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.
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?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser
I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.
> Engages in pointless wars
Also, the war cannot be won without boots on the ground, and that is also not feasible as you need 2-4x the amount of soldiers that the enemy nation has to successfully conquer a nation (as per the US Army / CIA handbook), and Iran has about a million soldiers, so 2-4 million US soldiers would be required for that.
It would literally turn into another Vietnam or Afghanistan. Unfriendly terrain where everything needs to be flown or sailed in, hostile population where the US has been painted as the "big devil" for 50+ years.
Speaking of Afghanistan, Taliban had 58,000 "soldiers", and we sent almost 600,000 soldiers there (peak strength) and still lost the war, and Iran is very similar to Afghanistan.
On the other hand, a US retreat would mean Iran keeps the chokehold on global oil reserves, and are free to develop nukes, with any future missions by the US to limit their nuclear weapon research resulting in a worse situation than before.
So yeah, basically a forever war, one that everybody that knows even the tiniest bit about the Middle East has advised against pretty much forever.
It make sense to a certain extent to focus on a capability researches vs largely throw away mission to deliver a few rocks for 20 billions.
The underlying program was in trouble. NASA had already concluded before Isaacman took over that the existing Mars Sample Return architecture had become a roughly $8–11 billion project with samples potentially not reaching Earth until around 2040.
So yes: NASA killed the bloated $11B / 2040 version of Mars Sample Return.
Isaacman is pushing NASA’s Mars program toward cheaper, faster, modular missions, greater use of commercial spacecraft and launch providers, and infrastructure that can support both science and eventual human exploration.
That makes the “NASA is abandoning Mars science” framing fake news. NASA is abandoning a specific, extremely expensive architecture.
Isaacman has explicitly left open the possibility of retrieving Perseverance’s samples through a different approach.
The real question is to what extent the new model will actually deliver the samples faster and for dramatically less money.
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.
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.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/china-on-track-to-launc...
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...
They are scheduled to go in 2028.
Some other countries might still develop ideas but when it's time to actually put it into practice and scale it seems it'll always require the Chinese to play a huge part in it. They're the only ones with appetite for "unprofitable" projects that have returns in decades.
Either deliver it under-budget or it should get cut. NASA has become more of a jobs program than a space program. Hopefully that changes.
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?
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
So bloody frustrating and completely unsurprising.
2. Use some of it for good science even if you don't want to improve welfare and healthcare.
3. Profit and prosper!
Sounds great to me.
Do it !
I can guarantee you that China will bring back samples before the US, simply because their program was built to bring back results, practically, while NASA's was meant to subsidize PHDs of people involved, while baiting people with "aliens!!!!1", there is no reason why the state should be funding the PHDs of people involved with niche/weird research rather than focus on what the vast majority want and support NASA for.
You can have obscure research as a side mission, not the core, while blatantly lying too.
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.)
More seriously some Starship related stuff may work one day?
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
That paper outlines a plan to do it, which people have been trying to do since the 70s
Here is one that will launch soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
When launching large masses to high energies gets cheaper, payloads have a chance to get cheaper, too.
"look guys 9/24 of the rovers are transmitting back, great success"
I think Starlink and cubesats have definitely proven the approach can reduce costs.
The engineering does not seem as challenging to me as figuring out how to get such a policy approved and pushed through all the administrative and decision making layers without watering down and budgetary inflation.
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
At least space exploration results in some valuable technology being developed, even if done in an extremely expensive manner.
When I worked at Boeing, sinking a die for a forging cost $250,000. Forging the part cost a few 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...
NASA is stuck in the past and does it consciously and voluntarily.
Or you don't need to craft a JWST with nail files anymore, but instead just lauch a swarm of mirrors to free float and emulate the whole thing. And if one mirror goes bad - just launch a new one for pennies (NASA pennies). Or if the whole project is nonviable somehow - no big deal, just launch next year a different architecture. Ok, not next year, but in like a few years. And not in three decades (LUVOIR anyone? hello? Is there anyone at NASA?), if on schedule, and forty years if not.
The list goes on. I get hedging risks and preserving institutional knowledge, sure. But not even discussing a different approach, which could be conducted in parallel, is very very bad.
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.
