?

What?

This is not possible.

- And we didn't reacquire.

I mean, I remember talking with the so called the ACE, the person that talks directly with the stations, he was talking to the station operators saying, "You know, I'm not, are you seeing anything at all, "any sign of the carrier weight?"

And it wasn't happening.

And that's something.

All right, we're going to have to get a, you know, off script.

- I think there are one of two possibilities.

It may take a while to get it torqued back around and we'll get a signal out of it.

- So I remember a voice in my own head saying "Follow your plans."

The emotional part of it became tolerable by having something to do that had been worked out and getting to it.

- Either way, there are things it will do other than just sit there.

- Okay.

- And I'm producing this out of our TV control room.

And no one's talking on the comm lines anymore.

That's gone silent.

And people are starting to pick up their telephones and communicate.

It's like, what's going on here?

Time comes that we're supposed to reacquire the signal.

There's no signal.

So five minutes goes by.

10 minutes goes by.

- [Man 32] This is Mars Climate Orbiter, mission control.

Now about 14 minutes past the point where we would have expected to receive signals from Mars Climate Orbiter as it reappeared from behind Mars.

- David Seidel, who was doing our commentary, gets off mic and calls me and says "I don't know what's going on.

"What is it that I'm supposed to say?"

Well, I didn't know what was going on.

So I jumped up and I ran as fast as I could over to the building they were in, to building 264.

And as I was running, I was saying, "I don't have a contingency plan for this.

"I don't know what it is I'm going to do "when I get up there, "but I've got to have a decision made "by the time I get off that elevator."

- [Man 33] Okay.

Yeah, I don't think we'll be, we'll probably not do the live shots.

- [Blaine] Now hold on.

Hold on on that.

One thing at a time.

Okay?

Hold on.

Okay.

We'll get Richard from here.

We need to shoot him with a camera.

I had to grab Richard Cook out of the mission support area and have him go on live to tell whatever it is that we did know.

We needed to tell that right then and there to the world.

This is Mars Climate Orbiter, mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Joining us now is Richard Cook, who's the Mars Surveyor Operations Project Manager.

Can you give us a quick update of what you know?

- What we're working on right at the moment is, the spacecraft has a number of autonomous recovery processes that it goes through when it has a fault.

We believe that we are in in all likelihood in the midst of one of those.

So we're going to be monitoring it over the next few hours to see what happens.

I think we will, obviously we will, as soon as we find out something, we'll let everybody know.

But at this point we're still, still very confident that we're in orbit at Mars and we need to, and we're going to see this spacecraft signal sometime in, like I said, the next few hours.

It was about that same time when the navigators came in and said, "Now we've got data all the way up "until the point at which it went out of communications."

When they processed that data it dropped to 60 kilometers, right?

Which is obviously below where we thought it was survivable.

And so that's really when it hit the, you know, fan so to speak and where everybody began to worry that we had lost the mission.

- We have a briefing this morning to give you an update on the status of Mars Climate Orbiter.

I guess we'll take--- - [Narrator] A few hours later, not long after sunrise, what had been planned as a celebratory press conference was instead the beginning of a long search for the guilty.

- [Robin] Robin Soriano, with Florida Today.

Could you tell us who is responsible for sending the navigation commands to the spacecraft?

- [Journalist 2] You must have a list of potential suspects already.

- [Journalist 3] This isn't a first of the smaller, faster, cheaper, better spacecraft that you've had problems with.

- [Journalist 4] Covered a lot of JPL missions.

And I realized you don't get the real final tracking until you get close to the planet.

But I can't recall an error this large ever.

- It was just a terrible, terrible experience, terrible day.

And no matter what you say in that sort of in a moment you're going to cause ripples, right?

I mean, the team is struggling to stay together in a sense.

And so any statement about what's, you know, what happened other than we lost the spacecraft, you get into that feeling of the team kind of coming apart.

And it was just turned into this incredibly divisive thing which is unfortunate obviously.

