The Leap: Mars? It Was A Miracle We Got To Florida

Geologist Steve Squyres risked his career and millions of dollars to get the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Flight Director Jason Willis reporting. We are currently six minutes away from hitting the top of the Martian atmosphere. We are expecting that the weather today at the landing site.

• 0:27Flora Lichtman?

  Twenty years ago, a group of scientists and engineers assembled in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch history being made. Spirit, the first rover designed to roam Mars, was dropping down on the red planet after a 300-million-mile journey. Its twin rover Opportunity was scheduled to land a few weeks later.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  At this time, we are roughly 11 minutes, 48 seconds from landing at the Guzette Crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars.

• 0:52Flora Lichtman?

  For the last three years, this team had worked to anticipate and mitigate every single problem that might crop up. But in this moment, they were just spectators.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  We, in our control room, we had no control at all.

• 1:07Flora Lichtman?

  This is Steve Squyres, the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Because Mars is so far away, it takes a long time for a signal to get back to Earth.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  When the speed of light gets involved, even simple words like "now" don't really quite have the same meaning, right?

• 1:24Flora Lichtman?

  So everything that they're seeing in this moment had already happened.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  So I'm sitting in the control room, looking at the Doppler signal from the spacecraft, starting to feel the Martian atmosphere.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  The vehicle has now hit the top of the Martian atmosphere.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  The reality is, it's been on the surface of Mars for four minutes, either bouncing happily or a smoking hole in the ground. We don't know.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Still awaiting signal that we are on the ground.

• 1:48Flora Lichtman?

  It wasn't just that Steve didn't have control. There was a lot on the line.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  A billion dollars, my career, careers of many, many other people. You know, very high-stakes game we were playing.

• 2:00Flora Lichtman?

  And high risk. The mission was so audacious that people thought it was completely impossible.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  You know, most of the world didn't think we could do it. We believed we could.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  We got signs of bouncing on the surface.

• 2:20Flora Lichtman?

  You can see Steve dropping to his knees in the control room.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  We're jumping up and down and cheering like we just won the Super Bowl. You know, we're going crazy.

• 2:32Flora Lichtman?

  This turned out to be a phenomenally, almost unbelievably, successful mission. The rovers made it to Mars and outlived their predicted lifespans by many, many years. They made big science discoveries and blazed a path for future Mars exploration, like the Curiosity rover and Perseverance. So, given all that success, you might not guess that just getting to the Cape Canaveral launch pad might have been the biggest achievement of all. This mission almost crashed and burned a number of times before it even got off the ground.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  All these years later, people will look at it and say, oh, you know, 14 years on Mars. It was, it was a miracle that you got it to work for that long. And I always want to say it was a miracle we got to Florida.

• 3:24Flora Lichtman?

  This is The Leap, a new series about scientists who are risking their careers, their reputations, and even their lives to make a breakthrough.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  When I was very, very young, eight years old, I was fascinated by exploration. Read books about the history of exploration all the time. And I would have told you I was a scientist. I just wasn't a good one yet.

• 4:00Flora Lichtman?

  Like most eight-year-olds, but he kept at it. He studied geology in college, and for one of his classes, he did a project on the Mars Viking orbiter, which was sending back these enticing new pictures of Mars. And Steve started fantasizing about all the questions he could answer if he could get down and dirty with the Martian soil, if he could just roam around Mars. His wheels began to turn.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  The dream of sending rovers to Mars and doing, you know, really kind of the first overland expedition across another planet.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Slowly came into focus over a period of many years.

• 4:36Flora Lichtman?

  By the late 80s, as a young professor at Cornell, he started to pitch the project. And over the next 10 years, he wrote proposal after proposal after proposal to NASA. Each one rejected.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  That's the way it should be. It really is. I mean, you're asking the government to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to do your science experiment. And, you know, you better have a pretty good story.

• 5:08Flora Lichtman?

  The story Steve was telling NASA is that they needed to get a better look at the Martian surface, a zoomed in view, the view you could only get from driving on Mars.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  You've got to realize at this point in time, the only look that we had ever gotten down on the surface of Mars was the two Viking landing sites, and then later the Mars Pathfinder site. And all three of those was a flat plane of identical looking boulders extending off into the distance in all directions. Mars looked boring in those pictures, but I knew from NASA from orbit that all of Mars isn't like that.

• 5:48Flora Lichtman?

