This article only obliquely mentions in the last paragraphs, but there's a parallel Chinese program that recently brought back samples from the moon, and will attempt Mars sample return, launching in 2028,
Anyone wanting to be involved in the future of scientific research should probably start learning Mandarin. We're going the way of the Soviets, where political officers will quash any science that doesn't fit their ideology.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/trump-planning-to-ha...
We also inverted the food pyramid recently since the whole thing reeked of big sugar/grain lobby, it can take a while for research to percolate above propoganda, and I'm not above suspecting the new pyramid of having its bias'
What’s the relevance of your point to this article? The program is extremely over budget and taking money from other projects. The previous administration sent NASA back to the drawing board on the project as well: https://www.courthousenews.com/nasa-goes-back-to-drawing-boa...
> NASA needs to rethink its goal of returning samples from the Martian surface to Earth, the agency’s administrator Bill Nelson said in a press call on Monday.
Is there any reason to think that their "ideology" is contradictory to scientific findings or is this just the traditional instinct to see all foreigners as mustache-twirling villains?
They have suppressed reporting of the deaths and missing from Kyirong Valley and Gyirong Port landslide. Surviving relatives living outside the area would appreciate information but the Chinese Government would prefer that everyone just move along.
The reason is money. The US has the world reserve currency which basically means infinite money. This will soon end and China will have the world reserve currency.
Its also close to impossible to immigrate to China. I've checked it out myself since I'm really impressed by the work Huawei is doing with high density wireless nnetworks. HK was an easier (still difficult) path, but I haven't checked again since it changed hands.
Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline? Do you think everyone outside the US views the moonlanding as a black page in history?
It’s fine to talk about a “race” if jingoism is the thing that gets most people on board with funding Nasa. But we ought to know better.
> Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline?
They are co-occurring facts in the same area and the only reason China’s success is relevant in this discussion is because it is co-occurring with and in the same field as the American decline that is (unlike the tangential Chinese angle) directly relevant to the story here.
So, in this specific case, if we are going to mention China at all, the answer is yes. Not because the two things are so linked that they ALWAYS need to be discussed together, but because that is the relevant nexus between the present subject and China at all.
This doesn’t actually represent an American decline in space exploration, though.
The NASA/ESA Mars sample return was poorly designed, they basically attached a half baked idea to the Perseverance mission in the hopes that having the mission “underway” would make it easier to fund the rest of the mission. That meant Perseverance was just putting things in tubes and leaving them sealed on the ground at random places around Mars. So that meant they would need to devise another system to go collect them, another system to store and launch them, and another system to return them to Earth. That’s a ridiculous process. The costs exploded, the gambit failed.
China’s was much better planned, having the rover and launch vehicle land together, fully funded from the beginning. However, it’s also much simpler, there’s no picking and choosing what to sample from a wide area, it’s just whatever is available to the lander wherever it happens to land.
And this would not have been the only future mission to deep space. The US is going to land a fleet of drones on Mars. They’re launching a nuclear powered drone to Titan.
The US has led the world in reusable rocket development, satellite constellations, and crewed LEO operations.
The big picture is clear. This one mission doesn’t really say much about the space program in general.
That’s not quite true - Perseverance has tubes for every tube (10) it left behind. The tubes left behind are the backups in case something happened to Perseverance- the main tubes are on board and can be collected all at once when from the rover.
And ironically the US very much considers itself to be in a race with China including in space, it's just run by such thundering morons that most of the moves they make advance China's interests more than theirs. Now the cancellation of Mars Sample Return isn't that big an issue in terms of strategic benefit or decline narratives, nor is it a particularly massive surprise (the program's issues are longer term than just current administration cuts). But there is a certain irony in some of the people most interested in scorekeeping with China (and for that matter Mars!) being the ones likely to ensure China pulls off the sample return first.
It's the other way around. He's framing America's decline in terms of Chinese success.
The Chinese rise is also remarkable in its own terms, but it's not the subject of discussion here. The subject here is how the US is under cutting its former preeminence in science.
