d

LInin The AstSho

LInin The AstSho

National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationOffice of External RelationsHistory DivisionWashington, DC 20546

I-38738 NEAR BookCVR.Fin2 3/10/05 11:58 AM Page 1
I-38738 NEAR BookCVR.Fin2 3/10/05 11:58 AM Page 2
Howard E. McCurdy

Low-Cost Innovation 

in Spaceflight

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous 

(NEAR) Shoemaker Mission

The NASA History Series

Monographs in Aerospace History

Number 36

NASA SP-2005-4536

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Office of External Relations

History Division

Washington, DC

2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCurdy, Howard E.

Low cost innovation in spaceflight : the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR-Shoemaker) Mission /

Howard E. McCurdy.

p. cm. — (Monographs in aerospace history ; no. 36)

1. Microspacecraft. 2. Eros (Asteroid) 3. Astronautics—United States—Cost control. 

4. Outer space—Exploration—Cost control. 5. United States. National Aeronautics and Space

Administration—Appropriations and expenditures. 

I. Title. II. Series.

TL795.4.M34 2004

629.43’544—dc22 2004018515
List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Challenge

Chapter 2: Origins

Chapter 3: Spacecraft

Chapter 4: Flight

Chapter 5: Legacy

Endnotes

Abbreviations

About the Author

NASA History Monographs

iii

iv

v

1

5

17

35

51

59

69

71

73

Table of Contents
iv

Table 2-1 Mass Summary

Table 3-1 Planned Cost of NEAR Mission

Table 3-2 Selected Spacecraft Development Costs

Table 3-3 Actual Mission Costs: NEAR and Mars Pathfinder

Table 3-4 Cost of NEAR Scientific Instruments

Table 3-5 APL Management Guidelines for Low-Cost Missions

11

18

18

22

23

31

List of Tables
In preparing this monograph, the author was assisted by officials at the Johns Hopkins University

Applied Physics Laboratory, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NASA Headquarters. He wishes

to acknowledge the assistance of persons who reviewed the manuscript or otherwise provided 

support for its production, especially Stamatios M. Krimigis, Andrew F. Cheng, Robert W.

Farquhar, Stephen Garber, Roger D. Launius, Jennifer Troxell, Matthew Rochkind, Jill Wilmoth,

Lisa Jirousek, Tatiana Floyd, and Henry Spencer.

Acknowledgments

v

On a spring day in 1996, at their research center

in the Maryland countryside, representatives

from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics

Laboratory (APL) presented Administrator Daniel

S. Goldin of the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA) with a check for $3.6 million.1 Two and a half years earlier, APL officials had

agreed to develop a spacecraft capable of conducting an asteroid rendezvous and to do so for slightly

more than $122 million. This was a remarkably low

sum for a spacecraft due to conduct a planetaryclass mission. By contrast, the Mars Observer

spacecraft launched in 1992 for an orbital rendezvous with the red planet had cost $479 million

to develop, while the upcoming Cassini mission to

Saturn required a spacecraft whose total cost was

approaching $1.4 billion. In an Agency accustomed

to cost overruns on major missions, the promise to

build a planetary-class spacecraft for about $100

million seemed excessively optimistic.

As a test of the feasibility of their “faster, better, cheaper” initiative, NASA officials had begun

Chapter 1: Challenge

funding the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous

(NEAR) mission in late 1993. They had assigned

the mission to the Applied Physics Laboratory, a

not-for-profit research and development division of

Johns Hopkins University located on a 365-acre

campus between Baltimore, Maryland, and

Washington, DC. Scientists and engineers from the

laboratory’s Space Department ran the mission. The

Space Department at APL had come into being in

1959 to build navigation satellites for the United

States Navy. Although increasingly involved in

NASA work, APL scientists and engineers had

never managed a major planetary mission. That

responsibility commonly fell to the Jet Propulsion

Laboratory (JPL), a NASA Field Center in Pasadena,

California, operated by the California Institute of

Technology.

Officials at the Applied Physics Laboratory

spent 27 months designing, constructing, and testing their 468-kilogram (1,032-pound) NEAR

spacecraft. On 17 February 1996, they launched the

spacecraft from the U.S. Air Force Cape Canaveral

Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 1
Stamatios Krimigis, head of the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (right), presents to

NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin and Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski a check representing the cost savings achieved during the

design and construction of the NEAR spacecraft. Gary Smith, Director of the Applied Physics Laboratory, stands on the left.

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)

launch station in Florida. The development program was over, the spacecraft launched and gone.

APL officials totaled the money spent on design,

testing, flight systems, scientific instruments,

prelaunch operations, and project management. To

the delight of mission advocates, the cost of developing the NEAR spacecraft totaled $3.6 million less

than the original estimate. Someone suggested that

the project leaders present an oversized, ceremonial

check to NASA for the money they had saved.

Goldin happily accepted it that spring.

Ten months later, on 4 December 1996, another

Delta 2 model 7925 rocket departed from the

Canaveral launch station. It too carried a low-cost

spacecraft, commissioned by NASA executives but,

in this case, built by workers at JPL. This spacecraft

was bound for the planet Mars. Called Mars

Pathfinder, the second spacecraft carried in its arms

a small, 22-pound microrover named Sojourner.

The NEAR and Pathfinder missions were the

most visible and highly publicized products of

NASA’s early efforts to demonstrate the feasibility

of low-cost spaceflight. Both missions were hugely

successful. The Pathfinder robot landed on Mars in

the summer of 1997. NEAR chased the asteroid

Eros around the solar system for four years, finally

orbiting the 21-mile-long object in February 2000.

After circling Eros for one year, the renamed

NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on the

asteroid’s surface in February 2001, the first such

landing in the history of spaceflight.

Much has been written about the management

of the Pathfinder mission, including books by team

leaders Brian Muirhead and Donna Shirley.2

Reports on the NEAR spacecraft, the asteroid rendezvous, and science results are likewise extensive,

including a book entitled Asteroid Rendezvous:

NEAR Shoemaker’s Adventures at Eros that features illustrations and articles by many of the principal participants.3 Reports on the management of

the NEAR mission are neither as extensive nor as

accessible. This monograph tells the story of the

NEAR mission from the point of view of the man2 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
agement challenges involved in conducting low-cost

missions while daily confronting the possibility 

of defeat.

The history that follows is divided into four sections. The first section recounts the origins of the

expedition and the struggle to get the mission funded

and approved. It explains how a small group of

people came to believe that an asteroid rendezvous

could be conducted as a low-cost mission, a revolutionary proposition at the time. Section two concentrates on the methods employed to translate the

low-cost philosophy into a robotic spacecraft that

actually worked. Attention is given to the teambuilding techniques that allowed the people organizing the mission to simultaneously restrain cost,

meet the launch schedule, and reduce risk. In section three, the management challenges involved in

flying the NEAR spacecraft over the five-year flight

regime are described. The difficulties were substantial, involving the guidance of a low-cost robotic

spacecraft and the coordination of mission teams at

three different locations. On the first rendezvous

attempt with Eros, the little spacecraft missed its

target, thus requiring another trip around the solar

system and significant changes in organizational

protocols. Finally, section four assesses the “faster,

better, cheaper”4 initiative and the NEAR mission’s

contribution to it.

The scientific returns from the first sustained

examination of a near-Earth asteroid were impressive. Equal to them in importance were the management lessons learned. For many decades, visionaries

have predicted a future of cheap and easy spaceflight by which means humans and their machines

would spread into the solar system. The NEAR mission team undertook one of the pioneering efforts

in that regard, producing a spacecraft that tested

not only scientific theories concerning the formation of the solar system, but also management theories on the reduction of cost.

In the years that followed, enthusiasm for the

“faster, better, cheaper” initiative waned. In 1999,

NASA officials lost four of the five “faster, better,

cheaper” missions they attempted to fly that year.

In 2003, the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia

caused experts to question the wisdom of applying

cost-saving techniques to spacecraft on which

humans fly. The expenses associated with planetary

missions rebounded. The “faster, better, cheaper”

phrase disappeared, replaced by a commitment to

“One NASA,” a new initiative with no major references to low-cost innovation.5

The legacy of the NEAR spacecraft and the

Pathfinder mission with which it once competed

nonetheless remain important to the overall development of spaceflight. If humans and their

machines enter space on the scale envisioned by

various experts, the movement will not occur with

ships that each cost billions of dollars to build. As

with earlier movements into other realms, ambitious and expensive expeditions will give way to

affordable technologies. The early efforts to create

low-cost spacecraft contain important lessons for

the people who work to make this vision come true.

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 3

To send a spacecraft to an asteroid, where it

could orbit and study the object, required in the

minds of most experts a medium-size machine of

the Mariner-Observer class. The Mariners were a

series of robotic spacecraft, launched between 1962

and 1975, that flew to Venus, Mercury, and Mars.

Most of the Mariner spacecraft flew by planets; one

orbited its destination. Most of the Mariners were

purchased and produced in pairs. Mariners 8 and 9

each had a dry mass (not including fuel) of about

2,200 pounds. Given the value of the aerospace dollar in the late 20th century, when the NEAR spacecraft was produced, each pair of Mariner twins cost

an average equivalent of $600 million. That sum

paid only for the spacecraft, along with the salaries

of the people who designed and built it. To pay for

the rockets necessary to launch the spacecraft, to

navigate through the solar system, to operate the

spacecraft upon arrival, and to collect and analyze

the scientific data required even more money. For

an entire mission, a Mariner-class spacecraft, in the

Chapter 2: Origins

currency of the late 20th century, could easily

approach $1 billion to design, build, launch, and fly.

Observer-class spacecraft continued the

Mariner tradition. Although conceived as a new

line of spacecraft, only one Observer ever flew.

Launched in 1992, Mars Observer was designed to

orbit the red planet and study its climate and geology. The robotic spacecraft had a mass of 2,240

pounds at launch, not counting its fuel. Although it

was originally conceived as a low-cost mission,

project expenses soared until they reached more

than $800 million for the spacecraft, its launch

vehicle, and the operations team ready to fly the

mission and conduct experiments. 

The Mars Observer story strongly influenced

the debate over whether to undertake an asteroid

rendezvous. Stories often form the basis for institutional learning, an important element in the formation of an organization’s culture. Employees use

Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 5
stories, presented in a narrative form, in order to

make organizational lessons more memorable and

transmit the cultural beliefs that remind others of

the hard-learned lessons of experience. As a number

of scholars and practitioners have observed, stories

shape the assumptions that people hold as they go

about their work. In the 1990s, no story had more

influence on the people planning NASA’s planetary

program than the one told about Mars Observer.

The facts of the case are these. Space scientists

in the early 1980s proposed a series of low-cost

robotic spacecraft called Planetary Observers that

would be used to explore the inner solar system.

Based on the design of Earth-orbiting satellites, the

Planetary Observers were to provide an inexpensive

means for conducting studies of Mercury, Venus,

and Mars. In 1984, the U.S. Congress authorized

and funded the first project in this series, then called

the Mars Geoscience Climatology Orbiter, later

renamed simply Mars Observer. In the beginning,

advocates promised to build the spacecraft for the

relatively low cost of $252 million.1 Project scientists and engineers designed the spacecraft so that it

could map the surface of Mars, study geologic features, and provide all-season weather reports. They

launched the spacecraft in 1992. Actual spending

on the project totaled $813 million, measured to

the point in the summer of 1993 when the spacecraft approached Mars. At that moment, the spacecraft disappeared.

Mars Observer symbolized the folly of the lowcost philosophy. From the date of its conception,

the cost of the mission grew. Even so, the mission

failed. People familiar with space missions generally

explained the results in the following way. No

spacecraft had visited Mars for 17 years, not since

the arrival of the Viking mission in 1976. The

Soviet Union had attempted two missions but had

failed, and the last of the Viking orbiters had run

out of fuel in 1980. The pent-up desire of scientists

to study Mars led them to attach an ambitious

array of instruments onto the Observer spacecraft:

a high-resolution camera, a thermal emission spectrometer, a laser altimeter, a gamma-ray spectrometer, a pressure modulator infrared radiometer, a

magnetometer/electron reflectometer, and a radio

science experiment. This arrangement increased the

complexity of the spacecraft, which lengthened the

development cycle, which increased the spacecraft

cost and mass. A heavier spacecraft necessitated a

larger launcher, which amplified launch expenses.

The Titan launch vehicle and associated preparations cost $293 million; this amount, added to the

$479 million expense of building the spacecraft and

the $41 million spent for abbreviated mission operations, totaled $813 million. Had the spacecraft

completed its mission, according to one estimate,

the total cost would have approached $1 billion.2

Speaking of the experience, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin complained that the cycle of

growing complexity and increasing cost fed on

itself, producing less frequent missions with everexpanding appropriations. It was little wonder, he

observed, that the space program was losing support among the Congress, the public, and scientists

growing old while waiting to fly their experiments:

Launching fewer spacecraft means scientists want to pile every instrument they can

onto whatever’s going to fly. That increases

the weight, which increases the cost of the

spacecraft and the launcher. Fewer spacecraft also means we can’t take any risk with

the ones we launch, so we have to have

redundancy, which increases weight and

cost, and we can’t risk flying new technology, so we don’t end up producing cutting

edge technology.3

The added complexity of the spacecraft pushed

against the desire of government officials to constrain the steadily growing project budget.

Increased complexity pushed costs up; NASA’s

promise to build inexpensive spacecraft pushed

costs down. The resulting equilibrium between

upward and downward cost pressures created a

spacecraft that was a bit too complex for the

amount of money allocated to reduce project risk.

The risks prevailed. Investigators concluded that

difficulties within the plumbing system designed to

deliver rocket fuel to the flight engine caused fuel

lines to rupture and the spacecraft to spin out of

control. Within the context of the story, the loss of

Mars Observer in 1993 provided vindication for

those who doubted the wisdom of applying a lowcost philosophy to complicated deep space expeditions. The spacecraft cost more than promised, took

too long (seven years) to deliver, and did not work.

In the context of the times, scientists and engineers who proposed low-cost planetary expeditions

generally were met with incredulity. People would

recall the history of Mars Observer and, as two of

6 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
the advocates of the NEAR mission observed,

“everybody knows what has happened to that.”4

Skepticism ran so deep that some good missions could not get approved. American scientists

wanted the U.S. government to send a spacecraft 

to intercept Halley’s Comet, due to return to the

inner solar system in 1986. The thought that this

would require a Mariner-/Observer-class machine

of indeterminable cost caused public officials to 

abandon the mission. The Russians, Japanese, and

Europeans sent spacecraft to visit Halley’s Comet,

but U.S. officials decided that they could not afford

to approve a spacecraft that promised low cost but

delivered cost growth.5

To propose a low-cost comet or asteroid rendezvous with a Mariner-/Observer-class spacecraft

during the mid-1980s or early 1990s invited disbelief from public officials who approved the funds.

To suggest that any such spacecraft be made massive enough to actually land on a comet or asteroid

invited ridicule. For all its expense and delay, Mars

Orbiter could not land on Mars. The only NASA

mission to accomplish that objective—the Viking

project—had consumed over $3 billion in inflationadjusted currency. Public officials simply were not

prepared to raid the U.S. treasury for the tax revenues apparently necessary to send large, expensive

robots to study chunks of rock or ice.

Could it be done for less? For decades, scientists had wanted to visit asteroids and collect samples from comet tails. For much of that time, they

had been told that the real cost of Mariner-/

Observer-type spacecraft was too high. However,

the technical feasibility of such a mission was not in

doubt. By 1990, NASA spacecraft had visited all of

the major planets, orbited two, and landed on

Mars. “The principal issue in late 1989–1990,”

observed the director of the space department at

APL, “was the exorbitant development cost.”6

Inventing the Discovery

Program

Scientists and engineers in the Space

Department at APL wanted to move into the field

of solar system exploration, a realm previously

monopolized by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL

employees specialized in planetary landings and flybys; as of the late 1980s, they were preparing to

send the Observer spacecraft to Mars and the

Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter. Rather than challenge

JPL in their traditional area of emphasis, APL employees turned to the realm of comets and asteroids.

Comets and asteroids are the building blocks

out of which the planets probably formed; by striking more massive bodies, they altered the characteristics of larger spheres and, in the case of Earth,

redirected the evolution of life. As primitive building blocks, asteroids and comets contain clues to

the formation of the solar system and the transportation of substances that give rise to life. They

contain metals and other resources of potential

value to future civilizations on Earth and in space.

If humans maintain their terrestrial civilization long

enough, they will need to redirect the course of

large comets and asteroids that would otherwise

strike the planet with catastrophic results. For these

reasons and more, a special advisory committee in

1983 had urged NASA officials to include an asteroid rendezvous in their long-range plans. Such a

mission, the Solar System Exploration Committee

had proposed, might be launched in the 1990s

using a spacecraft similar to the one that JPL

employees were aiming toward Mars—the Mars

Observer.7 Responding to the expectation that they

would be asked to direct such a mission, engineers

at JPL studied the technical requirements and concluded that an asteroid rendezvous mission was feasible with a spacecraft of the Observer’s size. 

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory sits on a 177-

acre, campus-like setting adjacent to the San

Gabriel Mountains, just northwest of downtown

Pasadena, California. JPL was founded during the

Second World War by a group of professors, students, and associates from the nearby California

Institute of Technology who perceived that the U.S.

Army would pay for a research laboratory devoted

to the development and testing of small rockets.

When the space race began, Congress transferred

the operation to the newly created National

Aeronautics and Space Administration. Although

listed as a NASA Field Center, JPL retains an unusual

status: it is operated through the California

Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s leading

science and engineering universities.

At the other end of the country, the rival APL

sits in its own university-like setting, a bucolic camThe Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 7
pus twice as large as the main Johns Hopkins

University campus 25 miles north of APL. Like JPL,

APL was created during the Second World War by

a group of university associates seeking to assist

with the war effort. JPL was created to assist the

U.S. Army; APL helped the U.S. Navy. JPL workers

developed jet-assisted aircraft takeoff; APL scientists developed the proximity fuse. JPL is listed as a

NASA Field Center; APL is not. Both laboratories

are associated with major research universities.

Armed with the results of the JPL feasibility

study, mission proponents assembled a Science

Working Group to advance the concept. To chair

the group, they chose Joseph Veverka, a professor

from the Cornell University Department of

Astronomy. When he was young, Veverka’s family

fled his native Czechoslovakia to avoid the communist takeover. The family settled in northern

Ontario, where the brilliant night skies inspired

Veverka to study physics and astronomy. Veverka

had been involved in nearly every solar system

exploration project since NASA built Mariner 9,

when he was a doctoral student at Harvard

University. He was an early advocate of comet and

asteroid exploration. 

Veverka’s group met through 1985 and identified a suitable target, a kilometer-wide body known

as asteroid 3361 Orpheus. The elliptic orbit of

Orpheus causes it to cross Earth’s path as both bodies travel around the Sun. Orpheus is a favored target of space enthusiasts who would like to mine it

for hydrogen, oxygen, and building materials.

Veverka’s group wanted to visit it. Group members

prepared a list of essential instruments to be flown

on a robotic spacecraft and recommended a 

1994 launch. The working group was dominated

by JPL employees, with whom Veverka had worked

on the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager projects.

Significantly, no representatives from APL appeared

among the outside members. The working group

gave the project a name: Near Earth Asteroid

Rendezvous (NEAR).8

Veverka reappeared in the summer of 1989 at a

workshop organized by NASA’s Solar System

Exploration Division. NASA officials had established a series of workshops to seek advice and

gather support for a broad range of solar system

exploration activities through 2000. The key workshop took place at the University of New

Hampshire from 26 to 30 June 1989. Veverka

chaired the plenary session in which a small group

of scientists made a radical proposal for a new 

initiative in low-cost spacecraft.

Up to that point, participants had assumed that

any new initiative for a low-cost planetary mission

would involve an Observer-class spacecraft. By

1989, however, Mars Observer was well over budget and behind schedule. The desire for low-cost

planetary spacecraft that could be prepared in short

periods of time clashed with the lessons from Mars

Observer. As part of the workshop, a special Small

Mission Program Group was asked “to construct a

rationale for a new mission line that would be lowcost and provide a mechanism whereby focused scientific questions could be addressed in a relatively

short time.” The initiative, Veverka recalled, “was

greeted with widespread skepticism.”9

Stamatios Krimigis did not share the overall

sense of disbelief. A 21-year veteran of APL,

Krimigis was the Chief Scientist in the lab’s Space

Department. Krimigis was born and raised in

Chios, Greece, immigrating to the United States to

study physics at the University of Minnesota. After

earning his bachelor’s degree, he enrolled at the

University of Iowa, where he studied under the

notable James Van Allen, famous for building the

scientific instruments on the first U.S. Earth-orbiting satellite that discovered the radiation belts bearing his name. Krimigis wrote his dissertation on

solar protons and received his doctorate in 1965.

Like Veverka, who would become Chair of the

Astronomy Department at Cornell University,

Krimigis eventually would become head of the

Space Department at APL. Both were highly intelligent individuals accustomed to the academic

process of drawing consensus from equally gifted

and often irascible colleagues.

Krimigis suggested that the Small Mission

Program Group not use Mars Observer as the basis

of its quest for low-cost solar system exploration.

Rather, he pointed to “a long standing NASA program called Explorer that had served the needs of

the space physics community and had provided relatively easy access to space.”10 Explorer-class spacecraft are among the most versatile and inexpensive

that the U.S. has launched. The first U.S. satellite

sent into orbit was Explorer 1, launched even

before Congress had finished work on the legislation creating NASA. It consisted of a spacecraft and

upper stage designed by JPL, a launch vehicle pre8 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
pared by Wernher von Braun and his German rocket

team, and an experiment designed by Krimigis’s

mentor at the University of Iowa.11 The Explorer 1

mission was developed in an incredibly short period

of time. The Von Braun-JPL-Van Allen team organized the mission in just 84 days before its 31

January 1958 launch.

Between 1958 and 1981, civilian space officials

organized some 60 Explorer-class missions. Most

were designed to study phenomena like the solar

wind, cosmic rays, and Earth’s magnetosphere. The

exact number of missions is hard to identify

because Explorer-class missions often bear names

like Vanguard, Ariel, and Boreas, and some satellites named Explorer (such as the Cosmic

Background Explorer) are too large to fit the category. Strictly speaking, Explorer-class satellites are

small and uncomplicated. Explorer 1 had a mass of

just 22 pounds, while later versions (like Explorer

58) totaled about 250 pounds. With the advent of

the Space Shuttle in 1981, rated to carry up to

65,000 pounds, the number of small Explorers

declined in favor of larger, multipurpose (and hence

more expensive) platforms.

At the time of the 1989 workshop, Krimigis

was working on a concept called the Advanced

Composition Explorer (ACE). This spacecraft,

eventually launched in 1997, was designed to fly

one million miles from Earth and study the solar

wind. The spacecraft would have a mass of 1,300

pounds, small for such a distant traveler. Krimigis

predicted that the ACE spacecraft would be built

for less than $100 million. It would be designed and

assembled using a simple management model, he

added, in which a single Principal Investigator oversaw the development of the spacecraft and each of

the lead investigators provided their own scientific

instruments.

Geoffrey Briggs, head of NASA’s Solar System

Exploration Division, listened intently. He

approached Krimigis after the presentation and

asked if APL would be willing to turn the concept

of an Explorer-type spacecraft into a proposal for a

specific mission. APL employees could make such a

proposal, and Briggs would appoint a Science

Working Group to review it, along with other proposals. Briggs established a Science Working Group

and asked Robert A. Brown, who had chaired the

panel from which the Krimigis proposal had

emerged at the 1989 workshop, to chair the group.

