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A few hours ago I was looking for some food safety information, found a US gov website posted on reddit and

The website wasn't available anymore

https://thegoodshirts.com/products/hello-i-am-fleeing-the-am...

What’s the relevance of your point to this article? The program is extremely over budget and taking money from other projects. The previous administration sent NASA back to the drawing board on the project as well: https://www.courthousenews.com/nasa-goes-back-to-drawing-boa...

> NASA needs to rethink its goal of returning samples from the Martian surface to Earth, the agency’s administrator Bill Nelson said in a press call on Monday.

where political officers will quash any science that doesn't fit their ideology

China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.

Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline? Do you think everyone outside the US views the moonlanding as a black page in history?

It’s fine to talk about a “race” if jingoism is the thing that gets most people on board with funding Nasa. But we ought to know better.

Go check out the grants which were cancelled:

https://grantwitness.org/nsf

Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)

>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools

>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.

>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers

>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.

>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty

>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers

Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.

At least we definitely know they shouldn't be learning German or French

Jan 3rd is coming soon to an impeachment near you.

Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu.

It would be cool if NASA worked with the Chinese agency to collect those cores using their rocket, it would be a win win.

It's not like they're going to do it only once though, and some is a lot more then zero.

"Profit" is too generous a motive. It didn't service the Big Man's ego, so it's gone. That they can do some damage by killing it just makes it sweeter. Trump is Teemu Saruman.

Sure! I worked on the digital logic that connects the rover to one of the scientific instruments on board, specifically the Mars Organic Molecule Analyser[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser

For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"

The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.

And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.

We've had 8 launches in the past 3 years, with only 10 in the combined 17 years before [1].

Seems that the reduced cost is being taken advantage of. And, make sure to exclude the drastic reduction in non-lunar launches in your cost comparison for lunar launches.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#2...

Some types of launches to some classes or orbits have gotten cheaper. Not all launches to all orbits. I don't know if any commercial launch services can even do planetary transfer orbits.

In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.

Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.

A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.

A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.

The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.

Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.

Probably has something to do with the recent anti-science movement that currently has our country and government in a chokehold.

The cost of launches has come down, but not the cost of Freemason actors and CGI.

It was long dead even before this final cancellation.

They store the empty tubes, why not the full ones? Are they collecting that much mass that it’s really impractical. Are the empty tubes nested like solo cups to save space? I understand the rationale for the sample return, but those tubes will be hard to find after years of dust storms.

No. The sample is only physically measured and then imaged. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/the-extraord... All further analysis will happen when the sample is returned to earth.

> would have deemed a real plan as too expensive

Who are these "powers that be"? And do they have an infinite credit card? Could they really just do whatever they want and for some reason they choose not to?

Or, it's simply cheaper to send the equipment to analyze the samples in the rover, than to send the samples back.

MSR was in planning stages *and already* had budget overruns big enough to cancel lunar rover

That cancelled program became famous for leaving behind an already bought launcher that now will fly mass simulator

The martian samples from meteors found on Earth aren't as good as the samples we'd get from a Mars Sample Return Mission because they have been in contact with stuff like water, air and who knows what else

Isaacman definitely likes scientific missions but was skeptical of MSR, he thinks we will have a manned mission to Mars by the late 2030s so the payoff was not there given the extremely long timeline and high costs.

And I mean I agree, for that much money we should be doing missions to Europa instead.

Sure does. R&D investments have a massively larger RoI than military spending - and you won’t be paying off that debt by trying to be frugal. The only way is forward, and bombing schools in Iran isn’t that. It might not be Mars either, but at the very least some interesting science falls out of it, and perhaps some interesting products out of that.

Kinda crazy that we could launch one mission like this daily for almost exactly ten years with that deficit.

I think the post was missing a </sarcasm> flag.

I guess I should clarify, I meant 0.5% to NASA in general. Right now it's 0.33%. In 2002 it was 0.72%.

Or we could look at the utterly stupid things, like maybe stop having a failed war in Iran, and just not pay for those? Thats a very big chunk of budget. As a bonus it would bring gas prices down, reduce future spending in VA and other combat veteran costs, and just possible help make the case for reducing the size and expense of our military (while still maintaining the 2 largest air forces in the world).