It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration, how far ahead of everyone else it would be, but also how far along everyone else would be. America was the catalyst for the impossible in that era, and then we decided to abandon it for... basically nothing. Enriching corporations, I guess?
People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.
The US is still significantly ahead of everyone else in space. It’s just that NASA has become a shadow of its past self.
Maybe it’s better this way. There is a tendency of every organization, private or public, to rot and stagnate over time. But in the private sectors they die more quickly and give way to new entrants, which would help space exploration long term.
Let’s be honest with one anther. We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we’re not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect us.
But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That’s the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America’s capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Cordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics…) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives.
As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The “tomorrow” articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible—the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed the Apollo voyages to the Moon—the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.
I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech. If anything, I think that technological development created to serve Earth-based demand also has benefits for making space exploration cheaper and easier - computers have gotten way cheaper and way more powerful since the Apollo Guidance Computer, which has obviously affected the entire world in countless ways but also means that we can computerize every aspect of space launches, generally for good.
> I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech.
It clearly was, at least in several examples. It looks like he's getting it right from NASA:
>What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.?
What view do you have of what programs have been cut from Chinese government budgets? Can you link to some of the HN discussions around them so I can also see people commenting on the internal policy decisions that the Chinese government has made available for people to openly comment on?
As someone from the former USSR, I find that hard to imagine. Downright denial that the moon landings even happened, sure, but seeing them as a bad event? Not really likely.
The Soviets launched the first satellite, put the first animal into space, launched the first lunar probe, got the first photographs of the dark side of the moon, put the first human in space, put the first woman in space, put the first craft with more than one crew member into space, did the first spacewalk, sent the first probe to Venus, got the first pictures of another planet, and launched the first space station.
The moon landing was fine and all, a moment of global historic import (and propaganda value, with the US putting their flag on it like they owned the damned thing) but that's still just one victory in a race that was otherwise entirely dominated by the Soviets, and on balance what the Soviets did was of greater scientific merit than anything the US would achieve for years. Americans didn't even care about space until Russia flew Sputnik over their heads.
Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)
>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools
>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.
>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers
>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.
>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty
>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers
Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.
Taxpayer money being used for race-based and gender-based "research".
"fostering gender equity" is not even science, trying to equate these grants with something like researching fundamental physics or chemistry is disingenuous.
>to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense
Equity and diversity initiatives are almost always blatantly racist and discriminatory by definition. They are also rife with ethnic favoritism and ingroup collusion.
Giving taxpayer money to people to "foster gender equity" by definition means you are giving money to try and advantage one group of people based on immutable characteristics (gender).
I find it telling that many of the people who lampoon these cuts make a point to never actually talk about the specific grants themselves, but like to keep the discussion at a higher level and discuss how "scientists" are going to leave in droves to go study in Europe instead of the USA.
>Examining Undergraduate Research Experiences of Latinx STEM Students in Research Intensive HSIs and Emerging-HSIs
>[this project] will undertake a comparative study of undergraduate research experiences for Latinx students at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) using an asset-based framework and Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology and the "platicas methodology"
If you went on CNN and discussed how funding is being cut for "comparitive studies using feminist epistemolgy", the majority of Americans would be fine with it. In fact a huge portion of Americans would likely say that cutting these types of grants actually advances the NSF's mission statement by cutting out racist and divisive programs that center on specific ethnic groups.
God forbid we figure out the best way for the smartest and most talented people of all backgrounds to contribute to science. Why take diamonds from the rough when you can just leave them there instead?
The NSF's focus areas do include research on people and society, as well as development of new training and education initiatives (https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/education) and fostering a robust STEM workforce (https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/workforce). Not every grant issued by the NSF needs to be geared towards fundamental scientific research; the NSF's mission is broad, and intentionally so.
There is no possible scenario where the senate, even post-midterms, votes to convict. And if they did, which they will not, the vice-president stands waiting to give us more or the same, or maybe worse.