The oversight group met in 1989 and 1990. Its

members did not recommend a specific mission, but

they did propose a name for the overall concept of

low-cost initiatives: they called it the Discovery

Program.

In 1990, Wesley Huntress replaced Briggs as

head of the Solar System Exploration Division at

NASA Headquarters. Huntress had spent nearly 20

years as a research scientist at JPL, where, in spite

of the general preference for large planetary missions, he had developed a commitment to the reduction of cost. Among his scientific interests, Huntress

specialized in asteroids and comets. Huntress reorganized the Science Working Group, requesting that

they select a mission and test the feasibility of the

low-cost approach. As part of the reorganization,

Huntress selected a new chair for the Science

Working Group. He asked Joseph Veverka to chair

the group; Veverka agreed.

Selecting a Mission

Reducing cost while improving performance is

difficult, but not impossible. As the history of the

electronics and computer industries suggests, this

goal requires someone to design machines that are

smaller and easier to operate. The replacement of

vacuum tubes with transistors, for example,

allowed industrialists to design radios that worked

better and cost less. One elementary measure of the

operational complexity of spacecraft can be derived

by examining the number of moving parts. 

On Mars Observer, for example, the solar panels

moved. So did the high-gain antenna. The overall

complexity of Mars Observer resulted in a spacecraft

with a mass of 2,240 pounds at launch, excluding

propellant. A 2,000-pound mass was characteristic

of the Mariner-/Observer-class spacecraft.

Explorer-class spacecraft might have one-eighth

that mass, but they were not designed for planetary

missions. If clever engineers could cut the mass of a

spacecraft designed for Mariner-/Observer-type

missions by 50 percent, to about 1,000 pounds,

they had a fighting chance to produce a machine

that could be produced for less than $150 million.

For the Mars Observer mission, the spacecraft

alone cost $479 million. The Veverka group set as

its goal the production of a spacecraft whose total

development cost did not exceed $150 million. As

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 9
the Discovery Program emerged, additional constraints appeared. The total cost of operating the

spacecraft, once launched, could not exceed $35

million, and the spacecraft had to be small enough

to fit on a rocket no larger than a Delta II, which,

in the 1990s, cost about $55 million per launch.12

At the Maryland laboratory, Stamatios Krimigis

assembled his staff and appointed a small group to

study the NEAR concept. The group contained oldtimers and youngsters, people from both inside and

outside the Lab. Krimigis appointed himself as the

lead scientist. He selected Robert Gold to study the

instrument package. Gold, a physicist with 10 years

of experience in the field of remote sensing, had

joined APL in 1977 and had served as the lead

investigator for two of the instruments on the ACE

spacecraft. Krimigis asked Edward Reynolds to

serve as systems engineer. A relative newcomer,

Reynolds had joined the Lab in 1985, performing

systems integration work on complex nuclear electric propulsion and strategic defense radar programs. Andrew Cheng, a young physicist who had

completed his doctorate just three years earlier,

agreed to serve as the chief scientist. Cheng had

served on a number of NASA advisory committees

but was not a member of the APL staff at that time.

To study the mission design, Krimigis recruited

Robert Farquhar, a brilliant aeronautical engineer

with 30 years of experience in the field. Farquhar

had spent most of his career at NASA and was 

in the process of moving to APL. As the study manager, Krimigis selected Thomas Coughlin, a softspoken mechanical engineer. Coughlin had joined

APL in 1982 and participated in several low-cost,

fast-track Strategic Defense Initiative programs,

including the renowned Delta 181 project on which

he had served as the program manager.

To make the mission worthwhile, the group

insisted that the spacecraft carry at least two instruments, a multispectral imager and a gamma-ray

spectrometer. A multispectral imager is a sophisticated camera, while a gamma ray-spectrometer

senses the composition of objects under study. “We

hoped we could eventually accommodate more

instruments,” said Andrew Chang, “but in the

beginning we committed only to those two.”13

The instruments were relatively light—just 60

kilograms in the group’s original proposal. The

major challenge confronting the team concerned the

design of the main spacecraft. The machine had to

be sophisticated enough to deliver the instruments

on what would be a multiyear voyage without busting the $150-million development goal.

On the other side of the country, in California,

a similar group studied the problem on behalf of

JPL. Unlike the people at APL, the JPL team

worked at a facility with no extensive tradition of

low-cost exploration. The cost of JPL planetary

projects typically approached or exceeded $1 billion; the upcoming Cassini mission to Saturn would

top $3.3 billion. The two teams appeared before the

Veverka working group in May 1991. They met in

Pasadena, California, home ground for JPL. The

two teams, observed Krimigis, “had reached startlingly different conclusions.”14

“It is improbable,” JPL team members explained,

that a near-Earth object rendezvous could be carried out for less than $150 million, even with a simple, no-new-technology machine.15 To escape this

improbability, the JPL team made an intriguing suggestion. By building and flying three spacecraft,

team members observed, the cost of the funds

assigned to the first spacecraft could be set at $150

million. The funds assigned to the second and third

spacecraft would be slightly less: $149 million and

$137 million, respectively. Total cost, the team

explained, would be $436 million.16

This was an ingenious approach, a means to

produce a Mariner-/Observer-class spacecraft that,

on the cost accounting sheets, looked like something less. The JPL team sought to take advantage

of the cost benefits inherent in a production line

while reaping the accounting benefits produced by

assigning project expenses to three separate but

interdependent missions. The incremental expense

of producing a second and third spacecraft relative

to the first is typically small, an advantage the JPL

team sought to exploit. On the Viking project to

Mars some 15 years earlier, the incremental cost of

not producing a third lander amounted to only $20

million out of a total spacecraft development budget of $357 million. The JPL team could conduct

one flight for $150 million, but that approach was

premised on the need to retrieve lost ground during

the two flights that followed.

The JPL estimate of $436 million paid for the

spacecraft only. Three rockets at probably about

$50 million each would be needed to launch the

three spacecraft. Operations and data analysis for

10 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
Based on the positions of the Earth, the

Sun, and the target asteroid (Anteros, at

that time), we convinced ourselves that

NEAR could be configured with a fixed

high gain antenna, fixed solar panels, fixed

instruments with a common boresight

orthogonal to the antenna axis, and a rocket

engine thrusting opposite to the instrument

boresight. With this simple spacecraft, we

could accomplish all the science objectives

of the mission.18

The APL team agreed that they could build

such a spacecraft with a dry mass of no more than

430 kilograms (946 pounds). Their actual calculations totaled 363 kilograms, plus a 67-kilogram

reserve. On top of that, they added a 200-kilogram

allowance for fuel. The group’s ability to accomplish the mission with such a spacecraft depended

upon a complex relationship among the spacecraft

mass, the lifting power of a Delta 2 launch vehicle,

various launch window opportunities, clever flight

trajectories, and the energy required for the changes

in velocity necessary to maneuver the spacecraft to

its destination. The group was reasonably certain

that their design could “accommodate all the tarThe Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 11

Officials from the Applied Physics Laboratory prepared this

sketch in early 1991 to demonstrate how a simple spacecraft

might carry out an asteroid rendezvous at a very low cost.

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)

three missions could easily reach $50 million or

more. Although the JPL team gave no total mission

estimate, one can surmise that the overall cost

would top $600 million. Such an amount

approached the $813-million sum that JPL officials

were spending at that time on Mars Observer,

which would be launched the following year.

Members of the APL team rose to explain their

approach. Tom Coughlin directed the presentation.

The group’s proposal, to say the least, was quite 

different. “The great pleasure in life is doing what 

people say you cannot do,”17 team member Robert

Farquhar later observed. In January, the APL team

had prepared a sketch outlining a concept for a

remarkably simple spacecraft. The drawing showed

a cylindrical spacecraft shaped like a large tuna can.

A high-gain antenna was fixed to the side of the

cylinder, pointing toward Earth. Instruments were

fixed to what appeared as to be the top of the

spacecraft, pointing toward the target asteroid. 

A rocket motor was fixed to the other end; solar

panels were fixed to the side. Said Cheng:

Source: Johns Hopkins University APL, “Near Earth Asteroid

Rendezvous” (report to Discovery Science Working Group,

NASA Solar System Exploration Division, May 1991).

Mass Summary

Instruments 60 kg

Propulsion 57 kg

Power 60 kg

RF 29 kg

Attitude 25 kg

C & DH 29 kg

Thermal 12 kg

Harness 18 kg

Structure 73 kg

Dry Mass 363 kg

18.5% Contingency (430 kg)

Fuel 200 kg

TOTAL MASS 563 kg

Table 2-1
geted missions . . . based on Delta II performance,

launch window considerations, and mission

requirements such as the maximum velocity changes

that the spacecraft engines could perform.”19

An accompanying chart laid out the spacecraft

development schedule. If the project were approved

soon, in 1991, detailed design and fabrication could

be completed in four years. The spacecraft would

be ready for launch in May 1997. The schedule, one

APL study group member admitted, was “extremely aggressive.”20 Finally, the APL group agreed

that they could design and construct the spacecraft

for less than the $150 million target price set by the

Veverka group. In fact, they offered to build the spacecraft for $40 million less—a mere $110 million.21

Andrew Cheng remembered a general reaction

of “not so much skepticism as amusement.”22 A

group of people with little experience in conducting

planetary missions was offering to build a simple

spacecraft and fly it millions of miles to an object of

limited size. Moreover, members of the group said

that they could build and test the spacecraft in less

than four years and for less than $150 million.

“The reviews were mixed,” said one of the people

attending the meeting. Many expressed disbelief

that such a mission could be done.23 Although officials in the APL Space Department had a good

record of delivering low-cost projects on time,

space projects within NASA as a whole were experiencing substantial cost overruns—an average of

77 percent over original estimates, according to a

study completed a few years later.24 The people

reviewing the two proposals did not want to

approve a low-cost project and then watch its cost

grow once work began. 

Joseph Veverka, the Cornell astronomer heading the reviewing board, was intrigued by the 

APL proposal. He had ties to JPL but favored the

low-cost approach. Cheng recognized that “if we

could succeed in this approach, we had a winning 

concept.”25

The leadership at JPL viewed the potential for

competition from APL with great concern. JPL

executives considered themselves to be part of the

world’s leading institution for planetary exploration. APL was not, yet its leaders wanted to compete for voyages to comets, asteroids, and (they

would later admit) planets like Pluto and

Mercury.26 JPL executives had competed with

NASA’s Ames Research Center in northern

California and prevailed; they did not welcome new

competition from APL.

Edward Stone, the new Director of the Jet

Propulsion Laboratory, told his people to rework

their concept. One month later, they responded.

With a small “team of believers,” the JPL team

reported, “a $150 [million] discovery project is

achievable at JPL.” They were ready to start work

on an asteroid rendezvous mission immediately.

“We have the experience, capability and desire to

manage this Discovery project,” the report said.27

The study team’s new position was less significant than the name of the person making the 

presentation. JPL executives assigned A. J. “Tony”

Spear to present the new findings. Spear wanted to

challenge the traditional JPL culture, then absorbed

with the Cassini mission to Saturn, by moving the

Center toward smaller and less expensive missions.

At the time, he and other dissidents were pressing

for a series of very low-cost spacecraft that would

establish a network of environmental monitoring

stations across the planet Mars. The concept was

called the Mars Environmental Survey (MESUR).

Its advocates envisioned a network of 16 spacecraft, the equivalent of meteorological posts, placed

at various locations. To land such a large number of

spacecraft on such difficult terrain required revolutionary technologies and severe cost constraints.

On 17 June 1991, Spear issued his presentation

to the Veverka group on behalf of a JPL asteroid

mission. Veverka reported to Wesley Huntress,

who, like Veverka, had spent much of his career

working with people at JPL. The asteroid mission

was based on the proposal of a 1985 Science

Working Group that had been dominated by JPL

employees. JPL had more experience in flying planetary missions, but APL had a better track record

with low-cost missions.

Regaining the Lead

The Veverka group issued its report the following fall, in October 1991. The group members

endorsed the concept of a Discovery Program

designed to encourage low-cost exploration of the

12 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
solar system. According to the guidelines, each mission in the Discovery Program would cost no more

than $150 million, perhaps less, for spacecraft

design and development. For the first mission in the

program, Veverka’s group recommended an asteroid rendezvous. Although the group members left

the selection decision to NASA, their recommended

guidelines contained the essential elements of the

APL plan.

“The first mission of the Discovery Program

should be a rendezvous with a Near-Earth asteroid,” the group began. The most suitable destination was asteroid 1943 Anteros, the target for

which the APL team had been planning. The

Veverka group recommended that the spacecraft

carry three instruments, including an imaging

device, and be small enough to launch on a low-cost

Delta 7925 rocket. The latter imposed a severe constraint. To assess whether a spacecraft can complete

its mission, planners calculate all of the changes in

velocity (called ∆V) necessary for the vehicle to

leave its low-Earth parking orbit, move through

space, rendezvous with its destination, and complete its mission. Generally speaking, a higher ∆V

requires a larger, more complex (and hence more

expensive) mission. The constraints imposed by the

Veverka group limited the mission to velocity

changes totaling no more than 5.5 kilometers per

second (12,296 miles per hour). 

Including the boost necessary to move the

spacecraft out of low-Earth orbit, mission planners

could expect to make more than 50 velocity

changes to reach and study a near-Earth asteroid.

Most proposals for asteroid rendezvous missions

called for total velocity changes in excess of 6 kilometers per second. Reducing that sum required a

small spacecraft and a clever trajectory, exactly the

approach that the APL team said they could carry

out.28 The APL team calculated that they could

reach Anteros with a total ∆V not exceeding 5.35

kilometers per second.29

Simultaneously, in a show of support for the

concept, members of the Senate subcommittee 

that handled NASA’s budget directed the Agency to

prepare a plan “to stimulate and develop small

planetary or other space science projects.” The subcommittee was headed by Senator Barbara

Mikulski, who represented the state of Maryland.

Mikulski was a strong supporter of the work of the

Maryland-based laboratory. The committee report

in which this language appeared urged NASA officials to emphasize projects “which could be accomplished by the academic or research communities,”

a way of saying that institutions like APL should be

given a chance to play.30

On 1 April 1992, NASA acquired a new

Administrator, Daniel S. Goldin. As an industry 

executive, Goldin had been an advocate of small,

low-cost spacecraft. The White House assistants who

selected him wanted someone who could reverse

NASA’s partiality for large, expensive missions.

Goldin had participated in the Brilliant Pebbles 

initiative, a plan to mass-produce inexpensive orbital

sensors that could detect a missile attack with bulletproof precision. Once Goldin arrived at NASA, 

he found that the realities of fiscal retrenchment supported his position. The Agency simply could not

afford expensive new initiatives. Goldin set out, in

his own words, to “re-invent NASA”:

Let’s see how many [spacecraft] we can

build that weigh hundreds, not thousands,

of pounds; that use cutting-edge technology, not 10-year-old technology that plays

it safe; that cost tens and hundreds of millions, not billions; and take months and

years, not decades, to build and arrive at

their destination.31

Shortly after arriving at his new job, Goldin

discovered the fledgling Discovery Program. He

was very impressed. He called it “the world’s best

kept secret” and became one of its prime advocates.32 Pushing from the top, he challenged NASA

employees to cut mission costs. Build smaller spacecraft, he urged Agency employees. Make cost control as important as scientific discovery. Take

chances, he said. “A project that’s 20 for 20 isn’t

successful,” he observed. “It’s proof that we’re

playing it too safe.”33

Shortly after Goldin assumed leadership of the

civil space agency, officials in NASA’s Office of

Space Science and Applications unveiled their

“Small Planetary Mission Plan.” As expected, it

embraced the low-cost approach that people in the

Solar System Exploration Division had been studying for nearly three years, since the 1989 summer

meeting in New Hampshire. “Two years ago, small

planetary missions were just beginning to be disThe Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 13
cussed by the scientific community. Today they are

the centerpiece of NASA’s new programs for the

1990s.” The report announced the Agency’s intent

to promote a new program called Discovery that

would produce a series of small, cost-effective

spacecraft “modeled on NASA’s existing Explorer

and Earth Probe programs,” just as the APL team

had proposed.34

To the shock of the APL team, however, the

report did not recommend an asteroid rendezvous

mission as the first Discovery project. Rather, the

first flight award went to Tony Spear and the JPL

team promoting MESUR. Spear’s group promised

to launch the first spacecraft in the MESUR series

by the end of 1996, thus providing an earlier test of

the low-cost concept than would be possible under

the APL proposal for a 1997 launch to the asteroid

Anteros. While government officials never approved

the whole MESUR concept, they did authorize the

first spacecraft. It was called Mars Pathfinder. Tony

Spear served as the project manager for the Pathfinder

mission as the spacecraft was designed and built.

What about the NEAR mission? It was a “second concept under study,” according to the authors

of the small planetary mission plan.35 Under the

terms suggested by Veverka’s Science Working

Group, the NEAR spacecraft would be launched in

May 1997 as the Pathfinder spacecraft approached

Mars. Within a few months, that launch date had

slipped to 1998. The later launch date necessitated

a new target—the asteroid known as 4660

Nereus.36 Compared to Anteros, Nereus was a less

interesting target. It was comparatively puny, just 1

kilometer in diameter. Members of the NEAR team

worried about the change. “Although Nereus satisfied all the requirements for a Discovery-class 

mission,” three of them wrote, “some scientists

were concerned that its small size could restrict the

quantity and diversity of the science return.” Put

another way, the three observed, the results would be

“somewhat boring.”37 As the Pathfinder expedition

gained momentum, the asteroid rendezvous project

slipped away.

A few people had different ideas, and none were

more outspoken in promoting their alternatives than

Robert Farquhar. A mischievous, distinguished-looking gentleman, Farquhar had a reputation as an

expert in celestial navigation and as something of an

eccentric. “The man is a genius with celestial pinball,” said one of his colleagues, “and he’d be the

first to admit it.”38

As a civil service employee at NASA’s Goddard

Space Flight Center in Maryland, Farquhar had

participated in the International Sun-Earth

Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) mission as its overall flight

director. This otherwise inconspicuous satellite

made spacecraft history when Farquhar invented a

trajectory that allowed it to beat the Europeans,

Russians, and Japanese to the first encounter with a

comet. Following Farquhar’s plan, flight controllers

nudged the ISEE-3 spacecraft out of the L-1 libration point where it was conducting its mission and

allowed it to fall toward the Moon. Arthur C.

Clarke, the famous science fiction writer, called the

resulting maneuver “one of the most remarkable

feats of astrodynamics ever attempted.” Following

a path that looked like the curled ribbon on a

child’s birthday present, the spacecraft received a

gravitational boost each time it flew by the Moon.

“This maneuver was repeated no less than five

times; on the last flyby, the probe skimmed only 

a hundred kilometers above the moon, and the

slightest navigational error could have been disastrous,”39 wrote Clarke. The lunar maneuvers, 

consisting of incredible twists and whirls, took 18

months to complete and eventually pointed the

ISEE-3 spacecraft in the right direction to complete

a nearly two-year journey to the comet GiacobiniZinner.40

Farquhar’s ultimate boss at the Maryland installation, Goddard Center Director Noel Hinners, characterized him as “a very bright, very innovative guy.”

Said Hinners: “I would like to have five more of

him around here—not 100, we couldn’t handle

that.”41 Farquhar is something of a maverick, an

outsider prone to irritating people less innovative

than he. “He’s an idea man,” observed fellow

research scientist Donald Yeomans. “He’ll have 100

ideas, 99 of which may not be reasonable. But that

last one is a beaut. And he does this routinely.”42

The launch window for any asteroid rendezvous was dictated by the position of the target

asteroid relative to Earth and the energy constraints

imposed on a low-cost mission. In a 1991 paper,

Farquhar had identified asteroid Anteros as the best

of the rendezvous candidates, based on launch

opportunities (in 1997), flight time (415 days), and

velocity change requirements (5.35 kilometers per

14 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 15

fiscal year ending in 1994. In the winter of 1993,

NASA executives asked Congress for funds to start

both the NEAR and the Pathfinder projects. In the

House of Representatives, where voting is apportioned by population, lawmakers appropriated

funds for the California-based Pathfinder mission

but refused to start funding the Maryland-based

asteroid rendezvous.

In the Senate, where each state receives equal

representation, Maryland is as big as California.

Though diminutive in stature, Barbara Mikulski

was a large presence on the Senate Appropriations

Committee. With a small amount of help from APL

executives, Mikulski placed $62 million in NASA’s

appropriation bill for the purpose of starting the

Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous project. In the

conference committee negotiations that followed,

Mikulski prevailed.

On the grounds of the Maryland laboratory on

5 December 1993, Senator Barbara Mikulski,

Stamatios Krimigis, Wesley Huntress, and APL

Director Gary Smith announced that APL would

begin work on a Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.

It would be the first launch in NASA’s new

Discovery Program of “faster, better, cheaper”

spacecraft, the first mission to rendezvous with 

an asteroid, the first U.S. planetary-type mission

conducted by a non-NASA space center, and “a 

significant economic milestone for Maryland.”46

The mission would be launched in February 1996

on a Delta 2 rocket and would arrive at Eros, a 

subsequent NASA announcement explained, in late

December 1998.

When the celebration died down, the newly

assembled members of the NEAR spacecraft team

confronted a sobering reality. They had to deliver a

flight-ready, fully workable spacecraft to the

Florida launch site by December 1995, just 24

months away. “This was an unprecedented

timetable for developing a planetary mission,” said

team leader Thomas Coughlin—a severe test of the

concept that a planetary expedition could be put

together cheaper, better, and faster, too.47

second), a conclusion endorsed by the Veverka

group. In the same paper, Farquhar noted that a

spacecraft launched in 2003 with the assist of an

Earth swingby could reach the asteroid Eros by

2005 while flying by Encke’s comet on the way.

Eros was especially interesting, Farquhar noted,

because it was the largest near-Earth asteroid.43

Nereus is a mere kilometer wide, while Eros has a

mean diameter 20 times that large.

Farquhar reexamined his calculations. A spacecraft could reach Eros at the end of what he called

a “small-body grand tour” of two comets and two

asteroids.44 This approach allowed an earlier

launch date in 2000, but the spacecraft would not

reach Eros until 2012. Farquhar performed the 

calculations again and again. Eros, he noticed, was

positioned in such a way that a launch in early

1996, when coupled with an Earth flyby, could

place a spacecraft at the asteroid in about three

years. It was a long flight, but the energy requirements worked. It could be accomplished with velocity changes that totaled just 5.53 kilometers per 

second, substantially less than those required by

other Eros opportunities. Significantly, the

February 1996 launch window allowed the APL

team to beat the Pathfinder group to the launch pad

by 10 months. The Pathfinder spacecraft would

arrive at Mars long before NEAR reached Eros, but

Farquhar also had a solution for that problem. By

adjusting the NEAR flight path, the APL mission

team could achieve an asteroid flyby on 27 June

1997, one week before Pathfinder reached Mars.

The arrival date at Eros was unchanged, but the

June flyby would give scientists a first quick look at

a large, 61-kilometer-wide, carbon-rich asteroid. 

With this mission plan, the NEAR project

could be first again. Farquhar took the plan to

Stamatios Krimigis, head of the APL Space

Department since early 1991, who called it an

“exciting opportunity.”45 Together, they transmitted

the proposal to NASA officials in Washington, DC.