  During those 10 years, what kept you writing proposals? You know, some people might quit after the first one gets rejected, or the second one, or the third one gets rejected.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  There were a couple of reasons I kept going. One was that I really knew if we had a chance to do it, and we succeeded at doing it, two different things, right? It was going to be great. And another thing was simply all the effort that I'd put in. I didn't want 10 years of work to be wasted, right? Now.

• 6:15Flora Lichtman?

  Sunk cost is what I'm hearing.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  People will tell you, you should not make big decisions on the basis of sunk costs, but that's kind of what I was doing.

• 6:24Flora Lichtman?

  Steve sent in a fourth proposal, and he told himself, OK, if this one's not selected, I will stop. He got to the final round. NASA was choosing between his project and an orbiter mission.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  And we knew they were going to pick one of the two. And there was a meeting at NASA headquarters with the NASA administrator to decide what was going to fly. And I remember I was sitting in my office at Cornell University. I knew the meeting was happening. I was waiting for the phone to ring. The phone rang.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  And it was like everybody from the Mars program at NASA headquarters, all gathered around the speakerphone. And they said, Steve, we have to ask you something. Can you build two? And as God is my witness, I said, "Two what?" And they said, "Two rovers." And I was just floored. I mean, not one of us on the project had dared to suggest to NASA that we ought to send two. It took the NASA administrator to see that that was the smart thing to do.

• 7:36Flora Lichtman?

  So if one fails, you have the other one?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that was it. And we were off and running.

• 7:44Flora Lichtman?

  Were you like, "I've just won the lottery"?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  No. Didn't feel like we'd won the lottery because it was real obvious that it was going to be a terrible, terrible challenge to get those things built and done and ready to launch. It was 34 months before we had to have the spacecraft on top of the rockets in Florida.

• 8:08Flora Lichtman?

  How many months?

• 8:09Speaker 03

  34. And you typically need at least four years to do something like this, and it's better if you got five. We had a shade less than three. It was sporty.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  It was a sprint for three years. It was absolutely a sprint.

• 8:27Flora Lichtman?

  This is Jennifer Trossler, a Jet Propulsion Lab engineer who has rocked many Mars missions.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  I've been on every Mars rover that's ever touched wheels on Mars. And I always say I have four children of my own, you know? And then I have sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance.

• 8:49Flora Lichtman?

  And even though she loves all her children equally, Spirit and Opportunity was a special mission. In 2000, when this got greenlit, there was a lot on the line for NASA.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  So the Mars program was... Hanging by a thread, frankly.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  What had happened was, the two missions that were launched to Mars in 1998, both failed. One crashed on the surface, the other one famously burned up in the Martian atmosphere because of a mix-up over English and metric units.

• 9:19Flora Lichtman?

  That's embarrassing.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  That's a very bad way to lose a spacecraft. Don't let it happen to you.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  And this mission was the savior mission. You know, we just had to succeed.

• 9:29Flora Lichtman?

  And Jennifer had a big role to play. Jennifer was a lead systems engineer. So there's scores of people working on these rovers. People in charge of building the robotic arm, other people are in charge of the software for that arm, and the cameras, and the wheels, and so on and so on. Jennifer's job was making sure all the pieces fit together.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  And the interesting thing was, I don't think I was really prepared for it. I mean, I'm certain, right? I'm certain.

• 9:54Flora Lichtman?

  When Jennifer started the role, one of her first tasks was presenting at the NASA preliminary design review. Passing is required to go forward with the mission. Jennifer's job as lead systems engineer was to summarize and present on all the risks to the mission and how they were planning on mitigating them. But Jennifer had just started, and she did not have that risk list in hand.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  I'd been on the job like, three weeks or something, right? And we walk into this preliminary design review, I'm sitting in the back of the room writing the risk list, listening, based on listening to people give their presentations.

• 10:29Flora Lichtman?

  It did not go well.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  We failed. We absolutely failed that review.

• 10:33Flora Lichtman?

  They had to get the next one right.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  So, we hunkered down for four months and managed to get past the preliminary design review. And then it was just so much to do.

• 10:44Flora Lichtman?