- And just to follow up on that last bit I wonder if you could just tell us literally over the next eight hours, I mean, literally, what are you folks doing?

- Right now that we have a fully staffed flight team both here and at Lockheed Martin in Denver we're going to essentially begin to dive into this navigation issue as soon as possible.

Probably as soon as we walk out of this room.

(soft music) - [Narrator] One month before the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter a JPL-built spacecraft called Cassini had skimmed closely past the earth with pinpoint accuracy bound for Saturn.

Cassini was the most expensive and advanced planetary spacecraft ever built.

The quintessential Battlestar Galactica.

- I hate that word: Battlestar Galactica but I understand where it came from.

- [Narrator] Tom Gavin was a veteran JPL engineer who considered Cassini as one of his and the lab's proudest achievements.

In the months preceding the loss of Climate Orbiter he had been asked to look under the hood of some of the other faster, better, cheaper missions.

What he saw, he didn't like.

- Well, nearest I could tell was that all the rule books had been thrown out.

That there were no rules.

The rules were, there are no rules.

I think there's a lot in faster, better, cheaper.

But it isn't it isn't being undisciplined.

And it's okay to take risks.

But understand what risk you're taking, okay?

If you don't understand what risk you're taking then you're uncontrolled.

I mean the MCO thing should've never happened.

There was no excuse.

I figured this was an easy event.

And about three o'clock in the morning, I got a phone call.

"You better come in."

And I walked in and I ran into Cunningham and McNamee.

And McNamee, I remember McNamee said, "We just took a perfectly operating spacecraft "and ran it into Mars."

And I was shocked.

How did this happen?

We know how to do this.

(soft music) - [Narrator] The cause of the navigation error had to be found and quickly.

Gavin was given that job.

He assembled a group of experts that included the former head of JPL's navigation section Frank Jordan.

- I had never dreamed that we were going to lose Orbiter to a navigation problem.

It totally decimated me.

And Gavin said, "Well, you're the guy "that's got to find out what happened."

- [Narrator] That was on a Thursday morning.

By Sunday night, Jordan believed he had found the answer when he compared two columns of numbers.

The first column from Lockheed Martin, showed the amount of force exerted by the spacecraft's thrusters.

The second column was JPL navigation solutions from those numbers.

- And I looked at these two rows of numbers and it hit me: you're all off by about the same ratio.

And I thought, there's something systematic.

Why should that be?

And so I computed the ratio and it was that the number of JPL was four and a half times larger.

I said, "Oh my God."

- [Narrator] The 4.5 number was precisely the ratio difference between the force of thrust as measured by English and metric units.

For the entire journey, the navigators had assumed the number supplied to them by Lockheed Martin had been in metric units as had been specified.

Unknown to them, each time the thrusters were fired the effect had been to push the spacecraft downward four and a half times more than their calculations.

The cumulative effect doomed the spacecraft.

(dramatic music) From morning newspapers to late night talk shows JPL and NASA were ridiculed.

For the metric confusion mistake was hardly rocket science.

- There's a little bit of human nature here because a little bit of looking at other people's misfortunes and thinking, "Well there, but for the grace of God, go I, "and look at those smart guys, "even they're dummies."

When it's laid bare, and it comes out to something as simple as one team using the metric system, one team using the English system and not knowing that there's a human foible component to it, that everybody gets 'cause we've all made mistakes like that.

This is just one of those epic mistakes.

- It was a difficult time because of course, you know, everyone looks at kind of the, you know, the final cause of what happened.

And that was, you know, the units error in this thrusting for the angular momentum desaturations.

But of course, you know, that's the tip of a big iceberg.

- [Narrator] Mike Watkins had been named supervisor of all of the JPL navigators only a few months before the loss of Climate Orbiter.

He too was swept into the media storm that broke over the measurement mistake.

- The harder thing to talk about is, you know, what led to the design, what led to the lack of communication and what led to the lack of staffing, that didn't uncover that problem and work that problem to a solution.

And I think the disappointing part was, of course you couldn't tell that story.

You know, you can't tell that story in the Tonight Show monologue.

