The United States Congress has passed a NASA budget that “does not support the existing Mars Sample Return program”, NASA officials are sending signals that the MSR program is effectively dead
https://thedebrief.org/a-potential-biosignature-is-awaiting-return-now-congress-abandons-retrieval-of-martian-rocks-that-may-hold-evidence-of-extraterrestrial-life/
19 Comments
Giving $100B to a paramilitary to shoot Americans in the face is more important than scientific discovery and understanding the universe better.
Every day I hate these people a little bit more than the last.
While MSR isn’t getting dedicated funding, MEP (Mars Exploration Program) is getting north of $100 million to study technologies related to MSR, so it’s not *completely* dead. And it could move to a private contract option for less cost (as the article said, MSR was reaching a projected budget of over $11 billion, and they had barely started), like what Rocket Lab has proposed.
A complete lack of public interest has been demonstrated and instead we brought grifters to the hill to testify over UFO flaps because all the conspiracists are intellectually lazy and want a short cut around the scientific findings of the very thing they want.
For the past several years, this has been my reply to the morons who say words like “multimodal” “extra dimensional” “UAP”. “You can’t prove they don’t exist!”. The idiocy is real and I blame social media for giving a bullhorn to voices that do not deserve to be heard.
Yeah, that tracks for us. Potential signs of ancient life on Mars, and we can’t scratch together the money or political will to fly the fucking rocks home and find out.
So… 70% of what Perseverance has been doing all these years was pointless?
At the very least those samples are still there sitting on Mars waiting, they’re from some of the most promising parts of the entire planet and sealed up for when they can be retrieved
I never understood why they scattered them all along the route. Seems easier to dump them in one place for retrieval.
Admittedly, I’d rather have them cut this than to terminate space observatory operations, e.g. for Chandra. Because once the plug is pulled there, there’s likely no going back.
As horrible as this is, the whole endeavor seemed doomed from the get-go by having it be 2 separate missions: getting there and taking the samples, AND THEN going there again, retrieving the samples, and then getting back to earth. And so they go ahead and do the first mission with zero guarantee the second mission will actually happen?!?! The entire thing should have been a single mission from the start.
But you must understand stand we need to send another 200 billion to ice.
How else will they fund those $50K ICE signing bonuses?
China or India will step in and return the samples.
But the ballroom and arch are still a go, right?!?
While extremely neat and a goldmine of science it was always a bit of a Rube Goldberg concept. We have fairly good success at landing a mission but we’ve never launched from a world with both gravity and atmosphere. Even still overall complete sample return success is bit lower.
So not only do you have to build a lander you have to design it also as a launch system. You also have to design a retrieval rover and an interplanetary return vehicle that can do rendezvous and docking. While we have experience in all these areas you’re now doing it as one mission autonomously.
Seems that NASA is basically focusing most resources on strategic competitions against other great powers in space, especially the permanent settlement on the moon.
That is not what many scientists and perhaps lots of people here would like to see, but maybe necessary for now. The rocks will be there for another million years, but if we miss the windows and let the authoritarian countries dominate space, humanity will be in trouble for centuries to come.
China and Russia have been highly focused on strategic missions in space, and many people here just ignore or reject any geopolitical elements in space and just want to focus on science. Science is not wrong but this is just naive and not seeing the danger ahead.
I’ve made comments about MSR before so I won’t redo my rant. I’ll just say that the problems on MSR go back years and are not only an MSR issue but a JPL issue. It’s not just congress or the White House causing problems. If JPL had competent leadership, half-decent project managers, and could be trusted to stay even remotely close to budget or timeline, MSR could be done.
The [last audit of MSR found a mess of problems that were just endlessly ballooning costs.](https://spacenews.com/msr-problems-illustrative-of-challenges-for-nasa-flagship-missions-audit-concludes/) [(oig audit pdf)](https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ig-24-008.pdf). They still don’t have a concept design for the lander. You can’t make budget without solid designs.
And yes, in a perfect world NASA’s budget would be the size of DOD’s and cost overruns wouldn’t matter, but we don’t live there. It’s a finite budget and there are a laundry list of missions that also have merit in planetary science and astrophysics. We have to make choices.
MSR’s earliest return estimate has already slid past 2040. Killing and rebooting the sample retrieval program really can’t make it worse.
China will do all of that. It will take longer but they will do it. And if they find oil… We know how it goes 😅
This will probably be the high water mark for space exploration. We have gone as far as we are going to.
Weird, you’d think that the White House would be all for discovering if Mars is ripe for strip mining.