I never really understood why you'd have Perseverance drill the cores and then just leave them on the ground for an underdefined future mission to retrieve.
> 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?
Yes. They decided that it was more valuable spending a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world (and enriching weapons companies in the process) than it would be to spend a few billion advancing science.
NASA's budget is $24 billion this year. That's substantially larger than even Trump asked for, which was $16 billion. For reference, the ESA, the entirety of the EU's budget for space exploration and enterprise: $8 billion.
USA has two goddamn robots on Mars. And multiple others orbiting the planet itself. And also a couple that have left our solar system.
The Trump administration wanted to cut NASA's science budget in half, so the final number ($7.25B) is about 1% less than last year's budget. <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-return-mission-dead" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-r...
Imnimo · · focus · HN ↗
q_andrew · · focus · HN ↗
petcat · · focus · HN ↗
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?
psadauskas · · focus · HN ↗
petcat · · focus · HN ↗
USA has two goddamn robots on Mars. And multiple others orbiting the planet itself. And also a couple that have left our solar system.
smallerize · · focus · HN ↗
dmix · · focus · HN ↗