  They were facing a to-do list 300 million miles long. A list that required deep collaboration between two camps that don't always see the world the same way. The scientists, like Steve, and the engineers, like Jennifer.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  A lot of people don't adequately appreciate how different those disciplines are.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Scientists are seekers of truth. We want to know how the universe works. And there are no limits on what we want to know. And so we would like there to be no limits on what we can know. All right? Engineers are practical. They're inventors, they're tinkerers, they're builders. They have to build machines and machines have to work. And so there's this built-in creative tension between science and engineering on a project like this, where the scientists want everything, the engineers need it to work.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  And that tension, when the culture is right, can lead to creative partnerships and getting stuff done that nobody believed could be done. And I've also seen projects where it's kind of this acid that eats away at the whole thing.

• 12:07Flora Lichtman?

  Team Corroding Acid? That was a thing Steve could not afford on this project. So he, along with Jennifer's boss, Pete Tisinger, who passed away in 2024, worked very hard to bridge this cultural gap.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  And I hammered into my team's heads the notion that we had to learn some engineering. We had to understand this vehicle, what it could do, what it couldn't do. We had to ask for what was reasonable and not ask for what was unreasonable.

• 12:34Flora Lichtman?

  This isn't always how it works on a project like this.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  It is often hard to understand the other side.

• 12:43Flora Lichtman?

  Engineering challenges come up that cause slowdowns. So you can imagine that on some projects, scientists might get frustrated and they might start asking annoying questions like...

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Why are we taking so long to figure it out? If you failed to accomplish the objective for the day, well, you know... What's wrong with you guys? What? Why did you make that error?

• 13:05Flora Lichtman?

  Steve didn't do that, Jennifer says.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  He took ownership of all that, right? If it took longer, he felt like he was part of why it took longer.

• 13:12Flora Lichtman?

  And Steve tried to make sure his scientists went about things the same way. To build understanding, he had his scientists get familiar with the rovers while they were being built and tested.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Put on the white coat, go into the clean room, start taking some data, get used to the, you know, hands-on, get used to that instrument because it's the same piece of hardware you're going to be using on Mars in a year, right? So that when we got to the surface of Mars, we knew how hard to push and we knew when it was time to back off. You got to get the science, but you got to keep the thing alive, too.

• 13:46Flora Lichtman?

  While Steve was trying to mitigate these future problems on Mars, the team was also facing a Kuiper belt's worth of problems here on Earth.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  There were so many times when I thought, this is it, it's over.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  I think maybe one of the very lowest moments was when we did the first test of the parachute design that we thought was going to land on Mars.

• 14:11Flora Lichtman?

  This is a test where they take a stand-in for the lander. In this case, they used a 3,000-pound weight shaped like a dart, and they drop it from thousands of feet in the air to test out the landing parachutes.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  It was done at a National Guard range outside of Boise, Idaho, which is a place where you could drop a big, heavy thing from the sky and they won't kill anybody. And yeah, we had this big Chinook helicopter and took this big test article up, dropped it, it fell, the parachute deployed, it made this beautiful orange and white bowl, and then it just exploded. It just ripped to pieces and parachute after parachute failed. And we were really in trouble. The vehicle had gotten so heavy that the parachutes couldn't land it. And if the parachutes don't work, you're done.

• 15:03Flora Lichtman?

  What were you thinking?

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Oh, [BLEEP].

• 15:11Speaker 03

  What else can you say?

• 15:13Flora Lichtman?

  And this wasn't the only hiccup. They had an issue with the pyrotechnics weeks before they were set to launch, issues with the cameras.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Uh, where we were getting this horrible speckled data, just, just looked like static on a TV set. I mean, it was, it was, you couldn't even figure out the images. We finally were pretty sure that we had traced it to a way that some wires had been built. And I was 98% convinced that that was the answer. We had found it and fixed it, but I wasn't really sure till we got to Mars.

• 15:47Flora Lichtman?

  Whoa, really?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:50Flora Lichtman?

  At one point, Jennifer was asked to work on a risk assessment for the whole mission to determine the probability of whether they'd make the deadline. The numbers came back around 30% likely to succeed.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  And so all the official analysis kind of pointed towards, you know, it's a real crap shoot.

• 16:10Flora Lichtman?

  In some ways, this is the nature of a big ambitious project that's trying to achieve something unprecedented. But there are different ways to deal with risks. You could take a top-down approach, designate leadership as the decision makers, require a bunch of paperwork, or you can empower people on the ground, the people closest to the problem, to make the decisions as they face them. Jennifer says that's what they tried to do on this project.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Definitely in the documentation world, we light weighted it. And people might say, oh, that risk process wasn't perfect, right? Because somebody's standing in a chamber somewhere making the decision, right? It's not like everybody's sitting in a room. But there is a dynamic there that builds great teams when you empower people.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  So, yeah, there was a lot at stake, but boy, you talk about something that makes you feel alive. This is hard to beat.