The NASA/ESA MSR was of substantially higher quality, mind you. The M2020 rover specifically picked up samples of high scientific value to be returned. The Chinese return mission will only return what it finds from its direct landing site.
Also they’re no where near each other. These Chinese rover cannot get there.
Also also, if China were to create a new mission to collect them, they would see their costs balloon to unsustainable levels as well, as the issue is how the mission is designed. The samples are all over the place and would need a rover specifically designed to collect them and return them to a launcher.
The US Mars sample return project was always half baked in the hopes that doing something would garner funding for the rest of the mission.
I think that the scientific community really doesn't care about who will bring the samples back, but simply wheter someone will do it and share them with the world
"Profit" is too generous a motive. It didn't service the Big Man's ego, so it's gone. That they can do some damage by killing it just makes it sweeter. Trump is Teemu Saruman.
The way things look, everyone in Trump's orbit is just grifting off the government directly or using it to their personal advantage, including his own children. He literally said "Every time my kids invest in a stock, they have inside information."
I worked on (a very small part of) the ExoMars rover (now called the Rosalind Franklin[0]).
It was supposed to launch in 2018, then was pushed to the early 2020s on a Russian rocket. For obvious reasons, it got pushed again, now launching in 2028.
The state of the world isn't great for space exploration, but I'm hopeful this mission will be revived at some point in the future.
Sure! I worked on the digital logic that connects the rover to one of the scientific instruments on board, specifically the Mars Organic Molecule Analyser[0].
As an outsider who is very interested in space exploration I'm very flummoxed by the state of space exploration.
With the price of launches so low compared to only 20 years ago due to advancements in launch technology and the increased cadence of launches it seems like it should be easier to do these kinds of missions and that there should be more, cheaper missions that are willing to take risks because the per mission cost is so much lower.
Can you comment on why that doesn't seem to be happening? Why aren't we covering Mars in cheap rovers and satellites?
For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"
0 to 1 is part of why the first Curiosity cost so much. If they kept the technology alive in practice, launching a new one every year doesn’t sound unreasonable.
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.
And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.
We've had 8 launches in the past 3 years, with only 10 in the combined 17 years before [1].
Seems that the reduced cost is being taken advantage of. And, make sure to exclude the drastic reduction in non-lunar launches in your cost comparison for lunar launches.
Some types of launches to some classes or orbits have gotten cheaper. Not all launches to all orbits. I don't know if any commercial launch services can even do planetary transfer orbits.
In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.
Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.
A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.
A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.
The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.
Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.
This mission is representative of what JPL has become. Leadership there increased the cost of the program to $11B and would not bring the samples back until 2040, they also designed the mission around legacy rockets like Ariane 64 instead of working to lower costs and increase capacity by working with industry and designing around Starship or New Glenn. The moon missions brought back 842 pounds of rocks and MSL would bring back 1.1 pounds. It’s directionally better to wait for manned missions to Mars so we can bring back tons of rocks or even do the research on Mars itself. It seems like the JPL mission is maximized to provide jobs to researchers and maximized for mission complexity rather than just buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time.
I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.
It's basically undead at this stage.
On a more serious note, after it was "paused" in 2023 because of scepticism about the return approaches and defunded by Congress earlier this year, ESA did look at other options, but now I think it's just JPL trying to find a commercial use case...
I never really understood why you'd have Perseverance drill the cores and then just leave them on the ground for an underdefined future mission to retrieve.
An all-in-one solution would be far too heavy. Splitting the tasks up makes a lot of sense. Having all the equipment onboard to drill cores, quickly analyze them, decide if they're worth keeping, and then putting samples in containers is enough work for one rover.
* Storing all the samples onboard means a larger and heavier rover
* Mass budget squeeze means no more helicopter
* The return requires a ground launch from mars, so no more SkyCrane delivery system
They store the empty tubes, why not the full ones? Are they collecting that much mass that it’s really impractical. Are the empty tubes nested like solo cups to save space? I understand the rationale for the sample return, but those tubes will be hard to find after years of dust storms.
