Free The Rock From Mars by Kathy Sawyer Page A

Building 31 would meet at a small Vietnamese restaurant up the road from the space center. As they shared entrées, they would also trade far-out ideas and indulge in freewheeling “what-iffing,” about scientific possibilities, the potential for surprises in nature, and the like. In this setting, they could let their hair down. As one occasional participant put it, “they would pluck ideas up like Clean Wipes”—tissues widely used in laboratories—“and throw them away.”
    The McKays became good friends with a sunny young woman named Robbie Score—not only through their work in Building 31 but also on the party circuit. By the early 1990s, Score had gained considerable influence in the archives up on the second floor, where the growing Antarctic meteorite collection—the bounty of the “poor man’s space program”—was housed. Well versed in the rocks, she was also famously generous in assisting those who wanted to study them—her “dudes and dudettes,” as she sometimes called them.
    The desperate dyspepsia in the space program had grown so deep that NASA had almost nowhere to go but up. In 1986, the
Challenger
tragedy, besides killing seven astronauts, exposed flaws and fissures that branched throughout the agency. The staggering fallout of that event—emotional, political, technical, and otherwise—finally obliterated the flickering halo of infallibility that had lingered from the Apollo triumphs. The thrust into space had long since metamorphosed from a national security imperative to a discretionary budget item, competing for money head-to-head with war veterans and cancer research. And NASA was racking up a record of failed projects, delays, and enormous cost overruns.
    The space shuttle program was plagued with technical glitches and delays. Congress seemed on course to cancel the presumed centerpiece of the agency’s future—the costly project to build a space station to serve as a laboratory complex in low Earth orbit. NASA engineers had launched the long-awaited, “revolutionary” Hubble space telescope into orbit with a devastating flaw in its lens, making the project an object of derision. A megamission arriving at Mars was lost to another human error. And in 1989, when the first President Bush proposed that the United States revive the exploration of the moon and Mars, NASA and its private contractors responded with a plan so expensive, self-interested, and unimaginative that the initiative sank like a rock.
    A fed-up White House had recently fired the NASA chief and brought in a new one, who vowed to reform the agency, shake it out of its defensive crouch, and inject it with new energy—no matter how many enemies he might earn.
    There had been times, especially during the 1980s, when McKay and his coworkers wondered whether the whole agency would be shut down. He kept up his contacts with universities, on the theory that he might have to go job hunting.
    But McKay preferred working for the government. The pay was reasonable. The benefits were good. And his senior status gave him job security, as long as the agency itself survived. He had money for the research he enjoyed, and he didn’t particularly want to teach. Besides, he had friends at universities who’d convinced him that the politics of academe were even more horrific than those in the NASA sandboxes. McKay once remarked, “I always go along to get along, then I do what I want to do.”
    By the early 1990s, McKay had concluded that, in more than one sense, the moon was deader than Elvis. McKay’s work had earned him a reputation as one of the world’s masters on his chosen subject, and he had published some two hundred papers, but he had become increasingly aware that his was a narrow audience—maybe a couple of dozen people who read his work carefully.
    It was important to him that his achievements be known and respected within the tribe. He was doing the “good, hard, honest work” of science. But he was getting tired