• 17:08Flora Lichtman?

  Is that true? Did you feel like extra alive at that time?

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's like your senses are heightened. You don't need as much sleep. Mentally, it was just like we all shifted into a higher gear that we didn't know we had, you know? And it's not sustainable. You can't, you can't be that intense all the time. No way I'd be able to live my whole life like that, but for a few years, yeah, we did it.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  Four, three, two, one, engine start. And liftoff of the Delta 2 rocket carrying the Spirit from Earth to planet Mars.

• 17:54Flora Lichtman?

  What was launch like for you?

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Ha! Wow. Launch was completely different from what I expected. Completely different. So, when I first started down this road, you know, 13 years before we launched them, one of the things that sustained me through all those hard times was imagining launch. And imagining launch as this triumphant moment when all the problems were cleared, we were ready to go, light those rockets off, and they go soaring off into space, carrying our hopes and dreams with them.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Vehicles responding. Vehicles recovering very nicely from the liftoff transient.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  And it's just this moment of triumph, standing there on the beach in Florida. It was not like that at all. For two reasons. One was that I didn't feel ready to let them go. So, we had two lists of tests. We had one short-ish list that we called the incompressible test list. These were the tests that we had to do and had to pass, or NASA wouldn't let us fly. And we wouldn't let us fly. We got everything on the incompressible list done, but then we had a whole bunch of other tests that we wanted to do. But it's time to go. And you have to launch them. And so you launch them not feeling as confident as you want to, that they're ready to do

• 19:22Speaker 03

  the job that we're going to ask them to do at Mars. The other thing that was weird about launch, though, was that it was hard to say goodbye.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  So many long nights, so many long nights in the test labs, right there next to the rovers, you know, lying on the floor underneath the belly of one of the rovers, trying to, you know, give directions on the headset to the guy who's trying to put the cameras where we're trying to, you know, "No, no, go left, not right," you know. And the way that we projected our feelings, our hopes, our aspirations, our dreams, our frustrations, all of those things into these machines that we had built. The machines became extensions of ourselves. And you just get so attached to these things and, boy, you put them on top of a rocket

• 20:14Speaker 03

  and you fire them off into space and they are gone. It really was hard to say goodbye. And I didn't expect that at all.

• 20:30Flora Lichtman?

  Spirit launched in early June of 2003. And Opportunity went about a month later. And they had these long fruitful lives on Mars. They were only supposed to last a few months on the planet. Spirit went for six years. And Opportunity for over 14. The rovers found evidence of liquid water on the surface of Mars, a huge discovery. But when I asked Steve about the highlight for him, his answer surprised me.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  To me, now the whole thing's over. 14 years on Mars, big success, all of that. For me personally, the part, if you could say, Steve, you could have 18 months to live over again, just to experience it one more time. I would pick the last 18 months before we launched. We had such an extraordinary team of people. And there was this sense of shared struggle that bound the team together. I've never experienced anything like it before or since. I get choked up even today thinking about it. Those people meant so much to me.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  The people are the real story here. You're inspired by the people around you. You're inspired by what they figure out, by the problems they solve. To be a part of a team and know that you couldn't even get close to accomplishing anything like this on your own, and that's how we move it forward.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  It was just all the ingredients for a high-intensity, high-pressure, do-or-die, you're going to make it or you're going to fail spectacularly. All those ingredients were there, and we just had to do it. So we did.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  We have six wheels in the dirt. Now we are the mission that we all envisioned three and a half years ago. Both the robes are performing marvelously. It's hoping we'd find something truly new and different. Well, we have.

• 22:52Flora Lichtman?

  The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Flora Lichtman, and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Christopher Intagliata, Poojao Vangay, and David Sanford, fact-checking by Nicole Pasulka, mixing and scoring by Emma Munger, music by Joshua Budo Karp. Thanks to Jim Bell, Rob Manning, and Wayne Lee, and thanks to you for listening.

• 23:23Flora Lichtman?

  We will be back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming. We have a conversation about AI companion chatbots. Are they friends or foes?

• 23:34Speaker 06

  I think the upsurge of companion chatbots is a mirror for what we really want, which is connections with other people.

• 23:44Flora Lichtman?

  You don't want to miss it. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.