“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.
That sucks, kinda seems like they’re saying ‘we don’t think you can do it on budget or on time so here’s even less money to work with’. To be fair there are valid criticisms of NASA going over budget and time but also feels like congress just doesn’t care that much about science
It seems most barely care about earth science. Why would anyone expect them to care about Mars science.
Every big program is appropriated annually; this isn’t a death knell, it’s just a vote of no confidence in the way things are. Proposed budget Is probably enough to keep the lights on during a reorg and rethink of the current mission scope, it’s just not enough to make forward progress. If they can get back in the box, I’d expect future appropriations to match the cost challenge Congress gave.
Of all the stupid things that Congress does, this feels…less stupid than usual. Usually they’d just cancel it outright.
Not saying there isn’t any journalistic value in the article but it feels like this mostly exists to get ‘nuke’ and ‘Mars’ in the same title lol
Hot take: defund any space research outside geostationary orbit and move these resources to fixing Earth. Really, we don’t need to know if there were bacteria on Mars 2 billion years ago, we need more green tech, more monitoring of Earth systems and an attempt at carbon scrubbing.
This isn’t a particularly hot take. It’s been a steady drumbeat since at least the instantiation of NASA… and it’s probably traceable all the way back to the folks standing around eating raw meat and laughing about the fool trying to tame fire.
The two biggest drivers for innovation are exploration and war. Exploration is the useful force in your proposed endeavor, teaching us how to survive in hostile environments and giving us insights about other resources or natural systems that we can adapt to our own. Exploration keeps the human race learning, thinking, and working together. You need those things.
What isn’t going to help you is the piddling handful of spare change that is spent across the world on space exploration. If your goals look inward, I respect that - you’ll have better returns by reforming the health and education mafias that siphon cash and stifle innovation. You’ll find more money and progress by far if you can divert funds and engineering focus from the military to environmental renewal.
What you shouldn’t want is to stifle any existing area of peaceful collaboration and innovation; this isn’t an either-or, it’s a yes-and. The target should be any societal aberration that makes it harder for people to get higher on Maslow’s pyramid. You’ve got valid goals, but bad aim.
(of course alongside defunding 75% of the military)
