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Mars NASA United States

Senate Lobbed a Tactical Nuke at NASA's Mars Sample Return Program (arstechnica.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The US Senate has slashed the budget for NASA's ambitious mission to return soil and rock samples from Mars' surface. From a report: NASA had asked for $949 million to support its Mars Sample Return mission, or MSR, in fiscal year 2024. In its proposed budget for the space agency, released Thursday, the Senate offered just $300 million and threatened to take that amount away. "The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," stated the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee in its report on the budget.

The committee report, obtained by Ars, noted that Congress has spent $1.739 billion on the Mars Sample Return mission to date but that the public launch date -- currently 2028 -- is expected to slip, and cost overruns threaten other NASA science missions. Further, the report states that the $300 million allocated to the Mars mission will be rescinded if NASA cannot provide Congress with a guarantee that the mission's overall costs will not exceed $5.3 billion. In that case, most of the $300 million would be reallocated to the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.
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Senate Lobbed a Tactical Nuke at NASA's Mars Sample Return Program More

Senate Lobbed a Tactical Nuke at NASA's Mars Sample Return Program

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  • Again... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Smitty62 ( 918272 )
    Again, people with no scientific or technical knowledge are dictating to scientists on what they can do and when.

    • Re:Again... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @02:52PM (#63686419)

      I love space exploration, I think we ought to be doing it - but paying the bills for it should be a political process. We need to convince people why it's a good idea to spend so much money to get a rock from so far away, because it's their money being spent to fetch it.

      Having said that, this particular political process is a corrupt farce, and this budget slashing seems designed to be a display of contempt while cancelling the mission without being seen to cancel it. If NASA could theoretically get it done for 1/3 the price tag, they would have started with half the original budget number. When NASA wastes money, it's because they're ordered to for pork barrelling purposes.

      • I would love to see the finding of such an experiment. However, I think it would be a political process, as what is the real value of the information is really worth the cost. The Golden reward would be finding a Microorganism embedded in the rock. Silver for fossilized evidence. Bronze for organic molecules. Other than that, it will just end up being some Grad Student PHD Thesis paper.

        Sure it will only be $3 out of every American pocket. To pay for it. But their may be some more worthwile and public hel

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vux984 ( 928602 )

          Yeah, because the little lab kits built into the mars explorers rivals what we have here on earth right? Same thing.

          Hell, we'd probably learn something worthwhile from the whole exercise of sending and returning a spaceship from another planet. Probably going to want to that unmanned a whole bunch of times before sending people too.

          So they could bring it back empty and we'd still be learning something pretty worthwhile...I'd fund it just for that. Being able to bring some stuff back is just a bonus.

          • Just look at the new manned lunar mission plans - the first is a manned flyby. I really don't get that, why not just put some mannequins in space suits? It's not like we don't have plenty of data already on food and air use.

            Anyway, yes, we should have an unmanned return mission to Mars before the first humans go. We need to make sure we can safely land the required mass (we have never landed anything big enough in that much gravity with such a thin atmosphere), and that test mission can do double duty an

      • The problem is that under this system you're more likely to find people willing to agree to fund an experiment where they ACTUALLY lob a tac nuke at Mars than something to bring back some rocks.

      • I love space exploration, I think we ought to be doing it - but paying the bills for it should be a political process.

        I completely agree. However, this means that governments should decide how much they can spend on research and exploration and then leave it up to the scientists to decide what the most effective way to spend that money is. Having politicians micromanage exactly how and where research funding is spent is stupid because they do not have the expertise needed to maximize the research return for the money available.

        While political intervention in science is inevitable, particularly with large projects, it s

    • No one is stopping the scientists from doing anything in this case. They're just stating that taxpayers aren't going to continue to fund it. There's plenty of other things that could be done with the money. I personally think that spending some of my tax dollars on space flight and exploration is preferable to a lot of the other useless or wasteful crap that it otherwise gets spend on, but there are other people who feel the same about spending going towards NASA. They apparently want their elected represen

      • The trick to 21st-century space exploration seems to be getting a Billionaire to pay for the development costs. Maybe they could find a way to modify the mission in a way that would get Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to be interested in funding it?

