DATE: Wednesday, July 16, 1997              TAG: 9707160473

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY AKWELI PARKER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: HAMPTON                           LENGTH:   82 lines

A NEW ATTITUDE GOT PATHFINDER ONTO MARS PLAYERS SAY CUTTING OUT BUREAUCRACY MADE IT POSSIBLE.

When NASA put men on the moon in 1969, Robert ``Bobby'' Braun was just a tyke, sitting on his dad's knee in front of the television set.

Two Fridays ago, as part of the team that put the Pathfinder lander on Mars, the 31-year-old NASA Langley aerospace engineer was somewhat more involved.

``People were going nuts - jumping up and down, high five-ing,'' Braun said, recalling the wave of euphoria and relief that washed over him and his co-workers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Braun's tiny but critical roles in the mission: make sure the spacecraft was pointed in the right direction and make sure its parachute opened correctly.

Technical details weren't the only concern. Old attitudes inside the National Aeronautics and Space Agency die hard, especially the love of the bureaucracy that's accumulated over the agency's nearly 40 years.

``When you try to shake up bureaucracy, there's emotion, concern,'' said Anthony Spear, manager of the Mars Pathfinder project since it began at JPL in 1992.

Spear, on loan to NASA Langley Research Center for a day Tuesday, told an audience that the project epitomizes the ``new way of business'' at NASA.

``It's a new NASA, and we've gotta get ready for it,'' Spear said.

When assigned to the Pathfinder mission, Spear said he was told by superiors, ``Do it as a Discovery mission.''

In other words, make it small, cheap and fast. And get results.

The program had a three-year schedule instead of the usual five.

``That made me gulp,'' admitted Spear.

To get the job done, the team resorted to ``Skunk Works''-style management. The original Skunk Works was responsible for creating such Cold War classics as the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. The gist of the Skunk Works' philosophy: the less paperwork and complexity, the better.

As NASA has aged, it's grown in complexity.

But on this project, said Spear, ``we didn't write memos.''

Folks low on the totem pole could go straight to the people who solved their problems instead of peeling back layer after layer of management.

Spear said that, for some people working on the project, that didn't sit too well.

``One-third of (the original project workers), we changed out,'' he said.

That kind of upheaval made it all the more crucial for things to work on Pathfinder. Ticking off bureaucrats and then failing to perform is a good way to have a program canned, Spear explained.

``There was a lot of pressure because there were a lot of naysayers all over our butts,'' Spear said.

That pressure came to a whistling boil just after 10 a.m., Pacific Standard Time, July 4. When Pathfinder's chute popped, it was like taking the kettle off the stove.

``The aeroshell worked properly, the heat shield worked properly and the modeling we did of the vehicle flying through the atmosphere was correct,'' said Braun.

Pathfinder later slipped its parachute, deployed a set of bulbous-looking airbags and bounced down to the Martian surface. Soon after, the world got its first glimpse in 20 years of Mars from the Martian surface.

In the absence of astronauts, traditionally the media darlings of any space endeavour, the Pathfinder mission had a different set of heroes. For one, the diminutive, six-wheeled roving robot named Sojourner, whose task is to crawl about the Martian surface ``sniffing'' rocks with its alpha proton X-ray spectrometer.

``People really identify with the rover,'' said Braun.

Thanks to the Internet, they also identified with the engineers, scientists and other usually obscure people who made the mission possible.

Although NASA, schools and corporations set up several ``mirror'' Pathfinder Web sites, it was slow going in cyberspace the day of the landing - the sites were swamped by Internet users wanting the latest Mars news and images.

``We get a lot of our adrenaline to keep going from the public,'' said Braun, who put in 16-hour days for about three weeks while at JPL.

``The public support for this thing has really been amazing - I get all kinds of phone calls and e-mail from people I hadn't heard from in years.

``It was almost like your baby graduated.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN

The Virginian-Pilot

Anthony Spear, Pathfinder manager...

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