EVER get that sense of déjà vu? The American space agency NASA doesn’t seem to, but for everyone else there was a strangely familiar ring to the announcement last week of the discovery of water on Mars. For those with short memories, NASA trailed the gist of the finding earlier this year. It made a similar announcement in June 2000, when the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft spotted evidence suggesting vast areas of the planet had once been heavily flooded. And even that wasn’t new. In the 1970s, the Viking spacecraft beamed back images of dry river beds, pointing to a wetter Martian past. So what’s going on?
Quite simply NASA has run out of things to say. Worse, the policy designed to get the agency out of this fix—the “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy of the 1990s—has failed. Exploring the Solar System using hordes of cheap spacecraft instead of a few expensive ones wasn’t a bad idea. But harsh cost cutting imposed within a culture accustomed to luxury budgets meant the vehicles simply didn’t work. Meanwhile, NASA’s only other recent stab at the “vision thing”, the International Space Station, is in danger of becoming the agency’s Vietnam: a financial disaster with unclear aims that’s slowly sucking it dry of money, expertise and political friends.
To be fair, the latest Mars studies do contain some important new information, about how much frozen water there might be and where it lies (see “The wet planet”). But to release these details without making it clear that Martian water itself is no new thing only served to strengthen the cynical view of NASA as an agency obsessed with spin and devoid of new ideas and goals. It also, inevitably, triggered a rash of advance speculation among journalists about the agency reviving proposals for sending astronauts to the Red Planet. That idea is laughable, given that NASA does not even have the funds for a probe that would send a sample back to Earth. But you can hardly blame reporters for getting hungry for real news when they are constantly being offered yesterday’s warmed-up leftovers.
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Of course there is some hope. NASA’s Cassini mission could pack a real scientific punch when it drops a probe into the dense atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. If, as some researchers speculate, Titan’s surface turns out to have oceans, waves and perhaps even signs of life, NASA really will have something to shout about. But ironically, Cassini is the last of the big missions that the “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy was designed to replace. What’s more, the probe won’t reach Titan till 2004, and that could be too late for NASA’s new chief Sean O’Keefe. He desperately needs to find a fresh direction for his demoralised agency and some scientific fanfare for a disillusioned public. And there’s the dilemma: how to balance the public desire for excitement and spectacle against researchers’ demands for scientific substance. It’s no easy task and if O’Keefe fails, this may not be the last time we learn of the discovery of water on Mars.