To make the mission work, Congress had to

appropriate funds to start the project immediately,

in 1993, as part of the appropriations bill for the
16 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
The Applied Physics Laboratory team won

approval to begin work on the Near Earth

Asteroid Rendezvous mission in late 1993. Gaining

approval for the project had been difficult; creating

the spacecraft would be harder. Members of the

team had to design, build, and test a robotic spacecraft that actually worked—and do so within the

cost and schedule constraints they had set for themselves. The mid-February 1996 launch window sat

just 26 months away, an impossibly short period of

time for the preparation of a planetary-type expedition. The $214.5 million that NASA officials

planned to spend on the entire mission (spacecraft,

launch vehicle, and flight operations) was considerably less than teams normally devoted to ventures

of this sort. As the first launch in NASA’s new

Discovery program, the mission would be subjected

to extensive scrutiny by both supporters and skeptics of the low-cost approach. In outer space, the

conceptual philosophy underlying this “faster, better, cheaper” project would be tested against the

unyielding reality of physics.

Chapter 3: Spacecraft

As a point of contrast, the mission team working on the Mars Observer spacecraft, launched in

1992, had spent seven years preparing their spacecraft after their official funding start. The Mars

Observer team had devoted $479 million to spacecraft development. Even counting the months since

the May 1991 presentation to the Discovery

Science Working Group, the NEAR team had given

themselves significantly less time. Additionally, the

NEAR team had promised to finish the first phase

of the project—construction of the spacecraft—for

a paltry $122 million, a considerable commitment

to the low-cost philosophy. (See table 3-1.)

Nor were they building an ordinary spaceship.

The NEAR spacecraft would fly much further than

Mars Observer, all the way into the asteroid belt

between Jupiter and Mars. No spacecraft had ever

flown that far from the Sun with nothing to generate electric power but solar arrays. (Missions

beyond Mars typically carry radioisotope thermoelectric generators, enlarging project expense.)

Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 17
When it arrived at its destination, the spacecraft

had to enter an orbit around an object possessing

little mass. The spacecraft team would need to fly

the tiny spacecraft around the asteroid in orbits of

ever-decreasing altitude, skimming over the surface

without crashing into it.

During the 1990s, NASA officials commissioned a substantial number of planetary and solar

system missions. Based on the funds devoted to the

development of the spacecraft, NEAR sat near the

bottom of that list. (See table 3-2.) Among major

solar system initiatives, including other “faster, better, cheaper” missions, only Mars Climate Orbiter

sat lower on the scale of money devoted to spacecraft development, and it had failed.

Had the NEAR team taken on too much, promising to build and test a spacecraft too rapidly with

too little money? Team leaders were confident they

had not. They did not believe that they had taken

on a task that would prove too fast or too cheap.

They planned to draw upon more than 30 years of

experience in managing low-cost projects. “We

have a hard time convincing people that it’s nothing

new to us,” said one APL project manager.1

Across the continent in California, the Mars

Pathfinder group faced a substantially different

challenge from the one confronting the NEAR

team. The NEAR team had extensive experience

with low-cost spacecraft but little familiarity with

planetary-type missions. The Pathfinder group

worked at an installation with an extensive 

tradition of planetary exploration but practically no

commitment to inexpensive spacecraft. Development costs for JPL planetary spacecraft commonly

ran toward $1 billion. Many JPL colleagues viewed

the work of Tony Spear and his small Pathfinder

team with disbelief. The notion that a small team of

JPL engineers and scientists could develop a spacecraft in less than three years for under $200 million

and land it on the surface of another planet was

contrary to the history and culture of that Center.

Most people thought it could not be done.

A different attitude prevailed at APL. Whereas

excessive pessimism persisted at JPL in California,

what might be characterized as excessive optimism

bubbled forth in Maryland. The Applied Physics

Lab had a long tradition of building inexpensive

spacecraft in short periods of time. The Space

Department at APL had come into existence for the

purpose of building inexpensive navigation satellites for the U.S. Navy. When the first ballistic 

missile submarines were built in the 1950s, their

inertial guidance navigation systems tended to drift.

To locate their position at sea accurately (a necessary requirement for accurately firing a ballistic

missile), submarine captains had to surface their

ships and take celestial readings, actions that, in the

words of one analyst, rendered “the whole concept

of a hidden missile platform useless.”2 Navigation

satellites provided a welcome solution to this 

dilemma. By receiving radio signals from satellites

in known positions, submarine captains could fix

their ships’ positions in a stealthlike fashion, help18 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Source: Applied Physics Laboratory, “NEAR Mission Plan vs.

Actuals ($M),” undated, folder 8722, NASA Headquarters

Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.

Table 3-1

Planned Cost of NEAR Mission

(in millions of real-year dollars)

Mission Elements Cost

Spacecraft 122.1

Mission operations after launch 46.2

Headquarters support 2.7

Launch vehicle 43.5

Total mission cost (planned) 214.5

Table 3-2

Selected Spacecraft Development

Costs (in millions of real-year dollars)

Spacecraft (Launch Date) Cost (Actual)

Cassini (1997) 1,422

Mars Observer (1992) 479

Pathfinder (1996) 200

Mars Global Surveyor (1996) 131

Stardust (1999) 127

Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (1996) 113

Mars Climate Orbiter (1998) 80 (est.)

Source: NASA, “Fiscal Year Budget Estimates” (annual issues as

indicated). Issues from FY 1987 through FY 1994: Planetary

Exploration section; issues FY 1997 through FY 2002: Special

Issues section, Major NASA Development Programs, Program

Cost Estimates. Reports can be found in the NASA

Headquarters library.
ing to create a credible deterrent to nuclear war.

The Applied Physics Laboratory developed what

became known as the Transit navigation satellite

system.

The U.S. Navy insisted that Transit satellites be

so small that military officers could launch them on

Scout launch vehicles. Scout rockets were tiny rockets, hardly more than guided missiles, capable of

pushing objects weighing little more than 400

pounds into space. Although they were mobile and

easy to launch, their use created a severe constraint

on the people designing the satellites. APL engineers

responded by producing satellites that weighed but

119.5 pounds yet had an overall operational reliability rate of 99.9 percent. 

Buoyed by their success with the Transit satellite

system, APL employees offered to prepare and test a

low-cost interceptor for the Strategic Defense

Initiative (SDI), popularly known during the 1980s

as “Star Wars.” In a room full of defense contractors

discussing half-billion-dollar systems and five-year

preparation times, APL representatives proposed a

test that would require little more than $150 million

and a year of work. According to one of the people

at the 1985 meeting where the concept was originally

proposed, the APL representatives were warned that

“you’re going to embarrass the United States and the

President.”3 The successful 1986 test of the APL

Delta 180 interceptor became the foundation for the

belief among top administration officials that space

systems did not need to be expensive to work. 

The prime responsibility for developing the

NEAR spacecraft fell to Thomas B. Coughlin. He

was one of the most experienced project managers

at APL, and his participation in several fast-track

SDI projects had prepared him for the technical

challenges of producing the NEAR spacecraft in

just two years. Coughlin had a clear vision of the

management philosophy necessary to produce a

low-cost, short-schedule spacecraft, but in his typical fashion, he would let other people claim credit

for the new approach.

Coughlin selected Robert Farquhar as overall

manager for mission design, a position from which

Farquhar would oversee the flight protocols for the

Mathilde flyby and the Eros rendezvous. With the

help of Stamatios Krimigis, Coughlin recruited

Andrew F. Cheng as the project scientist, Robert

Gold as the payload manager (in charge of instruments), and Andrew G. Santo as the spacecraft system engineer. In all, about 30 people participated as

members of the core group responsible for designing the spacecraft and preparing for flight.

Aerospace engineers commonly advance the

philosophy that cost, schedule, and reliability are

factors to be traded against each other. A low-cost,

fast-schedule project, according to this perspective,

should incur additional risk. To reduce risk, managers of fast-track projects typically ask for more

money. Traditionally, spacecraft managers take

what is characterized as a “pick two” approach

toward cost, schedule, and reliability. They ask

their sponsors to pick two and pay for the gains

with the third.

The philosophy underlying the “faster, better,

cheaper” approach challenged this outlook. The

NEAR and Pathfinder teams sought to produce

spacecraft that were simultaneously cheap and reliable and to produce them rapidly. The NEAR team

sought to achieve this goal through simple design,

high-tech instrumentation, reduced launch costs,

calculated risk-taking, and team-based management techniques.

Designing for Simplicity

The immediate problem confronting the team

was spacecraft design. Participants on the NEAR

project had to design a spacecraft that was robust

enough to accomplish its mission and spartan

enough to meet its cost goals. The two-year development schedule significantly limited the time available

for systems integration and testing. On a normal

spacecraft, individual components like the propulsion or telecommunication subsystems usually work

fairly well—so long as they are tested standing alone.

When linked together, however, they have a tendency

to fail. Engineers use systems integration and testing

to overcome these interactive flaws. The NEAR

spacecraft schedule did not leave much time for 

systems integration and testing. To reduce the possibility of interactive flaws, team members needed a

relatively simple spacecraft.

In pursuit of mechanical simplicity, the NEAR

team designed a spacecraft with few moving parts.

The body of the spacecraft consisted of an eightsided box that formed an octagon 9 feet (280 cenThe Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 19
timeters) tall. On one end of the box, the team

hard-mounted a 1.5-meter high-gain antenna, the

primary means for communicating with Earth, and

four solar arrays, each 6 feet long by 4 feet wide.

The solar arrays folded down for launch, then

extended into a fixed position once in space.

Following their deployment after launch, the solar

arrays did not move. 

On the opposite end of the spacecraft, team

members hard-mounted four scientific instruments.

A fifth instrument—the magnetometer—sat at the

opposite end, above the high-gain antenna. The

propulsion subsystem consisted of 11 small

thrusters, 1 large bipropellant engine, and accompanying fuel tanks. The propellant subsystem consumed nearly all of the volume inside the spacecraft

and essentially dictated its size. The main engine

protruded in a visually awkward fashion through

one of the panels on the octagonal spacecraft’s side. 

Fixing the high-gain antenna and solar arrays

to the body of the spacecraft vastly simplified its

design. On other planetary explorers, these mechanisms swiveled so as to allow antennas to point at

Earth and panels to point toward the Sun. During

most of its multiyear journey through the solar system, the NEAR spacecraft was designed to travel

with its solar arrays aligned toward the Sun. In that

configuration, it communicated with Earth through

a fanbeam antenna, an ingeniously powerful device

that resembled a large domino. When the spacecraft

needed more rapid communication, it turned and

pointed its dish-shaped high-gain antenna toward

Earth. For those periods of the mission, the solar

panels diverted from the Sun at an angle not

exceeding 40 degrees. To compensate for the lesser

light falling on the arrays during those periods, the

mission team changed the material out of which the

arrays were constructed and increased their size by

an appropriate amount. 

The instruments mounted to the opposite end

did not point forward, along the spacecraft’s usual

path, but were fixed to look out from the side, like

passengers sitting in an airliner. As if to confuse the

uninitiated, spacecraft designers called the end of

the machine moving forward along the flightpath

the aft deck.4 The spacecraft could be thought of as

backing up through the solar system, except for the

fact that space has no up or down.

The two-year development schedule was the

“foremost design driver” for the spacecraft and its

mechanisms, team members noted.5 Components

had to be designed and manufactured in a remarkably short period of time. Team leaders planned to

begin assembling the whole spacecraft just 

18 months after funding began. Mechanical testing

of the whole spacecraft was set for the 22nd month.

(The team planned to conduct additional tests 

at Kennedy Space Center before launch.) To prevent

unexpected interactions once the spacecraft 

was assembled, designers minimized the sharing of

common hardware. “This design,” three of the

team members reported, “allows parallel subsystem

development, test, and integration so that the 

compressed spacecraft development and integration

schedule can be met.”6 The propulsion subsystem

was so independent that two of the engineers working on the project characterized it “more as a separate spacecraft than a subsystem.”7

The simplified design reduced cost, cut time,

and helped prevent unexpected integration problems as the launch date approached. It also created

a spacecraft that was a bit hard to handle. The large

velocity adjustment thruster stuck out of the side of

the spacecraft, perpendicular to the line of sight

back to Earth and the Sun. Misalignment of the

thruster during flight maneuvers caused the spacecraft to torque. To counteract any torque, the

spacecraft would have to burn precious fuel.

“Precise tracing and control of the center of gravity

became mission critical,” lead engineers confessed.8

The NEAR team spent $79 million designing,

constructing, and testing its spacecraft, excluding

scientific instruments. In California, the Pathfinder

team produced a lander for just $135 million. (See

table 3-3.) These were small sums by exploration

standards. Most impressive was the short development time. An analysis of NASA space programs

suggested that planetary missions required an average of eight years of preparation; a subsequent

review of spacecraft difficulties identified insufficient development time as a primary cause of mission failure.9 The NEAR spacecraft team produced

a simple spacecraft—from initial funding to

launch—in just 27 months. Whether the spacecraft

could fly and complete its mission remained an

open question.

20 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 21

Robert Farquhar (right), Mission Director for the NEAR project, points to the large velocity adjustment thruster on the NEAR spacecraft. Project officials simplified the propulsion system so as to minimize the difficulties of integrating it into the spacecraft.

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
Saving Through Miniaturization

The NEAR spacecraft team saved money by

reducing the size of spacecraft components, particularly the instruments placed on board. So did the

Pathfinder team. Much of the philosophy underlying the “faster, better, cheaper” initiative relied

upon the revolution in solid state electronics.

Throughout the latter part of the 20th century,

industrialists used technological advances achieved

through miniaturization to simultaneously improve

the cost, production schedule, and reliability of

computers, calculators, cameras, telephones,

radios, and other electronic equipment. To NASA

Administrator Daniel Goldin, microtechnologies

were the sword that would “slice through the

Gordian knot of big, expensive spacecraft that take

forever to finish.”10

The camera or imaging system on the NEAR

spacecraft provides a good example of how such

innovation can occur. Compared to the cameras on

the Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars some 20

years earlier, the NEAR imaging system was a tiny

affair. The Viking cameras were bulky, a consequence of the then-new technological challenge of

taking pictures on an extraterrestrial world and

transmitting them back to Earth. The Viking cameras (two on each lander) were 22 inches tall and 10

inches wide at their bases. They took pictures a single pixel at a time. A nodding mirror in combination with a set of lenses concentrated one dot of

light on an array of diodes capable of detecting different focal lengths and colors, then repeated the

process for the next dot. The array measured the

light beam, whereupon the mechanism amplified

the signal, converted it into digital format, and

stored it for transmission back to Earth. Each camera took pictures by scanning a vertical line 512

pixels tall, pixel by pixel, then rotating and starting

another line. A color panorama took about 30 minutes to prepare. Scientists anxious to locate life on

Mars joked that any creature scampering across the

landscape would appear as a small disturbance on a

single column of dots.

Viking project managers hoped to build the

camera for $6.2 million while developing this new

technology. Technical problems caused them to

spend $27.3 million by the time their spacecraft

flew. That is the equivalent of approximately $100

million in the purchasing value of the dollar in the

1990s, more than the NEAR team planned to spend

on their entire spacecraft. The imaging system on

the NEAR spacecraft, by contrast, cost $1.8 million. The camera consisted of a telescope head 17

inches long that focused light on a charge-coupled

device (CCD). The CCD, which scientists characterize as a piece of electronic film, sat in a protective

housing that occupied a space barely 5 inches tall.

22 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Actual Mission Costs: NEAR and Mars Pathfinder

(in millions of real-year dollars)

Mission Elements NEAR Pathfinder

Spacecraft

Flight systems 79.1 135.3

Science and instruments 15.4 13.7

Project management 2.4 7.1

Integration and prelaunch operations 9.8 10.0

Other 6.8 4.6

Subtotal 113.5 170.7

Microrover — 25.0

Mission operations after launch 60.8 14.6

Headquarters support 2.7 4.8

Launch vehicle 43.5 50.3

Total 220.5 265.4

Table 3-3

Sources: 

Applied Physics Laboratory, “Near

Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR),

Phase C/D—Development Phase,”

undated, folder 17070, NASA

Headquarters Historical Reference

Collection, Washington, DC;

Applied Physics Laboratory, “NEAR

Mission Plan vs. Actuals ($M),”

undated, folder 10707, NASA

Headquarters Historical Reference

Collection, Washington, DC; 

NASA, “Mars Pathfinder: Project 

Cost and Funding Summary,” 

undated, folder 16263, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference

Collection, Washington, DC.
At its full field of view, the CCD captured an image

537 pixels wide by 244 pixels high. By the mid1990s, this was not a new technology. Edward

Hawkins, who led the APL team building the

device, based much of its design on the wide-field

imaging system prepared for the flight of the

Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) spacecraft.

Hawkins was a relative newcomer at the Applied

Physics Laboratory, having joined the staff just

seven years earlier, and as the NEAR project began,

he was still working on his doctorate in physics at

Johns Hopkins University. He had helped develop

the MSX imaging system, which APL had completed for the Ballistic Missile Defense

Organization. The MSX spacecraft used a multispectral imager for the purpose of distinguishing

potential ballistic missiles from the natural space

background. It was launched in April 1996, shortly

after NEAR, but work had begun in 1988, giving

the MSX imager team far more time to perfect technical details. Said Hawkins:

Fundamental to the success of NEAR was

the development of instruments based on

proven flight designs. By adapting existing

designs and concentrating on and improving the important features, we reduced the

development cost and risk.11

Hawkins anticipated the possibility that the

focal plane detector (FPD), which contained the

CCD and the timing control mechanism, might

interact with the imaging system’s data-processing

unit (DPU) in unexpected ways. If that happened,

fixing the problem would use up time needed to test

and calibrate the flight instrument, which could

delay the assembly and testing of the whole NEAR

spacecraft. To prevent that possibility, Hawkins and

his instrument team used an interface between the

FPD and DPU that was very similar to the one used

on the Midcourse Space Experiment spacecraft.

“The use of existing, reliable ground support equipment to test the flight hardware was probably the

single most important factor that enabled the

instrument team to meet the tight schedule of the

NEAR program,” Hawkins reported.12

The NEAR multispectral imager was built 

in-house at APL. The laboratory, reported Space

Department head Stamatios Krimigis, “has a long

history of designing and building innovative 

instruments.”13

The Pathfinder team used the same CCD technology to construct a camera in the form of a small

cylinder about 4 inches in diameter. Their imaging

system was constructed at the University of Arizona

Lunar and Planetary Laboratory under the direction of astronomer Peter Smith. The Pathfinder

team spent $7.4 million on their camera. Smith

spent much of the money improving the filters and

calibration of the camera, which allowed the

Pathfinder operations team to produce crisp pictures with accurate colors and three-dimensional

images.

In all, the NEAR spacecraft team spent $15

million on scientific instruments. (The Pathfinder

team spent $14 million.) The most expensive instrument on the NEAR spacecraft was the x-ray/

gamma-ray spectrometer, the primary means for

determining the surface composition of Eros. The

gamma-ray detector consisted of a 12-inch-long

cylinder, while the x-ray detector took the form of

three tube-shaped devices, sitting side by side, each

about 7 inches in length. (See table 3-4.) 

The scientific instruments on the NEAR spacecraft were small and, by traditional spacecraft standards, relatively inexpensive. From a distance, they

were hardly visible. In essence, the spacecraft was a

rocket engine (with accompanying fuel tanks and

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 23

Source: Applied Physics Laboratory, “Near Earth Asteroid

Rendezvous (NEAR), Phase C/D—Development Phase,” undated,

folder 17070, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference

Collection, Washington, DC.

Table 3-4

Cost of NEAR Scientific

Instruments

(in millions of real-year dollars)

Instruments Cost (Estimated)

Gamma-ray spectrometer 4.8

Spectrograph 3.3

Imager 1.8

Magnetometer 1.0

Instrument data-processing units 4.5

Total instrument development 15.4
24 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Technicians mounted scientific instruments on the section of the spacecraft that would point away from Earth and the Sun. Solar

panels and the high-gain antenna were fixed to the opposite end. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)

solar arrays) that carried scientific appendages

attached to its outer frame. The ability to miniaturize scientific instruments based on existing microelectronic technologies was a major factor allowing the

NEAR team to achieve its cost and schedule goals.

Reducing Launch Costs

For many years, exploration advocates have

touted the benefits of cheaper access to space.

Imagine launch vehicles that could carry payloads

into low-Earth orbit (LEO) for a cost of less than

$500 per pound, they said. This would allow the

transport of spacecraft, telescopes, and satellites 10

to 15 times the mass of current equipment.

According to the advocates, such access would revolutionize the use of space for scientific, military,

and commercial purposes.

In spite of such hopes and promises, the cost of

orbital access remained stuck through the 1990s in

a range that varied from about $4,500 to $7,000

per pound. (That provided access to LEO; flying to

the other planets and asteroids cost considerably

more.) To achieve really cheap access to space, mission managers were left with only one method of

reducing launch costs: they had to reduce spacecraft

size and mass, thereby flying on smaller and less

expensive launch vehicles.

As a condition for approving the NEAR project, NASA officials confined the APL team to a

launch on a Delta 2 rocket, model 7925. They

imposed the same requirement on the Mars

Pathfinder team. These restrictions produced

important effects. A small launcher reduced the

overall mission budget by keeping launch costs low,

and the limited lifting capacity of the Delta 2-7925

provided team leaders with an additional incentive
for keeping the spacecraft small. The NEAR team

spent nearly $25,000 per pound to dispatch its

spacecraft and the accompanying propellant—

a large sum, but not unusually high for machinery

sent on solar system expeditions. Overall launch

costs, however, barely broke $43 million, since 

the mass of the fully fueled spacecraft as it sat on

the launch pad totaled only 1,775 pounds (805

kilograms), including 717 pounds (325 kilograms)

of fuel. 

The requirement for a small launch vehicle

forced the NEAR team to miniaturize the spacecraft, itself a means of cost control. Spacecraft mass

was always a concern, said the NEAR spacecraft

engineers. They worried about spacecraft mass until

“the official weighing operation a few days before

launch.”14 Makers of Mars Observer, by contrast,

faced no such constraint. Scheduled to launch on 

a much larger Titan III, they allowed the size of

their spacecraft to grow—and the cost of the 

mission increased commensurately. Confining 

missions to small launchers created a physical

enforcement mechanism over cost and mass that

teams developing “faster, better, cheaper” spacecraft could not avoid.

Controlling Risk

In promoting the “faster, better, cheaper” initiative, Dan Goldin told his spacecraft managers to

take more risks. “Be bold,” he said, “push the limits of technology.”15 By that, he meant that managers should utilize new technologies as a means of

improving the performance of spacecraft. He did

not mean that managers should trade away performance in their effort to reduce the cost and time

required to prepare spacecraft for flight.

“Essentially, all of APL’s space missions are

one-of-a-kind,” observed two senior managers

from the APL Space Department. “So the challenge

is to get it right the first time.” In each case, spacecraft managers utilize technology to improve performance and then confront the risks inherent in

the technology. “‘Better, faster, cheaper’ does not

mean a trade-off among the three, but rather innovation and good technical judgment so that

resources are applied to those factors that eliminate

the most risk in each.”16

The NEAR spacecraft team took risks. They

used solar panels to power the spacecraft in spite of

the fact that no spacecraft using solar panels had

even flown that far from the Sun. They decided to

install a highly sophisticated mechanism for sensing

movement in the spacecraft, called hemispherical

resonator gyroscopes, which utilize a standing wave

pattern on a piece of quartz rather than the traditional spinning wheel. No spacecraft had ever

flown with such a gyroscope.17 In spite of these

risks, the NEAR team was much less worried about

the reliability of their spacecraft than the Pathfinder

group, which took extensive risks as well. In the

minds of NEAR team members, they had been

through this before. Nonetheless, they did take

many precautions as a means of counteracting the

potential for difficulties arising from the technologies they used.

