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.
This article only obliquely mentions in the last paragraphs, but there's a parallel Chinese program that recently returned 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...
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.
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.
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:
Apollo program was canceled during Nixon's presidency while the Cold War was very much still active (though slowing down little from detente). A few years later Reagan won on a platform of re-accelerating the Cold War with swelling military budgets and deficit spending, but without commiserate increases to space exploration and science.
The Space Race was a unique and limited phase during a time coming out of the atomic age where 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 where 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).
President Nixon cancelled NASA manned deep space exploration programs due to rising costs from the Space Shuttle program and the Vietnam War. It wasn't politically sustainable to keep funding everything. With the benefit of hindsight one could argue that we should have withdrawn sooner from Vietnam and cancelled the Space Shuttle program.
>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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
She was forced to stop posting her content after a Vice article outed her as bisexual, so the authorities used their blanket decency law to drag her in for an interrogation and guidance session, effectively ending her channel.
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.
US has/had the best schools in the world.
US provides/provided remarkable academic independence (tenure, etc).
US provides/provided the best expected economic return to foreign scientists.
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.
China is labeled an authoritarian regime while the US is labeled a liberal democracy, are you saying the behavioural standard for a liberal democracy is the behaviour of an authoritarian regime?
Oh, no! How did it happen that a country founded by religious fanatics and capitalism supporters (and who literally killed almost all natives) is run by religious nut jobs and billionaire sociopaths?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Is it that since the person didn’t find the page they were looking for, they must be a Chinese plant?
It's a bit of a poor example as well, because there was a long time when people were importing Australian baby formula into China because they didn't trust the food safety standards there.
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'
Big Bread vs Big Cow. Both are needed for pizza so maybe we can swap the pyramid for a rectangular "office tower" shape and call it a truce. Good opportunity for Big Pizza.
There's so much fad diet marketing and propaganda out there, but the Mediterranean diet is one of the few that's actually backed by a decent amount of real scientific research as being healthy for most people.
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.
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.
I think the defining moment is that IF China gets man back to the moon before the US, that will be the moment when it becomes too hard to ignore. That is the new political high ground.
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.
"Congratulations to China! They were the second nation to land on the Moon, just a few decades after the greatest nation in history landed there first, the United States of America.
We are not in a hurry now, because we already won that race many decades ago!
The Fake News Media is reporting that NASA completely lost the Moon race to China. A total disaster! Under my Administration, Space Force is winning BIG. Now, Beijing is supposedly up there doing who knows what. Fake flags, very low quality! The moon is ours, and Mars too (which the Moon is part of!). MAKE AMERICA SPACE AGAIN!
I think that would just end in people who had nothing to do with Apollo (having been children or born after) claiming that it didn't matter because America had been there decades ago, rather than looking inwards and considering what it says to have lost the means to go back.
Mandarin is high on my list, but its almost all for business and the people wouldn't be interested in me (different melanin). Whereas socially our Ukrainian and Russian refugees are way more interested in me, and there's potentially some business anyway.
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
knowing what I know about the way sceptical doctors were threatened during covid, the ars article confirms the covid zealots still have a flock. ars was over when conde nast bought them, this proves it.
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
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.
Not true - only ten samples were dropped off at a “depot” close to each other. The rest are on-board Perseverance and can be picked up all at once, which was always the primary plan.
Interesting question. Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty [1] states:
> 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.
They should do that anyways, plus their own, and then they can be like, “when America couldn’t afford it, we stepped in for them because were good people” and it would be strictly a PR win. As long as America didn’t just destroy the sample out of spite later, they could also act nicely and maybe we’re could all get along better.
Right - because the best engineering is done in a high stakes big bang of upmost complexity rather than iterative improvement?
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.
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.
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.
Whoa... TIL the rover had a tissue-box-sized helicopter (!!) on it! (and apparently the rotors must spin several times faster than a helicopter on earth due to Mars's sparse atmosphere). That's incredible.
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.
