NASA’s planetary science program is in trouble. Last month, NASA’s Bill his Nelson administrator told Congress that the space agency’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission urgently needed an additional funding injection of $225 million, and more budget cuts. testified that it could be This is alarming news, given the decades-long trend of ballooning costs for NASA’s top-priority missions, wreaking havoc elsewhere in space agency science budgets. Already, he says, MSR’s “too big to fail” status is affecting other NASA projects, and rumors are circulating that even more serious effects are still to come. Seeing this familiar situation play out again, some space scientists are sounding the alarm, hoping to somehow harden vulnerable missions against the oncoming storms.
Alan Stern, planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, who served as NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) deputy administrator from 2007 to 2008, said: Too ambitious to be fragile. No resilience to failure. ”
NASA is currently conducting planetary science missions throughout the solar system. Orbit the moon, fly rovers and robotic helicopters on Mars, rendezvous spacecraft with asteroids, study Jupiter’s atmosphere, and even traverse the edges of interstellar space. But his two biggest missions on the horizon, the so-called flagship, are MSR, a daring attempt to deliver Martian rocks to Earth, and Jupiter’s moon, named after an icy ocean. The Europa Clipper, a spacecraft that was sent to investigate signs on Mars. Habitability.
These missions, especially MSR, are not easy. Many experts see it as multiple flagship missions rolled into one. Already, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover collects samples around its landing site and drops them into sealed sterile tubes for future retrieval. NASA and its international partners are now finalizing plans for MSR’s next steps. These include sample acquisition, launch from the surface of Mars, rendezvous in Martian orbit home-bound transport, and safe delivery of precious specimens to Earth in new ways without risk of contamination. will be These feats have never been done before and the margin for error is very thin: “Everything has to work on Daisy’s chain,” he says Stern. “All of these steps are costly and can’t go wrong, otherwise the whole daisy chain will fall apart and you won’t be able to get your samples back.”
Managing and mitigating MSR’s enormous technical risk is a major contributor to the project’s skyrocketing costs. Allocations from NASA’s annual budget increased from $263 million for fiscal 2022 to $653 million for him, and $822 million for fiscal 2023. Now, according to Nelson’s congressional testimony, it needs another $250 million to get off the ground. However, MSR has yet to reach formal approval, a milestone where NASA codifies the mission’s technical details, cost, and schedule baselines. Thomas Zurbuchen, who from 2016 he served as NASA’s deputy director of his SMD until 2022, said:
NASA’s finite budget isn’t the only basic resource that can be destabilized by missions too big to fail. Space agency personnel are also a factor. Scientists and engineers may be pulled away from smaller or early-stage projects to support larger projects that are considered more urgent. As criticized in a recent audit, such shuffling could result in “stealing payments from Peter to Paul” either in money or man-hours. For example, as the Perseverance rover’s launch date neared, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) devoted more resources to the mission, depleting its MSR and Clipper. Fortunately, these efforts ensured the successful launch, landing, and subsequent ground operations on Mars of Perseverance. “That we bottom Make those choices,” says Zurbuchen. “But we struggled to keep up.” NASA had to shift more resources to MSR and Clipper, leaving the mission to the metal-rich asteroid known as Psyche understaffed. , and ended up missing the timing of the launch. Such delays often last for years, incurring additional costs and all the while exacerbating budget problems. “[NASA’s] planetary [science division] We’ve cleared all the problems before, so we’re under financial pressure,” says Zurbuchen.
To alleviate some of that pressure, NASA recently delayed the planned launch date of the Venus rover known as VERITAS by at least three years. This decision infuriated many Venus scientists. “NASA is defunding certain missions that until last year were the baseline budget,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It has nothing to do [VERITAS] the team did. This was essentially collateral damage. ”
NASA’s Planetary Science Division isn’t the only one to suffer flagship sins. There is usually a lot of pain that spreads around. For example, one of the most high-profile recent cases involved a chronic overrun on the James He Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the flagship mission of the Space Agency’s Astrophysics Division. Initially, he was estimated to cost $4.96 billion and launch in 2014, but JWST announced that he will launch in 2021 with a budget ballooning to over $10 billion. I was. To pay for the overage at the time, NASA ended all of his participation in ExoMars. It was a robotic spaceflight program led by the European Space Agency and intended to send two ambitious missions to Mars (NASA recently rekindled his support for ExoMars). . “A lot of the missions didn’t materialize during that time because all the money was going to James his web,” says Stern. “Or they were canceled or stillborn through no fault of their own just because NASA had to find resources.”