I personally see the Climate Orbiter failure as a failure of communication.

A failure to communicate how the flight system design with the more frequent desaturations would affect navigation.

A failure of the navigation team to have enough people to communicate with their peers.

"Hey, we see something funny.

What do you think about that?"

And also a communication failure between our operations team and the nav team.

And I think that lack of deep communication is really the thing we learned to fix in future missions.

- Good afternoon.

Welcome to NASA headquarters.

The subject of today's briefing is the first report of the board investigating the failure of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter mission and actions underway at NASA in response.

- Let me say right at the start that we clearly made a serious error.

Mars Climate Orbiter was on the wrong trajectory and our checks and balances did not reveal that error.

- And suddenly that NASA euphoria that had been building all that time, from Pathfinder to that moment, evaporated.

- Our report seems to list poor training, poor communications, cockiness, and a whole bunch of other not good things.

- So I know no one person is responsible but is there someone who should take the blame, who should be reassigned or fired?

- [Miles] There was blood in the water.

Okay?

It was a feeding frenzy.

The underlying tension associated with all of this somebody described it to me as near panic at Jet Propulsion Laboratory over this whole scenario.

These were people who really knew the space business, really understood what faster, better, cheaper meant, had deep sources that were saying, "This is not good.

Pick two.

"Faster, better, cheaper.

Pick two."

And we knew it.

We knew it was dead in the water.

- None of us want another mistake to go unchecked and unfound.

One of the most difficult challenges I had as director was the press conference following the failures.

And because such press conferences tend to be focused on fixing the blame.

And of course, JPL was ultimately responsible for the mission.

So in that sense, the blame was fixed on us.

But on the way back to the laboratory from that press conference I realized the most important thing was to fix the problem rather than fixing the blame, so that in fact, we could create a program moving forward.

And so on the way home, we worked on a speech, which was in fact focused on the way ahead rather than on fixing the blame.

Without a question, yesterday was the hardest day I've experienced in all my years at JPL.

It was hard because of an old truth.

The higher the expectation, the greater the impact of failure.

The future will depend on what we collectively learn from the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter.

Can we learn from our failures as well as our successes?

When we fail, do we learn to fix blame on individuals or do we learn to accept failure as a team?

Do we learn that the pain we experienced in losing a mission is so great that we avoid difficult challenges?

Or do we learn to accept the challenges, knowing that either great satisfaction or occasional disappointment awaits?

My choices are to embrace the tremendous future that can be ours.

But just as our past successes did not come easily neither will the future.

In the future, success will be defined not only by what we do, but how we do it.

And how we do it starts today.

(soft music) - And then it became very apparent that we had to do everything we could to try and save the Polar Lander because we had just lost the easy one.

That was the easy one.

And, and then Lander was coming.

- [Man 33] This team and the spacecraft, the spacecraft design has been under a great deal of scrutiny.

The words we're using now, is they've turned over all the rocks and they're now raking the gravel.

- [Sarah] We have never been to the south pole of Mars before, and we're not exactly sure what we're going to be going into.

- [Man 34] This is one of the most difficult things that you can envision in the space business.

Requires a very large set of mechanical activities to occur.

Technically initiated separations of the parachute and of the heat shield.

(servos operating) (engines firing) Descent engines have to fire for about 50 seconds, to slow yourself down and come to rest on the surface.

(suspenseful music) (servos operating) - [Narrator] After the cause for the loss of Climate Orbiter was found, Tom Gavin and NASA led an all out search for flaws that might doom the Polar Lander.

They had only two months to dive into the intricate details of a spacecraft that had been built a thousand miles away and was now millions of miles out of reach.

This frantic scrutiny uncovered a handful of potential problems that were addressed.

There was one issue that had no solution.

As a cost saving measure during the entry descent and landing sequence there would be no communications from the lander.

If the mission was lost there would be no way of knowing what had happened and little or nothing to learn for future missions.

This was another faster, better, cheaper departure from standard practices.

