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ESA and NASA Establish a Joint Mars Exploration Initiative
Matt_dk sends in a Spacefellowship article: "The ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood, met NASA's Associate Administrator for Science, Ed Weiler, in Plymouth, UK, to establish a way for a progressive programme for exploration of the Red Planet. The outcome of the bilateral meeting was an agreement to create a Mars Exploration Joint Initiative (MEJI) that will provide a framework for the two agencies to define and implement their scientific, programmatic and technological goals at Mars."
Where would we have been if we'd kept up the pace from the moon landing?
All over the Solar System, probably. Believe me, the engineers were planning it. (My Dad was one of them, so I have this on pretty good authority.) But once we Beat! The! Commies! To! The! Moon!, the national will disappeared, and with it the money.
So the answer to your first question is pretty much financial. Look at how much we spent on just Apollo, as a percentage of GDP, compared to how much we spend on all of NASA now ... and consider that the space budget has been a convenient target for Senators and Representatives who want to be able to tell their constituents that they're reining in wasteful government spending for, well, forty years or so. It's bullshit, of course, since NASA spending has never, even at the most expensive point in the Apollo program, been more than a tiny fraction of what we spend on many other programs with a far lower rate of return. But it's bullshit that plays well to ignorant audiences.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The last time Congress asked NASA how much it would cost to go to Mars they came up with a proposal that involved building giant ships in LEO to travel 2.5 years to Mars, stay there a month, and come back. The price tag was trillions. When asked why they should pay so much, NASA basically said "I dunno, it was your idea" and that was that. Lately, though, they've been talking about much more sensible things. 6 months there, 500 days on the ground, 6 months back. The purpose of the mission being to do all the nifty science those little robots have been doing, only at 1000x the scale. Not to mention doing some biological search that isn't retarded.. finding life in the most desolate places on Earth is hard and robots can't do it, and when we send robots to Mars to look for life we ignore any results that say they have found it (all the instruments on Viking said they had found life).
How we know is more important than what we know.
The exciting difference in this case is that more than just the USA will be working towards the goal. The apollo missions were ALL about the space race with USSR... at the time that competition was the only thing that would get it done. Now if you consider the fact that we have no TRUE enemies among the countries capable of a useful mars mission, you will realize that COOPERATION is what will drive the next great exploration of the solar system.
so you are right to say we would have been out of money if things had continued as they were. Now we have the opportunity to do something really amazing. The price of the technology to do a particular task is down. The size of the tax base this will be spread across is up (if you consider the ESA and possibly other international involvement). I don't know if this is the attempt that will put us on mars, but I do believe I will see it in my lifetime. I also believe that these things bring a society together. I have heard the stories of my parents generation gathering around their televisions to watch the moon landing, perhaps I can tell my children about everyone pulling out their smart phone and watching the mars landing. I hope so. We do very little that is positive for the future generations, this is one way to change that.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
shooting up probes from the moon?
Basically, the cost benefit was not there. We had to finish the Vietnam war. Then we had to satisfy all of the social programs. Then we had another two or three wars, interspersed with social programs.
Social programs waste the first derivative of Government spending. No good or service is produced. Mouths are simply fed. (Some will surely suggest this is good in and of itself).
But jobs are eventually created, and money trickles up from the poor to the grocer, the baker, and the crack dealer on the corner.
Wars waste the final derivative of Government spending. Stuff is destroyed. Even lives.
But new stuff is purchased, and jobs are created, and spending eventually trickles down.
Things like building highways, bridges, moon bases yield huge first derivatives, and the second derivatives are equally huge, and the follow on derivatives are even huger and last forever. We still drive Ike's highways.
But its hard to convince Joe Sixpack of this, because he has visions of rockets filled with 100 dollar bills launching into space and spewing money all over the place. He can't be convinced that all the money is spent right here on earth in his town.
There will always be the cry that we can't waste another nickel in space while some kid somewhere has holes in his shoes. Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!.
And if we ever do manage to accomplish anything in space, it is used to mock all other failings of human civilization. We can send a man to the moon, but we can't get the crack dealer off the corner.
So you see, had we actually persisted we would have an abandoned moon base by now, because we could no longer afford to support it with wars going on and little Freddy down the street having holes in his shoes, and all.
This is my optimistic outlook. After a few drinks I take on a rather darker opinion.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Contrary to what Amiga Trombone suggests below, I for one was part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan (which was an agreement NASA/ESA, Esa providing the Huygens probe), and my impression was *definitely* that the association was extremely beneficial, not only to share costs, but to respect the schedule.
In this kind of NASA/ESA association, none of the two agencies would dare being the first one announcing a delay, so everyone worked like mad.
And while at the present time there seems to be a lot of fuss on the actual details of the Mars mission(s), I'm sure that once actually signed the same will happen. OK Cassini/Huygens was years ago (its development at least*), but mentalities have not evolved here, and I just cant' see any european announcing "I had you investing 500 M$ on that mission, but now I back off" -nor the contrary.
Maybe (to Amiga) the different evolution of the ISS was due to too large a range of cooperating countries and entities. for Cassini/H it was just two, resulting in exactly two teams cooperating. Which I hope is what'll happen on Mars.
. ;-)
(*)and now don't start calling me a fossil
Herve S.
In fact, NASA already have that problem. Fact is... US switched to the metric system like most other countries. General science are on board, ofcourse, since it the imperial system makes no sense and is therefor not very useful in science, and especially in international reports. The military are easy to convince (SIR! YES, SIR! METRIC IT IS, SIR!) and NASA comes from both military and science, so they are with the program also.
Not so with the general public, which sometimes caused problems with NASA getting parts made in some stupid imperial sizes instead of real units, so if anything, that's less likely to happen if half the things in the join program is from Europe (which is not a country).