Team members reworked the spacecraft design.

When early design studies revealed that traditional

silicon solar cells would not produce sufficient electric power, the NEAR team switched to gallium

arsenide. Team members built in redundancy. The

spacecraft carried three separate attitude control

mechanisms—a star camera, a “fully redundant”

inertial guidance unit, and “redundant digital Sun

sensors.”18 The inertial guidance unit contained

“two power supplies, two processors, four gyros,

and four accelerometers.”19 The spacecraft carried

three methods of communicating with Earth: a highgain antenna, two low-gain antennas (both fore and

aft), and a fanbeam antenna with two microstrip

patch arrays especially important “in the recovery of

the spacecraft during emergency situations.”20

Where the design team participants could not

impart redundancy, they built in margin. Killing

risk with margin is a key strategy for engineering

reliability into complex systems. Margin enlarges

the tolerance for miscalculations, prepares spacecraft for new environments, and protects against

unanticipated errors.

The NEAR team built margins into spacecraft

components. Doing so was especially important for

the propulsion system that had to carry the spacecraft to Eros. As a standard precaution, the design

team engineered the fuel tanks to withstand twice

their maximum expected operating pressure; the

fuel lines were designed to operate at four times the

expected maximums. (A burst fuel line doomed the

Mars Observer mission.) Bob Farquhar’s insistence

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 25
that a spacecraft on which he had previously

worked (ISEE-3) carry extra fuel allowed it to make

an unplanned rendezvous with comet GiacobiniZinner.21 The team put extra fuel on NEAR.

Redundancy and larger margins worked to

increase the cost of the spacecraft. They also made

the spacecraft more complex. The people designing

the spacecraft balanced increased margins and

redundancy with simplification in other areas.

Complexity and simplicity coexisted within the

same machine. The NEAR team simplified the

design of the overall spacecraft—especially as they

attached components like the antennas and solar

panels to the body of the machine—and they 

simplified the interfaces between spacecraft components. Interfaces are the points at which components join and are the most common source of 

complex system failure. The propulsion system was

designed as a separate module “to simplify the

propulsion system-to-spacecraft interfaces and

greatly reduce schedule risk,” said propulsion engineers.22 Simplification of many components counterbalanced the risks taken with others. 

The short and unyielding work schedule also

promoted spacecraft simplicity because it acted as a

barrier against mission creep. This, too, helped 

to reduce cost and risk. Excessively long development schedules create windows of opportunity that

engineers may fill by increasing the technical complexity of a spacecraft. Although excessive tinkering

may be done with the intent of reducing risk, it

often has the opposite effect, as the history of the

Mars Observer mission demonstrated. The NEAR

team, faced with an unusually tight development

schedule, had to keep the spacecraft simple. The

team was obliged to use engineering methods that

were more linear than interactive in nature. Linear

methods, or what engineers call “clean interfaces,”

enhance reliability. With their February 1996

launch window approaching, the NEAR team could

not engage in actions that made the spacecraft too

complex.

Redundancy, margins, simplicity, and limited

capability all worked to increase the reliability of

the spacecraft. The nature of the mission, the short

development schedule, and the low cost ceiling

served to increase risk. The NEAR team worked

hard to balance the factors affecting reliability, risk,

cost, and the team’s ability to finish the spacecraft

on time. When these design factors are well balanced, as was the case with the NEAR development

effort, the contest between reliability and risk is

often decided by the quality of the management

team. Here, as well, great cost savings occurred.

Managing for Success

None of the money that spacecraft managers

consume is spent in space. All of it purchases goods

and services produced on Earth, and the greatest

portion of it pays the salaries of people working on

the project. Spacecraft projects are labor-intensive,

with far more funds devoted to salaries than to

hardware. During the 1990s, the tax-financed

expense of a single employee working on a NASA

project averaged $95,000, including salary, benefits, and administrative overhead.23 Any project that

lasts twice as long as usual and employs three times

as many people will, of necessity, cost a great deal

more than one that employs a smaller number over

a shorter development period.

The practice of using small, rapid development

efforts was pioneered by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson,

a Lockheed Corporation engineer who helped 

produce America’s first production-line jet aircraft

during World War II. Johnson set up a “skunk

works” development team that was almost too

small for its task and assigned a great deal of

responsibility to individual team members. Team

members were isolated from ongoing operations so

that they could concentrate on their assignments.

According to one version, the “skunk works” term

arose from the relocation of the team to a site well

removed from the main corporate facilities and

uncomfortably close to an adjacent plastics factory

that emitted a disagreeable smell.

Aerospace managers applied the small-team

philosophy embodied in the “skunk works”

approach to relatively small, focused projects.

Scientists at APL utilized small teams when they

began conducting experiments with sounding rockets after World War II; they continued the practice

when the Space Department was formed in 1959.

They accumulated over 30 years of experience on

some 50 spacecraft while practicing smallteam management. By the time the “faster, better, 

cheaper” concept became popular, the management

practices required to execute it had become quite

familiar to APL workers.

26 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
Shortly after the age of modern rocketry began,

managers overseeing the largest undertakings

adopted a different approach. Confronted with the

organizational necessities of deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles and sending humans to the

Moon, they invented large-scale systems management. This approach allowed very large mission

teams to coordinate frequent design changes within

“crash” programs proceeding simultaneously on

many different fronts. Systems management was

used to develop the first fleet of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles and to complete the Apollo

Moon project. Given the complexity of both undertakings and the number of people involved, the

management challenges confronting mission leaders

were as taxing as the technical problems involved.

Space historian Stephen Johnson has termed the

invention of systems management, the technique

used to solve the coordination challenge, “the secret

of Apollo.”24

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 27

Kelly Johnson Skunk Works Rules

• The skunk works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his 

program. The manager should report to a division president or higher.

• Strong but small project offices must be used by everyone involved.

• The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an

almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.

• A very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making

changes must be provided in order to recover from failures.

• There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be

recorded thoroughly.

• There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and 

committed but also projected costs to the conclusion of the program. Don’t surprise 

the customer with sudden overruns.

• Team members must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility 

to get good vendor bids for subcontracts on the project. 

• Push basic inspection responsibility back to subcontractors and vendors. 

• Team members must be delegated the authority to test their final product in flight. 

They can and must test it in the initial stages.

• The specifications applying to hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting.

• Project funding must be timely so that the skunk works manager doesn’t have to keep

running to the bank to manage cash flow.

• There must be mutual trust between the customer and the skunk works team with very

close cooperation and liaison on a day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding

and correspondence to an absolute minimum.

• Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled.

• Because only a few good people will be used, ways must be provided to pay people 

based on performance and not on the number of people supervised.

Source: Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos, Skunk Works (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1994), pp. 51–53. 
Large-scale systems management consists of a

series of formal techniques designed to give project

leaders ever-increasing degrees of control over the

design, financing, and reliability of machinery

under development. Progressive design freezes fix

the configuration of spacecraft and related subsystems at increasingly specific levels of detail. Formal

scheduling techniques (such as the critical path

method, or CPM) track the completion of individual tasks. Total program budgets and multiyear

financial plans track spending. Formal program

reviews provide management oversight and identify

pressing difficulties. Quality and reliability units,

located outside the project hierarchy, police the

work of project managers while project managers

police the work of contractors. At the top, formally

organized systems engineering and integration units

conduct studies to determine the potential for interactive failures arising from the simultaneous operation of two or more subsystems. The integration

units also check the effect of small design changes

on adjacent machinery. 

Formal, full-scale systems management is timeconsuming, labor-intensive, and expensive. It

results in an elaborate network of checks and balances wherein the result of any one action is

assessed for its effect on the spacecraft, the project

budget, and the development schedule. Leaders of

institutions like NASA utilize formal systems management to reduce the probability of unanticipated,

interactive failures once the mission is under way.

Designing and building large spacecraft without the

advantages provided by formal systems management is very risky—the equivalent of conducting a

circus trapeze act that begins its performance without a net. The smallest undetectable error can doom

the final result.

“Faster, better, cheaper” projects typically

forgo the more excessive demands of formal systems management, substituting instead the advantages that arise when members of a small team

intensively focus on a specific objective and feel personally responsible for the collective product of

their individual contributions. Even before people

like Kelly Johnson introduced team-based techniques like the “skunk works” approach, experts

on management recognized the advantages that

small, well-organized teams possessed in creating

new products and achieving high levels of product

reliability. Those advantages flow from the ability

of people working on small teams to communicate

with each other and coordinate their individual

contributions in an informal sort of way.

Leaders of both the NEAR and the Pathfinder

projects relied much more on teamwork than on

formal systems management to carry out their

work. In essence, they substituted teamwork for

formal systems management. However, they did not

abandon formal systems management entirely. The

NEAR team, for example, engaged in a succession

of technical, cost, design, readiness, quarterly, and

subsystem reviews. Like the Pathfinder team, they

established peer-review groups before which team

members had to defend their work. The peer-review

groups drew representation from inside the Space

Department, from other units within APL, and

from people outside APL. Thomas Coughlin, the

NEAR project manager, established the usual reliability and quality-assurance component that accompanies formal systems management but followed

the APL practice of vesting this responsibility with

a product-assurance engineer who sat as a member

of the core team.

Coughlin departed from formal systems management by avoiding the excessive paperwork, elaborate integration studies, and many external

reviews that characterize that approach. He insisted

that NASA executives, the people paying for the

mission, establish a single point of contact to oversee APL. When project teams are forced to report to

numerous supervisors and multiple Field Centers,

the small alterations in mission requirements that

tend to arise create huge cost and schedule anomalies.25 Years earlier, Richard B. Kershner, the

founder of APL’s Space Department, had refused to

take any further NASA contracts because he was

frustrated over the requirement that his project

engineers “squander every Friday briefing their

NASA oversight counterparts.”26 To Coughlin, the

single NASA Headquarters representative with

whom he worked seemed worried in the beginning.

She did not know whether the APL team could do

the work. Still, she protected the team, telling other

NASA officials who wanted to alter program

requirements and add more instruments to leave the

team alone.27

Coughlin worked hard to protect the team

from excessive bureaucracy. He kept individuals

focused on the completion of the project. He

banned high-ranking APL supervisors from his

weekly internal review meetings. He wanted just

28 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
the technical people and lead engineers to attend.

The meetings lasted 1 hour. No coffee was served.

Each person had 3 minutes to report.

By eliminating the formal elements of largescale systems management, Coughlin kept the

NEAR project team small. It had to be kept small.

A large team, with heavy paperwork requirements,

never could have met the impending spacecraft

development deadlines. The February 1996 launch

window had the same effect on Coughlin’s project

management methods that the Delta 2 rocket had

on spacecraft size. Both kept their respective products small. The impending launch date prevented

other people from adding new requirements that

would make the project slow and expensive. “You

have to shut everything out,” Coughlin remarked.

“That [launch window] was the biggest friend I had.”28

The core team at its height consisted of perhaps

40 people. This was quite small by spacecraft standards. Managers of large planetary missions commonly employ thousands of people to develop their

spacecraft. Even for small projects, the core development team can exceed 100 employees. Coughlin

estimated that the whole number of people working

to develop the project, including people in the APL

fabrication shops, totaled no more than 130 APL

employees, with perhaps another 170 doing work

that had been contracted out. “We tried to minimize the [number of] people who touched the hardware,”29 Coughlin explained. The decision chain

was so short that people on the team could make

major decisions in a day or so.

Managers of low-cost projects at the Applied

Physics Lab, like those working at the Jet

Propulsion Laboratory, use an organizational

approach called matrix management. Workers are

drawn into the project organization from other

units without formally removing them from their

home units and the supervisors to whom they

report. The matrix refers to the way in which the

project team is superimposed over the formal

organization chart. APL consists of departments

where project workers, technical experts, and management support personnel can be found. Within

the departments, technical experts are organized

into sections and groups that deal with processes

like electronics and power generation. The departments are linked to a research and technology center that contains additional experts in engineering,

technology, science, and analysis. APL also houses

fabrication shops, where hardware is built in-house.

The overall organization is further complicated by

the involvement of scientists from universities or

other research laboratories who oversee the creation of instruments and the involvement of contractors who produce spacecraft parts. The matrix

management system consists of a small number of

project leaders, reporting directly to their department heads, drawing help from a much larger network of sections, groups, branches, and shops. 

Effective teamwork is essential to this

approach. In the absence of the formal checks provided by full-scale systems management and the

lines of authority created by a strict chain of command, project leaders must rely upon the willingness of participants to develop a personal sense of

responsibility for mission success and communicate

concerns openly with one another. In short, the

leaders must rely upon the capacity of the members

to function as a team. Like the Pathfinder group

and other successful “faster, better, cheaper” projects, NEAR team leaders utilized a number of techniques that enhanced this capacity for teamwork. 

NEAR leaders colocated team members at the

APL campus in central Maryland. Colocation is 

a primary technique for promoting the high level 

of interpersonal communication necessary for

teamwork to occur. It is especially important for the

critical systems integration function. Division of the

systems integration function among two or more

sites, especially on a low-cost project, invites project

failure. Colocation of team members is a primary

safeguard against the communication difficulties that

arise on complex undertakings.

Most of the work on the actual spacecraft was

done in-house at APL. Hands-on experience with

the spacecraft gives team members a familiarity

with hardware that cannot be created through

paperwork reviews. APL had a tradition of completing 70 percent of any project in-house. Because

of its short development schedule, the NEAR spacecraft team retained 50 percent of its work, contracting out components such as the complicated

propulsion system to firms like the Aerojet

Propulsion Company.30

Coughlin assembled a small team of experienced personnel. (The Pathfinder group mixed

experienced and inexperienced personnel.) He

sought people with multidisciplinary knowledge

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 29
30 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

who could understand how their contribution to

the project fit into the system as a whole. Managers

conducting low-cost projects often use a technique

called multitasking, giving workers more than one

job to perform so that they view the project from

different perspectives, thus expanding individual

understanding of the overall machine. Project leaders also encourage seamless management, whereby

the same people move from design to fabrication 

to operational tasks. Coughlin appointed lead 

engineers for each subsystem, working out their

assignments with the supervisors of the units from

which these persons were drawn. Having one 

person responsible for each component of the

spacecraft increases reliability and reduces the need

for paperwork.

Coughlin insisted that project workers “design

to cost” and hold to the fixed schedule. Cost and

schedule goals were raised to a level equal to the scientific and technical objectives of the mission. “The

single highest risk to managing a cost-capped program is ‘requirements creep,’” Coughlin noted.

“This is it,” he said, fighting design changes and

pointing to the 1996 launch window. He had no

extra time to absorb design changes. “Additional

time in the later stages of development means that

a ‘standing army’ is being extended, which is very

expensive and also tends to defocus the team.”31

The exceptionally short development schedule

helped Coughlin keep people on the team. On longer

projects, as design and fabrication efforts drag on,

workers leave. In such cases, project leaders turn to the

paperwork requirements associated with formal 

systems management as a means of creating a written

record that new workers can consult. Short development times promote teamwork because they create an

incentive for people to stay. The people who stay

know that they will soon see the results of their work.

The organization established to design and build the low-cost spacecraft consisted of a small APL team assisted by scientists responsible

for the instruments the spacecraft would carry. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
Overall, Coughlin used a relatively simple project organization. He oversaw a small number of

people responsible for the spacecraft, its scientific

instruments, mission design, and in-flight operations. He organized six small science teams to assist

with the fabrication and operation of instruments,

with each team headed by an outside expert whose

work was counterbalanced by instrument specialists selected from APL. Most of the fabrication

work was done in-house at the Maryland campus

or by the Aerojet Propulsion Company, which 

produced the propulsion subsystem.

Writing about the experience, Coughlin summarized the management principles that guided the

work of the project team. In his typically modest

way, Coughlin credited the principles to Richard B.

Kershner, who founded the APL Space Department

in 1959 and served as its head for nearly 20 years.

John Dassoulas, an APL program manager and

project engineer, codified Kershner’s ideas in several

publications.32

Kershner was a brilliant mathematician who

placed more trust in the problem-solving capability

of individuals than in the coordinating powers of

formal management systems. Emphasizing individual skill, Kershner observed:

In carrying out a successful development

program, the importance of recognizing

individual differences in staff cannot be

overemphasized. It is precisely this recognition of differences that is least stressed in

many books and articles on the theory of

organization and management.33

In modern terms, Kershner was more interested

in leadership than in management. A colleague

noted that “he always made it fun, and could get a

bunch of screw-balls to work together.”34

Three of Kershner’s seven management guidelines for low-cost missions were designed to build a

tight-knit team that would stay focused on the project. Establish a small team of experienced personnel, he said. Appoint a lead engineer with full

responsibility for each subsystem. Limit the schedule from concept to launch to 36 months or less.

(See table 3-5.) Short development time motivated

engineers to stay with the project until the spacecraft was launched and eliminated the necessity for

extensive paperwork trails that would otherwise be

required to inform new personnel about the work

already done. Two of the guidelines dealt with the

challenge of restraining project spending: the need

to use cost as a design parameter and the requirement that reliability and redundancy be designed

into the mission at the start of the project. Efforts

to build in reliability once a project was under way,

Coughlin observed, invariably caused costs to grow.

One guideline dealt with the position of the persons

assigned to check on reliability and safety. Unlike

the practice in large programs where safety officers

sit outside the project organization, APL officials

preferred to appoint a product-assurance engineer

as part of the development team. The final guideline

addressed the method of project oversight

employed by the customer or the institution commissioning the project. APL officials insisted upon a

single point of oversight, even when the customer

(like NASA) might be composed of a number of

institutions or field centers. 

Coughlin embellished Kershner’s guidelines as

the NEAR project progressed. Coughlin instituted a

number of design constraints, such as the requireThe Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 31

Table 3-5

APL Management Guidelines 

for Low-Cost Missions

1. Limit the schedule from start to launch to 36

months or less.

2. Establish a small, experienced technical team.

3. Design the spacecraft and instruments to cost.

4. Use the lead-engineer method for each subsystem.

5. Design in reliability and redundancy at the outset.

6. Integrate the product-assurance engineer into

the program.

7. Assign a single Agency manager to interface

with the development team.

Source: Thomas B. Coughlin, Mary C. Chiu, and John

Dassoulas, “Forty Years of Space Mission Management,” Johns

Hopkins APL Technical Digest 20 (October–December 1999):

507–509. 
32 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

ment that major subsystems be able to stand alone.

He encouraged spacecraft engineers to attend the

meetings of teams designing instruments. He kept

the project team small, maintained in-house technical capability, and balanced the need for outsourcing with the necessity of completing at least half of

the fabrication work at APL. He insisted that the

lead engineers and the team as a whole feel personally responsible for the success of the mission and

defined mission success to include cost and schedule

as well as scientific goals.

Repeatedly, Coughlin and others on his team

insisted that the “faster, better, cheaper” principles

they used to organize the NEAR mission were not

new.35 They had been practiced within APL for

decades, becoming part of the ingrained organizational culture of the nearly 40-year-old Space

Department. “We’ve been doing that ever since

we’ve been around,” said one of the old-timers.36

Development of the NEAR spacecraft was relatively uneventful by comparison to other planetarytype missions like Viking and Mars Observer. The

project team held its preliminary design review in

April 1994, four months after funding started to

flow. The team completed its critical design review

the following November. Testing of individual components and assembly of the spacecraft began in

June (1995), following the arrival of the propulsion

subsystem from the Aerojet Company in May. Fullscale testing began in the last week of September. At

the Maryland lab, technicians subjected the spacecraft, in its nearly complete flight configuration, to

forces it would experience during flight. They

shipped the spacecraft a few miles away to NASA’s

Goddard Space Flight Center, where technicians

checked the capability of the machine to withstand

the acoustical shock of launch and balanced it on a

spin machine. They spun, shook, and vibrated the

machine. They tested the propellant tanks by presPursuing a fast development schedule, members of the NEAR project team began full-scale testing of the assembled spacecraft in late

1995, less than 24 months after mission funding began. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 33

Technicians mounted the NEAR spacecraft on top of its Star48B third-stage rocket motor at the Florida launch center. Project leaders

completed the design and development phase of the low-cost mission in just 26 months. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
34 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

surizing them with inert gas; they froze the hinges

that would open the solar arrays after launch in the

subzero environment of space. They switched electronic components on and off. Equipment at

Goddard was not adequate to test the ability of the

NEAR spacecraft to withstand the rapid spin rate it

would endure after launch (69 revolutions per

minute), so technicians conducted a final spin balance operation at NASA’s Payload Processing

Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and

checked for additional anomalies that might have

been caused by transporting the spacecraft south.

The NEAR team shipped the spacecraft to the

Florida launch site in early December 1995, 24

months after funding began.

The intensive testing program revealed flaws

that the spacecraft team worked to correct. The

three-person software team made 22 changes to the

computer software during the integration and testing period.37 According to Andy Santo, the team

was still updating default rules in the software one

week before the 17 February 1996 launch.38

The NEAR team designed and constructed its

spacecraft over one of the shortest development

schedules ever attempted for a planetary-type 

mission. It did so for far less money (in inflationadjusted dollars) than ever attempted for a project

of this sort. The task of preparing a low-cost 

spacecraft, once thought insurmountable, proved

relatively easy. The more difficult challenge lay

ahead. The low-cost, robotic spacecraft had to 

fly across the solar system to its ultimate destination—a severe test of the “faster, better, cheaper”

philosophy. That challenge would prove far more

difficult than the work of designing and constructing the spacecraft.
35

The launch window for the trip to Eros began on

16 February 1996 and remained open for 16

days. The mission plan called for the rocket to place

the spacecraft in a 100-nautical-mile-high parking

orbit 10 minutes after launch. Thirteen minutes

later, over Africa, a 4-minute blast would set the

spacecraft on its path away from Earth’s gravitational pull. Most of that thrust was to be provided

by the Star48B third stage, spin-stabilized at a rate

of about one revolution per second. Once released

from the launch vehicle, the spacecraft would use

an ingenious device to eliminate its spin. On the

g round, technicians wrapped two carefully weighted

cables around the spacecraft. After the third - s t a g e

firing, the spacecraft would activate a cable cutter,

which, in combination with the spinning motion,

would cause the weighted ends of the cable to move

away. As the cables unwound and eventually flew

away, they would absorb the spacecraft’s angular

momentum and reduce its spin rate to less than one

revolution per minute.1

Chapter 4: Flight

A d d i t i o n a l l y, the cables restrained the 1.8-meterlong solar panels that project engineers had comp ressed against the body of the spacecraft. As the

cables unwound, the solar panels would unfold.

Moving away from Earth, the spacecraft would communicate its status through NASA’s ground station in

C a n b e rra, Australia. At least, that was the plan.

Launch officers canceled the 16 Febru a ry launch

o p p o rtunity on account of high-altitude winds and a

range computer malfunction. The actual launch took

place on 17 Febru a ry at midafternoon under a bright

Florida sky. Cheered by the perf o rmance of the Delta

2, the NEAR project team waited for the spacecraft

to come into range above the Australian ground

station. If the spin sequence and other launch pro c ed u res had occurred corre c t l y, the spacecraft would

signal Canberra that it was safely on its way.

C o n v e r s e l y, a faulty spin sequence or launch vehicle

separation could throw the spacecraft into a tumble

that would prevent it from establishing radio contact

with the ground station below.

Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
36 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Launch of the NEAR spacecraft occurred on 17 February 1996.

(Courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA KSC-96PC-308)
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 37

The flight of the NEAR spacecraft through the inner solar system required the cooperation of three teams at different locations—the

mission operations group at the Applied Physics Laboratory, a navigation group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (shown here),

and an imaging team led by Cornell University astronomer Joseph Veverka. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)

Technicians at the Canberra facility, using their

new block 5 receiver and its 34-meter dish, listened

for the spacecraft’s signal. None came. Ten minutes

passed, and the NEAR team grew more anxious.

Still no signal arrived. Another 10 minutes passed.

Technicians working through a 1.5-meter antenna

detected a signal, so they switched their search from

the new block 5 receiver to an older, less sensitive

one. Detailed telemetry data from the spacecraft

flowed down. The spacecraft’s signal was so strong

that the ultrasensitive block 5 receiver refused to

accept what the older model could. “The spacecraft

was never in danger,” Robert Farquhar joked afterward, “but people here were in danger of having

heart attacks.”2

Organizing for Operations

The incident, minor in hindsight, provided a

warning of the dangers that lay ahead. The operations group planned to fly the NEAR spacecraft for

three years through the solar system, gradually

gaining ground on an object with very little gravitational pull. Extensive operational skill was required

to approach the asteroid and begin orbital maneuvers around it.

The organizational framework for this activity

was much more dispersed than the one used 

to produce the spacecraft. Project leaders established an operational center for the NEAR mission

at the Applied Physics Laboratory in central

Maryland and appointed an operations manager.

Navigational work, however, was assigned to the

Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

A group of APL employees operated the spacecraft,

but a group from JPL determined the orbit 

and designed trajectory correction maneuvers.

Complicating this organizational arrangement further, both groups sought help from the science
38 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

teams that had designed the spacecraft’s instruments. The imaging team, under Cornell University

astronomer Joseph Veverka, formulated the commands that allowed the machine to view objects in

space. The radio science team, also located at JPL

but not formally part of the navigation team, had to

calculate the asteroid’s mass. Along with the visual

images, the determination of shape and mass would

provide the numbers needed to keep the spacecraft

in a safe orbit once it reached Eros. Additionally,

these groups needed the support of NASA’s Deep

Space Network, through which communications

with the spacecraft were made. 

NASA officials planned to spend $46 million on

spacecraft operations after launch.3 The total amount

worked out to be less than $12 million per year for

the planned three-year flight and the year spent orbiting Eros. In keeping with the “faster, better, cheaper”

philosophy, this was a relatively small sum.

Operational difficulties can doom a mission.

The flight of Mars Climate Orbiter provides a dramatic example of the manner in which poorly integrated flight responsibilities can cause a spacecraft

to disappear. The lessons are instructive. The flight

of Mars Climate Orbiter took place while the

NEAR mission was under way. A contractor team

at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver,

Colorado, built Mars Climate Orbiter. A management team at JPL in Pasadena, California, oversaw

the project. To save money, the management team

did not involve experts from the technical divisions

at JPL in the design or construction of the spacecraft. Yet other workers at JPL prepared the mission

plan and flew the spacecraft, while science teams,

located at each team leader’s institution, contributed instrument protocols. The responsibility

for monitoring the status of the spacecraft during

flight fell to Lockheed Martin, but navigational

instructions were prepared at JPL. As an additional

complication, NASA officials required that JPL officials flying Mars Climate Orbiter also manage

Mars Global Surveyor, launched in 1996, and Mars

Polar Lander, launched in 1999. Finally, project

leaders relied upon two separate navigation teams,

one for the prelaunch development phase and

another for flight. The second team began its work

shortly before launch and did not participate in

prelaunch testing of the ground software used to fly

the spacecraft. Project leaders could have appointed

a systems engineer during the operations phase to

help integrate these activities but did not.4

The investigation board examining the loss of

Mars Climate Orbiter described this organizational

arrangement, in a clearly understated characterization, as “geographically distributed.”5 The difficulties inherent in this loose institutional pattern were

compounded by the “faster, better, cheaper” practice of minimizing formal systems engineering, as

was readily apparent in the case of Mars Climate

Orbiter by the absence of a systems engineer for

operations. To catch small systems integration

errors, the people working on other “faster, better,

cheaper” projects relied upon teamwork and solid

communications. Yet the techniques used to

enhance teamwork on those projects, such colocating team members, soliciting peer review, and moving workers from development to operations so 

as to provide institutional memory, were not

emphasized in this case.

The spacecraft vanished on 23 September 1999 as

it prepared to orbit Mars. Subsequent analysis traced

the cause to a ground software file called “small

forces,” which was used to construct trajectory models. The file contained thruster performance data that

were stated in English units of measurement. A subsequent navigation algorithm read these data as if they

were in metric units. One pound of force equals 4.45

newtons. Consequently, the navigation team underestimated trajectory effects by a factor of 4.45, causing

the spacecraft to fly too deep into the Martian atmosphere and disappear.

Numerous opportunities to catch this error

existed. All of them failed. In essence, the lack of

appropriate program integration on a low-cost mission created a situation in which no one noticed

that some people were working in metric while others were working in English units of measurement. 

The NEAR project was not as “geographically

distributed” as Mars Climate Orbiter. The NEAR

spacecraft was designed and assembled in Laurel,

Maryland, and flown from the same location.

Nonetheless, NEAR flight operations were not

wholly consolidated; they involved APL, JPL, the

Deep Space Network, and the Veverka group at

Cornell University. Whereas the people who assembled the spacecraft had extensive experience with

low-cost missions, the people who flew it had very

little experience with deep space missions. Nor 

did the NEAR operations team have much time to

practice.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 39

Spacecraft navigation is an extraordinarily

complicated process in which small errors can produce horrible results. Poor organization increases

the probability that undetected errors will become

serious flight difficulties.

Meeting Mathilde

The mission plan devised by Bob Farquhar

called for the spacecraft to move away from Earth

in an orbit of increasing radii relative to the Sun.

The spacecraft would move across the orbital path

of Mars and travel into the main asteroid belt.

Sixteen months after launch, it would approach the

asteroid Mathilde. Passing this dark, carbon-rich

object, the spacecraft would fall back toward the

Sun, aiming itself toward Earth. Following a journey relatively swift by comparison to the outbound

voyage, the spacecraft would zip by Earth’s South

Pole seven months later on 23 January 1998, picking up speed.

After passing Earth, according to the mission

plan, the spacecraft would chase Eros halfway

around the solar system, catching it 12 months

later. Eros orbits the Sun once every 1.76 Earth

years, or every 21 Earth months. The planned rendezvous would occur on the outer edge of Eros’s

orbit, with Earth on the other side of the Sun, 35

months after the February 1996 launch. 

Throughout 1996, members of the NEAR team

knew they had problems with the people flying the

spacecraft. During the integration and testing

phase, before a spaceship is launched, the operations group develops ground support system (GSS)

equipment that sends commands to the spacecraft.

The spacecraft, however, still sits on Earth, usually

fairly close to the equipment. People testing the

spacecraft use the GSS to simulate flight before the

spacecraft leaves. Simultaneously, the operations

group develops the equipment and computers that

will be used to communicate with the spacecraft

during flight. A critical piece of equipment is the

spacecraft data simulator, used during flight to

The 35-month transit plan called for the spacecraft to pass the asteroid Mathilde in 1997, return to Earth for an acceleration flyby in 1998,

and reach Eros in early 1999. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
40 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

check the effect of commands and procedures

before they are sent to the actual machine. 

On an ideal mission, all three systems—the test

GSS, the flight equipment, and the spacecraft data

simulator—would be the same. In practice, they

tend to be distinct. As each is built and tested,

observed Gary Whitworth, the lead engineer for

NEAR’s ground system, the spacecraft is typically

“thrown over the wall” to the next entity. The

equipment used to communicate with the spacecraft

in one phase may bear less than ideal resemblance

to the equipment used in the next. Seeking to implement the “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy,

Whitworth worked to develop what he called a

“common architecture” for communicating with

the spacecraft before and after it left Earth.6

A basic measure of flight-system performance

for any robotic spacecraft is the frequency with

which the machine retreats to a safe mode. In the

event of a serious anomaly, the NEAR spacecraft

was programmed to automatically point its trailing

side (called the forward end) toward the Sun and

begin a 2-degree rotation around that line of sight

while emitting a beacon signal from its fanbeam

antenna. Eventually, the signal would sweep past

the direction of Earth and be detected on the

ground. Flight controllers would reply with a “stop

rotation” command and begin to study the problem.7

Ground commands sent to the spacecraft and

not recognized by the on-board computer caused

the NEAR spacecraft to slip into a safe mode. (Rule

16 in the NEAR spacecraft computer did not allow

the robotic machine to accept any unapproved

command.) If the operations group inadequately

tested a command before sending it aloft, or if the

spacecraft data simulator did not adequately replicate the effect of the command, then the spacecraft

might respond by flipping itself into a safe mode

once the command arrived.

Watching the operations group fly the spacecraft, members of the overall project team began to

worry. The operations group was not flying the

spacecraft as well as team members had hoped. In

turn, members of the operation group felt assaulted

and unappreciated. From their point of view, the

project team did not understand the difficulty of

flying such a machine. Communication between the

operations group and the overall team broke down,

a dangerous situation in a “faster, better, cheaper”

mission where teamwork is the essential mechanism

for avoiding errors.

A few months into the flight, with the spacecraft traveling toward the asteroid belt, the flight

operations director resigned. The project team

found a replacement from outside APL. Mark

Holdridge had graduated from the University of

Maryland some 15 years earlier. He had worked at

APL as a contractor, not on the permanent staff. He

liked the no-nonsense, build-the-spacecraft-andget-it-out-the-door culture at APL and had always

wanted to join the organization as a full-time

employee. For 14 years, he remained in private

industry, serving in a variety of mission operations

roles. In 1996, he received a call from a person on

the APL staff who told him that unless the team

replaced the flight operations director, “we’re going

to lose the mission.”8 On 7 January 1997, with the

flight nearly one year under way, Holdridge arrived.

Holdridge, a stocky individual with a large,

brown moustache, had not been an outstanding

student at the University of Maryland, where he

studied aerospace engineering; however, through

practice, he had learned how to fly robotic spacecraft. His small, six-person group of generalists, he

thought, “had extensive spacecraft integration and

test experience but relatively little flight operations

experience,” the latter being especially important

for a deep space mission.9 Holdridge sought to

impose more structure on the members of the operations group. They wanted him to be just another

analyst. Holdridge wanted to combine the APL traditions of multitasking and cross-training with

increased hierarchy, specialization, and procedures.

Group members resisted these changes. Holdridge

wanted to bring new members onto the group

before the original six exhausted themselves. Group

size was increased to 21 during orbital operations.

He thought that the group’s midcourse maneuvers

were sloppily performed and that the group was not

adequately testing the commands before sending

them to the spacecraft. He insisted on regular

assessments of the spacecraft and its performance,

as well as that of the people working with him. He

worried that the equipment was sitting out in the

room where something like a plumbing leak could

destroy the electronics. The simulator was set too

close to the machinery for communicating with the

spacecraft. Holdridge worried that a careless operator might send a simulator test command to the

actual spacecraft. The loose and informal proce-
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 41

dures—what Holdridge called a “Dodge City kind

of approach”—added to the time required to control the spacecraft, and Holdridge worried that his

group was growing tired and overworked.10

In addition to resolving difficulties within his

operations group, Holdridge also had to develop

good relationships with the JPL navigation group

that was plotting the path of the spacecraft and calculating course maneuvers. The nature of project

work changes considerably when flight begins.

During the design and construction phase, the team

is dominated by the project manager, mission director, chief scientist, and spacecraft engineer. During

flight, the operations manager, navigation group,

and science teams assume dominant roles. Many of

the people who helped build the spacecraft move to

other jobs. A tightly managed preflight team may

unravel once flight begins.

Holdridge and his operations group began to

prepare for the flyby of asteroid Mathilde set to

occur in late June 1997. In laying out the mission

plan, Robert Farquhar had observed that the spacecraft’s path through the solar system would take it

near a C-class object in the asteroid belt. A slight

modification to the spacecraft’s path would allow it

to study the asteroid. The spacecraft would not

orbit Mathilde; it would merely pass by, providing

an opportunity to gather information about the

composition and shape of the asteroid and practice

the procedures that would grow exponentially more

difficult at the Eros rendezvous. 

Navigating in deep space is an art, requiring the

people who chart the path to collect information

from a number of sources. One source proceeds

from inertia, the principle of physics that describes

the tendency of an object to remain on a fixed path

until acted on by some force. The NEAR spacecraft

carried a sophisticated hemispherical resonator

gyro mechanism to measure induced movements.

These measurements were compared to the spacecraft’s Doppler signal as received on Earth. (When

a spacecraft accelerates relative to Earth, its signal

arrives at a lower frequency.) The NEAR spacecraft

also carried a star tracker and a set of five digital solar

attitude detectors to provide additional information.11

The process of navigation requires constant

checking and comparison of data from different

navigation sources to locate the spacecraft and

determine its position relative to the orbits of other

objects. The gravitational pull of objects the spacecraft may encounter on its voyage affects its path as

well. Navigating through space can be likened to

sailing across the sea, where a captain has to worry

about the manner in which winds and currents

affect the path of the ship, except that in space, the

ship is moving through three dimensions and all of

the buoys, markers, islands, and landforms are

moving as well.

Compounding the navigation challenge even

further, the exact position of the NEAR spacecraft

and the asteroid Mathilde were not precisely

known as the date for the flyby approached. The

calculated positions of the two objects contained

small amounts of error. Roughly one Earth day

before the point of closest encounter, following

instructions from the imaging group, the operations

group told the spacecraft to point its camera

toward a position in the cosmos where the navigation group in Pasadena believed the asteroid to be

and start taking pictures. In a summation of information from a collection of frames, Mathilde

appeared. Visual contact with Mathilde provided

the information necessary to redress the remaining

navigation error. The operations group sent a command to the spacecraft adjusting the sequence clock

so as to prepare the robotic machine for the activities it would perform during its close encounter

with this extraterrestrial body.

On 27 June 1997, the NEAR spacecraft passed

within 753 miles of asteroid Mathilde. The asteroid

was impressively large. If Mathilde’s center of gravity were placed above the main campus of APL in

Maryland, the outer edges of this roundish object

would stretch from the Potomac River north of

Washington, DC, to northern Baltimore. As a point

of comparison, the object that struck Earth 65 million years ago and possibly ended the reign of the

dinosaurs was about 6 to 9 miles long. Mathilde is

41 miles wide. It seems to consist of a carbon-rich

material, twice as dark as a piece of charcoal,

reflecting only 3 to 5 percent of the Sun’s light. A

huge, 20-mile-wide chunk of the asteroid had

blown away, leaving a crater that from one angle

looked as large as the asteroid itself. “It’s all crater,”

remarked Joe Veverka, leader of the imaging team.

“There’s hardly any asteroid.”12

Holdridge was pleased with the Mathilde flyby.

His operations team had performed well; the navigation group at JPL working with the NEAR radio
42 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

science team had accurately calculated the slight

change in the spacecraft’s trajectory produced by

Mathilde’s modest gravitational pull. Mathilde continued its wide orbit through the asteroid belt, and

the NEAR spacecraft dropped back toward Earth

for its planned 23 January 1998 swingby.

The Earth flyby was a critical and difficult

maneuver. The spacecraft had been gone from

Earth for nearly two years. It could have been dispatched directly from Earth to Eros, but that would

have required a larger and more expensive Atlas

launch vehicle. To keep mission costs low, the

spacecraft needed the trajectory change imparted by

the swingby to supplement the rocket power of the

Delta 2 that had launched the spacecraft two years

earlier.13

The Earth flyby required close cooperation

among the operations group, the navigation team,

and the scientists preparing image-taking protocols.

The spacecraft passed above the Aleutian Islands

and Siberia before accelerating to 29,000 miles per

hour over southwest Iran. It swung over Africa and

Antarctica. At its point of closest approach, the

spacecraft was only 335 miles above Earth, the

range within which NASA’s Space Shuttle and

Hubble Space Telescope fly. The swingby altered

the inclination of the spacecraft’s orbit, matching

the Eros orbital plane. As it departed Earth for the

second time, the NEAR spacecraft turned and took

a series of pictures of the South Pole. In the nearly

cloudless Antarctic summer, features in the snow

and ice appeared as subtle shades of white and blue

surrounded by the deeper blue of the southern seas. 

With the Mathilde flyby and the Earth swingby

complete, Holdridge grew more confident in the

work of his operations group. He sensed that the

overall project team was gaining confidence in his

leadership as well. In the 11 months remaining

before the rendezvous with Eros, group members

practiced their maneuvers. They developed a complete software simulator. They executed small

The NEAR spacecraft passed within 800 miles of Mathilde in June 1997, registering images of the 41-mile-wide asteroid. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 43

velocity changes. In advance of the rendezvous,

they prepared a Canned Activity Sequence (CAS)

into which they could quickly insert parameters.

The spacecraft drew closer to Eros.

Missing the Rendezvous

As the NEAR spacecraft approached Eros,

Holdridge and his operations team prepared for

five propulsive maneuvers necessary to put the

machine into the desired orbit around this small

body. The successful Mathilde flyby and the

whisker-close Earth swingby had bolstered the

team’s confidence. Six days after the Mathilde flyby,

on 3 July 1997, the team had fired the spacecraft’s

main engine—the large velocity adjust thruster—for

nearly 11 minutes. It was the first use of the spacecraft’s main engine in space. Instruments on the

spacecraft measured the amount of lateral (or sideways) movement that might accompany a main

engine burn. A flight code contained in the spacecraft set a threshold on the amount of lateral acceleration allowed. If too much lateral acceleration

occurred, the computer was programmed to shut

the engine down. An additional command told the

spacecraft how to handle such an on-board burnabort contingency.

Unbeknownst to the operations group, the

threshold was set too low. The operations group

noticed an unusual startup transient during the July

1997 main engine burn. The acceleration did not

cause a main engine shutdown, so the team did not

feel alarmed. As the flight progressed, however, the

amount of propellant in the spacecraft decreased,

increasing the effect of the transient relative to

spacecraft mass. In addition, one of the on-board

commands necessary to execute a burn-abort contingency was missing.14 Additional analysis of data

from the July 1997 main engine burn might have

revealed the anomaly. Extensive simulations might

have revealed the missing command and the fact

that the threshold was set too low; perhaps not.

Simulations often fail to duplicate flight conditions

exactly, and what is easy to see in hindsight is hard

to perceive in advance. 

Eighteen months after the Mathilde flyby, in

late 1999, the operations group at the Applied

Physics Laboratory in Maryland prepared the

spacecraft for a long main engine burn. This large

thruster firing would initiate the final set of maneuvers necessary to swing the spacecraft into an orbit

around the target asteroid. The burn began late

Sunday afternoon, 20 December (eastern time), as

most people prepared for Christmas week. Doppler

signals based on the spacecraft’s radio transmissions received by the JPL navigation group in

Pasadena through the Deep Space Network’s 70-

meter Goldstone antenna in the California desert

confirmed the gradual velocity change expected as

smaller thrusters began to prepare the spacecraft

for main engine ignition. The subsequent measurements, however, did not show the velocity shift

associated with a main engine burn. In fact, the

Doppler signature was absolutely flat. For some

reason, the main engine had shut down. Thirtyseven seconds later, all signals from the spacecraft

ceased. To the people back on Earth, the spacecraft

was gone. 

One-third of the way around the solar system,

the NEAR spacecraft was on its own. The main

engine burn caused a level of lateral acceleration

that exceeded the command threshold. The spacecraft automatically terminated its main engine burn

and moved into a safe mode. The missing script in

the burn-abort contingency program, however,

caused the spacecraft to wobble and tumble. It

could not hold its proper attitude, pointed toward

the Sun. Working on its own, the spacecraft shot

Passing by Earth so as to alter its orbital inclination, the NEAR

spacecraft took a picture of the Antarctic continent under its

January summer Sun.

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
44 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

increasing amounts of hydrazine fuel through its

thrusters, trying to maintain the proper position.

Byproducts from the thruster firings squirted onto

the optical camera. With the spacecraft out of position, its solar arrays could not collect sufficient

energy, and its batteries began to wear down. To

save power, the spacecraft switched off its transmitter, severing its remaining link with Earth.

Back in Maryland, the project team could only

hope that the spacecraft had shut down its transmitter in order to conserve power. In that event, the

spacecraft was programmed to turn the transmitter

back on after 24 hours and call home.

Far from Earth, the spacecraft fought to maintain its proper attitude. It conserved its remaining

electric power. After the passage of 24 hours, it

turned on its transmitter and sent a weak signal

through its fanbeam antenna in a rotating motion

toward the center of the solar system. The signal

reached Earth. The fanbeam antenna and the onboard autonomous controls saved the spacecraft,

said the relieved project manager, Thomas

Coughlin.15

So did the fuel margins that the project team

had incorporated into the spacecraft design. As

data from the spacecraft flowed into the flight operations center, the project team learned that the

spacecraft had wasted 66 pounds of hydrazine fuel

trying to stabilize its attitude relative to Earth and

the Sun. Anticipating difficulties they could not

know in advance, the spacecraft development team

had loaded about that much additional fuel into the

machine.16 Without the margin provided by that

extra fuel, any remaining chance of an Eros rendezvous would have disappeared.

The spacecraft was still speeding toward Eros.

The aborted burn and ensuing maneuvers had carried the spacecraft off course, however. The spacecraft would not enter into an orbit, nor would it pass

some 600 miles above Eros as planned. Instead, it

would speed by at a distance of 2,378 miles.17

Even at that distance, the spacecraft could give

mission planners their first good view of Eros,

important information that would help them prepare for a second rendezvous attempt. The main

work of conducting the unexpected Eros flyby fell

to the JPL navigation group and the Cornell

University imaging team under Joseph Veverka. The

navigation group had to recalculate the spacecraft’s

path. As the navigators rushed through this work,

the imaging team planned how to maneuver the

spacecraft as it sped by a rotating asteroid so as to

get the best possible pictures. They had very little

time. Members of the operations group spent all

night on 22 and 23 December preparing and sending commands to the spacecraft. They finished a

few minutes before the sequence began.

The NEAR team nearly lost the spacecraft.

“Recovery of the spacecraft was both amazing and

incredibly lucky,” wrote two of the participants.18

Had the more probable result occurred, an intensive investigation of the low-cost methods used at

APL would have ensued. Nine months after the

flawed main engine burn on the NEAR spacecraft,

workers at JPL lost Mars Climate Orbiter, another

low-cost initiative. One year after the NEAR anomaly, JPL workers lost Mars Polar Lander, which

crashed at its destination. Mars Polar Lander carried a pair of Deep Space 2 microprobes, designed

to penetrate the Martian subsurface and search for

evidence of water life. They too vanished. Had the

NEAR spacecraft likewise disappeared, the loss of

so many “faster, better, cheaper” projects would

have precipitated an exhaustive analysis into the

shortcomings of the low-cost approach. The recovery of NEAR moderated potential disappointment,

certainly relative to the reaction that occurred in

1999 as other low-cost missions failed.

Near misses can provide useful information

about organizational and technical shortcomings,

just as investigations of full-scale catastrophes do.

An Anomaly Review Board scrutinized the NEAR

engine burn to understand what went wrong. Their

analysis, tempered by the realization that the mission did not fail, provided insights into the project

management techniques that mission participants

had employed.