A point that the mission clearly made during reviews at NASA and JPL.

- Once you begin EDL, there's no RF link.

It's the way it is.

Nothing can be done with that.

The laboratory did not understand what was going on in that project.

And it operated in a very isolated mode.

That was very unhealthy.

(soft music) - [Narrator] No one had greater hopes for the success of Mars Polar Lander than its young Science Principal Investigator, David Paige.

Paige's passion for the red planet reached back to college days at Caltech.

A time when he worked on the Viking missions.

- In those days, Viking was old news.

The data were acquired during the seventies.

And I remember I used to walk down the hallways and you know, one sort of gruff professor would say, "Oh, Dave, you're never going to get anywhere "working on Mars.

"You know, it's just a bunch of old stuff."

And you know, "Just don't do that.

"That's completely boring."

- [Narrator] But Paige persisted.

He became especially interested in the Martian poles.

A fascination born perhaps out of his father's adventures as a member of Admiral Richard Bird's second expedition to the Antarctic in 1934.

- You could always argue that this is the classic case of the son following the father or at least trying to follow the father at some level exploring the poles of another planet.

So there could be a little of that mixed in but it certainly wasn't, you know, conscious.

Let's put it that way.

It searches for water under the surface.

The goal of the mission is not to find water.

It won't be considered a failure if we don't.

We have good reason to believe that there is water below the surface.

The question is how deep and in what form and how abundant it might be.

Water--- - [Narrator] Like the engineers, Paige's science team had worked in a feverish faster, better, cheaper mode, only to have the pace become even more intense after the loss of Climate Orbiter.

(soft music) - We had this even bigger mountain to climb, which was to get the Lander together.

We had, you know, a camera system, a robotic arm, we would dig trenches.

We would look inside layered terrains.

And the fact that this orbiter didn't work all of a sudden meant that our plans for how we were going to operate the Lander on the surface of Mars in just a couple of months, had to be radically altered.

Everybody was under incredible stress.

- [Narrator] And the Lander had left the launch pad not knowing precisely where it was to land.

20 year old Viking images had identified a general area but scientists had been awaiting new and far more detailed images from Mars Global Surveyor.

- In those days when you looked at the south polar layered terrain with Viking you saw this beautiful, smooth area that looked like, oh my gosh, you know, it looks like, you know, just, whatever, baby skin.

You know, there's no, there's no hazards here whatsoever.

- [Narrator] But that impression was dispelled by Global Surveyor's images.

Although this topographic map of the landing area was intentionally exaggerated to highlight height differences, it was still a sobering jolt as landing day approached.

(dramatic music) - [Man 35] We are an hour and a quarter away from arriving on the surface of Mars with three spacecraft.

(men speaking indistinctly) The soft landing Mars Polar Lander.

And two experimental [inaudible].

- [Man 36] Fault Protection reports all states are nominal.

We have a good spacecraft.

We are ready for entry.

- Spacecraft engineerimg [unintelligible] on Mars Ops.

- [Man 37] Yes, I'd like to report that the pyrotechnic device has fired to pressurize the propulsion system for [Unintelligible].

- [Man 38] Copy.

(suspenseful music) - F1 copy, spacecraft go for entry.

- You've been sitting in the room here for the last hour or so.

What's your view from the inside?

- Cautious confidence.

We think we've done everything we can do.

It's out of the engineers' hands at this point in time.

And every indication is that the spacecraft is performing exactly as intended.

Everything's nice and warm and ready to start the entry, descent and landing sequence here in just a few short minutes.

(suspenseful music) (men speaking indistinctly) - You guys have to eat a lot of peanuts.

(men laughing) - [Man 39] Engineer, attitude can confirm initialization of the absolute slew with the target entry attitudes.

- [Man 40] Copy that attitude.

Prepared for slew.

- [Man 41] F1 copy.

Autopilot initialize for slew.

- [David] This is a Doppler plot.

What we're seeing as the line curves downwards is the increase in the velocity of the spacecraft as it approaches Mars.

