Mars Sample Return 6
A speculative tale based on the history of the Viking Lander experiments and recent NASA plans
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
Welcome back to Glass Half Full and thanks for reading! In today’s chapter of Mars Sample Return, Joan faces the consequences of going against scientific orthodoxy.
(I’ve ret-conned the piece so the right-wing podcast host is now named Cutter Tarkelson.)
I’ve been looking for a better title, and think I might change it to “The Martians.” The story’s about potential Martians, after all, and I could ride on Andy Weir’s coattails. What do y’all think? Any other ideas?
The box containing Joan’s personal items wasn’t heavy, it just seemed that way. It didn’t hold much: A “To infinity, and beyond!” mug, photos of her nephews and niece, a model of the never-launched Roman Space Telescope. John, the security guard, held the front door of the NASA building for her. The DOGE teenager, whose name Joan hadn’t bothered to remember, brought up the rear. He’d stood over Joan’s desk as she’d cleaned it out, assuring she committed no waste, fraud, or abuse.
“Have a nice life,” he said now. He didn’t add “sucker,” “Deep Stater,” “you Chinese spy,” or even, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” His tone was enough to convey all this and more. He turned and went back into the building from which Joan was now exiled.
“Hang in there, Dr. Lee,” said John, whom she’d gotten to know in passing over the last year.
She was tempted to reply, “I’ll be back,” German accent and all. But the prospects for any return looked bleak at the moment. She opted for a simple thank you.
“What do you think you’ll do now?”
“It’s either a teaching post in the hinterlands, or Starbucks. Not much call for exobiologists in private industry.”
“Ah, that’s too bad. But I bet you’ll land on your feet.”
“Thanks, I hope you’re right!” She turned and headed for the Metro.
* * *
Joan thought she’d really gotten all her ducks in a row, crossed every t and dotted every i, or whatever other cliched metaphor one might use for a well supported presentation on the hazards of the Mars Sample Return mission.
It was four months now since her meeting with Jake, and she’d spent the time doing a literature review of the biology of extremophiles. Everything led to the conclusion that bacteria thrived in improbable places, including in space, so why not on Mars?
She’d also tackled the other big claim for the mission’s safety: that even if the soil samples hosted bacteria, and even were the microbes to escape containment, they weren’t likely to cause any problems on Earth. Bacteria had to evolve along with their hosts, the thinking went — no evolution, no chance of infection. Robert Zubrin, a leading proponent of Mars settlement, had popularized this idea.
But evolution was a matter of rolling the dice over generations. What if a Mars bacterium rolled the hard six, possessing exactly the right mechanism to insert itself into some ecological niche on Earth? The mechanism needn’t come from a complex adaptation, like the pathogens that evolved to invade or destroy host cells. It could be something as simple as a predilection for watery environments. That was the scenario imagined by the authors of an old sci-fi novel and TV series, The Expanse. Colonists on a new planet were blinded when a water-loving bacteria found a perfect home in their eyeballs. No evolution required.
The International Committee Against Mars Sample Return had imagined several other scenarios, including a Mars bacteria with a taste for plankton or one that could somehow interfere with grain production. It only took a little imagination to come up with such possibilities. Maybe imagination was the thing the NASA scientists and engineers were missing — an inability, or maybe a disinclination, to imagine the worst.
Joan had one more point to research. The sample return vehicle was already on a vector that would bring it to Earth in a few months. Could it change its trajectory and speed to enter a stable orbit, rather than plunging to Earth? She couldn’t just ask the engineers in charge of the mission. But the folks at ICAMSR thought it was possible. She called up a few old engineering friends from grad school, and they agreed.
So the plan would be to park the samples in orbit and outfit one of the new private space stations with all the safeguards and equipment to study the soil samples for signs of life. Space tugs were already roving Low Earth Orbit, gathering up space junk and moving it around, sometimes de-orbiting it, sometimes moving it to a safer altitude. The sample return capsule would be just one more item on their manifest.
Transporting it to the space station wouldn’t be a problem. Engineers would have to come up with a receiver to get the canisters safely inside a sealed area of the station. But that was the sort of challenge NASA used to love.
She gathered her literature review, the critique of the existing mission, and her proposed changes into a single document and printed it out. (Nothing like good old paper to give a proposal weight.) Then she took it to her boss, Marcy, and asked how to send it up the chain.
“Don’t,” was all Marcy said.
Joan was so flummoxed by the response, she couldn’t come up with her own.
Marcy flipped through the pages of the proposal and sighed. “You know we’re all about Mars now, right?”
Joan nodded.
“And you know who’s behind that, right?”
“Of course.” The influence of the world’s richest man on the funding-starved agency was hard to miss. “But we’re still an independent department of the government, aren’t we?”
Marci scoffed. “No, but we play one on TV and in government hearings.”
“Come on, Marcy, this is important.”
“Your career is important.”
Was that what she was risking? Hadn’t NASA learned to avoid groupthink and rushed decisions? Couldn’t the engineers and scientists who staffed the agency be swayed by facts and logic? “This is bigger than my career. It’s a fate of the Earth kind of thing. If an exobiologist isn’t going to raise these questions, then who?”
Marci looked at her for a long moment. Joan held her gaze.
Her boss pushed the proposal back across the desk. “I see you’ve made up your mind, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. In the old days, I would have sent you to the Office of the Chief Scientist or the Science Directorate, but now you’ll need to talk to someone in Mission Safety and Assurance. Try Brian Hayes, assistant to the Deputy Chief.”
It took Joan several days but she finally got on the schedule of the staffer Marcy had recommended. She sent him a copy of her proposal a couple of days ahead of the appointment. But when she got to the conference room where they were to meet, she found a much older man than she’d expected.
