Mark,

I think you're referring to this earlier comment by Grondine:

"Viking veteran Dan Goldin is very typical in this regard: he started off his
working career engineering manned flight to Mars with the Saturn launcher;
he had moved on to Viking life science experiments; and finally he had ended
up working in the most secret of the defense reconnaissance satellite programs."

I still contend Grondine's comment is mostly nonsense. Goldin started work for TRW before the Viking program started (1968). Prior to that time Goldin did ion engine work at NASA Lewis. An important future application for ion propulsion systems is manned missions to Mars. I don't doubt that Goldin got his name on a couple of early 1960s NASA technical reports and/or AIAA conference proceedings concerning the feasibility of manned Mars exploration using ion propulsion. This has nothing to do with Viking or life science. I have not seen anything to refute my original assertion that Grondine dreamed this stuff up. When I challenged Grondine about this, all he could do was refer to URLs that had nothing to do with Goldin or Viking. I don't know if this was a bungled response or a half-cocked attempt at distracting people from the fact that he was spewing nonsense.

Gary