The very tight organizational techniques used

to produce the spacecraft came apart when the

spacecraft began to fly. The operations effort, constructed out of geographically dispersed groups,

was neither as tight nor as failure-conscious as the

development team, even though many of the same

people were involved. The Anomaly Review Board

criticized the operations group with regard to the

startup transient on the July 1997 main engine

burn: “The NEAR team failed to recognize the significance of this transient and its potential increase
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 45

in importance with decreasing propellant mass.”19

A spacecraft system engineer or lead engineer for

spacecraft software actively involved in mission

operations might have caught the prior anomaly,

but the influence of these individuals had dissipated

relative to that of the people flying the spacecraft.

“The comments, suggestions, and requests of the

system engineer in operational matters carried no

particular weight and were often ignored,”20 members of the Anomaly Review Board wrote. The software engineer had moved to another department. 

In a team-based project, these two individuals

were “the principal repository of knowledge of

NEAR’s overall system design.”20 A more elaborate

process of configuration management might have

caught the underlying problem, but the leaders of

the NEAR project chose to forgo elaborate configuration management techniques. Compensating

practices such as the involvement of key design and

development engineers in flight operations might

have revealed the anomaly. Yet such practices

waned once operations began.

The spacecraft had been flying for nearly three

years, 50 percent longer than the time required to

build the machine and deliver it to the launch site.

“Risk-reduction practices that were established for

critical operations prior to launch and were used

during early operations had simply been abandoned,” members of the Anomaly Review Board

noted. What Board members characterized as a traditional “belt and suspenders” mindset among

design engineers prior to launch faded as operations

progressed.22 (“Belt and suspenders” refers to the

failure-avoidance habit of employing two methods

to hold up one’s trousers.) In short, a much looser

organizational system emerged as the mission

matured.

Anomaly Review Board members remembered

the 1996 ceremony in which NEAR officials returned

$3.6 million in a ceremonial display of cost-saving

prowess. “It might have been wiser for NASA to have

redirected this $3.6 million toward activities to further

reduce mission risk,” Board members wrote—activities such as building better simulators, testing flight

software, and documenting operational procedures.23

In one important respect, the rendezvous burn

failure strengthened the capacity of the people flying the NEAR spacecraft. The event focused their

attention on the precarious nature of the mission. It

taught them how to work together in a crisis. It

reminded them, after three years of flight, how

close the specter of disaster lurked. It also gave

them another year to get ready for rendezvous. 

As it sped by Eros, the spacecraft returned more

than 200 images, as well as important spectral

information.24 Mission planners saw an elongated,

cratered object some 20 miles long. Scientists measured the density of Eros and located its rotation

pole. They found no little moons orbiting Eros—at

least, none over 50 meters in size.

Armed with data on Eros and the spacecraft, the

project team considered its options. The spacecraft

had burned so much fuel that a large course correction and quick return seemed improbable. Team

members assessed one option that allowed the

spacecraft to follow the asteroid around the solar

system for 14 Earth months, about three-fourths of

the way through Eros’s orbital year. Such a flightpath allowed a second attempt at rendezvous in

February 2000, on or near Valentine’s Day.

Exploring Eros

In order for a team-based management system

to work, the people involved must be familiar with

each other and share a common outlook toward

their work. A team-based project relies upon the

exceptional communication channels that exist in

tight-knit groups to overcome the disadvantages

imposed by the lack of formal management controls. To enhance those communication channels,

physical proximity is helpful, in the sense that team

members gather in one place. The people involved

in flying, navigating, and commanding the NEAR

spacecraft, however, were dispersed across the

United States.

The 14 months added onto the NEAR flight plan

by the missed rendezvous allowed the geographically

dispersed operations, navigation, and science participants more preparation time. Participants used that

time to improve flight software and practice their

routines. That enhanced their capacity to work

together as a team. “We had a good understanding of

each other as a team,” two participants observed.25

Mark Holdridge, who led the mission operations

team at APL, admitted that the extra time made him

feel “much better prepared.”26
46 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

The software changes were especially important. Technology improvements often strengthen

the performance of persons managing risky technologies. By subjecting seemingly intractable problems to technologically guided procedures, the

improvements reduce the number of distractions

with which team members must deal at any one

time, thus allowing them to concentrate on the

issues that absolutely require human intervention.

Participants in the flight of the NEAR spacecraft

employed the extra time afforded by the missed rendezvous to improve supporting technology, including their flight simulator and the software used to

compute the location of the spacecraft and the position of the asteroid. This work expedited the

process of preparing the commands necessary to

maneuver the spacecraft, reducing both tedium and

the opportunity for errors.

Orbiting Eros was challenging in a number of

ways. Eros’s gravitational pull on the spacecraft

was relatively small by comparison to other objects

that space scientists had explored. Commensurately,

orbital velocity was relatively slow. An object circling Earth near the surface of the globe travels at a

speed of about 8,000 meters per second. The typical orbital velocity for the NEAR spacecraft in a 50-

kilometer-high orbit around Eros would be about 3

meters per second (about 6.5 miles per hour). Small

perturbations caused by Eros’s irregular shape,

combined with the unusually low orbital velocity,

could cause the satellite to escape into space or

crash into the surface of the asteroid. The spacecraft team had only a rough understanding of the

asteroid’s gravitational field as the rendezvous date

approached. They planned to learn more about the

gravitational field from orbital operations.27

As the spacecraft closed the distance to its

objective, on-board cameras searched for small

satellites undetected on the earlier flyby that might

interfere with orbital operations. They found none.

The mission plan called for the spacecraft to close

on Eros slowly and pass at a relative speed of about

10 meters per second, much slower and safer than

the approach 14 months earlier. As planned, the

spacecraft would approach Eros from an angle

slightly south of the asteroid’s equatorial plane on

the sunward side, providing a clear view of the

asteroid’s illuminated surface. The spacecraft would

move slowly past Eros to a distance of approximately 325 kilometers (200 miles), at which point it

would turn from its line of flight and begin orbiting

the asteroid.28

The operations group prepared for orbital

insertion by instructing the spacecraft to execute a

series of fine-tuning burns. On 2 February 2000,

while preparing for a braking burn, the spacecraft

fell into a safe mode. Concern was temporary, as

the now-confident flight teams completed the necessary velocity change on the following day.29

The final maneuver was scheduled to take place

at 10:33 in the morning, 14 February 2000, EarthMaryland time. Preparing for the arrival of dignitaries, someone walked through the operations 

center and complained about the scarcity of NASA

logos. As part of his effort to revitalize NASA’s 

organizational culture, Administrator Goldin had abolished the futuristic, wormlike logo and reinstated the

emblem used when NASA had sent Americans to the

Moon. In an e-mail message, Gary A. Moore wrote:

Our guys, who had already had enough 

of the media preparations, ran off a bunch

of cheesy-looking copies on the Xerox and

stuck them around at random places, tacking them up with only a single strip of tape.

The morning of the burn, an indignant

NASA advance man ran around the operations area doing a “search-and-destroy”

operation on our mocking signs.30

NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, in attendance with Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland,

remarked that he had never seen such a controlled

mission operations center. “What he did not realize,” said one of the mission planners, “is that we

were all in a daze after all the long hours and crises

of the previous weeks.” At the end of the day, after

the successful rendezvous, team members went

home. “Everyone was so burnt out that no one felt

like going out to celebrate afterwards.”31

Team scientists, however, were ecstatic. Eros

was much more structured than anyone had imagined. The 21-mile-long rock was covered with

craters and grooves. A large chunk was missing

from the center, causing some to characterize the

asteroid as “potato-shaped.”32 Some people saw

“weird white patches.”33 “Eros has an ancient, heavily cratered surface,” project scientist Andrew Cheng

observed. “There are also tantalizing hints that it has
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 47

a layered structure, as if it were made up of layers like

in plywood.”34 Once again displaying his eccentricities, Mission Director Robert Farquhar arranged for

the spacecraft to commence its orbit of Eros, named

after the Greek god of love, on St. Valentine’s Day.

Celebrating the association, reporters for Science

magazine published a photograph of a heart-shaped

natural feature on the asteroid.35

The JPL navigation group promised to give 

scientists a closer look. The spacecraft began its

rendezvous with Eros in a relatively safe 321-by366-kilometer orbit, one rotation every 22 Earth

days. As they learned more about the asteroid’s

gravitational field, navigators planned to settle into

a tighter orbit, some 50 kilometers or 30 miles high,

with a revolution every Earth day. They even hoped

to dip their orbit down to just 5 kilometers (3 miles)

above the asteroid’s surface, although they could

not hold that altitude long due to the demanding

fuel requirements of such a trajectory. The proximity of the NEAR spacecraft to Eros on these low

passes was the equivalent of a commuter airline’s

cruising altitude over Earth’s surface. 

The low passes required close cooperation

among the navigation, operations, and imaging

groups. Members of the imaging group wanted perfect lighting conditions for the low passes; a small

navigation error could produce disappointing pictures of the dark side of the asteroid or velvet black

space. Participants of the three groups had been

working together to fly the spacecraft around the

asteroid for eight months when the low passes

began. In spite of another safe-mode event, the lowaltitude flyovers went well. The teams grew more

confident in their capabilities and attempted a 2-

kilometer flyover. 

The close-in passes revealed unusual features.

Looking inside craters, the spacecraft took pictures

of smooth areas offset from the center that project

scientists chose to characterize as “ponds.”

Consisting of what appeared to be fine soil, the

ponds ranged in size from 7 to 100 meters wide.

Similar features had never been seen on small bodies elsewhere in the solar system, such as the moons

of Mars. With closer inspection, the unusual

grooves detected from higher altitudes revealed

themselves to be subtle depressions of up to 25

meters deep. Few small craters appeared, a fact that

initially puzzled the scientists. “It is difficult to

explain the scarcity of small craters on Eros,” scientists wrote shortly after the images appeared.36

The spacecraft team flew the expeditionary

machine around Eros for nearly one Earth year. The

near-infrared spectrometer failed. The NEAR

spacecraft began to run out of fuel. The mission

was renamed NEAR-Shoemaker. The small, robotic

spacecraft had been gone from Earth for five years,

more than twice the length of time necessary to

design and build it. Total expenses for the operational or flight phase of the extended mission had

grown to $60 million, more than planned but still

modest by exploration standards. NASA executives

prepared to switch off funding and further communication with the spacecraft in February 2001.

Mission Director Bob Farquhar did not want the

mission to end quietly. “We could let the thing quietly limp away or just turn it off,” Farquhar said.

“But that just wouldn’t be right.”37 In fact, Farquhar

contemplated a more spectacular ending, one he had

envisioned earlier when the spacecraft was being

designed. He wanted the spacecraft to land.38

A faulty main engine burn caused the NEAR spacecraft to miss

its planned January 1999 rendezvous with Eros. Flight teams

spent more than one year pursuing the asteroid, eventually

threading the spacecraft into an orbit around the 21-mile-long

object on 14 February 2000. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
48 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

The challenges imposed by such an objective

were more political than technical. No one in

NASA, the sponsoring organization, had authorized a landing. No one high in the NASA or APL

hierarchy wanted to commit his or her organization

to an unplanned objective and then have to explain

why the attempt failed. The spacecraft was not

equipped with airbags or descent engines or landing

legs to cushion its fall. The chances were great that

the spacecraft would crash into the asteroid or tip

over in such a fashion that no one would know if it

had successfully touched down. NASA higher-ups

told Farquhar to quit using the “landing” word to

describe his proposal. “It’s not a lander,” said

NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Science,

who was warming to the idea. “This is a controlled

descent.”39 The L-word continued to appear in the

press, however, by reporters who recognized a good

story. Farquhar was reprimanded for “taking about

landing again.”40

Before the near-infrared spectrometer failed, it

had returned information showing the reflected

sunlight from Eros to be remarkably uniform in coloration. By implication, Eros was uniform in composition. But the imaging camera had revealed

incredibly diverse geologic features—boulders, fractures, ridges, ponds, and the curious absence of

small craters. The gamma-ray spectrometer,

designed to determine the composition of surface

rocks, might have helped resolve the mysteries

raised by the geologic features, but it demonstrated

poor sensitivity from orbit, even on close 3-milehigh approaches. To the spacecraft team and supporting scientists, the solution seemed obvious: go

closer.41 A slow, controlled descent would allow the

spacecraft to capture images from as low as a few

hundred meters above the surface of Eros and

transmit them back to Earth before plowing into

the asteroid’s surface. Features as small as 4 inches

wide would be visible. 

APL Space Department head Stamatios

Krimigis embraced the concept and worked to convince top NASA officials, who in turn approved.

NASA Administrator Goldin, chief advocate for the

“faster, better, cheaper” initiative, made plans to be

present at the APL operations center during the

high risk-event. Mission planners scheduled the

touchdown for 12 February 2001, almost one Earth

year after orbital maneuvers began.

The navigation, operations, and imaging

groups met extensively to lay out the sequence of

events. They planned to begin the descent from a

36-kilometer (22-mile) high circular orbit. All of

the team members prepared to gather at the APL

operations center except for members of the navigation group, who needed to track the spacecraft

from the JPL facility in California. A succession of

five thruster firings would cause the spacecraft to

drop toward the surface and break its fall.42 The

Close approaches revealed strange surface features, such as the pondlike deposits (left) and the absence of small craters (right). The

areas shown are about the size of a modern stadium complex on Earth—250 meters across on the left and 150 meters on the right.

Controllers instructed the spacecraft to dip as close as 2 kilometers above the surface of Eros. 

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 49

spacecraft would approach the landing zone on 

its side, with solar arrays and high-gain antenna

pointed back toward Earth. From this position, 

the camera, positioned on the aft end of the spacecraft, would point straight down. Even if the spacecraft crashed, the camera would transmit pictures

during the descent. The operations team prepared 

a final series of thruster firings designed to slow 

and soften the impending impact. Team members

positioned the spacecraft so that the solar panels

and aft end would hit the surface first. The navigation group would know that touchdown had

occurred through Doppler tracking from Earth and

the loss of the signal from the spacecraft. Said two

members of the planning group, “no one expected

the spacecraft to survive.”43

However, the signal did not stop. The solar

panels, in conjunction with the aft end of the spacecraft, created a perfect three-point landing. One or

two of the panels possibly bent as the spacecraft

backed onto the surface of the asteroid. The decision to fix the solar panels rigidly to the octagonal

body of the spacecraft, initially done to save money

and simplify design, allowed the spacecraft to land

with the forward end elevated in such a fashion as

to enhance communication with Earth. The spacecraft touched the surface with a downward impact

velocity of about 1.7 meters per second (about 4

miles per hour), only twice as fast as NASA astronauts had settled their lunar landers on the surface

of the Moon.44 The NEAR spacecraft bounced

slightly at touchdown, a motion revealed by a slight

shift on the Doppler track. The camera, pointing

down, buried itself into the surface material and

was unusable. The gamma-ray spectrometer, which

scientists hoped would get close enough to take a

few readings, was a few feet from the surface and

still transmitting—ideally situated to produce highquality data.

Dan Goldin was so astonished by the results that

he refused to announce the landing until he received

additional confirmation. “This could not have

worked out better,” Bob Farquhar offered.45 The JPL

navigation team and the APL operation group contemplated firing the thrusters briefly in order to

change the orientation of the spacecraft, creating 

a mobile laboratory out of what was a stationary

lander, but they decided against the risky move

because the quality of the transmissions coming

through NASA’s Deep Space Network were so fine. 

As the asteroid twisted and moved further

away from the Sun, the hemisphere on which the

spacecraft sat moved toward its winter season. Like

other objects orbiting the Sun, the asteroid experienced seasons, with temperature differentials estimated to range from the boiling point of water to

the temperature of liquid nitrogen. The gamma-ray

spectrometer transmitted data for 12 days. The

Erostian winter approached. As night commenced

on 28 February 2001, Earth-Maryland time, the

NEAR-Shoemaker team put the small spacecraft to

sleep and ceased communicating with the distant

machine.

Straining for closer inspection, expedition leaders allowed the

small, robotic spacecraft to descend to the asteroid’s surface.

This illustration depicts the results of the 12 February 2001

asteroid landing, the first ever achieved on such an object.

(Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory)
50 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 51

“This mission has been the thrill of a lifetime,”said Andrew Cheng, the NEAR project scientist. Cheng had worked on the project since its

origins. “It’s been ten years of my life and worth

every moment.”1 Cheng had joined the Applied

Physics Lab in 1983, shortly after receiving his doctorate in physics from Columbia University. A

cheerful and articulate scientist, he had taught

physics at Rutgers University before deciding to

conduct research full-time at APL.

By sending what was eventually relabeled the

NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft to Eros, Cheng hoped

to look back to the point in time when the solar system and planets formed. The quest for scientific

understanding provided the primary purpose for

the NEAR mission, the first systematic expedition

to a near-Earth asteroid. Scientists wanted to study

its composition and characteristics as a means of

furthering their understanding of the solar system.

Yet the mission served another purpose as well. As

one of the first attempts to create a new line of inexChapter 5: Legacy

pensive spacecraft, NEAR provided a test of the

low-cost approach and the management methods

supporting it. 

The scientific results of the NEAR mission have

been described in a number of popular publications

and technical papers, including Asteroid Rendezvous,

edited by Jim Bell and Jacqueline Mitton, and the

January–March 2002 issue of the Johns Hopkins

APL Technical Digest, a quarterly publication of

APL. The management and cost-cutting lessons

drawn from the mission are emphasized here, along

with a brief review of the scientific results.

Scientific Findings

To build asteroids and planets out of a flattened

cloud of debris orbiting an infant sun, chunks of

matter must come together. “That’s done with collisions,” Cheng explained. If bits of rock and ice
52 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

collide gently, they stick together. Once enough particles arrive and the object grows sufficiently large,

some of its constituent material will melt and stratify. “If we have too violent a collision, then these

objects will break each other up into small pieces

again, and we have to start over.”2

The asteroid Eros is one of the most primitive

objects in the solar system. “One of the most surprising results obtained by NEAR at Eros was the

lack of magnetization,” Cheng and his colleague

Deborah Domingue observed. The absence of magnetization was discovered by the magnetic field

instrument team under the leadership of Mario

Acuña. If Eros ever melted, or blew away from a

larger object that did, the NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft should have detected the magnetic field that

results from material melting in the presence of an

ambient field. “The absence of magnetization is

consistent with a thermal history in which Eros was

never heated to melting.”3

On the surface of Eros, scientists saw boulders.

Parts of Eros are littered with boulders, some as

large as a house. Repeated impacts by small objects

should have pulverized the boulders, but there they

were. Scientists inspecting close-up photographs of

Eros found a clue to the reason for the prevalence

of boulders. Eros possesses very few small craters.

The scientists saw plenty of large impact craters,

but few small ones. “Shockingly, with few exceptions, they are not there!”4 observed Clark

Chapman, a member of the NEAR imaging science

team. The sort of impacts that might create small

craters and pulverize large boulders are strikingly

absent on Eros.

The mechanism by which this situation might

have occurred, according to some scientists, provides a striking insight into the reason why some

objects leave the asteroid belt and fall toward

Earth. Scientists suspect that small objects, like

meteorites, alter their orbits due to the unequal

solar heating they receive. The warming they experience does not cancel out the cold they endure.

Eventually, radiant forces cause the object to pop

out of the main asteroid belt and enter a more elliptical planet-crossing orbit. According to this theory,

which was developed before NEAR visited Eros,

the asteroid belt should be marked by a deficiency

of meteorite-sized objects. Those objects should

have left the asteroid belt and fallen toward the

Sun, where some should have hit the inner planets

and their moons. Yet they would not hit asteroids

like Eros so long as Eros stayed in the main asteroid

belt. The visual evidence collected by the NEARShoemaker team lent credibility to this theory.

So how did Eros escape from the asteroid belt

and fall toward Earth? The solar effect works best

on small objects the size of meteorites, not large

asteroids. Again, the inspection of Eros provided

clues. Eros appears to be a tightly packed, consolidated body. Though never massive enough to melt,

it does possess material that has been pressed into

tighter, rocklike forms. Several lines of evidence

support this conclusion. The gravity field around

Eros is consistent with that of an object of uniform

density. Photographs show ridges, grooves, and pits

or craters arranged in chains. Crater slopes are

steeper than a more loosely assembled body could

support.

One explanation is consistent with the findings.

Eros could have split off from a much larger body

whose mass was sufficient to consolidate the material into a more uniform density but not so large as

to begin melting. Said Domingue and Cheng:

Taken together, the gravity field measurements, linear structural features, tectonic

features such as Rahe Dorsum, jointed

craters, and indications of internal structural coherence all suggest that Eros is a

collisional fragment from a larger parent

body, or a so-called “collisional shard.”5

Inspection of Eros suggests that it spent most 

its geological history in the main asteroid belt, then

broke off from a larger body. That breakup, or perhaps some less-well-understood force, caused it to

leave the main asteroid belt and move toward the Sun.

Having moved to the inner solar system, Eros

poses a potential danger to Earth. Its path could

eventually intersect that of Earth and create a celestial collision. One calculation places the odds of

such an event at 5 percent.6 This would not happen

for millions of years, but it could occur. The asteroid’s orbit does not currently intersect that of Earth,

but eventually, Eros is destined to move even closer

to the Sun and fall into it or strike a planet or some

other object like the Moon. Even if Eros does not

strike Earth, some other near-Earth asteroid will. It

has happened before, and it will happen again.

Understanding the dynamics and composition of
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 53

near-Earth asteroids will be essential if humans ever

need to move one.

Not all asteroids are the same. As it flew by

Mathilde, the NEAR spacecraft detected an object

of remarkably low density. Mathilde is loosely constructed—so much so, to use a scientific analogy,

that if the asteroid were laid gently on Earth’s

oceans, it might float. Its low density is consistent

with what scientists call a rubble pile, an asteroid

that formed as the result of materials slowly gathered together. Eros is much smaller than Mathilde,

but also denser. Mathilde is a C-type asteroid on

which carbon compounds prevail, whereas Eros

consists of metal and silicate minerals, an S-type.

Both are distinguishable from M-type asteroids,

where metallic iron appears.

Humans may decide to recover precious minerals by mining asteroids. This innovation might

encourage orbital manipulation in an effort to

move such a precious object closer to Earth.

Alternatively, humans may attempt to alter the path

of a near-Earth asteroid destined to collide with the

home planet. As far-fetched as these schemes seem,

moving asteroids is probably essential for humans

intent on maintaining a long-lived, technological

civilization.

What about those strange pondlike shapes? No

such features are found within craters on the Moon.

One group of scientists showed how long-lasting

terminators between sunlit and shadowed areas

could create electrostatic charges capable of lifting

and redistributing very fine particles. Cheng preferred an alternative explanation. Small asteroid

quakes induced by objects falling on Eros—scientists call them seismic agitations—could cause fine

material on the slopes of crater bowls to shift

toward the bottom and form level areas. The low

gravity on Eros would render steep slopes susceptible to redistribution when the surface shook, much

more so than on comparatively larger bodies such

as the Moon. Under those circumstances, Cheng

explained, “ponds should form easily on Eros but

not on the Moon.”7 Significantly, the NEARShoemaker spacecraft landed on such a pond.