Who are these "powers that be"? And do they have an infinite credit card? Could they really just do whatever they want and for some reason they choose not to?
Yes. They decided that it was more valuable spending a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world (and enriching weapons companies in the process) than it would be to spend a few billion advancing science.
NASA's budget is $24 billion this year. That's substantially larger than even Trump asked for, which was $16 billion. For reference, the ESA, the entirety of the EU's budget for space exploration and enterprise: $8 billion.
USA has two goddamn robots on Mars. And multiple others orbiting the planet itself. And also a couple that have left our solar system.
The entity that has exclusive power over the US federal budget, and thus NASA budget, is called the US Congress. This is a standard arrangement in representative democracies.
Um, NASA doesn't ask anything from the Congress, they get no say. They did not request their budget to be halved. They advise the executive, and then the executive asks the Congress to halve their budget and cancel half the missions because, you know. Luckily, the Congress was not inclined to agree because NASA actually has a solid bipartisan support.
The war in Iran costs about $95m a day and is already over $43b cost to the taxpayers, just in military spending. That's nearly two NASA budgets in just over 200 days.
The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.
The reason why NASA ended the Apollo program is because the American public 1) was never as committed to Apollo as younger people seem to believe they were with most people being indifferent to it and plenty of people being outright against it as wasteful, and 2) even the modicum of support it had on the Apollo 11th landing was gone by the next mission. Famously, Apollo 13 was notable for regaining the attention of the public, which it almost certainly would not have had if it weren't for their lives being on the line.
The public has almost never voted for more funding to NASA. The Kennedy Administration put a shitload of money into NASA hands, without real public approval, for geopolitical goals. It was never for public anything. The public just cannot be assed to spend even a few dollars on things they don't like, and they've never cared for generic space science.
The general public can in fact do whatever they can manage to fund, including through enormous debt, which is how we spent like $40 trillion on stupid wars in the desert for no reason. I was never really in agreement with doing that, but for some reason such a suggestion was "Unamerican", as claimed by the very people bitching about the debt right now. Who just so happened to be mostly the same people voting on doing those stupid wars.
It doesn't matter how many games you want to play with how "the system" makes it hard to vote for the right people, or how the incentives are constructed, but even in such a system, the Trump power bloc is still based around voting people out if they get in his way. The power always comes down to voting. The people in our government do all the shenanigans they do because it's how you capture the votes. They pander to giant businesses because those businesses pay for their political ads, which always go up in price so that only the largest businesses can afford to control them. But politicians do it because those ads get them the votes. If just doing their job better got them more votes, they would do that, or be replaced with someone who would.
The powers that be are the voters, with caveats and nuance.
I'm personally sad to see samples from Jezero crater with potential biosignatures [1] won't find their way back to Earth for the foreseeable future. I was _really_ looking forward to learning more about what we found.
Maybe in some ideal world the US and China would work together to pass those samples on to a Chinese MSR, but it seems borderline impossible.
I hope that one of these days my great grandchildren will be able to go to the Smithsonian and see the beat up and dusty Curiosity rover live and in the proverbial flesh.
The Japanese 'Martian Moons exploration' mission is launching to Phobos next month and doing a sample return; how hard would a martian to phobos sample moving mission be that could then be collected off Phobos sometime?
I think the original plan was to land another rover, which would drive to each sample. I hope future plans weight the use of helicopters for retrieval after Ingenuity's success. It looks like the sample capsules weigh less than 3oz.
For better or worse it won’t be long until we get private exploration for minerals and water on the Moon and nearby planets, at a relatively decent scale (in comparative terms)
What could possibly fund the private exploration of minerals or water on the Moon or planets?
Which of the 180ish elements would possibly be found on a foreign body in enough scale that couldn't possibly be found, made, or replaced by cheaper means here on earth?
Space mining doesn't make sense! We can't even justify exploiting all known resources here on earth itself because they aren't profitable, how do you work those numbers when, instead of literal slave labor, you have to pay the energy cost of going up and then back down for every kilo of matter?