The closer it gets to Mars the more significant the gravitational pull on the spacecraft and the greater its speed.

We're going to lose this information shortly as the spacecraft turns away from earth.

- [Man 42] And all stations have tele on Mars Ops.

We have all stations at 1463 and 15 LCLS.

(suspenseful music) - [Man 43] FLM spacecraft engineer.

- [Man 44] ZFM.

- [Man 43] Happy landing, Sam.

- [Man 44] Copy that lad.

30 minutes or so to go here.

(men speaking indistinctly) - This is a view of the landing site.

The red ellipse is a target area.

And in the center of that ellipse is where we're headed today.

They showed me a picture of this sort of large depression, and it reminded me of Climate Orbiter again, that somehow the Lander had sort of drifted off course a little bit compared to where we wanted to land it.

And that it was not going to hit this cliff but it seemed like it was awfully close to this cliff feature here.

And I said, "Oh God, you know what, how did this happen?"

You know, somebody said some sort of techno mumbo jumbo about, you know, trajectories and solutions and all this kind of stuff.

And I said, "Okay, you know, whatever."

But I think that was the real interesting moment for me because it really hit home sort of how remote Mars is from the earth.

You're just completely on your own.

Like the concept of like true exploration really hit home.

That we were really, really out there.

(camera clicking) - [Man 45] At this time, the Lander should be commanding separation from the back shell with the guidance system initiating a pitch up maneuver.

Power to send is only about 40 seconds in duration.

During that time, the spacecraft will decelerate from approximately 75 meters per second or 160 miles per hour down to a soft landing, in just over five miles per hour.

- [Man 46] Systems, we expect to touch down at 20:14:45.

- [Man 47] Copy that.

Hey Billy, are we past that mark systems?

- [Man 46] Affirmative.

- [Man 47] Copy that.

- [David] At this point the Lander should be sitting resting safely on the surface for the nominal flight path.

Again, storing RT data in critical entry descent landing engineering telemetry in its nonvolatile memory.

- [Narrator] Just minutes after the time of the scheduled touchdown into the mission support area walked, unannounced, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin.

He was followed by JPL Director Ed Stone and Caltech president David Baltimore.

And on the telephone from Washington was vice president Al Gore waiting to congratulate the team.

- In this particular instance it was almost like you hear stories about animals or cats, you know, that are pregnant cats that want to go off in a corner and hide somewhere before they give birth.

Right?

This was definitely one of those cases, where it was like, can we just get all of the press out of here and get all of the dignitaries out of here and let us do what we need to do, you know, in dignity by yourselves and we'll call you.

You know, get out of the, get the dad out of the delivery room, go, go to the bar across the street.

And once the delivery's done one way or the other we'll call you when this is over.

(men speaking indistinctly) - We were showing him the pictures of the landing site and he looked and said, "That's, "are you sure this is a safe spot?

You know, all of a sudden, (laughing) you could see this, you know, twinge of doubt, sort of roll over the man's face as he started, you know, sort of looking at what we were actually going to do here, which was to, you know, come blazing through the atmosphere, open up these parachutes, put on the thrusters and try to land this three legged Lander, you know, in this terrain here.

- [Man 48] All stations [Unintelligible].

We're still looking.

[Inaudible] - [Narrator] Half past high noon was the first opportunity to hear from the lander but there was only silence.

(suspenseful music) (camera clicking) - [Man 49] First AD, we are at 21:23:26.

Telemetry looking for... [Inaudible] - Imagine standing next to Dan Goldin.

And then Goldin's assistant's got the telephone tied in to Gore, to report the success.

And, um... that's bad news.

Bad day.

(man speaking indistinctly) (men speaking indistinctly) (suspenseful music) - We did not hear.

But we had a plan for what would happen when we didn't hear.

We have a plan of additional communications opportunities today.

That playbook, you know, I think it reflects our normal model which is, well, it's a problem, but this thing will, you know, this is what could have caused it and that'll be okay because there'll be another opportunity.

