A Planetary Society Retrospective

How do you top landing humans on the Moon? For NASA, the answer was planetary exploration. Spacecraft built by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California filled the 1970s with planetary firsts: Mariner 9 orbited Mars, Mariner 10 flew past Mercury, Pioneer 10 visited Jupiter, and Pioneer 11 made it to Saturn. The Viking probes performed the first Mars landing in 1976, and a year later, the dual Voyager probes embarked on a grand tour of the solar system.

Things looked less rosy at the end of the decade. The high-dollar Viking and Voyager programs came at a cost, stifling the development of smaller missions. Meanwhile, the fledgling Space Shuttle program was behind schedule, over budget, and gobbling up more and more of NASA’s budget. Policymakers used a perceived lack of public interest in planetary exploration as an excuse to slash budgets further, and at one point in the early 1980s, NASA seriously considered divesting itself from JPL altogether.

Bruce Murray, a California Institute of Technology planetary scientist who had played key roles in many NASA planetary exploration firsts, took command of JPL in 1976. Murray was alarmed at the situation, as was Carl Sagan, a Cornell University astronomer who was making a name for himself as a public science communicator. Murray and Sagan wanted to build a grassroots advocacy group to prove there was public support for planetary exploration. They identified Louis Friedman, a JPL engineer who was finishing a 1-year fellowship in Washington, D.C. learning the inner workings of Congress, as the potential organizer of such an organization. On 30 November 1979, Murray, Sagan, and Friedman formed The Planetary Society. According to its formation documents, The Planetary Society was founded to spread public awareness of planetary exploration and the search for life, share the latest findings from those efforts, and stimulate the development of new science and technology projects.

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