Narration:

Transcript:

This is a checkerboard of a story.

We've got to do a better job of selling ourselves. We've got a lot more competition now.

There was no one in their right mind that would bid a laser altimeter.

We had to convince the management that this was not a crazy idea.

How were we going to find the surface of Mars? How we're going to track it?

We were defining the rules as we went.

As they said in the letter to me, If you don't make it on time and in budget, we will fly a brick instead. We're not going to hold this mission up.

Communications with the Mars Observer spacecraft were lost.

It never crossed my mind that spacecraft would let us down.

Can you get your team back together in time?

We were only given three years to rebuild it.

This is the first profile of a crater we've ever seen on a planet.

We were in demand to provide a laser altimeter to another mission.

What is this mystery we're seeing?

We started in the worst possible orbit.

All of the easy missions are done, as they say.

I had sleepless nights thinking that I wasn't going to be able to make this work.

And this came out of "it can't be done" in the mid eighties to a tool that we now accept as the standard.

It wasn't a destination or a place that we were, as much as a place that we would become.

[music]