But the reason we kept throwing good money after bad is because the goal was never really about making a good launch system. It was all about sending money and creating stable long-term jobs in various states and districts, actively supported by the politicians representing those areas. So you had parts being built all over the place, in a way that just sends costs skyrocketing, but that's okay - because the rocket isn't the goal.
Of course the government itself is aware of this problem, much like fishermen are aware that overfishing is self destructive in the long-run, even if they are nonetheless individually motivated to do exactly that. So I think this was why the big push for commercializing space. And I think we'll ultimately see the exact same thing with deeper space missions and technologies. SpaceX's goal is Mars and I see no reason to think they will fail there. At that point, costs for various Martian missions - be they sample return, rovers, or whatever else - should be relatively negligible relative to today. Exactly as happened when we went from ferrying people to the ISS using the Space Shuttle, to when we started launching them on Falcon rockets.
Cynicism is a variety of compliance in advance. It creates the conditions it decries.
Obviously there are corrupt politicians. But also obviously there are politicians who actually want to advance the public interest. It is the job of voters to tell them apart and ensure only the latter become the custodians of state power.
There have certainly been a few exceptions, but they're few and far between - and tend to be because of special circumstance. For instance I think Bernie Sanders, before he tried to run for President, was a good guy. But that's because he's from Vermont, a state with a smaller population than El Paso, TX. Democracy works quite well with small populations, but not so well with with larger populations when the 'distance', speaking both metaphorically and literally, between voters and their representatives grows too far. It also tends to fail when societies become too divided.
As for the voter determining who's socially motivated and who's a silver tongued conman? I don't think that's at all realistic.
Also I think we need to start looking at smaller institutions and even private companies doing beyond LEO research soon - exactly because of the launch costs going down.
Yet at the same time, traditional big exploration players don't seem to be really able to make use of ti quick enough for some reason (politics ? inertia?).
Personally I couldn't give a shit about astronauts landing on the moon I want hundreds of drones flying around the solar system doing science but I'm the minority. At least ESA isn't doing much propaganda.
Launch is cheap for SpaceX. But they still charge high prices for everyone else. It's often estimated that a Falcon 9 launch costs SpaceX $15-20m, but they charge $60m+ to customers.
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.
The numbers above are notional, not literal. But you get the idea.
[dead]
I'm worried it's arguments like this that doomed MSR [0]. Why spend 11 billion to get a couple rocks back in 2040 when Starship will be sending astronauts in 2030? But now it seems the near term goals of the Starship program are changing. At this point, who knows when we'll send people to Mars?
> buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time
I don't know about you but I'm not hearing anyone say they've reserved Starship mass-to-Mars-and-back. You're right that we should rely on private industry more. The CLPS program is the most comparable example (although time will tell whether it's a good one). But for a mission with the risk tolerance of MSR, the CLPS model doesn't work, IMO.
And meanwhile the Chinese are planning on launching their sample return in 2028. They're gonna beat us by a decade.
[0] My thoughts here are partially from this great blog post: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/who-is-the-villain-in-mars...
We should aim for the long game. An insanely expensive one-time mission using disposable rockets to analyze rocks that we've already analyzed with rovers is probably not the best path.
Not sure I get the comparison.
Okay, okay, rather we're not getting humans back off of Mars anytime soon.
Landing is by far the easy part. MSR was partly a mission to see how hard it really is to get anything back into space from the Martian surface. If you can manage a pound, you can probably then manage 3 or so 180 pound humans and all their safety support.
Like, think of it. You somehow have to land a fully fueled rocket on freaking Mars. No site prep, near vacuum and no aero breaking, very expensive and nearly impossible second chance.
Fine fine, you just land the shell and then refuel on Mars with some form of automated fuel refinery on Mars. Like, if you have robots that can do that, you've ended capitalism already and have no need for humans in the first place.
Im not saying a human return mission is impossible, but it is just so very much harder than a Trillion dollar Apollo program lets us believe.
So what advantage, in the realm of all possibilities, would this give China that we should be seriously concerned about?
We have such bigger existential threats right now that my emotional response to the quoted text is an aggressive lack of concern.
Definitely haven't made a complete argument here, but those are my thoughts. I know there are more concrete, pressing issues out there. But we don't all have to save the world. We just have to do our part and be decent human beings.
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.
Not only are political officers making science decisions, but nasa lost its way in the depths of over engineered missions due to requiring a senator to be bribed by the quantity of home stage work.