        • All NASA funding to those companies goes through a bid process so if SpaceX, Blue Origin or Boeing don't want to develop projects they don't have to bid.

          They always do though because who doesn't want a government contract? It worked out great for SpaceX who got a fat launch contract to develop Falcon as well as Dragon. Blue Origin even sued when they didn't get selected in the first HLS round.

          The current paradigm of letting commercial providers do the actual launching and NASA can build the actual science

          • Correction - SpaceX got a *skinny* (compared to any of the competition) launch contract to FLY Falcon and Dragon. They got (almost?) nothing to develop it.

            Which is ideally the way it should be any time the basic technology is already proven - the government pays you to *deliver*, not to develop. Paying for development is how we flush billions down the drain for massively delayed and still unreliable crap like the SLS, or *tens* of billions for combat planes that are dramatically less capable than what the

            • NASA functionally saved SpaceX by Musk's own admission. The fairly known story now was they had to make Falcon 1 work after the initial launch failures to qualify for the first Commercial launch contract via NASA which they got in 2008, functionally getting the long term support needed to transition to Falcon 9 which launched in 2010.

              This is not to take away from what SpaceX has done on it's own but SpaceX is a glowing example of a well structured private/public partnership with each side working in the fr

              • Oh, absolutely. Businesses need customers to survive, and the government is one of the few willing to pay for risky unfinished technology well in advance. But the fact remains that NASA didn't pay for development - they paid for deliverables. That the money was spent on development is entirely SpaceX's internal operations. Contrast to... pretty much every other launch system NASA has paid for - where they explicitly paid for development, and then *also* paid a separate amount for the deliverables.

                You're

                • To be fair SpaceX is being paid to deliver HLS and Starship is such an ambitious project that while it has risks the potential payoff is massice to I am pretty OK with them getting some public funding and I thought it was actually pretty smart move to give them the first round contract for something really cutting edge than the usual players with their more traditional proposals.

                  At the very least with Starship we get to literally where the money is going out in Texas and I think they'll stick with their cur

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 )

      Science gets in the way of dogma, therefore get rid of the science.

    • Re:Again... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @03:20PM (#63686509) Journal

      Again, people with no scientific or technical knowledge are dictating to scientists on what they can do and when.

      Good luck finding funding, public or private, that doesn't have strings attached. Let me know how that goes when you argue "We want a billion dollars for Project X, and oh, you have to give it to us no-strings-attached, because you're not an expert. You'll just have to trust us. Now, hand over the money."

  • Manned versus unmanned (Score:3)

    by Tim the Gecko ( 745081 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @02:55PM (#63686429)

    If you are going to blast 250kg of astronaut off the surface, then it's not unreasonable to add 50kg of sample return as well. However, for automated missions every successive funding committee will try to reduce costs by cutting down the sample return mass.

    Manned missions have returned 381kg of Moon rock, while four automated missions have returned less than 2kg in total. The science aspect of Moon exploration was subordinate to "flags and footprints", and perhaps the same will be true for Mars.

    • While Manned missions may not be as practical, they are more politically beneficial. Nothing says look how cool our nation is, by having people be first to a new planet.

      The moon landing inspired so many people and our culture, over a half a century ago. However with media today, it won't be the Big event like the moon landing was.

  • Why not a strategic nuke? Not that I support one over the other, or even either.

  • Ballooned costs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by esperto ( 3521901 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @03:18PM (#63686499)

    I agree with the senate on this one, the costs for the mars sample return ballooned in such a way that it would be probably cheaper and faster to completly fund starship and send just one guy to collect the samples by hand and fly back.

