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172 Shifting to a more Soviet approach (ironically, as the Soviet Union collapsed) NASA granted a private company, Malin Space Science Systems, complete authority over all Mars Observer data returns. It did this through a legal fiction that Malin actually 'owned' the pictures. In other words, these pictures, paid for in full by the American people, were to be first examined by Dr. Michael Malin, the owner of this company, and then released, if at all, only on his say-so. Dr. Malin, of course, is a violent opponent of even photographing the face again. He was intended, in effect, to operate as a censor. But the public pays for NASA, and the public has an absolute right to know everything that NASA discovers, whenever possible at the moment the discoveries are being made. NASA's attempt to violate this principle would appear to be a fundamental repudiation of its public trust. In the weeks before the Mars Observer was slated to go into orbit, public pressure to release all the images became stronger and stronger. But, like both of the Soviet Prometheus probes before it, which also had the potential to re-image the face, the Mars Observer ceased to report right before it arrived. There was suspicion that NASA may have aborted the mission rather than continue it and risk being forced by an outraged public to photograph the face. Others speculated that the mission continued in secret, that the people NASA had working on it were e fired anda shadowy intelligence-gathering organization, the National Reconnaissance nce: AW dae ate -- Office, allowed to take over. I normally receive electronic mail from ham operators quite soon after they hear any unusual telemetry from space. As of March, 1995, I am fairly sure that the Mars Observer has not started reporting again on any of its publicly known frequencies. However, the National Reconnaissance Office possesses the capability to control the mission from the intelligence installation at the Goldstone tracking station, which can be patched into a 200-foot deep-space dish antenna and bypass all civilian information channels. Whether the Observer can communicate on unlisted frequencies or not I was unable to determine. What, between 1960 and today, has transformed NASA from the enthusiastically public agency it was when it was founded into the secretive bureaucracy that exists today? Why was it so intent on controlling what we were allowed to see of Mars that it was willing to go to extraordinary, possibly even illegal lengths, to censor the pictures even before the Observer apparently failed? The reason may well be that the data from Cydonia strongly suggests that the face is not natural and if the Observer had confirmed the existence of artifacts on Mars, hard questions might soon begin to be asked about what is happening here on earth. Do we understand so much about our world that v we only waste valuable public resources s by 1: awe re oo c aria teat studying things like the Mars face? Is the scientific community's narrow--and very recent-- vision of mankind as an evolutionary isolate really true? The Mars Committee and its various offshoots have struggled consistently over the years on behalf of the public interest. Their work is presented with great documentary force in Dr. Stanley V. McDaniel's 1993 book, The McDaniel Report, published by North Atlantic Books of Berkeley, California. This report should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of public science. As I write, the battle rages. NASA is attempting to make censorship of incoming data a permanent part of the exploration process--in other words, to institutionalize compromise of the public trust while appearing to serve it. Frankly, the battle will only end when the treasure that our nation lavishes on space exploration is being expended by a new scientific organization that is staffed by open-minded and adventurous researchers and divorced from the military and the intelligence community. In the ideal, it would be exclusively devoted to the free, open and genuinely scientific exploration of the vast cosmic unknown, and everything it found would be available to all.