New Mars

Former Manager of the NASA Exploration Programs Office Dr. Humbolt C. Mandell considers the other problem in sending humans to Mars; convincing the humans on Earth that they should pay for the mission.

Engaging our customers in the Mars exploration adventure

The hardest problems in getting to Mars may not be the engineering challenges.

Occasionally overlooked in our zeal to send humans to Mars is the question of who will pay for it. By now, it is community folklore, or at least conventional wisdom, that there can never be another “Apollo” program, wherein the President of the United States issues a mandate, and that mandate is supported by both houses of Congress, to send humans on a new all-American space adventure. Without debating that issue, it is clear that a return to Apollo budgetary levels is unlikely, and that any realistic plan for sending humans to Mars must not rely on those levels of funding from government sources.

NASA now has a major thrust to identify “affordable” Mars missions. Affordability is in the eye of the beholder, but a realistic assessment of affordability would be for a program to cost no more than allowed by current NASA budgetary levels, plus whatever the international community and the private sector are willing to contribute.

Missions which meet these criteria have been identified, but to date, the costs have not been verified. Neither has NASA fully come to grips with the fact that, to achieve affordable costs, the cultural changes initiated by Administrator Goldin must continue and even accelerate.

Some critics say that NASA is indeed incapable of mounting a human mission to Mars, for a number of reasons, one of them being the inability to make a major change to the management paradigm.

There are others who say that the human Mars mission should be done privately, and that when humans eventually go to Mars, the motives will be purely commercial.

Others say that the human Mars mission must be international, that the United States alone can not mount such an effort.

Although I personally might disagree with these points of view, it is not the purpose of this paper to debate them. But it must be conceded that it will be extremely difficult for NASA to make the necessary management changes, harder, perhaps, than the considerable engineering challenges involved.

Joe Rothenberg, the Associate Administrator for Space Flight in NASA, has stated four conditions which will have to be met before humans can explore Mars. These are:

• a compelling scientific or exploration rationale;
• a strong potential for high commercial return;
• strong public support;
• and credible (affordable) cost estimates.

Credible costs, according to Mr. Rothenberg, plus two of the remaining three conditions, will be mandatory. He is undoubtedly correct. This article will deal primarily with seeking and cementing the necessary public support, and assuring program affordability, a necessary ingredient in public support.

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The NASA Customer Engagement Team

… do the people support human Mars exploration or not, to the extent that they are willing to pay for it? No one knows.

Currently, no one really knows what the customers want. NASA is not alone among Federal agencies in not understanding its customers well. The Administration has recently called for a Dialog With America to be accomplished as a follow on to the successful National Performance Review.

In NASA’s case, do the people support human Mars exploration or not, to the extent that they are willing to pay for it? No one knows. There is abundant anecdotal evidence to support the fact that the people are highly interested. The billion “hits” on the Mars Pathfinder web site are often cited as evidence. There has been enormous press coverage of Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, and Lunar Prospector missions. Television polls show strong support for human space exploration. But these are only interesting trivia, and certainly not the evidence required to convince those who must appropriate the necessary funding to do so.

There are large uncertainties which must be answered. Detailed demographics of public support must be measured. We must know what the people would want us to do if they knew what we are able to do and what the true costs to them would be. We do know that there is a large public misperception of how much money NASA spends relative to other Federal agencies.

Not only must the customers and other stakeholders in the mission be understood, they must be educated in what is possible and what it would cost them. Only then can they make the enlightened decisions required to say what they want the Congress to do with their money. The customers must become involved in the process. Toward that end, NASA has appointed a Customer Engagement Group to find out what an enlightened electorate would want NASA to do in planetary exploration, to enhance the ongoing constituency building process, and to involve the customer in planning what we do. Only if that is done will the necessary funding be made available.

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The Need for a Business Plan

The plan for going to Mars will probably resemble more closely the startup plan for a multi-national company than for a traditional space program.

