238 HISTORY or THE committee on science and technology 



1965, and the Karth subcommittee gave full support in 1965 to an 

 ambitious new planetary program called Voyager, to make an in- 

 strumented landing on Mars. 



Shortly after 10 o'clock on the morning of March 7, 1966, Karth 

 assembled his subcommittee and staff in the smaller of the two main 

 committee rooms, room 2325 of the Rayburn Building. It was one of 

 those lengthy brainstorming sessions during which the committee 

 members chewed and digested the testimony they had elicited in public 

 hearings, and were now down to the hard decisionmaking process 

 when they were airing their opinions in free-wheeling, off-the-cuff 

 discussion in executive session. About an hour into the discussion, the 

 following exchange occurred: 



Mr. Karth. Could we talk about Venus for a minute? 



Mr. Mosher. De Milo? 



Mr. Karth. De Milo — I think the question arises on Venus, whether or not we 

 feel the only Venus shot which is scheduled between the middle or late 1970's is a 

 reasonably decent investment for $30 million? 



Mr. Mosher. Are you suggesting we might just as well leave Venus to the 

 Russians for a while, and let them do the job, and work on that, and we could just 

 ignore it for a while? 



Mr. Karth. I am not suggesting anything, except maybe we discuss this thing 



Mr. Conable. Well, the imponderable here is the prestige element, I guess. 

 You raised this implication in your opening remarks about Venus, Mr. Chairman. 

 There is a serious question whether we want to put ourselves in the position of 

 simply saying, "We have no interest in Venus," and the Russians are likely to be 

 talking about it a good deal — ■ — 



Mr. Vivian. I have a feeling the scientific community really put that Venus shot 

 in there * * *. My feeling is if we are going to save anything, any significant fraction 

 of that money, it has to be saved reasonably soon with a positive decision * * *. 

 What you are saying is you would rather put enough eggs in the basket on Mars 

 with the hopes of really doing a job on it, feeling that the peripheral data we are 

 going to pick up on Venus is not going to be worth much. 



Mr. Karth. I am saying I would like to put those extra eggs into the Mars 

 basket without touching any other program. 



Same time, same place, the same cast of characters assembled the 

 next day, March 8, to mull over the same issue. Karth again raised the 

 issue of Venus, and the consensus in the committee began to develop, 

 with Mosher observing: 



Well, I certainly think, Mr. Chairman, that the Venus program is one that is 

 most expendable. It is the one we can do away with and hurt less than anyplace else. 



Mr. Conable. It certainly sounds as if we ought to make a serious effort to try 

 to hind Voyager more heavily. 



Karth also raised the question whether several European countries 

 might be interested in cosponsoring the Venus shot, adding: 



I had Bill Wells, my assistant, yesterday checking around to see whether or not 

 we could make some effort to talk to the European counterparts about the possibility 

 of their undertaking a program like this on a cooperative basis with the United 