If it's often not worth it to mine literal gold here on earth because it can't be profitably extracted, the core limit on gold mines as an investment and business venture, why would it be profitable to, for example, mine that gold on Mars and try to bring it home?
My brother in law (JPL) was telling me about this earlier in August. Big letdown but he assured me that they'll come back to earth some day ... just gonna sit up there a long time.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this but one reason not to do this mission is that we have ~400 Martian samples from meteors found on Earth [1]. The fact that there's even 1 is kind of amazing to me. And this has been confirmed by multiple methods including analyzing the air bubbles trapped in the rock matching Mars's atmosphere.
Flying to Mars and then flying back is incredibly complicated and much more expensive. Rather than sending an exploratory rover or a satellite, you have to basically send an entire launch vehicle when we've never launched anything into orbit from Mars before. And it has to operate essentially autonomously (for the launch).
Even missions to get samples from comets and asteroids are far less complicated because you're not dropping into a gravity well with just enough atmosphere to cover all your stuff in dust but not enough for atmospheric braking. Mars has the exact wrong amount of atmosphere.
Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better but it diminishes the value when we already have samples here. So the huge price tag and incredible engineering complexity becomes harder to justify.
The martian samples from meteors found on Earth aren't as good as the samples we'd get from a Mars Sample Return Mission because they have been in contact with stuff like water, air and who knows what else
I was holding my breath for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which amazingly wasn't cancelled but they did cancel its successor, the Habitable Worlds Observatory Space Telescope which would be able to spot earth-sized exo-planets
even though Congress already funded it, because somehow the executive is allowed to illegally pocket veto Congress over and over again past two years
it's all Heritage Foundation and Russell Vought, he has no use for science and education
Knowing Jared Isaacman, he won't let MSR die without a fight. It wouldn't shock me to see NASA consider Rocket Lab's MSR proposal; they had submitted a pretty affordable proposal some time ago.
Isaacman definitely likes scientific missions but was skeptical of MSR, he thinks we will have a manned mission to Mars by the late 2030s so the payoff was not there given the extremely long timeline and high costs.
And I mean I agree, for that much money we should be doing missions to Europa instead.
Yes the administration warned American space companies not to attend the international space summit in France last week because it was international cooperation. NASA attended.
The USA can't afford to waste money shipping a bunch of rocks halfway across the Solar system just so some woke geeks can speculate if Mars in the past could have supported transgender athletes.
It would jeopardize important national security projects like the White House Ballroom, the Triumphal Arch, the Garden of Heroes and National Golf Course, and of course the Donald J. Trump Center for The Performing Arts (formerly The Memorial To That Loser That Got Assassinated.)
Sure does. R&D investments have a massively larger RoI than military spending - and you won’t be paying off that debt by trying to be frugal. The only way is forward, and bombing schools in Iran isn’t that. It might not be Mars either, but at the very least some interesting science falls out of it, and perhaps some interesting products out of that.
This is so disappointing. The closest thing we ever discovered to life on other planets and the US won't even put 0.5% of budget towards retrieving it.
Or we could look at the utterly stupid things, like maybe stop having a failed war in Iran, and just not pay for those? Thats a very big chunk of budget. As a bonus it would bring gas prices down, reduce future spending in VA and other combat veteran costs, and just possible help make the case for reducing the size and expense of our military (while still maintaining the 2 largest air forces in the world).
What makes you think the poster you responded to agrees with the Iran war expense? He simply commented on how difficult it is to cut anything from the Federal budget. He's right. Remember when all the lunatics were out keying Teslas a few short months ago?
No, its not a strawman. Cutting tiny things from the budget to save money when there are big obvious wastes right out in front is fucking stupid. Complaining about how hard it is to cut tiny things from the budget when there are giant obvious wastes out in front is equally as stupid.
If you want to seriously affect the budget, go for the things that burn large piles of money first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3
The website wasn't available anymore
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-arch-drones-snipers-9.73...
