As Douglas Adams put it: most people where only concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper. The amount of small green pieces of printable paper is completely and utterly irrelevant in comparison to the next milestone mankind can achieve and must achieve to survive. (My personal, admittedly strong, opinion of course)
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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If you read the reports...
Normally JPL outsource their Mars mission hardware to Lockheed Martin. For some reason they have decided to do Mars Sample Return in house. The reports argue JPL hasn't built the necessary in house experience and should have worked with LM.
Secondly JPL is suffering a staff shortage which is affecting other projects and the Mars Sample Return is making the problem worse.
Lastly if an organisation stops performing an action it "forgets" how to do it. You can rebuild the capability but it takes time.
A team arbitrary declaring they are experts and suddenly decideding they will do it is one that will have to relearn skills/knowledge on a big expensive high profile project. The project will either fail (and be declared a success) or masses of money will be spent to compensate for the teams learning.
Either situation is not ideal
Thank you for providing this interesting insight. I didn't know any of this. I hope JPL will be able to build up the necessary in house experience again to not having to depend on contractors. Maybe in the distant future mankind will be able to actually work together on this problem space instead of being busy with corporate infighting.
It would be cool if NASA's budget was raised, but in the meantime we have to deal with the reality that a flagship mission going way over budget takes money away from other programs.
The program has a “near zero” probability of meeting the existing launch readiness dates and would cost $8-9.6 billion
That sounds laughingly cheap to me - that's the price for the James Webb Space Telescope. It isn't "cheap" compared to science budgets, but compared to the US' society budget, it's nothing.
Also Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could pay for about 40 of those missions, but instead they're just sitting on and hoarding that money.
Reminder that Elon Musk bought Twitter, just to ruin it, for the price of 4 of those Missions.
I'm really conflicted on this one. Behind schedule and $10 billion will inevitably turn into even more behind schedule and even more money. The opportunity cost of the money is a big part of that.
I'm also still holding out hope that SpaceX will get Starship to Mars and back some time in the 2030s, but maybe that's too naïve or optimistic of me.
Didn't the latest stuff sent up there have the ability to analyze samples on the spot? Why do they want to send samples back?
I suspect a full-scale lab is a little more capable than a pocket lab bolted on a rover
I think a real key will be getting geologists on the ground there. The productivity comparison is something crazy, like, an astronaut could do a few years of rover work in a week.
Wow, a bigger gap than I would have guessed.
let's admit. China will return samples first. Not in same shiny way as samples return, but still first.