Operation of the gamma-ray spectrometer and

magnetometer from the surface of Eros helped to

reveal the composition of the asteroid, along with a

fascinating possibility. Eros appears similar in composition to the class of stony meteorites known as

ordinary chondrites. Such objects, primitive building blocks left over from the construction of the

solar system, have struck Earth in the past. They

can be found in museum collections around the

world. Measurements from Eros, along with a path

that takes the asteroid close to Earth, suggest “that

Eros may be the parent body of at least some of the

ordinary chondrites” already on Earth, according

to one project scientist. Pieces of Eros may already

have struck the planet, an omen supporting the

importance of further scientific investigation.8

Cost Implications

Along with the Pathfinder expedition to Mars,

the NEAR mission to Eros was the first effort to

dispatch low-cost spacecraft on planetary-type

expeditions.9 The earliest projects within the

“faster, better, cheaper” initiative, including Mars

Pathfinder and NEAR, performed remarkably well.

The highly publicized Mars Pathfinder and its

Sojourner rover explored the Ares Vallis flood plain

in the summer of 1997. The following year, the lowcost Lunar Prospector detected evidence of water

ice at the Moon’s north pole. This mission was followed by Deep Space 1, which completed the first

test of an ion propulsion engine in space and flew

by the asteroid Braille. Of the first 10 missions in

the “faster, better, cheaper” series, 8 (including

NEAR) did exceptionally well, raising hopes for

wider implementation of the low-cost approach.

The missions that followed did not produce

similar results. Beginning in December 1998 and

lasting through the next 13 months, NASA

launched six more missions under its “faster, better,

cheaper” philosophy. Four failed. Mars Climate

Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 2, and the

Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE) all crashed or

suffered uncorrectable difficulties. In January 1999,

the NEAR team endured what could have been a

mission-ending event during its missed Eros rendezvous. By a very slight margin, NEAR missed

becoming the first of what would have been five

“faster, better, cheaper” projects to fail that year.

The NEAR team recovered and went on to

study Eros in detail. The other four missions were

lost in full. But for a few pounds of fuel, NEAR

could have joined the four. The line between triumph and catastrophe in the realm of spaceflight is
54 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

very narrow. Instead of preparing a history of

accomplishments, NEAR participants might have

found themselves perusing a series of accident

investigation reports. 

The failures of 1999 empowered the people

who doubted the wisdom of low-cost endeavors.

Analysis of the failures suggested that NASA officials had pushed the edge of the low-cost envelope

too far. The development of the Mars Pathfinder

spacecraft, along with its Sojourner rover, cost

$196 million. Buoyed by enthusiasm for the

approach, NASA officials attempted to design and

construct the next two Mars spacecraft, Mars

Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, for $193

million. In essence, advocates of the low-cost

approach attempted to accomplish two new 

Mars missions for the price of one. The enthusiasm 

for cost cutting affected components such as the 

spacecraft’s landing system. Within an already thin

budget, members of the Mars Pathfinder team allocated just $27 million for the development of an

innovative, low-cost air bag landing system. The

Polar Lander team attempted to prepare a more

conventional and potentially more expensive rocket

landing system for just $15 million. Pathfinder

landed successfully; Mars Polar Lander crashed.

NASA officials attempted to do too much with too

little, an effort that produced problems of mismanagement and communication breakdowns.

The experience of 1999 repeated itself at APL

three years later with the loss of another low-cost

mission, the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR).

Shortly after the successful NEAR flyby of the

asteroid Mathilde, NASA officials approved an

APL mission to fly by the comets Encke and

Schwassmann-Wachmann-3 and analyze their

material. The CONTOUR project was organized

much like the NEAR mission before it. APL 

officials relied upon a small team to develop a 

relatively simple spacecraft with robust capabilities.

In the case of CONTOUR, however, the spacecraft

disappeared.

As with the NEAR spacecraft, project officials

on CONTOUR relied upon an outside contractor

to prepare the spacecraft’s main rocket motor. The

Large Velocity Adjust Thruster (LVA thruster) on

NEAR was developed by the Aerojet Propulsion

Company as if it were “a separate spacecraft” in

order to “simplify the propulsion system-to-spacecraft interfaces and greatly reduce schedule risk.”10

A similar approach was used on CONTOUR. Two

aerospace companies prepared CONTOUR’s solid

rocket motor, which was embedded within the

spacecraft body. The APL project management

team trusted the two contractors to deliver a reliable motor, well tested and ready to fly. In keeping

with the “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy, team

members did not enlist technical experts at APL to

assist with the solid rocket motor development.

Team members did not “penetrate” the contractor;

they did not utilize elaborate systems engineering

processes to establish contract requirements; they

did not conduct an extensive test and redesign program on the rocket motor; and they did not subject

technical decisions to extensive peer review.11 The

“faster, better, cheaper” initiative was predicated

upon a management philosophy, known as the

Deming method, that entrusts product quality to

front-line workers who use statistical methods to

check their own work.12 The philosophy saves money

and, when properly utilized, has been shown to

increase product reliability on manufactured goods.

On the CONTOUR mission, a research and

development undertaking, the approach apparently

failed. When flight controllers lit the solid rocket

motor to push the CONTOUR spacecraft out of its

Earth-circling orbit, exhaust from the motor probably fouled the spacecraft and caused it to degrade

and fail. According to the Mishap Investigation

Board, the “nozzle was embedded within the spacecraft to a greater degree than is typical,” a design

decision not adequately analyzed during spacecraft

development.13 The investigating committee could

not absolutely confirm this scenario because the

CONTOUR project team did not install devices

that provided telemetry on spacecraft performance

during the critical engine burn. The absence of

telemetry during critical mission events, another

cost-saving move, was also employed on the illfated Mars Polar Lander and was found to be

“indefensible”14 in both cases.

With the CONTOUR mission, APL officials

attempted to push the edge of the cost-saving 

envelope even further than they had done with

NEAR. The NEAR spacecraft cost $113 million to

develop—a radically low cost for a spacecraft

designed to fly through the inner solar system for

more than three years. APL officials attempted to

develop the CONTOUR spacecraft for about $70

million. The overall cost of the CONTOUR 

mission, including spacecraft development, launch,
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 55

and operations, was much less than the expense of

NEAR—$220 million on NEAR reduced to $154

million for CONTOUR.15

Officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

where the tradition of low-cost spaceflight had

never been strong, reversed direction after the disappointing results in 1999. JPL officials garnered

an $800-million commitment as protection against

the possibility of failure during their next attempt

to land on Mars.16 With that sum, they developed

two powerful rovers that arrived in early 2004. The

$800-million budget, which covered development,

launch, operations, and data analysis, contrasted

sharply with the $265 million spent for Mars

Pathfinder, which landed, and the $329-million

total mission cost set aside for the two 1999 Mars

spacecraft that failed.

For a while, advocates of the low-cost approach

resisted the pressures pushing project costs upwards.

During 1999, NASA officials approved four 

new low-cost Discovery missions: Deep Impact; 

the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment,

GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission; Aspere-3; and the ill-fated CONTOUR. They

followed with two additional Discovery-class

approvals in 2001: Dawn and Kepler. As of 2003,

NASA guidelines required groups proposing

Discovery expeditions to confine total mission

spending to less than $299 million and development

time to 36 months or less.17

Commitment to the low-cost cause persisted in

2000, when NASA executives suspended planning

of the Pluto-Kuiper Express, a mission to the outer

edge of the solar system. The overall cost of the

Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission, being studied by a project team at JPL, grew rapidly following the disappointing events of 1999. NASA executives issued a

stop-work order on the planning effort and invited

interested parties to propose alternative approaches

that could fit under a $500-million cost cap.

As time passed, however, support within NASA

for the low-cost approach waned. The departure in

2001 of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, principal advocate for the “faster, better, cheaper” initiative, significantly reduced enthusiasm for the

concept. So did the loss of the Space Shuttle

Columbia in 2003. During the mid-1990s, when

enthusiasm for the concept was strongest, NASA

executives had instituted a number of cost-cutting

reforms in the management of the Space Shuttle

program that found inspiration in the low-cost philosophy. Following the release of the Columbia

Accident Investigation Board’s report, which

strongly criticized NASA management practices,

NASA workers treated “faster, better, cheaper” as a

curious but ill-fated administrative reform.

Still, the underlying conditions that had

prompted the search for low-cost techniques

remained. NASA’s overall share of federal tax 

revenues remained relatively constant, forcing

Agency leaders to fund new initiatives out of money

taken from existing programs, and members of

Congress tended to ignore space initiatives that did

not demonstrate some modicum of fiscal discipline. 

In 2003, NASA executives told officials at APL to

proceed with a mission to Pluto and the frozen

objects in the Kuiper Belt. Set for launch less than

three years later, the mission met many of the 

challenges set out by the original advocates of the

low-cost approach. In 2004, APL workers launched

MESSENGER, a relatively low-cost mission to

Mercury approved under Discovery Program guidelines. Although NASA employees frequently denigrated the “faster, better, cheaper” phrase, new 

initiatives tended to contain the principal features

associated with that approach.

Management Lessons

Shortly after the creation of NASA, with

Americans preparing to race to the Moon, NASA

executives asked workers at the California Jet

Propulsion Laboratory to prepare a set of robotic

spacecraft that could collect close-up pictures of the

lunar surface. Through what was called Project

Ranger, JPL workers designed a set of machines

capable of transmitting television pictures back to

Earth while speeding toward a crash landing on the

lunar soil. The first six Ranger shots at the Moon

failed. Subsequent investigations revealed that the

project team had utilized traditional management

techniques that were too weak to enlist the support

of experts from other parts of JPL. The assistance of

those experts was needed to make the project work. 

The difficulties with Project Ranger and similar

undertakings caused NASA executives to examine

their management techniques closely. At the time,

NASA was full of people with tremendous technical
56 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

skill, but few people who understood the intricacies

of managing very complex projects. Throughout

the Apollo years, NASA executives worked to

install large-scale systems management in the institutional habits of people conducting human and

robotic expeditions. The elaborate system of institutional checks and balances characteristic of largescale systems management guided the Apollo flights

to the Moon and NASA’s first large planetary expeditions, such as the Viking mission to Mars. 

Low-cost projects like the NEAR mission represent an alternative approach to the challenge of

spaceflight. As part of the effort to produce inexpensive spacecraft in short periods of time, low-cost

projects forgo many of the elaborate procedures

found in modern systems management. Yet they do

not return to the weaker forms associated with the

early days of Project Ranger. The low-cost

approach represents an alternative to both weaker

forms of project management and the more elaborate workings of full-scale systems management. 

It is an alternative constructed around the ability 

of people working in small teams to accomplish

large goals.

On NEAR, scientists and engineers confronted

with a limited budget and a short development

schedule created a workable planetary-type spacecraft. The NEAR project team did this through a

relatively simple spacecraft design, judicious risktaking, and appropriate management techniques.

To manage the project, APL officials relied upon a

small project team with focused responsibilities and

a capacity for resolving problems in simple ways,

without resorting to the elaborate paperwork procedures associated with systems management.

The NEAR project demonstrated the importance of teamwork and communications in achieving reliability in low-cost undertakings. Low-cost

projects are incredibly fragile, having forgone many

of the formal protections afforded by systems management. Such projects rely extensively upon the

sense of responsibility that individual players feel

for their contribution to the mission, as well as their

willingness to identify and resolve problems.

Officials at APL utilized a wide range of techniques

designed to enhance the capacity of individuals to

function as a team, such as colocation of team

members and extensive hands-on work with the

spacecraft.

Experience with NEAR and similar projects

demonstrates the limits to which the low-cost

approach can be pushed. When managers of lowcost projects fail to emphasize teamwork, their

projects become vulnerable to the breakdowns that

foreshadow mission collapse. The spacecraft development group functioned well as a team; in the

beginning, the operations group that flew the

NEAR spacecraft did not. As a consequence, the

operations group very nearly lost the spacecraft. 

On the NEAR project, as with the Mars

Climate Orbiter project launched after it, the development team handed a low-cost spacecraft to an

operations team that was not prepared to fly it. The

development team knew that the NEAR spacecraft

would exhibit difficulties in flight, a consequence of

limited funds and a quick track to launch.18

Officials who conduct successful low-cost missions

often utilize a form of seamless management in

which the people possessing the institutional memory acquired during spacecraft design and fabrication work with the operations team. Sometimes the

operations group is involved in spacecraft design.

Dividing operations from development or loosening

the teamwork techniques that have guided the project

once flight operations begin invites project failure.

The NEAR project demonstrated the advantages of conducting a low-cost mission within a

supportive organizational culture. Both NEAR and

Mars Pathfinder were demonstration projects. They

were designed to show others how low-cost planetary expeditions might be conducted. People who

work on demonstration projects have a natural tendency to perform well, a consequence of “can do”

attitude that tends to prevail on pioneering efforts.

A different challenge faces the people who follow. In subsequent efforts, officials are expected to

institutionalize the approaches that the first projects

demonstrated. Institutionalizing an approach in an

organization whose members may be hostile to the

overall concept is a much more difficult undertaking than exhibiting how the concept might possibly

work within a group of committed individuals.

What works as a demonstration for a while may

prove exceptionally hard to institutionalize for

many projects in a row.

In that regard, officials at APL enjoyed a large

advantage, particularly in comparison to those who
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 57

worked across the continent at JPL. Members of the

NEAR project team worked within an institution

that for decades had operated under a low-cost 

philosophy. Cost reduction was part of the APL tradition and culture. The NEAR team did not have to

fight against an entrenched organization; they drew

upon a supporting one. Eighteen months following

the February 1996 launch of NEAR-Shoemaker,

workers at APL dispatched their Advanced

Composition Explorer (ACE), another small, lowcost spacecraft. For APL, it was business as usual,

so much of a tradition that no one bothered to classify ACE as part of a new approach to spaceflight.

The flight of NEAR, as with other low-cost

space missions begun in the final years of the 20th

century, showed how expeditions into the solar 

system could be conducted rapidly and relatively

inexpensively. The experience also reminded participants how thin the line between project success

and failure remained. Compromises in team-based

management techniques, too little money, and too

little time doomed other low-cost endeavors.

Management difficulties on the flight operations

team nearly caused NEAR to fail. The NEAR project, like similar undertakings at that time, demonstrated that expedition costs and preparation time

could be reduced considerably. It also served to illuminate the limits on the degree to which these

reforms could be pursued. 

Postscript 

As the asteroid-rendezvous spacecraft orbited

Eros in the spring of 2000, NASA officials renamed

it NEAR-Shoemaker as a tribute to Dr. Eugene M.

Shoemaker, a geologist who spent his life expanding

human understanding of asteroids and comets.

Shoemaker was a member of the Science Working

Group whose 1986 report recommended the NEAR

mission and created its name. In public, Eugene

Shoemaker and his research partner and wife,

Carolyn, along with David Levy, were best known

for discovering the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which

crashed into Jupiter in 1994, raising public awareness of the threat such bodies pose to planetary

spheres. Shoemaker died in an automobile accident

while conducting field research with his wife on asteroid impact craters in the Australian outback in 1997. 
58 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 59

1. “Applied Physics Laboratory Honors NEAR Team for Underbudget Development and Launch,” APL

press release, 9 April 1996.

2. See Brian K. Muirhead and William L. Simon, High Velocity Leadership (New York: Harper Business,

1999); Price Pritchett and Brian Muirhead, The Mars Pathfinder Approach to “Faster-Better-Cheaper”

(Dallas: Pritchett & Associates, 1998); and Donna Shirley, Managing Martians (New York: Broadway

Books, 1998).

3. See “The NEAR Mission,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1998); “NEAR

Shoemaker at Eros,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 23 (January–March 2002); Jim Bell and

Jacqueline Mitton, eds., Asteroid Rendezvous: NEAR Shoemaker’s Adventures at Eros (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2002).

4. Administrator Daniel Goldin often used this phrase and was a proponent of the initiative. See Howard

E. McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2001).

5. NASA, “One NASA Recommendations,” publication 8-40119, 31 March 2003.

Chapter 1 Endnotes 
60 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Chapter 2 Endnotes 

1. U.S. General Accounting Office, “Space Exploration: Cost, Schedule, and Performance of NASA’s 

Mars Observer Mission,” GAO/NSIAD-88-137FS, May 1988.

2. U.S. General Accounting Office, “NASA Program Costs: Space Missions Require Substantially More

Funding Than Initially Estimated,” GAO/NSIAD-93-97, December 1992, p. 8.

3. Daniel S. Goldin, “From Entropy to Equilibrium: A New State of Nature for NASA,” excerpts of

remarks by NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, NASA Plum Brook Station, Sandusky, OH, 21

October 1992. 

4. Stamatios M. Krimigis and Joseph Veverka, “Foreword: Genesis of Discovery,” Journal of the

Astronautical Sciences 43 (October–December 1995): 345. 

5. John Logsdon, “Missing Halley’s Comet: The Politics of Big Science,” Isis 80 (June 1989): 254–280. 

See also Logsdon, “Missing the Comet: Why No U.S. Mission to Halley?” folder 1314, NASA

Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.

6. S. M. Krimigis to Howard E. McCurdy, 28 October 2002. 

7. Solar System Exploration Committee, NASA Advisory Council, “Planetary Exploration Through Year

2000” (report), 1983. 

8. Science Working Group Report, “Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR),” JPL Re-Order No. 86-7,

June 1986. Joseph Veverka chaired the Science Working Group.

9. Krimigis and Veverka, “Foreword,” p. 345.

10. Ibid.

11. James Van Allen, under whom Krimigis studied as a doctoral student, had worked for the Applied

Physics Laboratory during the 1940s on the proximity fuse project.

12. Spacecraft development and operations costs were stated in 1992 dollars. NASA, “NASA’s Discovery

Program: Solar System Exploration for the Next Millennium,” ca. 1995, folder 17070, NASA

Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.

13. Andrew F. Cheng, “Planetary Science at APL,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 20

(October–December 1999): 582.

14. Krimigis and Veverka, “Foreword,” p. 346.

15. JPL, “Discovery Program Study Status,” vol. 1, presentation to Discovery Science Working Group, 13

May 1991.

16. JPL, “Discovery Program Study Status,” vol. 2, presentation to Discovery Science Working Group, 14

May 1991.

17. Quoted from Frank Kuznik, “Yankee Space Smarts,” Washington Post Magazine (11 November 1984): 13.

18. Cheng, “Planetary Science at APL,” p. 582.

19. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous” (report to

Discovery Science Working Group, NASA Solar System Exploration Division, May 1991).

20. Cheng, “Planetary Science at APL,” p. 583.

21. Stamatios M. Krimigis, “APL’s Space Department After 40 Years: An Overview,” Johns Hopkins APL

Technical Digest (October–December 1999): 473.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 61

22. Cheng, “Planetary Science at APL,” p. 582.

23. G. Scott Hubbard interview, Houston, TX, 7 May 2003.

24. Krimigis, “APL’s Space Department After 40 Years”; U.S. General Accounting Office, “NASA Program

Costs.” See also Donald P. Hearth, “NASA Project Management Study” (report), 21 January 1981,

folder 000992, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 

25. Cheng, “Planetary Science at APL,” p. 582.

26. Lee Dye, “Maverick Scientist Casts an Eye on Pluto, Proposes Way To Probe Distant Planet Years

Ahead of Schedule at Small Cost,” Los Angles Times (5 September 1989); Michael E. Ruane, “In Hot

Pursuit of an Icy Planet, Laurel Scientists Direct Mission to Pluto,” Washington Post (8 December

2001).

27. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Discovery Program Mission Study Reports, vol. A: JPL Near Earth Asteroid

Rendezvous Mission, compiled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the NASA Solar System

Exploration Division, JPL D-8747, vol. A, July 1991.

28. Discovery Science Working Group, executive summary of Discovery: Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous

(NEAR) Report, October 1991, p. 2. Joseph Veverka chaired the group.

29. Robert W. Farquhar, David W. Dunham, and Jim V. McAdams, “NEAR Mission Overview and

Trajectory Design,” Journal of the Astronautical Sciences 43 (October–December 1995): 354.

30. NASA, Small Planetary Mission Plan, report to Congress, April 1992, p. 1.

31. Daniel Goldin, transcript of remarks and discussion at the 108th Space Studies Board Meeting, Irvine,

CA, 18 November 1992; Daniel Goldin, “Toward the Next Millennium: A Vision for Spaceship Earth,”

speech delivered at the World Space Congress, 2 September 1992.

32. Goldin, remarks and discussion at the 108th Space Studies Board Meeting, p. 2.

33. Daniel Goldin, remarks to JPL workers, 28 May 1992, p. 15.

34. NASA, Small Planetary Mission Plan, pp. 1, 4; NASA, “NASA Announces Plans for Small Planetary

Missions,” news release 92-63, 8 May 1992.

35. NASA, Small Planetary Mission Plan, p. 6.

36. NASA, “NASA Selects 11 Discovery Mission Concepts for Study,” news release 93-027, 11 February

1993, p. 3. See also Robert Farquhar, Shao-Chiang Jjen, and Jim V. McAdams, “Extended-Mission

Opportunities for a Discovery-Class Asteroid Rendezvous Mission” (paper presented to the AAS/AIAA

Spaceflight Mechanics Meeting, AAS 93-127, Pasadena, CA, 22–24 February 1993).

37. Farquhar, Dunham, and McAdams, “NEAR Mission Overview and Trajectory Design,” p. 355.

38. Quoted from Oliver Morton, “The Art of Falling,” Wired Magazine (December 1999): 326.

39. Arthur C. Clarke, “‘The World Behind the Moon’ or ‘After You, Monsieur Lagrange . . . ,’” Journal of

Astronautical Sciences 49 (January–March 2001): 21.

40. Michael Milstein, “Hang a Right at Jupiter,” Air & Space (December 2000–January 2001): 67–71.

41. Quoted from Frank Kuznik, “Yankee Space Smarts,” p. 13.

42. Quoted from Frank Roylance, “Mission Designer Is at Top of His Game,” Baltimore Sun (19 January

1998).

43. Robert W. Farquhar and Kuninori T. Uesugi, “A Low-Cost Program of Missions to Near-Earth

Asteroids and Comets” (paper presented at the 42nd Congress of the International Astronautical
62 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Federation, IAF-91-465, Montreal, Canada, 5–11 October 1991). See also David W. Dunham and

Robert W. Farquhar, “Trajectory Design for a Lunar Mapping and Near-Earth-Asteroid Flyby

Mission,” in Spaceflight Mechanics 1993, vol. 82 of Advances in the Astronautical Sciences, ed. by

Robert G. Melton, Lincoln J. Wood, Roger C. Thompson, and Stuart J. Kerridge (San Diego: Univelt,

1993): 605–624. 

44. Robert Farquhar, Shao-Chiang Jen, and Jim V. McAdams, “Extended-Mission Opportunities for a

Discovery-Class Asteroid Rendezvous Mission” (paper presented at the AAS/AIAA Spaceflight

Mechanics Meeting, Pasadena, CA, 22–24 February 1993).

45. Stamatios M. Krimigis and Joseph Veverka, “Foreword: Genesis of Discovery,” p. 347.

46. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory News, press briefing to announce the Near-Earth

Asteroid Rendezvous mission, 10 December 1993; NASA, “NASA Begins Development of First

Asteroid-Orbiting Mission,” news release 93-220, 15 December 1993.

47. Thomas B. Coughlin, “The NEAR Mission,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June

1998): 93.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 63

Chapter 3 Endnotes

1. John Dassoulas, quoted in Robert L. Qualkinbush, “Learning ‘Smaller, Faster, Cheaper’ from the

Applied Physics Laboratory,” Space Policy 13, no. 4 (November 1997): 305.

2. Qualkinbush, “Learning ‘Smaller, Faster, Cheaper’ from the Applied Physics Laboratory,” p. 307.

3. Quoted from Qualkinbush, “Learning ‘Smaller, Faster, Cheaper’ from the Applied Physics Laboratory,”

p. 309.

