Red Planet meets red ink: budget ax could chop two NASA Mars missions

“The fist things to go are the 'nice to haves,' things that won't result in lots of jobs being cut,” says Keith Cowing, editor of the website NASAWatch. For instance, cutting the James Web Space Telescope at this point would cost jobs, while delaying beyond its projected 2018 launch would add costs to an already expensive observatory. That project remains on the books.

On the other hand, the two Mars missions, which he dubs “gold plated,” aren't yet far enough along to yield similar losses if canceled, he suggests. The missions are likely scrapped.

At the same time, some of the financial challenges are of the agency's own making – underestimating costs initially, then having to cope with the overruns.

Some of the overruns come from trying to make quantum leaps in design and having to adjust to the "unknown unknowns," aerospace specialists have observed. But not everyone is convinced that progress needs to come via quantum leaps.

McCurdy notes that the cost of Mars missions has grown significantly since 1996, when NASA landed its first rover, Sojourner Truth, on the red planet. This mission was dubbed Mars Pathfinder for a reason, he explains. At a cost of about $265 million, the mission was to be the first of a series of inexpensive landers that then-NASA administrator Daniel Goldin suggested could be launched quickly and cheaply to Mars. Break up the research into small chunks, the logic went, and the failure of one or two wouldn't throw the exploration program off stride.

NASA then bought two very successful, long-lived rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, for less that $1 billion. Original plans called for one, but like the Mars Viking program in the 1970s, NASA ordered up two to ensure that at least one would succeed. The cost of a second rover was seen as manageable.

Now, the latest rover – expected to arrive on Mars in August – carries a more robust price tag of $2.5 billion. And it will use a landing technique necessitated by its large size but which has never been fully tested as a system.

By some estimates, it overshot its original budget by about 30 percent. NASA delayed its initial 2009 launch to allow time for additional testing.

Warnings in the early 1990s that a sequence of big ticket missions – especially to one destination – was likely to be financially unsustainable are coming true, McCurdy says.

Meanwhile, competition for NASA's limited space-science pot is heating up.

For instance, researchers are developing a mission concept that would set an instrumented raft to drift on one of Titan's hydrocarbon lakes to analyze the planet's chemistry and perhaps hunt for evidence of life there. The mission's cost must be held to around $400 million.

“That's a real bargain,” McCurdy says. “Juxtapose that against another Mars Science Laboratory or a Mars sample return, and it's not hard to choose which one you would do, especially when you've got astrobiologists saying the chances of finding life are equal on Mars, Europa, and Titan.”

Previous

1 | 2