NASA excels at bold projects. Consider the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is rewriting cosmology and revealing profound insights into stellar evolution, along with precious views of our own solar system. Although JWST was notoriously over budget and delayed by a decade, who among us now would dare say that its $10-billion investment was not worth the cost and the wait?
But NASA’s latest big-ticket science project, the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, might not face such a happily-ever-after scenario. Even if it succeeds in bringing pieces of Mars back to Earth, it may do so by siphoning funds from other planetary science projects and scuttling the space agency’s well-laid plans for further exploration of the solar system.
Worse, if left underfunded during its current stage of development, MSR could face even longer delays and higher costs, the very cause of JSWT’s delay. This would stifle exploration of the Red Planet until the late 2030s.
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