A number of important questions must be answered for our customers before humans will travel to Mars. When should humans go? (It is considered a certainty that they will go some day.) What should they do while they are there? What is the role of the Moon, and lunar exploration, if any? What is the role of the private sector? What are the reasons for private sector involvement? How can money be made? What is the proper role of the international community, both private and public sectors? What are the proper roles of governments? What technologies should governments fund? How much will the venture cost, and how can the money be raised? How should it all be managed? How should the ideas be marketed? How should the public be engaged? Is new legislation required? What is the role of NASA in all of this, and how can the necessary cultural changes be made within the NASA institution to enable all of this to happen?

A business plan is needed to begin to answer these questions. NASA is pursuing such a plan with in-house and academic assistance.

The plan for going to Mars will probably resemble more closely the startup plan for a multi-national company than for a traditional space program. NASA has very little expertise in the writing of business plans, particularly ones involving public/private partnerships and the cooperation of several nations and their industrial sectors. The complexities presented by the many cultures, languages, ways of doing business, national and international laws, and governmental differences make the development of the business plan one of the major challenges of the entire program.

Couple this with NASA’s new, lower-cost ways of doing business, where the agency does not itself fully understand the implications of imposing new management practices on its forty-year-old bureaucracy, and the problem becomes even more complex.

So NASA has recognized that it genuinely needs outside skills and expertise to complement its own. Many of those skills are available in the academic community.

Skills required include business planning (domestic and international), public affairs, public administration, marketing, advertising, and communications. It may only be within the academic community where all of the needed skills reside for a plan requiring so many disciplines.

The “NASA Means Business” project will enable business schools to participate in a “hands-on” manner in the actual planning of the NASA Mars Exploration enterprise. Several prestigious universities and management experts associated with these universities are expected to participate. The results will be a fully integral part of the NASA program management planning process. This activity, entitled “NASA Means Business,” will have the additional effect of building a larger constituency and advocacy for the Mars exploration mission.

NASA intends to participate fully in the development of the business plan, and will provide access to experts in all aspects of mission planning and vehicle design. And because of the high levels of interest by NASA management, it is expected that key NASA managers will be directly involved in this project.

The Customer Engagement Group is implementing a systematic approach to answering the key questions, and assessing and developing public support for human space exploration, in support of strategic planning activities currently underway in the NASA Office of Space Flight and at the Agency level.

A private consulting firm has been hired to provide some of the expertise which is not resident in the Agency, in particular the skills needed to assess the needs and desires of NASA’s customers and stakeholders, and to assist in developing the campaigns to engage these groups.

And a large advertising firm is becoming closely involved with NASA, providing us with badly needed expertise in how to better get our messages out to our customers.

It is presumed that once NASA knows what its customers need and desire from the agency, it will deliver high value products, and will be rewarded by resources. But previous efforts to determine customer needs have not been very successful, for a number of reasons. First, respondents have often been self-selected, resulting in very biased results. Even when randomly chosen, respondents are often essentially ignorant of the factual background of the questions which they are asked, and, with knowledge, would answer quite differently.

But there is now new science to allow better results from polls. The Deliberative Poll(TM), developed by Dr. James Fishkin of The University of Texas, has been successfully utilized in Europe and the United States to measure the true attitudes of the electorates when they are familiar with the issues. A large sample is chosen completely at random, representing all ages, ethnic groups, economic strata of the nations. The sample is physically assembled at a common point, administered scientifically-developed instruments, exposed to experts pro and con on all issues, and allowed to debate and deliberate each issue in depth. Then the sample is re-polled to determine shifts in attitudes. What has been shown by this process is that an enlightened group will have substantially different attitudes from the same group prior to their enlightenment.

But Deliberative Polls are expensive, primarily because of the costs of bringing all of the people together at a common point and feeding and housing them.

Therefore, NASA and others are in the process of developing funding mechanisms. Funding may come entirely from the private sector, but at this point, some public funding has not been ruled out. A private foundation, the Foundation for Space Exploration, is actively involved in the process of fund raising.

Stakeholders such as the Congress of the United States are equally important. Their needs and wants must also be addressed. Therefore, NASA must focus on the issues which are important to the key stakeholders, and demonstrate how the NASA programs address those issues. If other programs are needed, they must be initiated. If some are irrelevant to the needs and wants of both customers and stakeholders, they must be eliminated and the resources utilized on things which are important to the customers and stakeholders.

