New Budget NASA Space Science Missions

pertinax18 writes "The New York Times is reporting that 'Some of the most highly promoted missions on NASA's scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or perhaps even canceled under the agency's new budget.' This looks to directly impact the types of missions that have been NASA's greatest successes like the Mars Rovers. 'Among the casualties in the budget, released last month, are efforts to look for habitable planets and perhaps life elsewhere in the galaxy, an investigation of the dark energy that seems to be ripping the universe apart, bringing a sample of Mars back to Earth and exploring for life under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa'"

Comments

A Tale Of Two Goals, indeed

[Buran]

And so Dickens was right.

We have long been hoping that someday people would go back to the moon for more than just the Apollo-style touch-and-go missions, and now that looks like a reality more than it ever has since the end of the Apollo program.

And yet, it is the worst of times, too, for those who have been working very, very hard on programs that have nothing to do with the lunar program which have been very productive. I can only hope that this will pass, and that once the new vehicles have been developed and are flying we will be able to resume other science programs -- and face it, despite the setbacks like the Polar Lander and the Climate Observer, there have been a great many successes in the NASA robotic programs. The HST, the MER program, Cassini, the Great Observatories, Landsat, the list just goes on and on.

The Shuttle was and is a great idea, but the execution was flawed due to too much pennypinching during the design phase. It is an amazing idea and I hope that a safer reincarnation of the same thing returns, from either a government or from a private company. Do it right (manned flyback booster, a hardier orbiter, and so on) and put a better escape system on it.

But until things get smoothed out again, all I can do is wait, and hope that it all works out in the end. I've been a space buff for years, and I probably will be forever, and I know that the new expendables will probably be more inexpensive to operate plus the processing flow will hopefully be smoother.

Until then, though, it is the season of light and the season of darkness.