UCLA professor and alumnus David Paige is working tirelessly on the next Mars Surveyor Program (MSP) '98 lander mission called "The Mars Volatile and Climate Surveyor" (MVACS). Due to launch on January 8, 1999, there is little time and no money to waste.

In his stuffy office, amid stacks of data covering the tables and overflowing to the floor, he seems not at all affected by the "severe cost constraints" imposed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Instead, he seems excited by the challenge.

"I make the analogy of movie making," Paige said, "where you have a lot of people who do different things and one management structure like NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)."

As principal investigator of a team of international scientists and engineers, Paige will have responsibility for the overall success of MVACS. Mission Control for the science team during the prime mission, where Paige will be in command, will be managed from UCLA's new Science and Technology Building in Westwood.

The MSP is a series of NASA missions to explore the Red Planet. The program will launch orbiting or landing vehicles each 26 months over the next decade. In keeping with the "better faster, cheaper," mode set by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin (in response to the loss of the Mars Observer in 1993), each mission will adhere to a $150 million price cap.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that the old way of doing things - huge budgets, packing every instrument and science experiment desired onto a spacecraft, and placing all the risk into a large, one-time shot at space - is over," wrote David Dubov, in the "Martian Chronicle," a publication of the Mars Exploration Program at JPL in Pasadena.

July 4 was the program's first success. The Mars Pathfinder Mission placed a science payload on the surface of Mars at one-fifteenth the Viking price tag. Viking was the Mars mission before the more recent Pathfinder mission.

What has made this possible is NASA's shift to a business-like mind-set. With cost the primary factor and performance and risk being the dependent variables, one way to save money is to adapt existing technologies, rather than create them from scratch.

For example, the Surface Stereo Imager for the MVACS mission is a duplicate of the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) camera. The Meteorology Package uses the same deployment mechanism and a number of sensors derived from the Pathfinder experiment. Even readily available software has been used.

"Instead of creating a new command structure for the computer, we bought Windows 95 and modified it," Paige said, "taking out the office commands and replacing them with commands to instruct the launcher, the camera, the robotic arm and all other functions of the mission." Paige is creating the two-meter robotic arm from scratch.

There have been some some new developments, though.

A team headed by Kim Gostelow programmed the flight computer for the Pathfinder mission, which required the creation of an entirely new computer language. The project entailed developing a 350-page dictionary to use in "speaking" to the spacecraft.

"Much of this work will be used in future missions," Gostelow said. He has been at JPL since shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA in 1971.

Gostelow worked on the Viking mission, when everything needed to be specially designed and built for each mission. But now, Gostelow said, "we get equipment cameras and batteries from what is generally available, then modify whatever we need to our specifications. The demand for advanced equipment by the every-day consumer has really grown, so we're really able to take advantage."

Another of NASA's major considerations is the attractiveness of space exploration to the general public. Costing more than $100 million annually (about $300,000 per day), the Mars mission is still a hard sell in a time of drastic social welfare cuts and general fiscal unease.

Scientists and NASA have a new challenge: to make these missions seem more exciting, educational and necessary to the nation.

"By studying Mars, the most likely planet for future human expeditions, scientists hope to better understand the formation and evolution of Earth, and of the inner solar system," reads a fact sheet put out by NASA and JPL . "This effort - which is affordable, engaging to the public, and of high scientific value - will also provide a base for infusing science, mathematics and engineering into our nation's educational system. International participation and collaboration are expected to enhance the value of the program."

"There was tremendous opposition to the space program the first time around in the 1960s," said Tom Lieser, associate director of the Anderson School's economic forecast. "But landing on the moon, a stunning technical achievement, changed minds."

Lieser feels that public willingness to support large budgets to place human beings on heavenly bodies has again diminished, impacting the job market for engineers.

"The program is far smaller than it used to be in terms of jobs, but the jobs that remain are higher-paying and have an important economic impact. There's a certain technological core which you'd like to see remaining," Lieser said. "Even with all the favorable publicity, JPL will continue to downsize into the next century, which makes the new money-saving policy the only way to go."