Scientific American: Trump Seeks to Cancel NASA’s Mars Sample Return—And Scientists Are Outraged
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-budget-calls-for-stranding-nasas-mars-samples-on-the-red-planet/?fbclid=IwY2xjawKM1zlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETAzN014cXkySzVHTEFNS05QAR71U0ZAMj1yzzCwaCTkCrDlNgvfjU_sCscbfYTk1FUvlqkQWgBOQ-t1ltAKDg_aem_ufA-VYAsPv6VNewKWnwozw
21 Comments
Why do we need a sample return when we could just send Trump there to taste it himself?
What? Trump wants to cancel the sample return and replace it with a crewed mission. That will cost ten to a hundred times as much and take decades. A crewed mission will likely be cancelled in a few years.
Just say there are precious minerals in them Martian hills and the mission will pay for itself.
No we’re not. MSR is a garbage mission. Other parts of the proposed NASA cuts are far more damaging. MSR is an ill-conceived mission concept that escaped being canceled by the Biden admin. but it was close. No surprise the next admin would axe it.
>on May 2 the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) dropped a budgetary bombshell, proposing to cut NASA’s top-line funding by a quarter, slash the space agency’s science budget by nearly half and entirely eliminate MSR. The cancellation is justified, the OMB document claims, because MSR is “grossly overbudget” and its goals of sample return will instead “be achieved by human missions to Mars.
Alright, so where is the funding for these human missions (plural) to Mars, Mr. Trump?
If they are only outraged now and over this, then they aren’t very clever scientists.
When you have no idea what science means and the value to humanity, you cancel it.
Eh I’m ok with this. So much waste and mistakes. The Chinese launched a plan that will land 28 and return 32.. we got to get better at this
Anyone that voted for Trump cannot complain. The rest have my sincere condolences
I approve if Musk and Trump are on the first crewed mission as well!
He wants to give the contract to Elon. This is not rocket science… or is it?
To be fair, the program has been filled with ineptitude. They sent a rover not yet knowing how the samples would be brought home. They had a dumb idea that a second rover would retrace the first rover’s path, picking up discarded samples. Then they were going to have a helicopter retrieve them. Billions of dollars over budget and over a decade late, it’s a total fiasco. And I’m really pro-space, but this is not a good program. Just like the SLS rocket costs are absolutely ridiculous.
Why don’t the scientist write checks to make up the difference? The US is heading to bankruptcy and has to cut back. US politicians have approved uncontrolled diarrhea of spending a just the interest on the debt is killing us.
Administrations flipfloping on this mission will just result in wasted money and no mission ever occurring.
It’s not a mission that can be planned and executed in 8 years.
All that has to happen is China threatening to beat the us in a sample return and then trump will triple funding.
Everything Trump does makes sense via the lens that he is a Russian Asset.
The cuts to science, education, and our space program as well as major poorly chosen assignments to our Health Services System leadership make it abundantly clear that he is trying to kneecap all of the things that made the United States Thrive during the Bretton Woods era and would have allowed it to continue some level of dominance for the next couple decades.
The dominance of democracy abroad and the United States to some extent is primarily a detriment to Russia. Russia is our true enemy and I look forward to the day that we get our head out of our asses and pool our resources to end that threat
If there is a terrible, awful, horrific thing to be done, Trump and Co will do it. It’s not really a surprise anymore.
Humans are going to be on Mars before the MSR mission is planned to be completed. Might as well let the astronauts grab the rocks on their way home and save us all 8 billion dollars (and a little embarrassment)
Dont worry, this is just a tariff negotiation, once the martians come to the table they can work out a deal to bring Martian products to the US.
MSR is just the lowest hanging fruit, it’s just not worth it to spend billions for a few kg of samples. We’ll bring back half a ton when we (eventually) put a manned mission together. Cancelling things like Nancy Grace Roman telescope makes a lot less sense though
The smartest move NASA could make is cancel manned missions until we have full time propulsion units that could put constant 1/4g on ship to get us there in weeks not months. In meantime invest in robotics and AI for exploration.