    10 billion is and insane amount of money for such a small achievement, it would be very interesting to get samples directly from mars and without contamination, but the samples are very small and we already have rocks from mars that landed on earth and we can analyze. That amount of money would definitely be better spent on some other science mission... heck they could spent it on 10 different missions and would still have some money left.

    I think someone tried to use the same sunk cost fallacy they used on JWST, but JWST is a telescope that will be sending data for the next 10 years at least, the ROI is still worth it even with the increased cost.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Congress wants to reallocate for a manned moon mission, NOT a manned Mars mission. And asteroids from Mars have been space-weathered, altering them. Space missions almost always cost more than planned. Do nothing new and estimates will get better.

      • A much more valuable return on investment.

        There's no rush to discover the details of Mars - it's been (mostly?) dead for billions of years, it'll still be dead if it takes us a couple more decades to get there.

        Meanwhile, virtually all the technology we develop for the moon will be directly applicable to exploring and surviving on Mars, without the near-guaranteed death of the entire exploration team if something essential doesn't work right. Not to mention, once we've got an industrial beachhead on the moon

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          > And if there's life on Mars, bringing it back to Earth could potentially be very dangerous.

          Finally there's something we agree upon. We don't even know enough to judge the risk yet, which generally means it's too risky right now. Rather than a sample return, perhaps we should land a super-fancy self-contained lab, which would be say a $15b mission.

          • Could be much less once we have an industrial moon base to provide supplies. Or if someone like China, Russia, or Musk leads the way with a willingness to spend as many lives as needed to get the job done without huge safety margins.

            A manned laboratory on Mars would be worth dozens robotic missions within a few weeks of getting established and starting to do science. If it's truly on the roadmap, it seems silly to continue sending robotic landers for any primary mission other than preparing for a manned m

  • Should be fostering the development of a rapidly reusable launch platforms. I like space exploration *more* than anyone else, but we're not gonna get to do much long term if we don't crack ultra-low-maintenance rapid reusability. Rockets should be 100% robot inspectable and as reusable as airplanes, if not cars (though that may be impossible). MSR is important, but we should be doing one MSR ever decade or so .. .we should be doing multiple MSR missions a year.

  • NASA should be solely a research organization that outsources commodity tasks. Space launch is a commodity.

  • Someone needs to call out the bribed politicians who continually throw away taxpayers money by keeping the useless SLS going.

    • +1 Agreed. Massive waste of money. Cancel and divvy up the cash amongst whichever companies are working on rapidly reusable launchers. How many beach houses do Boeing executives need?

  • ...Let the smartest people in the room do the science, will you, Congress? Why is it that people with no known intelligence with regard to science can still dictate terms?

  • C'mon NASA...you know we really needed to cut funding for Space to help the peaceful mission in Ukraine.

    Do you really expect us to worry or care about space at a time like this? Y'all should get your heads out of the clouds and pay more attention down here. NASA, didn't yall notice that we've got ourselves into a bit of an extreme proxy dust-up of freedom down here? That helping Ukraine carry on diplomatic missions with those Ruskies is what's costing us actual money here, it's also why we've had to cut bac

  • As I've heard it one of the biggest problems with the sample return mission is feature creep - a huge portion of the budget is the result of adding multiple redundancies in case, e.g. the existing rover is unable to load the samples itself thanks to spending so much longer in operation than originally planned.

    Which is just stupid. Without any lives on the line (except the possibly billions of deaths if some horrible Martian pathogen is present in the samples - should never forget to consider to those low-p

  • Private industry could do this faster, cheaper and more effectively. Let Stockton Rush [wikipedia.org] handle the design and implementation.
  • It is the dumbest thing that NASA has ever come up with. "Lets build a rover that takes core samples and then drops them randomly about the martian surface, and lets just hope we can figure out a way to collect them" - the whole fucking thing was totally asinine from the start.
  • Elon will no doubt volunteer to pick up these samples before his return to Earth, long before SLS will have reached the Moon.

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