Look, there's your safety, forget about the food safety, obviously the real priority is the snipers. I feel so safe already.
https://thegoodshirts.com/products/hello-i-am-fleeing-the-am...
http://www.img.chinafoodsltd.com/Uploads/Zlkkkl/Picture/2021...
https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2026/06/08/monster-use...
> NASA needs to rethink its goal of returning samples from the Martian surface to Earth, the agency’s administrator Bill Nelson said in a press call on Monday.
China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.
I am sure this is nothing to be concerned about whatsoever.
These are smart people, they’re not going to make major life decisions based on simplistic takes from political opportunists.
And kicking people off of twitter and facebook for similar banned thoughts?
It’s fine to talk about a “race” if jingoism is the thing that gets most people on board with funding Nasa. But we ought to know better.
They are co-occurring facts in the same area and the only reason China’s success is relevant in this discussion is because it is co-occurring with and in the same field as the American decline that is (unlike the tangential Chinese angle) directly relevant to the story here.
So, in this specific case, if we are going to mention China at all, the answer is yes. Not because the two things are so linked that they ALWAYS need to be discussed together, but because that is the relevant nexus between the present subject and China at all.
The NASA/ESA Mars sample return was poorly designed, they basically attached a half baked idea to the Perseverance mission in the hopes that having the mission “underway” would make it easier to fund the rest of the mission. That meant Perseverance was just putting things in tubes and leaving them sealed on the ground at random places around Mars. So that meant they would need to devise another system to go collect them, another system to store and launch them, and another system to return them to Earth. That’s a ridiculous process. The costs exploded, the gambit failed.
China’s was much better planned, having the rover and launch vehicle land together, fully funded from the beginning. However, it’s also much simpler, there’s no picking and choosing what to sample from a wide area, it’s just whatever is available to the lander wherever it happens to land.
And this would not have been the only future mission to deep space. The US is going to land a fleet of drones on Mars. They’re launching a nuclear powered drone to Titan.
The US has led the world in reusable rocket development, satellite constellations, and crewed LEO operations.
The big picture is clear. This one mission doesn’t really say much about the space program in general.
And ironically the US very much considers itself to be in a race with China including in space, it's just run by such thundering morons that most of the moves they make advance China's interests more than theirs. Now the cancellation of Mars Sample Return isn't that big an issue in terms of strategic benefit or decline narratives, nor is it a particularly massive surprise (the program's issues are longer term than just current administration cuts). But there is a certain irony in some of the people most interested in scorekeeping with China (and for that matter Mars!) being the ones likely to ensure China pulls off the sample return first.
When your enemy is making a mistake don't interrupt them and all that jazz.
The Chinese rise is also remarkable in its own terms, but it's not the subject of discussion here. The subject here is how the US is under cutting its former preeminence in science.
People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.
Maybe it’s better this way. There is a tendency of every organization, private or public, to rot and stagnate over time. But in the private sectors they die more quickly and give way to new entrants, which would help space exploration long term.
The collapse of the USSR was the worst thing to happen to NASA.
I would suggest a watch of "We Stopped Dreaming" https://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc
A less angry version (video and transcript of Neil DeGrasse Tyson testifying before the Senate's Science Committee on 7 March 2012) https://ifsa.my/articles/we-stopped-dreaming-by-neil-degrass...
It clearly was, at least in several examples. It looks like he's getting it right from NASA:
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1996/43.html
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff2003/hm_3.html
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/node/9275
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Telescope-Mirror-Tech-Improves-Eye-...
So things like curing AIDS don't count?
What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.? Is America ascending or declining?
The success China is having isn’t something that’s occurring in isolation. There is a void and they are filling it.
What view do you have of what programs have been cut from Chinese government budgets? Can you link to some of the HN discussions around them so I can also see people commenting on the internal policy decisions that the Chinese government has made available for people to openly comment on?
America was a bulwark against Chinese expansion, and that ended a while back, maybe with WTO entry?
International relations under this regime is a new poison, and is aiding some awful regimes.
Former Soviet people might...
