NASA/ESA Mars Initiative

There was also a news story late last week about how NASA was going to take a "major stake" in the ESA's "ExoMars", but I haven't seen anything from NASA. Maybe, like many Russian announcements, they are floating a trial balloon?

NASA HQ knows that the MARS program is very vulnerable after the very poor way Doug McCuistion is running the program with MSL overruns through the roof. There may not be any reports in the public view but NASA HQ is scared. The amount of lies on MSL is out of control and the draft lessons learned all point to the program executive, Doug McCuistion. Doug allowed CDR to be fast tracked six months earlier when the actuators needed re-design, he approved authority to proceed in three termination reviews and covered up a breach report to congress. His job is on the line and he is shaking. This is a great science program but the PM Richard Cook took the blame when Doug didn't do his job. Unfortunately, JUNO now has to pay the price after Rick Grammier has done a tremendous job of managing the project only to have his reserves raided for MSL and his launch date taken to launch MSL. Now he will have an overrun to keep the standing army on the payroll since the next launch date won't be much later with the DoD securing the EELV manifest slots but don't worry NASA (err I mean Doug) will claim a launch manifest issue. Hopefully Bolden will pink slip Doug after the 120 days since Weiler won't.

The reason for no press release could be that NASA doesn't want the American public know that its working with ESA. NASA wants American public thinks NASA can do everything by itself so doesn't have to acknowledge international partners

Because we are tired of looking for ET with Robots alone.
was:
This is the scientific plan "find" ET.
is:
send biology from earth and "make" ET.

Because we are tired of looking for ET with Robots alone.
was:
This is the scientific plan "find" ET.
is:
send biology from earth and "make" ET.

I think any inner-planetary human missions will have to be a co-operational mission between several governments for the resources and politics problems to be overcome. I love this Idea maybe in the spirit of soyuz-apollo we can get the Chinese to jump on board.

Fred Sanford

Because NASA doesn't have an Administrator and the agency's future plans are thus on "hold"?

Keith, here is the link to the NASA press release:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/mars-20090708.html

Editor's note: this has not been issued as a press release.

What about ITAR? Seems as if they need a new administrator to lobby the White House on the issue.

"Editor's note: this has not been issued as a press release."
I guess that it would be a news article but the joint statement can be found on both the main page of the ESA website and in the Mars section of the NASA website.

Editor's note: and you only see it there if you go looking for it. A press release goes out to hundreds of thousands of people - many of them media - directly. Why NASA cannot or will not issue this statement when it issues so many other things is baffling.