NASA Pulling Out of ESA-led ExoMars Mission? 144
astroengine writes "It's a strange irony that to afford the expense of space exploration, international collaboration is often sought after — spreading the cost across several international partners means the biggest space missions may be accomplished. And yet in times of austerity, national budgets balk at the prospect of investing in international projects like ExoMars. Sadly, that's exactly what could be facing the ambitious ESA-led Mars rover/satellite mission if NASA's Science Mission Directorate budget is slashed in the next financial year. NASA may pull out of the project, leaving ExoMars with no rockets or a means to actually land on Mars. Could Russia help out? Possibly, but it will still lead to ESA taking on more cost than it has budgeted for."
Stating one of the obvious comments (Score:2, Insightful)
Russian tech and systems seem to have a hard time achieving a safe Martian landing, so the program may really be screwed.
Space/X (Score:5, Insightful)
Space X [slashdot.org] has some ideas on how to land a rocket on Mars, and is already testing some design principles, like the SuperDrago rockets for landing its Dragon capsules.
If I were the Europeans, I would be contacting them. The cheapest and best original thinking in the space race is currently at Space/X.
Amounts to sacrificing the mission - (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's disingenuous to say to ESA "hey, we can't cover this, hope you can find another partner" this far in. Maybe one can look at the overruns for MSL and JSWT and say that this is the responsible thing to do, to allow those two programs to finish, but in the middle and long term, this is going to prevent any further NASA-ESA collaboration. Where is the big dividend from having shut down the shuttle program?
Public interest (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem for all participants is public interest, without it politicians take the easy road and cancel science missions.
With the present status of education in many EU countries and the US there is little chance to get the population interested, science loses from real time trash TV.
Re:Anybody notcing a trend here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I'm from Romania you insensitive prick.
P.S. Since Romania IS part of ESA it will participate in ExoMars and we have no legal concept of illegal download, so maybe US turning into a balkanic country isn't such a bad idea
Dick waving (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone working in any kind of aerospace program is very intelligent. They are doing something very difficult, with very little room for error, in a room with a lot of different people. I think it's safe to say that space travel has a fairly consistent success rate across agencies, at least up to a reasonable error.
Re:But the military... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sad that this got modded troll. For the cost of just one of the military's insanely expensive, never used "next generation" airplanes that get crashed by trainees more often than they see battle, entire NASA projects could be funded for a decade...