If it doesn't happen then its of worse quality.
No need to. Mars delivers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/arts/who-owns-this-chunk-...
The website wasn't available anymore
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hpiuem/the_officia...
The Chang’e missions plan for this in 2030 and they have hit every target to date. While the US is currently targeting 2028, it isn't inconceivable that it can slip by two years.
China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.
More business in China though, tricky to prioritize since I'm doing any of this for the abundance of intimacy and the slavic people come with that, for me. I need to learn Mandarin and Russian.
at least Cantonese is no longer seriously a contender in my sphere. That was distracting
Chinese speak English. I mean, you only need to watch youtube videos here.
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.
And kicking people off of twitter and facebook for similar banned thoughts?
[dead]
> 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.
Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu.
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.
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.
[dead]
What worries me the most is that I can’t imagine students and citizens going to protest en masse on the streets against the war. They’re too busy to complain on X and Tiktok to do anything about it.
I don't think that option even exists. In my opinion the world order changed this year, the USA w/ it's trillions of dollars of GDP and huge military lost it's grip on the ME.
I think you missed the “pointless” part of the argument, such as it was.
By killing the anti-nuclear leadership of such country and proving their opponents points that only nukes could protect them from the USA...
It was called JCPOA but Israel didn't like it because it would've meant peace for the region. War _is_ the point for Israel at this point.
Further, the agreement allowed Iran to develop more advanced centrifuges. The kind which could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
Further, the agreement left substantial nuclear infrastructure and expertise intact. For example, Fordow was not dismantled and 1,044 IR-1 centrifuges remained there. Natanz also retained thousands of operating centrifuges.
In 2025, the IAEA concluded that Iran had failed to declare nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at Lavisan-Shian, Varamin, and Turquzabad, and could not determine the whereabouts of some nuclear material.
The JCPOA allowed Iran to significantly expand its military capabilities and strengthen the regime via economic sanction relief, the release of hundreds of billions of dollars of Iranian international assets, and normalisation of trade (most notably oil). Iran used this opportunity to consolidate power without any material commitment or action towards sustainable cessation of nuclear weapons research and capability.
One could argue that it was the best of all bad options on the table, but let us not pretend it was a good option. Iran has been funding death and terrorism all over the world for decades. Its stated goal is the annihilation of many Western nations. The treatment of its own people is beyond comprehension and description. It routinely practises the rape of virgin women before execution (for things like not dressing modestly, or protesting), so that these young women will end up in hell. If the world were just, the entire world would unite to invade Iran, remove the dictator class from power, and implement democracy.
Just to be crystal clear: none of what I have written states nor implies that Trump has handled this conflict well.
Sorry, but all you did was:
1. Showed them and the world that treaties with you are worth nothing
2. Showed them and the world, to gain the respect of the US, you need nukes. Decades of loyalty, treaties or good partner have been shown to be worth nothing, while being an authoritarian dictatorship and having nukes are respected.
3. Showed them and the world that having US bases on your soil is a liability and not a protection.
All in all if you were US president and your task was to destroy the US' standing in the world, there is not much more you could have done.
* 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
I feel like SpaceX does an amazing job of producing docos and media (constant professionally-commentated live streams etc) but I never seem to see much from NASA. Sad, really.
[deleted]
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.
[deleted]
We have Mars rocks at home.
> Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better
The Mars rocks at home.
The ability to manufacture in space, when the price to orbit is about 3000 $/kg can be very lucrative.
Just refuelling in orbit for long-range missions, with the fuel coming from the moon (aluminium-oxygen for exemple) would be a game-changer, and the ressources to make it happen are not that out of reach.
Congress awarded it $150 Million
so Vought or someone in the cabinet pocketed that and gave it $5 Million instead
They can't do anything with $5 Million, that's their point
That's one tomahawk missile
Imagine what NASA could have done with the $1000 MILLION PER DAY being spent on bombing Iran to no purpose or result
Nancy Grace only happened because it was a refurbished second spy telescope built but never launched by the NSA, basically a Hubble pointed at earth
HWO needs to be built from scratch because detecting non-light-emitting earth-sized planets is a technological miracle not even possible this decade at any price
It was meant for 2040 but now I won't live long enough to see it even if the next Congress re-funds it
That cancelled program became famous for leaving behind an already bought launcher that now will fly mass simulator
They should open NASA's version of a gofundme page. =3
[dead]
Excuse my French
Put another way, I’m pretty sick and tired of planing 30 year long missions, with all the money an engineering and human resources, for rocks.