- What are the possibilities realistically that something catastrophic has happened to the spacecraft?

- I think we have a long way to go before we're going to be of any concern.

- Can you think of a single scenario that would account for the failure of communication with both the probes and the Lander.

- Not separating.

The cruise stage not separating.

And so we played through the playbook, which stretched for days.

- And, we will continue to look for the probes once a day all the way out through sol nine.

But to be honest with you, the chances of hearing from them will be greatly decreased by tomorrow morning.

It was a very bad time period for those of us who had given so much and invested so much in a mission.

You get very attached to the spacecraft.

And when you lose one it's like losing a best friend and it's very difficult.

- [Journalist 5] How confident are you that the probe is intact on the surface?

- You know, I think that that's the big question.

- And it begs the question again whether we're trying to do these too fast and too cheap.

And that is something that we hear quite often from people around here.

What do you say?

- Frankly, are you not clutching at straws?

- We haven't exhausted all the possibilities.

I do think that the lesson I learned from that is that they either go really well or they really don't go well.

There's not really a in between that's very likely.

We're pretty much reaching the point where we've used up our final silver bullets.

You can still continue to try to find it but to get yourself in that mindset which you got to accept it, is better, better for everyone than sort of slowly ripping the band-aid off, which is what we did.

- JFM, go ahead.

- [Man 50] JFM, I'm sorry to report that all we have is HKTM at this point.

It seemed to have been a nominal no-contact MR pass.

- Copy that Mark.

Thanks for that.

Thanks for hanging in there with us.

(soft music) - [Narrator] The loss of Mars Polar Lander was first believed to have been caused by a premature shutdown of the descent engines.

If true, the Lander after safely traveling 200 million miles was lost in the last 200 feet of its journey.

But no crash site has ever been seen from orbit.

Subsequent research points to the likelihood that the Lander in its cruise stage never separated.

But Mars Polar Lander remains a mystery still to be solved.

- We just went too far in trying to skinny down and reduce the number of eyes, the number people involved.

It was just too fragile.

It almost worked.

In fact, it probably could have worked.

But that is not the right answer.

The right answer is to find the right balance of checks and balances and safety net.

So that in fact, you don't expose teams to these sorts of situations which are really devastating for the teams.

The eyes of the world are always upon us when we go to the red planet.

When we succeed--- - [Narrator] One week after the failed landing Ed Stone, once again, addressed the lab.

While acknowledging another painful loss, his message was really about the future.

- The last week has been very difficult and the attention is far from over.

But scrutiny and criticism can be good things.

At times we will be uncomfortable with some of what is said about us.

But at the end of the day we will learn from what has happened and JPL will be a better place for all of it.

I was reminded of this earlier this week, when Homer Hickam, the author of "Rocket Boys", some of you may know the book by the movie title, "October Sky."

And he suggested that I turn to chapter 19 of his book.

A lot has happened to you, probably more than I know.

But I'm telling you, if you stop working on your rockets now you will regret it the rest of your life.

You've got to put all your hurt and anger aside so that you can do your job.

Your job, sonny, is to build your rockets.

You've got to give it everything you've got.

You all are Homer Hickams.

A lot has happened to you, probably more than I know.

But if you stop working on your rockets, on your projects, you too will regret it the rest of your life.

You have to put all your hurt, your anger aside, so you can do your job.

Because your job is to build the rocket.

Your rocket is going to open the doors to space exploration in the 21st century.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) (soft music) - [Facilitator] All members' opening statements will be placed into the record at this point.

Will you all please stand and raise your right hand?

- We just went too far.

We pushed those boundaries too far and we've cut, we cut back too far on what history has taught us, to be sound management and sound engineering principles.

I think the project felt that what they were doing was reasonable and that it's good work and it would work and it could have worked.

And it would've worked if nobody made a mistake.

But that's the big if, you know, and that's what people are.

They're mistake makers.

And you have to have a system that's tolerant to a mistake.

Which means you have to have checks and balances.

- We find a NASA headquarters, Jet Propulsion Laboratory's interface, that was ineffective in resolving issues and managing risk.