There was extreme media coverage of the helicopter, live streams, twitter accounts, and scientists talking every day in media about if they could get another flight out of the copter. It was a huge media moment
The fascinating thing is that it wasn't a primary part of the mission but got lots of excitement. For me it was the thing that it features many off-the shelf parts from smartphones, uses linux and other open source software and it beat the expectations on how long it will service - Planned ~30 days with 5 flights and it did almost 3 years with 72 flights. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/after-three-years-on-mars-...
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.
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.
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?
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.
You're right I was forgetting the Falcon Heavy. But it's certainly not cheap when the government is footing the bill. The Nancy Grace Roman launch cost NASA $255m, far above SpaceX's prices for even an expendable GTO launch.
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.
They issued statements like that... aaand then built a copy of the rover for the same cost as the original one. And it only took them 10 years to do this :)
Yeah, build-to-print at the small scale of space missions never really works in practice because requirements always change and small changes in requirements tend to have big design impacts.
Not just mass optimization either. Intense effort and cost are expended through verification because a single payload simply must work. But using commodity hardware with reduced verification effort, launching many, and tolerating some amount of attrition has resulted in reduced costs for Starlink.
Maybe if we launched 30 Starships carrying 30 rovers each. With only 30 units, the prices would likely be similar to current commercial satellites, which are already built on standardized platforms.
I'd go even more radically low cost, and kit the first lander out with wifi, and a half dozen each of every commercially available robot dog, humanoid, and wheeled or tracked robot of any interest. Rumble in the Mars Robodome. Bit of publicity for the existing manufacturers who may be willing to pay for the privilege, and who will undoubtedly learn valuable things about how their designs fail and can be improved. And you figure out in one stroke if there's a COTS platform you can buy for $30k that gets you 80% of what you need. If any of them function for any period of time, you use them to prepare the space for future landings. Rinse, repeat. After a few iterations, you have a half dozen manufacturers with commercially produced platforms with a few strategic modifications to which you can bolt your science instruments.
All I can think about now is a bunch of e-waste littering Mars. At some point, other visitors will show up to investigate Mars and come to the conclusion that the Earthlings are just so trashy their trash even started filling another planet.
The surface of mars is roughly the size of Earth's dry landmass. They'd have to spend quite a lot of effort looking for it to find it. And at that point it'd probably look more like a treasure trove of useful thermoplastics, refined metals, magnets, and other useful things otherwise difficult or expensive to source on Mars directly.
Testing of using commodity parts was part of the Mars helicopter and it worked well enough that making many of them seems plausible. I'd love to see multiple drones flying faster/further than rovers. Just not really sure what instruments would make them useful.
That's another great example. And ridesharing on the mission allowed them to prove it very inexpensively and with much lower risk than a dedicated mission.
I think if they had a big f-ing rocket at their disposal and could bundle a couple dozen of them MIRV style there would be no political downside if a bunch went splat so long as a bunch didn't
"look guys 9/24 of the rovers are transmitting back, great success"
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.
I won't find it now, but I distinctly remember watching a video about some big NASA event a few years back but when Starship Booster (first stage) had been flying already. Basically none one at the event even considered switching paradigm from ultra custom probes and landers built from unobtainium and unicorn blood in favor of the way cheaper and way less robust, almost mass market hardware, to be launched once every 10 months instead of every 10 years on a regular basis. (PS: I know all the laundry list of arguments against this approach, and they are not that convincing at NASA scale). And I won't even talk about Space Disgrace System for manned flight.
NASA is stuck in the past and does it consciously and voluntarily.
... 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
We just need to setup a fake corporate sponsor meet and greet. We camouflage Ship to look like a hotel ball room, with a door for "private meetings" that leads to the cargo bay.
To my understanding people at NASA and people approving budgets like novel stuff. What’s the point of 100 identical rovers on mars? For politician - good publicity only for first 5 rovers, then it is only routine. For engineers, challenge of designing and constructing new cutting edge stuff is interesting and fulfilling, constructing 50th clone is boring. (If now you give money to top talent to do cutting edge, then after 5years you will have pool of talented people; might benefit next mission or some other company)
The point is that, while the first of them has 2 MPx cameras with crappy optics, the fifth one has 50 MPx cameras with automagic everything, and the tenths one has damn light stacking array of top tier cameras and on board AI to colour correct on the fly or some other magic stuff. And at the same time battery increases x10 times while losing half of the wight and thermal deficiencies, CPUs get better and more redundant, better memory, wheels are getting fixed in 1 year instead of 10 and the list goes on.
