Thread by @People_Of_Space

So .... a final sequence of tweets about the Mars missions which I reported on, how JPL got its Red Planet groove back on..... and a true story of why I should never navigate on Earth, let alone Mars..... #Mars @daretodream #Space #CountdownToMars

I started reporting on space for newspapers in 1989, in retrospect one of those pivotal years in history. By then, NASA had a number of problems: aging work force, end of the Cold War and what was the political point of the agency since the Soviets were no longer around

The politics were murky to say the least. In early 1992, The George H.W. Bush administration fired Dick Truly as the boss and brought in Dan Goldin, who, for all his fearsome reputation, had a problem he knew only too well was rushing towards him

The NASA budget was on a downward curve: as Goldin said at the time, Hubble was blind, Galileo was deaf, the Shuttle had been "grounded" in 1990 deseret.com/1990/6/30/1886… and that meant he had the wherewithal to recreate the agency in his own image

Goldin had already called Mars Observer “the last ship out of port” – and when it was lost just before it arrived, his desire for “cheaper, faster, better” missions became not just a mantra but the only way forward

JPL did what it always did best: get the impossible to work. And against all the odds, it did: Mars Pathfinder landed successfully in 1997, even though both airbags and rovers were seen as ridiculous in some quarters

Pathfinder despatched the first rover - Sojourner - across the Martian surface. I reported on it, and was in a lucky position to know Donna Shirley reasonably well as she was a good friend of my mentor Al Hibbs

We tell her story in our @search_mars book, but she had one unusual attribute for a space engineer: she can explain things in plain and engaging English. Donna understood what anyone without a technical background would be interested in.

Too many engineers seem to subscribe to the “Mary Poppins” school of public engagement – “I never explain anything”@GlenCornhill (ironically, as I explain in my very own Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious way here: twitter.com/i/events/12229…

Your humble scribe interviewed Donna many times. In October 1997, she drove me to where I had been staying in Pasadena for 15 years by then. “Navigator to pilot,” I said, “I have no idea where we are.” “Good job we didn’t hire you to drive Sojourner,” she said. @GabriellBirchak

1996/97 was an interesting time to report Mars, not least for “that meteorite” - which we obviously discuss in the book. And here is a free sample, you lucky, lucky people.
salon.com/2020/06/13/the…

Whatever the scientific merits of that surreal episode, it had one beneficial effect – people realised that to look for life you needed to use as many areas of research and synthesise findings together

JPL hired Dr Kenneth Nealson, which sent out an irrefutable message: life on Mars was also no longer a taboo. And NASA was back in the astrobiology business.

Dr Nealson is one of the few people who has discovered "electronic" bacteria in extreme environments that defy understanding of how bacteria are supposed to behave.

Alas, we didn’t have enough room to run one of my long interviews from the time, but a flavour of his importance may be found here. news.usc.edu/86954/a-skepti…

Now retired from USC, one of his later hires was Luther Beegle, who tomorrow will see “Seven years of terror” (as he told us) come to fruition as his contribution to #Perseverance

As principal investigator for the SHERLOC instrument, we have a long interview with him carried out by @howellspace that is just fabulous in the book

And so here we are: on the cusp of the next landing when, behind the headlines, space scientists are now looking for the signs of ancient life on the world next door. So far as I am concerned: result!

And Perseverance is now 99.63% of its way there - with over a million miles to go. The excitement is too much for this old gentleman. Time for bed!
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

So tomorrow I will talk about people we have spoken to for our book, how I learned my trade - and without giving too much away, will have an article to show you and a podcast, too