We find a Lockheed--- I think that JPL had two responsibilities.

They had the responsibility to follow our direction, but they also had the responsibility to go back and to say, you know, that it wasn't, that the direction was not executable.

And we identified organizational changes that we thought were appropriate at JPL and at NASA headquarters to assure the success of the program in the future.

- I was excoriated, in the hearings in the Congress.

It was ugly.

- I don't object to losses from taking risks.

That's what it's all about.

I definitely object to losses due to mistakes, especially what I unmercifully will call, stupid mistakes.

- I'll answer the question.

I feel a certain level of hostility in this interaction.

- [Senator Vern] Well, you're a good politician.

I'm trying to get to the point yet-- - But those two missions to Mars will always be on my back.

I don't care.

- We wanted to push the limits to see how far we can go.

He was not thrilled with what he heard, I guess, would be a way to describe it.

I mean, he didn't say anything about you're wrong.

You know, it's a problem.

But he was, you know, he was having difficulty as I would have, you know, internalizing the whole activity.

- You don't win popularity contests when you're changing bureaucracy.

- As a NASA administrator, I had to take the heat.

I was worried we were going to lose the Jet Propulsion Lab due to this gnashing of teeth.

And there were people at NASA headquarters who love retribution.

- It had to go down hard.

I think it would have gone down hard with anybody, because it was a pretty hard hitting report.

And it really said that, you know, we were on a course that was destructive for NASA.

- So if there is no further business before the committee, the Committee on Science stands adjourned.

(gavel banging) (footsteps approaching) - I pushed too hard.

And in doing so, stretched the system too thin.

It wasn't intentional.

It wasn't malicious.

I believed in the vision.

But it may have made some failure inevitable.

I have no qualms about pushing them.

Albeit, they should have pushed back a little bit, but it's okay.

I wanted to demonstrate to the world that we could do things much better than anyone else.

And you delivered.

What we did is we reduced the price of the mission from, in excess of billions, to a few hundred million.

We knew we could have errors and it occurred.

So what?

So what?

I salute the team's conviction and courage and make no mistake, they need not apologize to anyone.

They did not fail alone.

As the head of NASA, I accept the responsibility.

You can't have stunning science without failure.

And I have no regrets about that mission.

Zero.

None.

(soft music) - [Narrator] The Mars 98 failures were a setback and a new beginning.

Rather than retrenching, NASA's Mars program was reinvented and given greater financial support.

In years to come, technical twins of Mars Polar Lander would fly.

The Climate Orbiter mission was immediately reflown, as Mars Odyssey 2001.

- [Man 51] We have basically, eight receivers in lock right now and the spacecraft all... (men clapping) - [Narrator] Dan McCleese' science instrument on his third attempt, finally made it safely to the red planet.

Getting Mars Odyssey underway was a fitting capstone for Ed Stone's tenure as JPL director.

And before departing he signed onto a bold plan, to send an entirely new kind of Rover to Mars.

Dan Goldin liked the idea so much that he ordered up two of them.

It was one of his last major decisions.

(soft music) As 2001 was also Goldin's final year at NASA.

The era of faster, better, cheaper came to an end.

But there would also be far fewer Battlestar Galacticas.

And while one era was ending, another was beginning.

For JPL and its new Director, Charles Elachi, the arrival of the 21st century would be the opening of a renaissance of space exploration.

And several of those involved in Mars 98 would join the ranks of the laboratory's upper management.

One of them was Tom Gavin, who would put in place flight rules and practices that all missions were required to follow.

Spacecrafts became more expensive as a result, but more of them worked.

The year 2001 also marked the completion of Mars Global Surveyor's primary mission.

The mapping orbiter would continue to operate for five more years, collecting more data than all previous Mars missions combined.

But Global Surveyor ceased operating in 2006.

Its demise brought on by an error made during an update to the spacecraft's complex computer system.

It was another reminder that humans are and will always be mistake makers.

(soft music) (smooth classical music)