The moon landing was fine and all, a moment of global historic import (and propaganda value, with the US putting their flag on it like they owned the damned thing) but that's still just one victory in a race that was otherwise entirely dominated by the Soviets, and on balance what the Soviets did was of greater scientific merit than anything the US would achieve for years. Americans didn't even care about space until Russia flew Sputnik over their heads.
Space? That was excellent marketing.
https://grantwitness.org/nsf
Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)
>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools
>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.
>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers
>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.
>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty
>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers
Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.
Yeah classic woke stuff that
> TRTech-PGR: NSF BSF - Recombining Allelic Diversity via Genome Editing for Dissecting Complex Plant Traits
This would be funny if it wasn't happening in real life. Clearly they did "ctrl-f diversity" and didn't actually read what they were cancelling.
"fostering gender equity" is not even science, trying to equate these grants with something like researching fundamental physics or chemistry is disingenuous.
Equity and diversity initiatives are almost always blatantly racist and discriminatory by definition. They are also rife with ethnic favoritism and ingroup collusion.
Giving taxpayer money to people to "foster gender equity" by definition means you are giving money to try and advantage one group of people based on immutable characteristics (gender).
I find it telling that many of the people who lampoon these cuts make a point to never actually talk about the specific grants themselves, but like to keep the discussion at a higher level and discuss how "scientists" are going to leave in droves to go study in Europe instead of the USA.
>Examining Undergraduate Research Experiences of Latinx STEM Students in Research Intensive HSIs and Emerging-HSIs
>[this project] will undertake a comparative study of undergraduate research experiences for Latinx students at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) using an asset-based framework and Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology and the "platicas methodology"
If you went on CNN and discussed how funding is being cut for "comparitive studies using feminist epistemolgy", the majority of Americans would be fine with it. In fact a huge portion of Americans would likely say that cutting these types of grants actually advances the NSF's mission statement by cutting out racist and divisive programs that center on specific ethnic groups.
Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
Also also, if China were to create a new mission to collect them, they would see their costs balloon to unsustainable levels as well, as the issue is how the mission is designed. The samples are all over the place and would need a rover specifically designed to collect them and return them to a launcher.
The US Mars sample return project was always half baked in the hopes that doing something would garner funding for the rest of the mission.
Sounds like they blew it. What a shame.
No need to. Mars delivers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/arts/who-owns-this-chunk-...
I think the Trump admin decided since it will not make them a profit, like other scientific research already canceled, it is not worth doing.
It was supposed to launch in 2018, then was pushed to the early 2020s on a Russian rocket. For obvious reasons, it got pushed again, now launching in 2028.
The state of the world isn't great for space exploration, but I'm hopeful this mission will be revived at some point in the future.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin_(rover)
[1] https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/beo
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser
With the price of launches so low compared to only 20 years ago due to advancements in launch technology and the increased cadence of launches it seems like it should be easier to do these kinds of missions and that there should be more, cheaper missions that are willing to take risks because the per mission cost is so much lower.
Can you comment on why that doesn't seem to be happening? Why aren't we covering Mars in cheap rovers and satellites?
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.
Seems that the reduced cost is being taken advantage of. And, make sure to exclude the drastic reduction in non-lunar launches in your cost comparison for lunar launches.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#2...
In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.
Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.
A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.
A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.
The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.
Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.
I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.
* Storing all the samples onboard means a larger and heavier rover
* Mass budget squeeze means no more helicopter
* The return requires a ground launch from mars, so no more SkyCrane delivery system
It says they have two sets of every sample: One onboard and one in the designated drop area.
The drop area is a backup: if the rover dies while travelling somewhere, the return pickup mission would not be in the right spot.
Who are these "powers that be"? And do they have an infinite credit card? Could they really just do whatever they want and for some reason they choose not to?
USA has two goddamn robots on Mars. And multiple others orbiting the planet itself. And also a couple that have left our solar system.
The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.
The reason why NASA ended the Apollo program is because the American public 1) was never as committed to Apollo as younger people seem to believe they were with most people being indifferent to it and plenty of people being outright against it as wasteful, and 2) even the modicum of support it had on the Apollo 11th landing was gone by the next mission. Famously, Apollo 13 was notable for regaining the attention of the public, which it almost certainly would not have had if it weren't for their lives being on the line.