He reached out a hand and said, “I’m James Hartwick, Brian’s boss. Call me Jim. He mentioned your meeting and I decided to take it. He couldn’t have given you a decision — I can. Is that your proposal?” He nodded at the thick document she had tucked under an arm.
She handed it over. “This is it.”
“Please, take a seat.” He sat opposite her across the long conference table, leafing through the pages. “I had a look at your proposal last night. Your PhD clearly wasn’t wasted. You’ve got some interesting ideas, some truly scary scenarios, and the lit review seems thorough. And it’s not filled with any of that AI crap, either. You’d have no trouble publishing this in any respectable journal.”
“So you think my proposal’s worth considering?”
He considered for a long moment. “It’s not that I do or don’t, it’s that this is above your paygrade. Heck, it’s above my paygrade.”
“But maybe you could kick it up to your boss?”
“It’s above her paygrade.”
“What about the Administrator himself?”
“I don’t have that kind of access, but no one’s paygrade is high enough. You know who calls the shots when it comes to Mars.”
Of course Joan knew. This is what she’d been worried about even before her meeting with Marcy. But she was prepared for the objection.
“He’s concerned about what will happen to his astronauts once they get to Mars, right? Isn’t he also concerned about potential bacteria in the return samples?”
“Our engineers have convinced him their safeguards will prevent any unplanned release. Of course, science doesn’t have a great record when it comes to preventing lab leaks, so we have to tamp down any concerns about bacteria at all. The public outcry would be too great. And this comes straight from the man himself.”
“He’d take such risks with Earth, just to put people on Mars?”
“If we had all the time in the world, he might not. But it’s a scheduling issue. We’ve got to get those samples on the ground and get them analyzed before the next Mars launch window comes around. Retrofitting an existing space station would take too long, not to mention the money, most of which would be his. It would put him back another two years. He’s already way behind the timeline he originally promised. He won’t let anything hold him back this time. But he still wants to know about any microbes before he sends people out there.”
Joan sat there, all the air seeming to have vacated her lungs.
“I know I’m just a lowly engineer, but this is my decision. This stops here.” He took the proposal and tossed it into a trash can. “I’m going to scrub the digital version when I get back to my office, and so will Brian. I suggest you do the same. Go back to your archival work and keep your head down. I’ll have to mention this to my boss, but I’ll try to put it in the best light possible. You’ve got a lot of promise, and I’d hate to see your career nipped in the bud over this.”
He rose, and Joan did too, still too stunned to speak.
Before leaving the room, Jim retrieved her proposal from the trash can. “That was just for show. I’m going to put this through the shredder myself.”
He went one way and Joan went the other. She hardly knew how she got back to her cubicle. Marcy was away at off-site meetings, thank god. She spent the rest of the day doing not much. The next morning, the boy from DOGE was hovering over her desk when she arrived, a malevolent half grin on his lips.
* * *
Joan took a seat in the Metro car, the box on her lap. That earned her some sympathetic looks from her fellow passengers. She guessed they were used to this scene, after a decade of relentless staff cuts. Maybe some of them had been through it themselves.
What to do next? She got out her phone. She hadn’t scrubbed her proposal, obviously. What did she have to lose now? She uploaded it to arXiv. Then she sent a link to the folks at ICAMSR. But what the heck, why not go wide? She resurrected that old message from Blastr’s drafts folder. Was the message alarmist? Not alarmist enough? She no longer cared. Blastr hated links, so she just added, “See the paper I just uploaded to arXiv.” She hit send.
When she got home, she turned off her phone and spent the rest of the day cleaning her apartment and checking the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s job postings on her laptop. She didn’t open any social media.
She went out for drinks that night with Marcy, who was sympathetic with a side of I-told-you-so. She drank too much and got home in the wee hours.
Joan awoke late the next morning, hungover. She looked at her phone and it was exploding, which only made her headache worse. First, she checked a message from her sister. "What did you do? You’re famous! Internet-famous, but still famous!”
She scrolled through her emails and found one from a British astrophysicist with a popular YouTube channel. They followed each other on Blastr. It was marked urgent and the message said simply, “Need a statement from you ASAP. Uploading tomorrow.” Tomorrow was now today, and had been for many hours across the Atlantic. Plenty of time for a video to go viral.
She checked Blastr. She’d been reblasted thousands of times, including by the British YouTuber, who’d also DM’d her. Joan went to the YouTube channel and found the video. “Exobiologist calls for putting the brakes on billionaire’s pet project.” Except the title called out the billionaire by name. It already had 500,000 views, and the billionaire’s minions were all over the comments. Joan could only read a couple death and rape threats before clicking away.
She went to the fridge and got a glass of water, her heart racing. She tried to calm herself by looking out at the old apartments across the street.
Then her phone rang. That didn’t happen often anymore. Obviously she wasn’t going to answer a call from an unknown number — in Maine, no less. She checked the voice mail that eventually came through. “Hi, Dr. Lee, this is Sarah. I’m a producer with Cutter Tarkelson. We’d like to schedule an interview with you.”
Joan didn’t follow politics much, but she couldn’t help knowing that Tarkelson was an ex-Fox News host who’d been fired over some scandal, she couldn’t remember what. The fact that he’d moved on to host his own podcast was news to her.
This didn’t help her anxiety at all. She sat on her couch, put her head between her knees, and tried to breathe. A friend had recommended the technique, which was supposed to be calming. Also the closest thing to climbing into a hole Joan could think of right now.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, please consider hitting that like button, sharing it with your friends, or even subscribing or upgrading your subscription. And please leave a comment with your thoughts.
Mars Sample Return will be back in two weeks with Chapter 7.
Next week, we’ll take a listen to another tune in my Protest Songs series, “Clampdown” by The Clash.