But “too big to fail” may be a corollary to the lofty ambitions that scientists, policy makers, and the public generally give NASA.Mark Sykes, his CEO and director of the Institute for Planetary Science, said NASA’s system meaning Fail. Flagship missions deliberately take on tasks that can’t be easily done, so cost estimates are always underestimated, he says. “At this point (and historically), the only buffer NASA has other than expanding or canceling these flagships is all other missions and research programs treated as cookie jars to be raided if necessary. is,” he says.
No wonder many researchers fear that MSR will similarly raid other projects outside of planetary science. In fact it already is. His 2024 budget proposal for NASA calls for slowing work on the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (a solar physics mission) and slowing technology development for the Habitable World Observatory (a future flagship mission for astrophysics). I’m here. The agency says that’s it, anyway. “In terms of the planetary portfolio, MSR funding has so far been added to the planetary budget,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “So at this point, we didn’t need to acquire from other parts of our planetary portfolio.”
Still, there have been many mysterious movements among many planetary science missions. VERITAS is behind. New Horizons, the spacecraft that gave us the first detailed view of Pluto, has moved from the Planetary Sciences Department to the Solar Physics Department. More ice bodies may be observed at the little-explored outer limit of the solar system. NASA also cut funding for her NEO Surveyor, a space telescope designed to detect near-Earth asteroids, as part of the space agency’s planetary defense effort. The agency only partially funded the Dragonfly mission, a giant nuclear quadcopter intended to fly in the frigid skies of Saturn’s icy moon Titan. The window has been postponed, confirmed by James Garvin, DAVINCI+ principal investigator at Goddard Space Flight Center. Some scientists also speculate that the MSR overrun will also put other Mars missions, such as the Curiosity rover, on the chopping block. “There are no missions in development or in flight or rolling that are not in jeopardy,” Sykes says.
Glaze, however, has an explanation for all these changes. True delays like VERITAS’s were not caused by MSR’s overrun, she said, but by the COVID pandemic. budget. Additionally, NASA has been forced to consider rising inflation, rising costs, and a very tight supply her chain. Finally, she claims the MSR has not experienced any overruns as the mission has not yet reached confirmation. “We haven’t actually set a budget yet, so there are no cost overruns or anything like that,” she says.
But given that NASA has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars, Sykes disagrees. “Gray’s statement does not match the facts on the ground,” he says. “This is what NASA does. They play with words. They play with money so they can allocate it. They keep things secret in an attempt to stifle criticism.” ”
And even though MSR hasn’t started getting into other planetary programs, NASA itself seems to admit that this could be a matter of time. In the draft budget, the space agency noted that “the cost of Mars sample returns could increase beyond the out-of-year profile indicated in the budget, and would either reduce funding for other scientific activities or We need to reduce the scope of this mission.” For this reason, NASA is creating an independent review board to evaluate the current program. This basically provides a final check and a last chance for some course corrections before NASA commits. “We don’t want to affect our planetary science portfolio,” he says, Glaze. “But remember we have a fixed budget. So we have to balance everything. And that’s our challenge: how do we balance all these priorities? is.”
“Try to be daring”, sure. Casey Dreier, the Planetary Society’s head of space policy, said he would need to spend an additional $250 million this year alone, making it all too difficult to get VERITAS back into his NASA budget. I’m here. And other missions, such as the punctual Uranus rover, which tops the representative wish list of the US planetary science community, will probably never see the light of day. “The easiest missions to postpone are those that haven’t started yet,” he says Dreier.
To avoid such collateral damage, Stern said NASA should pause and rethink the mission’s architecture or see if foreign partners can provide resources to ease the budgetary burden. is proposing. Sykes has a larger intervention in mind: Congress. “NASA has never been transparent about what they are doing,” he says. “Congress should require NASA to report on delays and budget adjustments made over the past year on a mission-by-mission, project-by-project basis.” They need to protect other programs. Otherwise, the fallout could just mean there are very few planetary programs left, Stern adds. “American taxpayers and science in this agency are suffering as a result of putting everything on the MSR altar,” he says.
This is not to say that many scientists aren’t thrilled with the prospects of MSR, whose results could rewrite textbooks and possibly provide the first compelling evidence of extraterrestrial life. “These samples will be studied by literally thousands of scientists for decades to come,” says Laurie Lehshin, current director of JPL. But how much does it cost? “Mars doesn’t reveal its secrets easily. That’s been the Martian MO for many years,” he says. “The question is what price the scientific community is willing to pay for this mission, both literal money and other opportunities.”
