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

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Geologist Steve Squyres risked his career and millions of dollars to get two rovers roaming on Mars. But the mission almost didn’t make it to the launch pad. Steve and NASA engineer Jennifer Trosper describe the many obstacles the team faced in getting Spirit and Opportunity ready, from ripped parachutes to fuzzy camera feeds, and the problem-solving it took to safely land the twin vehicles on Martian soil.“The Leap” is a 10-episode audio series that profiles scientists willing to take big risks to push the boundaries of discovery. It premieres on Science Friday’s podcast feed every Monday until July 21. “The Leap” is a production of the Hypothesis Fund, brought to you in partnership with Science Friday.Transcript is available on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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 is landing sight. 20 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. At this time, we are roughly a large. 11 minutes, 48 seconds from landing at the Goosef Crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. 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. We, in our control room, we had no control at all. This is Steve Squires, 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. When the speed of light gets involved, even simple words like now don't really quite have the same meaning, right? So everything that they're seeing in this moment had already happened. So I'm sitting in the control room, looking at the Doppler signal from the spacecraft, starting to feel the Martian atmosphere. The vehicle is now in the top of the Martian atmosphere.

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. Still awaiting signal that we are on the ground. It wasn't just that Steve didn't have control. There was a lot on the line. Billion dollars. My career, careers of many, many other people. You know, very high-stakes game we were playing.

And high risk. The mission was so audacious that people thought it was completely impossible. You know, most of the world didn't think we could do it. We believed we could. You can see Steve dropping to his knees in the control room. We're jumping up and down and jump. cheering like we just won the Super Bowl, you know, we're going crazy. 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. All these years later, people look at it and say, oh, you know, 14 years are on Mars. 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. This is The Leap, a new series about scientists who are risking their careers, their reputations, and even their lives to make a breakthrough. 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. 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. The dream of sending rovers to Mars and doing, you know, really kind of the first overland expedition across another planet, slowly came into focus over a period of many years. 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.

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. 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. 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 CNN from orbit that all of Mars isn't like that. 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.

There were a couple 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? Sunk cost is what I'm hearing. 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.

Steve sent in a fourth proposal. And he told himself, okay, 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. 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. And it was like everybody from the Mars program at NASA headquarters all gathered around the speaker phone. And it says, Steve, we have to ask you something. Can you build two? And as God is my witness, I said, to what? And I 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. So if one fails, you have the other one. Yeah. And that was it. And we were off and running. Were you like, I've just won the lottery? 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. How many months? Thirty-four. 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 a sport. It was a sprint for three years.

It was absolutely a sprint. This is Jennifer Trasper, a jet propulsion lab engineer who has rocked many a Mars mission. 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. 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. So the Marsh program was hanging by a threat, frankly. 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. Oh, that's embarrassing. That's a very bad way to lose a spacecraft. Don't let it happen to you. And this mission was the savior mission. You know, we just had to succeed. 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.

And the interesting thing was, I don't think I was really prepared for. I mean, I'm certain, right? I'm certain. 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. 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. It did not go well. We failed. We absolutely failed that review. They had to get the next one right. 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. 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. A lot of people don't adequately appreciate how. different those disciplines are. 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 build-in creative tension between science and engineering on a project like this, where the sciences want everything, the engineers need it to work. And that tension, when the culture is right, can lead to, you know, creative partnerships and getting stuff done that nobody to believe could be done. And I've also seen projects where it kind of is acid that eats away at the whole thing.

Team corroding acid? That was the 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. 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 could do, we had to ask for what was reasonable and not ask for what was unreasonable. This isn't always how it works on a project like this.

It is often hard to understand the other side. 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, why are we, you know, 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? Why did you make that air? Steve didn't do that, Jennifer says. He took ownership of all that, right?

If it took longer, he felt like he was part of why it took longer. 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. Put on the white coat, go into the clean room, start taking some data, get used to the that, 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 to science, but you got to keep the thing alive, too. 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.

There were so many times when I thought this is it, it's over. 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. 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. It was done at a National Guard range outside of Boise, Idaho, which is a place where you could drop 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. What were you thinking?

Oh, shit. What else can you say? 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. Where we were getting this horrible speckled data, just, just, Look 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 until we got to Mars.

Whoa, really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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. And so all the official analysis kind of pointed towards, you know, it's a real crop shoot. 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. Definitely in the documentation world, we lightweighted 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. So yeah, there was a lot at stake, but boy, you talk about something that makes you feel alive.

This is hard to beat. Is that true? Did you feel like extra alive at that time? 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.

And it's not sustainable. 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. Four, one engine start and lift off of the Delta II rocket carrying the spirit from Earth to planet Mars. What was launch like for you? 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, carry our hopes and dreams with them. 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 him go. So we had two lists of tests.

We had one short-ish list that we called the incompressible test list. These were the test 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 the job that we're going to ask them to do at Mars. The other thing that was weird about launch, though, was it was hard to say goodbye. 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 and you fire them off in a space and they are gone. It really was hard to say goodbye. And I didn't expect that at all.

Spirit launched in early June of 2003. An 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, an 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.

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. The people are the real story here. You're inspired by the people around you. You're inspired by what they have. 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.

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

Well, we have. The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Flora Lickman, and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Christopher Intagliata, Pajau Vange, and David Sanford. Fact-checking by Nicole Posulka, mixing and scoring by Emma Munger. Music by Joshua Budo Karp. Thanks to Jim Bell, Bob Manning and Wayne Lee. And thanks to you for listening.

We will be back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming. We have a conversation about AI companion chatbots. Are they friends or foes? I think the upsurge of companion shopbots is a mirror for what we really want, which is connections with other people. You don't want to miss it. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.