This will also require expertise outside of the usual NASA in-house skill set.

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Involving Old Friends and New Ones In Unconventional Ways

Involving Old Friends and New Ones In Unconventional Ways

NASA recognized early in the planning process for a Mars initiative that the skills required to bring the activity to fruition do not all reside within its own organizational walls. Already, substantial dialog is being held with technology developers in government laboratories and the private sector. The Department of Energy has a resident engineer at the Johnson Space Center to assist in identifying technologies useful to Mars exploration.

NASA Space Act Agreements (SAA’s) are being written with the private sector to bring innovative (and proprietary) technologies to bear, and to thereby reduce the risks and costs of Mars exploration.

Very meaningful dialog is also being held with the international community, and a number of promising partnerships have been identified, which should significantly decrease the financial burden on the United States taxpayer.

Partly because of its current hiring freeze, and a downsizing of the work force, there are some critical skills which NASA does not have. SAA’s are also being pursued to create partnerships to supplement the NASA skills. One such agreement involves a Mars Precision Landing institute created to provide experts who can supplement the NASA work force and solve the critical problems associated with close proximity landing of two or more spacecraft on the Mars surface.

The academic community is also involved in in-line NASA mission design activities, further involving that important sector of our customer base in the process of developing the human Mars mission. For example, designs of Mars drilling devices, developed by Texas A&M University in conjunction with consultants from the petrochemical industry, have shown significant promise.

And, as stated above, the academic community will be offered the opportunity, beginning in the Fall of 1998, to participate in the development of a business plan for the NASA Mars mission.

NASA has traditionally had a number of university partners, and intends to not only maintain but to expand and enrich these relationships. To assist in aligning university activities more closely with those of the human space exploration program, a new HEDS-UP (Human Exploration and Development of Space University Partners) project has been initiated, managed by the Texas Space Grant Consortium and the Lunar and Planetary Institute.

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Affordability

Partnerships are being pursued with experts in cost analysis and organizational cultural change to assure that when the time comes to send humans to Mars, the people of the nation will be convinced that the venture will be affordable, and will have confidence that NASA can manage it well.

If Mars missions are to happen at all, they must be affordable. Affordability is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but the general assumption is being made that whatever NASA funding is required will have to fit within its current budget or less.

This will be a major challenge. Earlier cost estimates, made with cost models based on previous NASA experience, produce cost levels which can never be funded. Approximately an order of magnitude reduction in costs will be required from those produced by the models. NASA research has established that costs are much a function of the management style of the organization performing the job. Products are being sold to the private sector for prices far below those which NASA has had to pay. The difference is in how the items are procured, or how the development programs are managed. NASA knows the parameters of low cost management. But a major challenge will be to implement the very substantial cultural changes required to make low cost Mars programs possible.

This challenge must be met, however, if NASA’s customers are to perceive that Mars exploration is indeed affordable. Partnerships are being pursued with experts in cost analysis and organizational cultural change to assure that when the time comes to send humans to Mars, the people of the nation will be convinced that the venture will be affordable, and will have confidence that NASA can manage it well.

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But Will the People Support Us?

Although many of the technologies required to explore Mars are currently available, or well on the way to fruition, there is still a lot NASA needs to know, particularly about the attitudes of its customers and stakeholders, and a lot of outside help that will be required to successfully pursue a leadership role in human Mars exploration. Although there are program architectures now in place which satisfy the affordability criteria, it will be a very hard sell to get permission from our customers and stakeholders to do the job. Unprecedented and unconventional approaches will be mandatory if we are to succeed. We have already begun the process of involving new people in new and exciting ways.

The general population, which is our primary customer, has little of the knowledge which will be required for it to be willing to provide the required resources.

A large part of the problem is public perception. The general population, which is our primary customer, has little of the knowledge which will be required for it to be willing to provide the required resources. So NASA and all who want to see humans go to Mars in our lifetimes have first to engage the customers in the adventure.

The engagement process begins with knowing what the customers and stakeholders need and want from us, and what they would want if they knew what we could do for them, and at what cost. A Deliberative Poll

Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2001