The public has almost never voted for more funding to NASA. The Kennedy Administration put a shitload of money into NASA hands, without real public approval, for geopolitical goals. It was never for public anything. The public just cannot be assed to spend even a few dollars on things they don't like, and they've never cared for generic space science.
The general public can in fact do whatever they can manage to fund, including through enormous debt, which is how we spent like $40 trillion on stupid wars in the desert for no reason. I was never really in agreement with doing that, but for some reason such a suggestion was "Unamerican", as claimed by the very people bitching about the debt right now. Who just so happened to be mostly the same people voting on doing those stupid wars.
It doesn't matter how many games you want to play with how "the system" makes it hard to vote for the right people, or how the incentives are constructed, but even in such a system, the Trump power bloc is still based around voting people out if they get in his way. The power always comes down to voting. The people in our government do all the shenanigans they do because it's how you capture the votes. They pander to giant businesses because those businesses pay for their political ads, which always go up in price so that only the largest businesses can afford to control them. But politicians do it because those ads get them the votes. If just doing their job better got them more votes, they would do that, or be replaced with someone who would.
The powers that be are the voters, with caveats and nuance.
Maybe in some ideal world the US and China would work together to pass those samples on to a Chinese MSR, but it seems borderline impossible.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09413-0
Which of the 180ish elements would possibly be found on a foreign body in enough scale that couldn't possibly be found, made, or replaced by cheaper means here on earth?
Space mining doesn't make sense! We can't even justify exploiting all known resources here on earth itself because they aren't profitable, how do you work those numbers when, instead of literal slave labor, you have to pay the energy cost of going up and then back down for every kilo of matter?
If it's often not worth it to mine literal gold here on earth because it can't be profitably extracted, the core limit on gold mines as an investment and business venture, why would it be profitable to, for example, mine that gold on Mars and try to bring it home?
That cancelled program became famous for leaving behind an already bought launcher that now will fly mass simulator
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCgC1yA7_w
Flying to Mars and then flying back is incredibly complicated and much more expensive. Rather than sending an exploratory rover or a satellite, you have to basically send an entire launch vehicle when we've never launched anything into orbit from Mars before. And it has to operate essentially autonomously (for the launch).
Even missions to get samples from comets and asteroids are far less complicated because you're not dropping into a gravity well with just enough atmosphere to cover all your stuff in dust but not enough for atmospheric braking. Mars has the exact wrong amount of atmosphere.
Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better but it diminishes the value when we already have samples here. So the huge price tag and incredible engineering complexity becomes harder to justify.
[1]: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/martian-meteorites-rare-visit...
We have Mars rocks at home.
> Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better
The Mars rocks at home.
I was holding my breath for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which amazingly wasn't cancelled but they did cancel its successor, the Habitable Worlds Observatory Space Telescope which would be able to spot earth-sized exo-planets
even though Congress already funded it, because somehow the executive is allowed to illegally pocket veto Congress over and over again past two years
it's all Heritage Foundation and Russell Vought, he has no use for science and education
And I mean I agree, for that much money we should be doing missions to Europa instead.
Mars has a little bit less gravity than Earth
How big would a rocket need to be even to send a small payload (let's think 20kg/45lb) even suborbitally so that it can be caught by another spaceship
Now check how big a rocket has to be to send all of that from Earth
You'd probably have to send this on Starship. And refuel it while on orbit
It would jeopardize important national security projects like the White House Ballroom, the Triumphal Arch, the Garden of Heroes and National Golf Course, and of course the Donald J. Trump Center for The Performing Arts (formerly The Memorial To That Loser That Got Assassinated.)
What makes you think the poster you responded to agrees with the Iran war expense? He simply commented on how difficult it is to cut anything from the Federal budget. He's right. Remember when all the lunatics were out keying Teslas a few short months ago?
If you want to seriously affect the budget, go for the things that burn large piles of money first.