4. Theodore J. Hartka and David F. Persons, “The Design and Testing of the NEAR Spacecraft Structure

and Mechanisms,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1988): 163–173.

5. Hartka and Persons, “The Design and Testing of the NEAR Spacecraft Structure and Mechanisms,” 

p. 167.

6. A. G. Santo, S. C. Lee, and R. E. Gold, “NEAR Spacecraft and Instrumentation,” Journal of the

Astronautical Sciences 43 (October–December 1995): 374.

7. Hartka and Persons, “The Design and Testing of the NEAR Spacecraft Structure and Mechanisms,” 

p. 164.

8. Ibid., p. 163.

9. David A. Bearden, “A Complexity-Based Risk Assessment of Low-Cost Planetary Missions: When Is a

Mission Too Fast and Too Cheap?” (paper delivered at the Fourth IAA International Conference on LowCost Planetary Missions, Johns Hopkins University/APL, Laurel, MD, 2–5 May 2000), folder 15669,

NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; NASA, Mars Program

Independent Assessment Team, “Summary Report,” 14 March 2000, folder 16843, NASA Headquarters

Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; NASA, JPL Special Review Board, “Report on the Loss

of the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 Missions,” JPL D-18709, 22 March 2000. 

10. Daniel Goldin, “From Entropy to Equilibrium.” 

11. S. Edward Hawkins, “The NEAR Multispectral Imager,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19

(April–June 1998): 108. 

12. Hawkins, “The NEAR Multispectral Imager,” p. 112.

13. S. M. Krimigis to Stephen J. Garber, NASA History Office, 4 December 2003, NASA Historical

Reference Collection, Washington, DC.

14. Hartka and Persons, “The Design and Testing of the NEAR Spacecraft Structure and Mechanisms,” 

p. 163.

15. Goldin, “Remarks to Jet Propulsion Lab Workers,” pp. 22–23.

16. Ward L. Ebert and Eric J. Hoffman, “Quality and Reliability: APL’s Key to Mission Success,” Johns

Hopkins APL Technical Digest 20 (October–December 1999): 496.

17. Stamatios M. Krimigis, “Sample Next Generation Technology,” in “NEAR Update: Management and

Lessons Learned” (presentation to the NASA Advisory Council, 15 March 2001), folder 17070, NASA

Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.

18. Andrew F. Cheng, Robert W. Farquhar, and Andrew G. Santo, “NEAR Overview,” Johns Hopkins APL

Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1998): 96–97.

19. Thomas E. Strikwerda, J. Courtney Ray, and David R. Haley, “The NEAR Guidance and Control

System,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1998): 210.
64 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

20. Robert S. Bokulic, M. Katherine E. Flaherty, J. Robert Jensen, and Thomas R. McKnight, “The NEAR

Spacecraft RF Telecommunications System,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June

1998): 214.

21. Kuznik, “Yankee Space Smarts,” p. 13. 

22. Larry E. Mosher and Sam Wiley, “Design, Development, and Flight of the NEAR Propulsion System,”

Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1998): 174–184.

23. NASA, Budget Estimates: Fiscal Year 1996, vol. 2, sec. 3, 1–10.

24. Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space

Programs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

25. Thomas B. Coughlin, Mary C. Chiu, and John Dassoulas, “Forty Years of Space Mission

Management,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 20 (October–December 1999): 507–510.

26. Qualkinbush, “Learning ‘Smaller, Faster, Cheaper’ from the Applied Physics Laboratory,” p. 306.

27. Thomas B. Coughlin interview, 26 December 2001.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Jay R. Dettmer, “Cooperative Fabrication of the NEAR Spacecraft,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical

Digest 19 (April–June 1998): 241–246.

31. Coughlin, Chiu, and Dassoulas, “Forty Years of Space Mission Management,” p. 507–508; Coughlin

interview.

32. Richard B. Kershner, “The Arcane Art of Research and Development Management,” Johns Hopkins

APL Technical Digest 2 (January–March 1981): 45–49; J. Dassoulas, “Small Satellites at the Johns

Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory,” Acta Astronautica 32 (1994): 660–663;

Qualkinbush, “Learning ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ from the Applied Physics Laboratory”; Coughlin,

Chiu, and Dassoulas, “Forty Years of Space Mission Management,” pp. 507–510. 

33. Kershner, “The Arcane Art of Research and Development Management,” p. 45.

34. Quoted from Qualkinbush, “Learning ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ from the Applied Physics Laboratory,”

p. 307.

35. S. M. Krimigis, T. B. Coughlin, and G. E. Cameron, “Johns Hopkins APL Paradigm in Smallsat

Management,” Acta Astronautica 46, no. 6 (2000), 187–197.

36. Quoted from Qualkinbush, “Learning ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ from the Applied Physics Laboratory,”

p. 305.

37. David D. Scott et al., “The NEAR Command and Data Handling System,” Johns Hopkins APL

Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1998): 232

38. Andrew G. Santo interview, 26 December 2001.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 65

1. Theodore J. Hartka and David F. Persons, “The Design and Testing of the NEAR Spacecraft Structure

and Mechanisms,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1998): 167.

2. Quoted in Ben Iannotta, “After Signal Scare, NEAR Heads for Eros,” Space News (26 February–3

March 1996): 6. 

3. Applied Physics Laboratory, “NEAR Mission Plan vs. Actuals ($M),” n.d.

4. Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board, Report on Project Management in NASA (13

March 2000), p. 16.

5. Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board, Phase I Report (10 November 1999), p. 10.

6. Gary G. Whitworth, Anthony J. Somers, and William C. Stratton, “Efficient Spacecraft Test and

Operations with the NEAR Ground System,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June

1998): 248.

7. Robert S. Bokulic, M. Katherine E. Flaherty, J. Robert Jensen, and Thomas R. McKnight, “The NEAR

Spacecraft RF Telecommunications System,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June

1998): 217.

8. Mark Holdridge interview, 26 December 2001.

9. Mark Holdridge, “NEAR Shoemaker Mission Operations,” 27 December 2001, p. 7. For a later version of the 27 December paper, see Mark Holdridge, “NEAR Shoemaker Spacecraft Missions

Operations,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 23 (January–March 2002): 58–70.

10. Holdridge interview.

11. NASA, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Pre-Launch Mission Operation Report (2 February 1996).

12. Quoted in “In Close Flyby, Spacecraft Sends Back Photos of Battered Asteroid,” Washington Post

(1 July 1997).

13. Joseph C. Anselmo, “NEAR Cruises by Earth, Heads for Asteroid,” Aviation Week & Space

Technology (2 February 1998): 26.

14. NEAR Anomaly Review Board, The NEAR Rendezvous Burn Anomaly of December 1998 (Maryland:

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, November 1999). Final report of the anomaly

review board.

15. Quoted from James R. Asker, “Missed Asteroid Rendezvous Cues Probe of Low-Cost Missions,”

Aviation Week & Space Technology (4 January 1999): 31.

16. Larry E. Mosher and Sam Wiley, “Design, Development, and Flight of the NEAR Propulsion System,”

Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 19 (April–June 1998): 175. 

17. Robert Farquhar, David Dunham, and Bobby Williams, “The Second Coming of NEAR,” Planetary

Report (November–December 1999): 14–18.

18. Maureen Bell and Bill Owen, “On Course and Picture Perfect,” from Bell and Mitton, Asteroid

Rendezvous, p. 92.

19. NEAR Anomaly Review Board, The NEAR Rendezvous Burn Anomaly of December 1998, p. 23.

20. Ibid., p. 25.

21. Ibid., p. 25.

22. Ibid., p. 25.

23. Ibid., p. 28.

Chapter 4 Endnotes
66 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

24. NASA, “NEAR Spacecraft Reveals Major Features of Eros,” news release, 8 February 1999.

25. Bell and Owen, “On Course and Picture Perfect,” p. 93.

26. Quotation from Holdridge interview; see also Holdridge, “NEAR-Shoemaker Spacecraft Mission

Operations.”

27. Bobby G. Williams, “Technical Challenges and Results for Navigation of NEAR-Shoemaker,” Johns

Hopkins APL Technical Digest 223 (January–March 2002): 34–45.

28. Robert W. Farquhar, David W. Dunham, and James V. McAdams, “NEAR Shoemaker at Eros:

Rendezvous, Orbital Operations, and a Soft Landing” (paper presented at the AAS/AIAA

Astrodynamics Specialists Conference, Quebec City, Canada, 30 July–2 August 2001).

29. James R. Asker, “Spacecraft NEARly Ready for Its Valentine Day Date,” Aviation Week’s Aviation

Now (15 February 2000), http://www.aviationnow.com. Printed copy can be found in folder 17070,

NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC. 

30. Gary A. Moore to Roger D. Launius, e-mail message, 7 March 2000.

31. Ibid.

32. Warren E. Leary, “Taking a Close Look at Earth’s Strange Neighbors,” New York Times (11 April

2000).

33. Moore to Launius.

34. “Asteroid Images Show Signs of Being Spun Off,” Washington Times (18 February 2000). 

35. Constance Holden, “Love, NASA Style,” Science 287 (25 February 2000): 1395. 

36. J. Veverka et al., “Imaging of Small-Scale Features on 433 Eros from NEAR: Evidence for a Complex

Regolith,” Science (20 April 2001): 487.

37. Quoted from Warren E. Leary, “Asteroid Orbiter Plans a Final Close-Up,” New York Times (6 February

2001).

38. J. Kelly Beatty, “NEAR Falls for Eros,” Sky & Telescope (May 2001): 35–37.

39. Transcript of the 31 January 2001 NEAR End-of-Mission press conference, NASA Headquarters.

40. Farquhar interview; Beatty, “NEAR Falls for Eros”; Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics

Laboratory, “NEAR Mission Meets Science Goals; Ready for First-Ever Controlled Descent to an

Asteroid,” news release, 31 January 2001; Andrew G. Santo, “NEAR Spacecraft Flight System

Performance,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 23 (January–March 2002): 76.

41. Beatty, “NEAR Falls for Eros.” 

42. Williams, “Technical Challenges and Results for Navigation of NEAR Shoemaker,” p. 39.

43. Bell and Owen, “On Course and Picture Perfect,” p. 97.

44. James A. Asker, “Cheating Death, NEAR Lands, Operates on Eros,” Aviation Week & Space

Technology (19 February 2001): 24–25.

45. John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, “NEAR Shoemaker’s Historic Landing on Eros

Exceeds Science, Engineering Expectations,” news release, 14 February 2001.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 67

1. NEAR End-of-Mission Press Conference.

2. Ibid.

3. Deborah L. Domingue and Andrew F. Cheng, “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous: The Science of

Discovery,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest 23 (January–March 2002): 14, 15.

4. Clark R. Chapman, “The Battered History of Eros,” from Bell and Mitton, Asteroid Rendezvous, p. 80. 

5. Domingue and Cheng, “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous,” p. 10.

6. Erik Asphaug, “Once Upon an Asteroid,” Nature 413 (27 September 2001): 369–370.

7. Ibid., p. 11.

8. Jim Bell, “Ingredients of an Asteroid,” in Bell and Mitton, Asteroid Rendezvous, p. 71.

9. The first “faster, better, cheaper” project, as classified by NASA, was the Solar, Anomalous, and

Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPLEX), conducted under the Small Explorer Program (SMEX),

launched in 1992. NEAR was the second “faster, better, cheaper” project to be launched and the first

under the Discovery Program. See McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper, pp. 6–7.

10. Hartka and Persons, “The Design and Testing of the NEAR Spacecraft Structure and Mechanisms,” 

p. 164; Mosher and Wiley, “Design, Development, and Flight of the NEAR Propulsion System,” p. 174.

11. NASA, Comet Nucleus Tour CONTOUR Mishap Investigation Board Report, 31 May 2003, p. 17.

12. Mary Walton, The Deming Management Method (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986).

13. NASA, Comet Nucleus Tour CONTOUR Mishap Investigation Board Report, p. 9.

14. Ibid., p. 15.

15. NASA, Fiscal Year 2002 Budget Justification, Special Issues Section, Major NASA Development

Program Cost Estimates, sec. SI, p. 28; for development costs, see NASA, Fiscal Year 2001 Budget

Justification, Special Issues Section, Major NASA Development Program Cost Estimates, sec. SI, p. 27. 

16. NASA, “Mars Exploration Rover Launches,” press kit, June 2003, p. 6.

17. NASA, Discovery Program, “Program Description,” 15 December 2003, http://discovery.nasa.gov/

program.html (accessed 16 August 2004).

18. Coughlin interview, 26 December 2001.

Chapter 5 Endnotes
68 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 69

ACE Advanced Composition Explorer

APL Applied Physics Laboratory (part of Johns Hopkins University)

CAS Canned Activity Sequence

CCD charge-coupled device

CONTOUR Comet Nucleus Tour

CPM critical path method

DPU data-processing unit

FPD focal plane detector

GSS ground support system

ISEE-3 International Sun-Earth Explorer-3

JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory

LEO low-Earth orbit

LVA Thruster Large Velocity Adjust Thruster

MESSENGER MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging

MESUR Mars Environmental Survey

mph miles per hour

MSX Midcourse Space Experiment

NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NEAR-Shoemaker Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous

SAMPLEX Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer

SDI Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as Star Wars)

SMEX Small Explorer Program

U.S. United States

WIRE Wide-Field Infrared Explorer

Abbreviations
70 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
71

Howard E. McCurdy is a professor of public administration at the American University in Washington,

DC. He is the author of four books on space (The Space Station Decision; Inside NASA; Space and the

American Imagination; and Faster, Better, Cheaper). In addition, with Roger D. Launius, he has coedited

Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership and coauthored Imagining Space. He lives in Maryland.

About the Author

Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
72 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight
73

All monographs except the first one are available by sending a self-addressed 9-by-12-inch envelope for

each monograph with appropriate postage for 15 ounces to the NASA History Division, Room CO72,

Washington, DC 20546. A complete listing of all NASA History Series publications is available at 

http://history.nasa.gov/series95.html on the World Wide Web. In addition, a number of monographs and

other History Series publications are available online from the same URL. 

Launius, Roger D., and Aaron K. Gillette, compilers. Toward a History of the Space Shuttle: An Annotated

Bibliography. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 1, 1992. Out of print.

Launius, Roger D., and J. D. Hunley, compilers. An Annotated Bibliography of the Apollo Program.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 2, 1994. 

Launius, Roger D. Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 3, 1994. 

Hansen, James R. Enchanted Rendezvous: John C. Houbolt and the Genesis of the Lunar-Orbit

Rendezvous Concept. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 4, 1995. 

Gorn, Michael H. Hugh L. Dryden’s Career in Aviation and Space. Monographs in Aerospace History, No.

5, 1996. 

Powers, Sheryll Goecke. Women in Flight Research at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center from 1946 to

1995. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 6, 1997. 

Portree, David S. F., and Robert C. Trevino. Walking to Olympus: An EVA Chronology. Monographs in

Aerospace History, No. 7, 1997. 

Logsdon, John M., moderator. Legislative Origins of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958:

Proceedings of an Oral History Workshop. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 8, 1998. 

Rumerman, Judy A., compiler. U.S. Human Spaceflight, A Record of Achievement 1961–1998.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 9, 1998. 

Portree, David S. F. NASA’s Origins and the Dawn of the Space Age. Monographs in Aerospace History,

No. 10, 1998. 

Logsdon, John M. Together in Orbit: The Origins of International Cooperation in the Space Station.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 11, 1998. 

Phillips, W. Hewitt. Journey in Aeronautical Research: A Career at NASA Langley Research Center.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 12, 1998. 

Braslow, Albert L. A History of Suction-Type Laminar-Flow Control with Emphasis on Flight Research.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 13, 1999. 

Logsdon, John M., moderator. Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Apollo. Monographs

in Aerospace History, No. 14, 1999. 

NASA Monographs in Aerospace History Series

Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight: The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission
74 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Perminov, V. G. The Difficult Road to Mars: A Brief History of Mars Exploration in the Soviet Union.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 15, 1999. 

Tucker, Tom. Touchdown: The Development of Propulsion Controlled Aircraft at NASA Dryden.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 16, 1999. 

Maisel, Martin, Demo J. Giulanetti, and Daniel C. Dugan, The History of the XV-15 Tilt Rotor Research

Aircraft: From Concept to Flight. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 17, 2000 (NASA SP-2000-4517). 

Jenkins, Dennis R. Hypersonics Before the Shuttle: A Concise History of the X-15 Research Airplane.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 18, 2000 (NASA SP-2000-4518). 

Chambers, Joseph R. Partners in Freedom: Contributions of the Langley Research Center to U.S. Military

Aircraft of the 1990s. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 19, 2000 (NASA SP-2000-4519). 

Waltman, Gene L. Black Magic and Gremlins: Analog Flight Simulations at NASA’s Flight Research Center.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 20, 2000 (NASA SP-2000-4520). 

Portree, David S. F. Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000. Monographs in

Aerospace History, No. 21, 2001 (NASA SP-2001-4521). 

Thompson, Milton O., with J. D. Hunley. Flight Research: Problems Encountered and What They Should

Teach Us. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 22, 2001 (NASA SP-2001-4522). 

Tucker, Tom. The Eclipse Project. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 23, 2001 (NASA SP-2001-4523). 

Siddiqi, Asif A. Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary Probes, 1958–2000.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 24, 2002 (NASA SP-2002-4524). 

Merlin, Peter W. Mach 3+: NASA/USAF YF-12 Flight Research, 1969–1979. Monographs in Aerospace

History, No. 25, 2001 (NASA SP-2001-4525). 

Anderson, Seth B. Memoirs of an Aeronautical Engineer: Flight Tests at Ames Research Center: 1940–1970.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 26, 2002 (NASA SP-2002-4526). 

Renstrom, Arthur G. Wilbur and Orville Wright: A Bibliography Commemorating the One-Hundredth

Anniversary of the First Powered Flight on December 17, 1903. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 27,

2002 (NASA SP-2002-4527). 

Chambers, Joseph R. Concept to Reality: Contributions of the NASA Langley Research Center to U.S. Civil

Aircraft of the 1990s. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 29, 2003 (NASA SP-2003-4529). 

Peebles, Curtis, editor. The Spoken Word: Recollections of Dryden History, The Early Years. Monographs

in Aerospace History, No. 30, 2003 (NASA SP-2003-4530). 

Jenkins, Dennis R., Tony Landis, and Jay Miller. American X-Vehicles: An Inventory—X-1 to X-50.

Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 31, 2003 (NASA SP-2003-4531). 

Renstrom, Arthur G. Wilbur and Orville Wright Chronology. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 32,

2003 (NASA SP-2003-4532).

Bowles, Mark D., and Robert S. Arrighi. NASA’s Nuclear Frontier: The Plum Brook Reactor Facility,

1941–2002. Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 33, 2004 (NASA SP-2004-4533).
Acuña, Mario, 52 

Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), 9, 57

Aerojet Propulsion Company, 31–32, 54

Anomaly Review Board (see NEAR)

Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), asteroid rendezvous proposal, 11–12; history and culture, 

1, 7–8, 18–19, 56–57; in-house technical capability, 29, 31; management guidelines for lowcost missions, 31

Bell, Jim, 51

Briggs, Geoffrey, 9

Brown, Robert A., 9

Cassini mission, cost, 1

Chapman, Clark, 52

Cheng, Andrew, 10–12, 19, 46, 51–53

Clarke, Arthur C., 14

Columbia Accident Investigation Board, 55

Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR), 54–55

Coughlin, Thomas, 10–11, 15, 19, 44; project

management philosophy, 28–32

Dassoulas, John, 31

Delta II, cost, 10, 24–25

Delta 180 interceptor, 19

Deming method, 54

“Design to cost,” 30

Discovery program (see NASA)

Domingue, Deborah, 52

Eros, 46–48, 52–53

Explorer spacecraft, 8–9

Farquhar, Robert, 10–11, 14, 19, 21, 25, 37; 

landing, 47–49; NEAR mission plan, 

39, 41, 47; selection of asteroid, 14–15

“Faster, better, cheaper” approach, 13, 18–19, 22,

25, 28, 38, 40, 54, 56; demise, 55; missions, 

18, 44, 53

Goddard Space Flight Center, 14, 32

Gold, Robert, 10, 19

Goldin, Daniel S., 1, 2, 25, 46, 48–49, 55; 

cost-reduction efforts, 6, 13, 22

Halley’s comet mission, 7

Hawkins, Edward, 23

Hinners, Noel, 14

Holdridge, Mark, 40–43, 45

Huntress, Wesley, 9, 12, 15

International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), 14

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), asteroid rendezvous proposal, 10–11; history, 7; NEAR

navigation group, 37–38, 43–44, 47–48; radio

science team (NEAR), 38; Ranger project, 

55–56; Science Working Group, 8

Johnson, Clarence “Kelley,” 26–28

Johnson, Stephen, 27

Kershner, Richard B., 28, 31 

Krimigis, Stamatios, 2, 8–10, 15, 19, 23, 48

Launch costs, 24–25

Levy, David, 57

Lockheed Martin Astronautics, 38

Mariner spacecraft, cost, 5

Mars Climate Orbiter, 38, 53–54

Mars Environmental Survey (MESUR), 12, 14

Mars Exploration Rover mission, 55

Mars Observer, 25; cost, 1, 5–9, 17

Mars Pathfinder, 2, 14, 18, 20, 23, 53; cost, 22,

54

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker Mission 75

Index
Mathilde, 41, 53

Matrix management, 29

Mikulski, Barbara, 2, 13, 15, 46

Mitton, Jacqueline, 51

Moore, Gary A., 46

Muirhead, Brian, 2

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

(NASA), cost overruns, 12; Deep Space

Network, 38, 49; Discovery program, 

9–10, 13–15, 55; logo, 46; Science Working

Group, 9, 12–15; Small Mission Program

Group, 8; Solar System Exploration Committee,

7; Solar System Exploration Division, 8, 13;

Space Science and Applications office, 13–14

Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEARShoemaker), Anomaly Review Board, 44–45;

conclusion of mission, 49; cost, 1–2, 17–18, 20,

22–23, 25, 38, 45, 47; design of spacecraft,

19–20; Earth flyby, 42–43; flight organization,

37–39; flight operations methods, 39–42,

45–46; flightpath, 39; instruments, 22–24,

48–49; landing, 47–49; launch, 24–25, 35–37;

management approach, 26–32; Mathilde flyby,

41; missed rendezvous, 43–44, 53–54; name, 8,

57; orbital operations, 47–48; organization

chart (prelaunch), 30; oversight, 28, 48; risk

management, 25–26, 44; schedule for development, 20, 29, 32–34; selection of asteroid,

14–15; testing, 32, 34

Pathfinder (see Mars Pathfinder)

Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission, 55

Ranger project (see JPL)

Reynolds, Edward, 10

Santo, Andrew G., 19, 34

Shirley, Donna, 2

Shoemaker, Caroline, 57

Shoemaker, Eugene, 57

Skunk works approach, 26–28

Smith, Gary, 2, 15

Smith, Peter, 23

Spear, A. J. “Tony,” 12, 14, 18

Stone, Edward, 12

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 19

Systems management, 27–29, 56

Team-based project management, 28–32, 45, 56–57

Transit navigation satellite system, 18–19

Van Allen, James, 8–9

Veverka, Joseph, 8–9, 12–15, 41; NEAR imaging

team, 38, 44

Viking mission, cameras, 22; cost, 7, 10, 22

Von Braun, Wernher, 9

Whitworth, Gary, 40

Yeomans, Donald, 14

Boldface type indicates photograph

76 Low-Cost Innovation in Spaceflight

Index
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