AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
May 1994

"Clementine": No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Brenda Forman

Well, somebody actually did it:  faster/cheaper/better.  And 
so of course, the forces of "slower/more expensive/better-
but-only-if-it-costs-more" seem to be doing their best to 
kill it off.  As Claire Booth Luce succinctly put it many 
years back, "No good deed goes unpunished."

Clementine is faster/cheaper/better personified.  Built in a 
mere 22 months from concept to launch (you don't get much 
faster than that!) for the startlingly low price of only 
$80M, including mission control and a Titan 2 rocket (you 
don't get much cheaper, either!), it was launched on time in 
late January 1994 and is currently in lunar polar orbit doing 
the first-ever map of the entire lunar surface.  (Apollo only 
mapped the area between about 20û north and south of the 
lunar equator.)  After that, it will had off for a rendezvous 
with near-earth asteroid Geographos.  Then it will be "lost 
and gone forever" (hence its name).

BMDO (Ballistic Missile Defense Organization) developed 
Clementine to fly a range of miniature sensors and 
electronics originally developed for the Strategic Defense 
Initiative (SDI) to see how they worked in space and 
particularly how they withstood the fierce radiation there.  
But SDI-related tests in earth orbit would violate the ABM 
(Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty, so BMDO decided to send 
Clementine to the moon.  When the planetary science community 
heard about that, they got NASA to get them a role in the 
mission.  NASA helped design the mission and will provide 
tracking facilities and services.  All Clementine's science 
data will be given to NASA for publication and archiving.

So here is our first return to the moon since Apollo 17, 
successfully pioneering the faster/cheaper/better approach 
that is supposedly to be our pathway to the future.  Should 
we not expect cheers, support and enthusiasm from all 
onlookers?

Hardly.  As I have had occasion to remark in this space 
before, faster/cheaper/better is popular only so long as 
nobody actually does it.  After that, it becomes a target to 
be shot down.

The problem is that faster/cheaper/better doesn't have a 
constituency:

-If faster, then finished sooner -- and there goes 
"program stability."
-If cheaper, then fewer contracts and less pork with 
which to bind supporters to the cause.
-If better, then others look (or at least, fear to look) 
bad by comparison.

The result is that excellence becomes a threat to the status 
quo.  The political manifestation of this is a cutoff of 
funding.  Which is precisely what's happening to Clementine.

Clementine was hardly launched before it became a political 
orphan.  First off, its leading champion, BMDO's Deputy for 
Technology, Col. Pete Worden, was summarily transferred to 
the Air Force Staff (a move that some saw as retaliation for 
his outspoken advocacy of the program).  Then BMDO announced 
that it would not continue to fund Clementine because BMDO's 
own mission had been extensively revised so as to concentrate 
on ground-based defense.

Other suitors did emerge, but they demanded sizable dowries.  
In January 1994, both the Air Force and the Navy offered to 
adopt Clementine -- but only if its funding was transferred 
from BMDO.  BMDO, however, wanted to use the money for 
missions it considered higher priority (e.g., THAAD (Theater 
High Altitude Area Defense).

Finally in March 1994, DoD transferred Clementine to the Navy 
along with its FY94 funding.  Which is fine as far as it goes 
-- except that there's no money to fund any follow-on work in 
FY95.  The White House has refused to include any funds for 
it in the FY95 budget request.  Consequently, the entire 
effort may just wilt away.

One might think it odd that a White House so vociferously 
wedded to the concept of faster/cheaper/better would so 
readily assassinate the first successful exemplar of the 
approach.  Ah, but one need only consider Clementine's 
pedigree to comprehend the cause.  Clementine is the child of 
BMDO.  BMDO is what's left of SDI.  SDI was (oh, horrors!) a 
Republican initiative!  And this is a Democratic White House!  
Forget faster/cheaper/better, folks, this is politics!

Furthermore, neither Defense nor NASA seemed noticeably eager 
to rise to the program's defense.  Defense has bigger fish to 
fry, while NASA seemed to be getting twitchy over what it saw 
as the Pentagon's incursion into the small spacecraft turf, 
which NASA considers it own sacred ground.  NASA would prefer 
to mount its own Small Spacecraft Technology Program, for 
which it asked $108M for FY95.  Will that turn out 
faster/cheaper/better!  We can but wait and wonder.

So there things sit.  Excellence penalized.  Success 
abandoned.  Business as Usual Triumphant.  Mrs. Luce was 
right.