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NASA Pulling Out of ESA-led ExoMars Mission?
astroengine writes "It's a strange irony that to afford the expense of space exploration, international collaboration is often sought after — spreading the cost across several international partners means the biggest space missions may be accomplished. And yet in times of austerity, national budgets balk at the prospect of investing in international projects like ExoMars. Sadly, that's exactly what could be facing the ambitious ESA-led Mars rover/satellite mission if NASA's Science Mission Directorate budget is slashed in the next financial year. NASA may pull out of the project, leaving ExoMars with no rockets or a means to actually land on Mars. Could Russia help out? Possibly, but it will still lead to ESA taking on more cost than it has budgeted for."
I think it's disingenuous to say to ESA "hey, we can't cover this, hope you can find another partner" this far in. Maybe one can look at the overruns for MSL and JSWT and say that this is the responsible thing to do, to allow those two programs to finish, but in the middle and long term, this is going to prevent any further NASA-ESA collaboration. Where is the big dividend from having shut down the shuttle program?
The cheapest and best original thinking in the space race is currently at Space/X.
And the biggest schedule slippage.
Yeah, its amazing how NASA hit its goal of men on Mars in 1984, got the shuttle flying on time and under budget, AND had the ISS finished before the start of the 90's at cost! Why would anyone look anywhere else!?
JPL is responsible for many successful planetary robotic mission including collaborationsas happened with Cassini and MSL. JPL has executed a many highly successful missions such as Voyager and MER2 (Opportunity) while never killing anyone or blowing huge budgets. Do not confuse JPL with the manned scapeflight porkbarrel in Houston. JPL does science; Houston does hugely expensive stunts and kills people. Unfortunately NASA is run by ex-pilots and astronauts; when robotic missions are cut, which happens all the time, Houston is usually behind it. The amount of money spent (wasted) on the spacestation and the shuttle dwarf the amount of money spent on Mars missions.
Comments like the parent here just drive me nuts! I should give up even reading much less replying to any space-related items here. "NASA is great at viewgraphs and theme parks, but as far as science goes, they're rapidly falling behind." Where does this kind of sentiment come from? Is it in any way bounded by reality? NASA's recent track record for planetary science is pretty good, held up to that of other national space programs (not to disparage those other programs, but just as a point of comparison);
- JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to escape Earth's orbit
- ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander (crashed?)
- Cassini's Huygens probe had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent
- India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing , rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons)
Compare with
- NASA's MESSENGER, in orbit around Mercury for a year and producing a ream of science data
- NASA's Kepler mission, boosting our count of exoplanets by something like an order of magnitude
- NASA's Mars Rovers, 8 years into a nominal 30-day mission
- NASA's Juno probe, on its way to Jupiter
- NASA's Cassini flagship mission, far into extended mission already and aiming to keep working through 2017
- NASA's MSL, over budget but successfully on its way to Mars
- NASA's New Horizons, now closer to Pluto than any other man-made object, and moreso every day
For the record, other current missions up for extensions include EPOXI, GRAIL, MRO, Mars Odyssey Orbiter, and LRO.
Yes I'm cherry-picking a bit here, but overlooking dozens of other programs also. It's not my job to document all this - but before posting snide little "NASA's good at viewgraphs" comments, maybe do a minimal amount of search.