Costs Force SMD To Reconsider Mars Strategy

Hmm. Sounds like the Program of Record is lacking funds to maintain existing program goals and timelines.

Sounds like the original architecture was not thoroughly thought through.

I suggest we put together a commission, maybe led by a guy named Augustine, and come up with options for the President to consider. Maybe we can get Space X, or OSC, or Boeing , etc. to pull something together that is cheaper, takes advantage of capitalistic market forces, because it's clear NASA won't be getting any more money....

Mars Sample Return is Constellation for the unmanned Mars mission. It's not a question of if it will collapse merely of when. Time for fresher thinking.

Perhaps they could launch a study into determining the similarity of apples and oranges :-)

Re. the story and "NASA is considering a plan to get around limited budgets set in Washington by stretching out missions".

What! The budgets in Washington are not unlimited! I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you! It all Washington's fault as usual. Why if we just had unlimited budgets we'd be on the Moon by now.

When the real goal was to do things we did things!

When the goal is to plan, re-plan, re-optimize, re-vector, socialize and hand ring; well we sub-optimize on paper and process, and leave the doing things to others...

Sad state of the country in general. It is not just NASA that is having this "crisis."

Sample return to Earth from Mars surface is frankly not the optimal strategy balanced between science value versus cost and expectation of mission success. If we follow the Flexible Option recommended by the Augustine panel, then we can stage robotic systems (and eventually astronauts) to the Martian moons for receipt and LOCAL processing of samples brought up from high-value surface sites. The technology does exist to do high precision compositional and other analyses from relatively heavier lander packages on the moons. Ask the Russians, they plan to do a lander mission there and later much farther beyond to the ocean moon Europa. The risk and cost is too high presently to plan on landing large systems on Mars to do the needed analyses, far better to get faster if more limited results from way stations on the moons. And get NASA to focus some technology development funding on advancement of the near-site analytical capabilities in space, not just on more labs in Houston. Its tens of millions of bucks for the needed in-space analysis development versus tens of billions for bringing the stuff back in multiple missions to Earth and maybe not getting anything back at all in our lifetimes. Just a suggestion.