It was almost certainly not going to tell us conclusively about past life on mars. And if it could, let humans collect it.
The next person who suggests an $11B mission for rocks should get smacked with a yardstick.
> Put another way, I’m pretty sick and tired of planing 30 year long missions, with all the money an engineering and human resources, for rocks.
The engineering and Human Resources involved are a feature, not a bug! That's how you keep knowledge around, people employed, and strategically important industries alive, even if they nominally do not have enough orders to survive. You can't just decide "let's launch a rocket" and do so quickly when it's critically important--those capabilities have to be tended to.
The US just recently learnt this the hard way when it turned out nobody knew how to build icebreakers anymore, and had to buy them from Finland.
> It was almost certainly not going to tell us conclusively about past life on mars. And if it could, let humans collect it.
Sending humans to Mars is mindbogglingly complicated, has a massive chance of death by one of a thousand exciting possibilities, and doesn't add anything to returning samples that a robot can't do cheaper, faster, and most importantly now.
Yes, at some point it might be worthwhile to send humans there, but there are a lot of challenges that have to be overcome before we are actually ready. All the while there are samples sitting around idle.
> The next person who suggests an $11B mission for rocks should get smacked with a yardstick.
I seriously hope the yardstick hitting en vogue right now will soon be displaced by civilised discussions again.
[deleted]
Yeah still looks like an overcomplicated project
Maybe that's why China can make it work
[dead]
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.
And I mean I agree, for that much money we should be doing missions to Europa instead.
... checks math ... Starship should have enough cargo capacity for this. One launch. We could put the whole senate up there. The house might take a couple launches unless we really pack 'em in. /s
So you are missing the fuel for the return trajectory, which they plan to make there IIRC. So add in situ resource utilization to your list.
Would take a lot of prep missions, and might not be worth the cost, but in theory it's doable. Curiosity massed 900 kg and Perseverance massed 1025 kg according to Wikipedia, so dropping a metric ton of supplies for the robot to assemble would, again in theory, be feasible. (In practice the equipment for landing the supply crates safely would take up a good chunk of the mass budget, but there should be something left over in the mass budget for the crates to contain).
Now, if someone does perfect a general-purpose, AI-driven robot, then yes, sending that robot on the Mars mission instead of a human would make a lot of sense. That's kind of, kind of, what we've done already with the rovers. But until such a general-purpose robot is actually created, human beings are still the most versatile, adaptable entities that could go to Mars.
That should start with, "There is no _known_..."
Unknown unknowns are why people who care about economics and power (governments) care about science.
Seriously.
The stupider you are, the more likely it is that there is something valuable that you don't know about.
But sophistry on that level doesn't actually change the minimal economic value of putting people on Mars.
Well it turned out to be the start of something very important.
[deleted]
China in the current era is doing sample returns from the Moon, building horizontal skyscrapers, hosting a 'robotic olympics' where they're breaking all sorts of human records in quite impressive looking ways [1], and much more. And now just casually blowing by the US in space capability? To say nothing of it coming scarcely more than a decade after we banned them from the ISS [2] for fear they'd still all our super secret space sauce? That's going to do crazy good things for the morale, mindset, and broader unity of a society.
Basically a good reason to do cool things is to do cool things. I think one quantifiable result of this sort of stuff is that now we live in a society where most American kids want to be YouTubers, while most Chinese kids want to be astronauts. [3] It's not hard to see how that sort of upbringing is going to shape the future generations of a society.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJyktujxO7I
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
[3] - https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-dream-of-being...
Notice how the US space interest rapidly dried up with the death of the Soviet Union. I’m not sure if China really motivates the same thing because it’s an authoritarian semi-capitalist society - it’s the communist “people owning the means of production” that gets capitalists really worried.
That alone is a separate multibillion dollar program just to do that.
Sounds like they blew it. What a shame.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/23/world/asia/23...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-c...
> A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body. Ownership of objects launched into outer space, including objects landed or constructed on a celestial body, and of their component parts, is not affected by their presence in outer space or on a celestial body or by their return to the Earth. Such objects or component parts found beyond the limits of the State Party to the Treaty on whose registry they are carried shall be returned to that State Party, which shall, upon request, furnish identifying data prior to their return.
