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posted by n1 on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the robots-take-our-jobs,-who-takes-the-robot's? dept.

Announcing a New Paper on NASA's Mars Exploration Program: Not all is well with the future of Mars exploration

NASA's robotic Mars Exploration Program is on a troubling path of decline—and decisions must be made now in order to stop it. This is the conclusion my colleague Jason Callahan and I reached as we prepared a new report for The Planetary Society: Mars in Retrograde: A Pathway to Restoring NASA's Mars Exploration Program (pdf). I urge you to download it and read it yourself.

[...] [We] found a fundamental contradiction in NASA's extant Mars plans: there is not much of a program within the Mars Exploration Program. Currently, NASA has a single mission development—the Mars 2020 rover (InSight, which launches in 2018, is part of the Discovery program). There have been no new mission starts for Mars since 2013, one of the longest droughts in recent history.

But the existing Mars missions are aging and won't last forever. A new orbiter is badly needed to relay high-speed communications with ground missions and to provide high resolution mapping of the surface to support landing attempts by NASA and others (not to mention provide important science). Yet the latest budget release for 2018 contained no new start for this critical mission.

Also at The Verge.

Other upcoming Mars missions include SpaceX's Red Dragon lander, the Emirates Mars Mission, the EU's ExoMars 2020, a Chinese orbiter, lander, and rover mission, Japan's Mars Terahertz Microsatellite, and India's Mangalyaan 2.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @03:14AM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 09 2017, @03:14AM (#522920) Journal

    You have to keep in mind here that NASA doesn't get to decide, on the most broad level, how they spend their money.

    But it is their responsibility to steer those who do decide how to spend NASA's funding. NASA has long been a willing accessory to their irrelevance by this means.

    This is one of the many reasons that looking at percents is more useful than raw dollars.

    No, it's not. As we saw in the previous cycle of posts, this was instead a way to claim misleadingly that a relatively constant funding stream was a decline by half.

    Even in total budget real dollars, NASA received vastly greater funding the years when they were able to quickly do some incredible things with their budget in the mid to late sixties running from $30 to $40 billion.

    They also followed economic practices like avoiding one-off missions that allowed that money to be spent much more effectively in pursuit of their incredible things.

    I do agree that they could have done more with what they had in the past, but this isn't a dichotomy. They need to spend their money more responsibly, but even if they spent it perfectly - they'd still be far short of what they need to actually start making things happen.

    If they spent it far more effectively, they'd have a far more effective case for getting more funding in the next cycle of funding.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @07:14AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @07:14AM (#522959)

    You think congressional funding has even the slightest bit of anything to do with merit? Congressional budgets are decided by committee. And this [wikipedia.org] is the current head of the Congressional Committee on Science which has direct oversight of the funding of NASA. A bible thumping lawyer with 0 scientific or technical background fueled by big oil and big media and with no apparent interest in science whatsoever beyond the realm of undermining climate related research to keep those "donations" flowing.

    Smith has been responsible for substantially increasing the funding for SLS, cutting the funding for earth sciences, scrapping the asteroid redirection mission, and more. Congress doesn't care about NASA. They're largely the ones responsible for destroying it. And again on the above - what NASA does or does not spend their money on IS NOT THEIR CHOICE. They have discretion in the implementation but what is funding and for how much is the choice of congress. Congress is slicing NASA up a dozen different ways, underfunding each part - except the useless jobs program known as SLS, and then acting surprised when nothing productive happens which is then used as a justification for further cuts.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @11:09AM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 09 2017, @11:09AM (#523000) Journal

      You think congressional funding has even the slightest bit of anything to do with merit?

      Yes. And let us keep in mind that the only reason those congressional committees have any money to play with at all is because they actually do on occasion fund things that are viewed as of merit to the voters.

      And again on the above - what NASA does or does not spend their money on IS NOT THEIR CHOICE.

      Again, I strongly disagree. NASA has been a partner in its irrelevance. Where again is the NASA opposition to the SLS which consumes a sixth of their budget or similar projects over the past four decades.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @05:28PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @05:28PM (#523163)

        And politicians in congress are reelected, not out of nuance of our system, but because people approve of the job their doing? You should check the congressional approval ratings sometime. You see the thing is politics is divided in America and we use a distracted first past the post system. That means you vote D or R, or you waste your vote. And even if you don't approve of the job your D or R is doing, people who would vote for this individual would still prefer to have somebody they think is doing a shit job but goes by their same preferred letter, rather than have somebody in office who uses the other letter. Ta da - politicians getting elected for decades even when their own supposed constituents think they are horrible.

        Do you know what would happen to NASA if they didn't cheerlead for the SLS? Their budget would get hacked and slashed even more. They play ball and get slowly squeezed to death or they try to take a stand and rapidly die.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @06:06PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 09 2017, @06:06PM (#523181) Journal

          And politicians in congress are reelected, not out of nuance of our system, but because people approve of the job their doing? You should check the congressional approval ratings sometime. You see the thing is politics is divided in America and we use a distracted first past the post system. That means you vote D or R, or you waste your vote. And even if you don't approve of the job your D or R is doing, people who would vote for this individual would still prefer to have somebody they think is doing a shit job but goes by their same preferred letter, rather than have somebody in office who uses the other letter. Ta da - politicians getting elected for decades even when their own supposed constituents think they are horrible.

          So supporting evidence for my point that NASA, which is after all the organization tasked with space development by US Congress - while US Congress is not so tasked by voters, is responsible for its shirking of its duties.