It is clear, then, that the sample containers are still the property of the US, and that if the Chinese brought them back to Earth, they would be required to give them to the US.
[1] https://www.unoosa.org/unoosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/o...
[dead]
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.
We are not in a hurry now, because we already won that race many decades ago!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
President Donald J. TRUMP"
President Donald J Trump
https://thegoodshirts.com/products/hello-i-am-fleeing-the-am...
I am sure this is nothing to be concerned about whatsoever.
Unfortunately all across the West we see a new desire for fascism over individualism and liberty.
They absolutely enforce ideological positions in opposition to science, and very aggressively so.
There is no waffle room on this.
> she had reported security flaws in Tencent’s Sogou keyboard drivers to Western and transnational media.
ok, you got me, if by "science" you mean something completely different than academic research.
I can understand why westerners are uncomfortable with this. I can't find it in myself to care.
These are smart people, they’re not going to make major life decisions based on simplistic takes from political opportunists.
As we dismantle those components via xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, funding cuts, and so on, trends will change. Already I see a substantial uptick in my PhD/Academic friends moving to Europe as we cede our historic advantages.
If, in say 15 years, China provides better schools, or better economic returns, or (perhaps unlikely) better independence, or all 3, then scientists will go there.
A reserve currency is just a currency that central banks and other important institutions hold in "reserve". The Euro is a reserve currency, as is the Yen, Pound, and others. The American dollar is the primary one, and that usage will ebb and flow over time, but it's arguable that no longer being the primary one is a good thing as it will make American exports more competitive among other things. I don't think I agree but folks have very reasonable and competing takes on this.
The world also isn't going to adopt a Chinese currency as a reserve currency either because China would have to make liberalizing economic reforms which would run counter to the control that the CCP has over the country (why people keep forgetting that China is run by an authoritarian group is beyond me but whatever) and so they won't make those reforms and the world just won't adopt that currency.
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 alone is a separate multibillion dollar program just to do that.
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.
[dead]
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...
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.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...
They were the first to orbit, after all.
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.
Boomers and Silents (and, to a lesser and understandable extent re: Challenger, Gen X) should be ashamed, though.
I get harangued every time I point the finger, but for Pete's sake, Millennials didn't do this. Millennials wanted to go to Space Camp. It has to be SOMEONE'S fault. SOMEONE take responsibility.
[dead]
Stop rubber stamping stupidity like RFK, pass a war powers resolution, and reign in the vengeance based tariffs.
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.
[dead]
"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.
Iran basically holds global oil supplies in a chokehold, and should the US choose to withdraw unconditionally today, Iran would still collect tariffs on all ships passing the strait, and be free to develop nuclear weapons.
Who's going to stop them ? Any attack would simply further constrain oil supplies, with increased costs as a direct consequence.
Regardless of the outcome, global oil prices have taken a permanent hike up. They'll likely drop quite a bit if/when the war ends, and Iran (or allies) stops bombing Saudi oil pipes, and likely also when the Ukraine/Russia war ends, where Russia can alleviate some of the pressure on asia.
If nothing else, its at least driving adoption of the electrification of the western society, and I'm seeing heat pumps and EVs selling at an increased pace. That obviously doesn't help if your electrical grid is also fossil fuel based, but there are also major renewable energy plants being commissioned.
Trying to keep yourself dry with a newspaper over your head in a hurricane: pointless.
Wait until you find out that the helicopter carried a small piece of fabric from the wing of the 1903 Wright Flyer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Wright_Brother...
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.
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.
[dead]
Everyone suffered under people owning the means of production, not just the capitalists.
* most people use communism as short hand for central planning which IMHO was the major economic problem that caused economically slow growth and lack of goods. combined with the authoritarian repression that caused a different kind of suffering. But neither of those is required by a communist political movement.
It’s important to remember that most movements and experiments fail, same reason countries and companies also fail. A lot of them failed due to mismanagement, idealogical disputes, children not sticking around (ie no new members) etc. building sustainable communities is hard and not a unique problem for communes.
btw these are all the same reasons open source projects fail yet we wouldn’t call open source a failure despite it having all the same problems and looking more like communism than capitalism.
Also you’re overstating the failure rate. Amana Society, Inc is a cooperative structure that evolved from a commune. REI is also a cooperative corporate structure although not quite like a commune. So clearly there’s a path to evolve to that’s sustainable and does work and looks quite a bit different from capitalism. And there’s a difference between communal living and cooperative commercial entity which is good to separate.
The suppression I'm talking about is the CCP rejecting that gay people exist in fact, and censoring anyone that dares to be too visibly gay.
The Space Race was a unique and limited phase coming out of the atomic age when public support for scientific research was at an all time high. With the Kennedy and Johnson administrations willing to fund programs left and right to improve education and research with long term aims. The Soviets were also at the apogee of their scientific capability, and Khrushchev did great PR for all their achievements which unnerved Americans and provided the Cold War justification for new domestic programs.
Once the Brezhnev age of stagnation and lopsided USSR military spending set in, the new Cold War 2.0 became about numbers of delivery vehicles and NATO conventional deterrence, not space and science. By then the US had clear technological dominance that seemed insurmountable in the new world of microchips and computers in which the Soviets couldn't compete. Which allowed Reagan to boost military budgets and deficit spending while simultaneously beginning the Republican "starve the beast" strategy to cut taxes and non-military domestic programs.
All of this is to point out that Cold War = Space Race/Apollo is looking back with rose colored glasses. We could just as easily see federal space and science spending getting further slashed every year while churning out warheads, delivery vehicles and conventional arms ever faster (and seems more likely based on late Cold War trends).
Space? That was excellent marketing.
I am saying that most Americans would agree that these types of grants go directly against their mission statement.
The mission statement is not limited to doing science, which is the misrepresentation you tried to make.
[deleted]
[deleted]
REI is not a commune at all. Neither is the Amana Society.
Communes have a 100% failure rate.
Twin Oaks Community in Virginia has been running for 60 years now and does income sharing between the residents.
The Bruderhof Communities have been running for a century now.
And my point regarding REI and Amana is not that they’re communes but that they’re non-capitalist organizations. If those models took any kind of serious hold at a government level, they’d be fought tooth and nail just like communes.
The Twin Oaks community has a population of 100 and annual turnover of 20%. That's pretty high. I suspect Twin Oaks' only success is being able to constantly recruit new members and get them to turn over their assets to the commune. Then they get disenchanted with communism and leave.
The Bruderhof communities average around 120 people. I couldn't find any statistics on how long people stay in them.
Congratulations, 2 communes out of 20,000 have survived! It still rounds to a 100% failure rate.
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-...
Your twin oaks assessment is also off. New members don’t turn over their assets - you keep your preexisting assets. You are forbidden from spending those preexisting assets while a member. So I don’t think it’s fair to claim it’s sustained by constantly tricking new members into turning over assets.
> So I don’t think it’s fair to claim it’s sustained by constantly tricking new members into turning over assets.
Thanks for the correction.
NGOs and non-profits have only a 30% failure rate at 10 years supposedly.
So by the mark of survival rate you’re using we should be actually looking to NGOs and non-profits.
Obviously that would be silly and I’m not arguing that communism where everyone earns the same is a workable system at scale. It’s not for obvious reasons.
But the only options aren’t wild extremes. You could imagine a market economy with a strong social safety net. You could imagine strong unions and worker protections. You could imagine the responsibility of the company executives being the employees and customers over the shareholders. You could imagine that businesses over a certain size get government inspectors and ombudsman automatically assigned to check if there’s any malfeasance going on. There could be stricter laws around private market funds entering the political system. You could imagine national wealth funds for tech like Norway has for natural resources. Etc etc etc. our current capitalist system in the US is a choice and there’s no reason it needs to be set up the way it is from a sustainability perspective. Indeed, by every conceivable evidence the country is treating itself apart.
And bringing us back on topic, you could imagine scientists creating the priorities and funding allocations for science projects without having to justify it to the politicians and military industrial complex.
You could envision all kinds of things. That doesn't mean they'll work.
The free market US has done much better environmentally than socialist countries.
Anyone wanting research funding is going to have to justify it, regardless of the system that is set up. Just imagine you set aside $1 billion and opened it up to anybody with a research idea and no vetting of their ideas. The money will disappear in a moment, and you'll get zero research results.