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.
Outside of specifics like the space shuttle program, launch costs have never been that big of a factor. Like 5-15% of a program's cost. If your satellite or rover costs billions to build and another billion to run for a decade, saving a hundred million (or even a couple hundred million) isn't that much of a game changer
A practical issue with government spending is that it's self motivated. Politicians' only job is to get elected. And one big way to do that is by ensuring that money goes to your district, creating jobs and opportunities. This is how you get things like the SLS, nicknamed the Senate Launch System. It was a tremendous waste of money, spending on the order of decades to build a launch system that was arguably obsoleted years before it completed, and will in any case be far too expensive to ever regularly use.
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.
Politics, especially in its modern form, does not incentivize nor reward those who would put the public interest ahead of their own political careers. On the contrary it effectively prunes the overwhelming majority of these people out of office long before they get anywhere near the higher levels of office.
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.
One issue is definitely that there is no tangible (economical) upside to anything other than low earth launches and now maybe the moon, and the scientific exploration, while technically cheaper now, is still expensive - and requires a lot of public funding, which hinges on public interest. I don't think the general public is still as enthusiastic about space exploration anymore, people are far more skeptical about the upside given all the problem we have down here that occupy their minds constantly.
Yep notice that all the space stuff going on is about commerce not science.
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.
America is being run by somebody who doesn't understand the value of science, so it is seen as a waste of money and worse, systematically destroyed. The problem is that the result won't become apparent for about ten years at which point Americans will be asking why everyone else is making money from science and technology breakthroughs and they're getting poorer.
It is definitely picking up - you if look at the list of planned launches to the Moon for example, there are quite a few things launching in the next 12 months.
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?).
One reason is that launch is not as cheap as often stated.
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.
Would it make sense to send better robotic analyzers there than to bring the samples back here? Fighting gravity and kilometers involves spending many billions on return; a lesser amount could be spent on surface activities.
The issue is the size of some of these analysers. For instance, a synchrotron, which is required to non-destructively generate nanometer-scale 3d images of the samples are 3-4 times the size of a football stadium
We would need to move people and cargo back and forth eventually, so best to get started on that ASAP. Not to mention sample return has been done from the Moon & asteroid to great success, its a proven concept on how to get the most from the samples.
Don't mince words. Say it with your chest. The world state is being ruined by authoritarianism appeal to small-minded people's worst basal instincts, lack op apathy, and lack of curiosity. And unchecked capitalism, but I really shouldn't even need that 'unchecked' qualifier.
Science should stand above politics . Europe and Germany are crazy to develop a great x-ray satellite „eRosita“ together with Russia , shoot it in space , performs great, but then stop operating it because of politics . It is tax paid , so who decides ?
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...
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?
The point of exploiting ressources in space is not to bring them back to earth (to the ground, specifically), but to use them in space.
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.
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 and 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.
The way we spend military budget is inefficient yet, Americans grew in 90s not to say eu people tend to believe we live in the rosy world of friendly people , despite countries like North Korea , Iran , Russia , and even China to a certain extent.
You're missing the forest for the trees. It's not about "rocks", but the science retrieving those rocks enables.
> 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.
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.
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?
Cool idea! However I think the Mars to Phobos sample move would be nearly as difficult as MSR. The hard parts of MSR were landing, sample collection, ascent from Mars and rendezvous with the return orbiter. The only thing this would change would be the last part, which would still be a rendezvous, just not necessarily a synchronous rendezvous. It could be useful for solving some transfer window timing problems though. And it would be awesome.
I was hoping that MME would have solved the phobos->orbiter part :-); so then you just have to get mars->phobos - you don't have to get a rendezvous for that - you just have to land intact on phobos. You can try this a few times until you manage it; only once it's sitting on Phobos do you send the equivalent of MME to collect it.
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 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
it's cancelled via funding via some illegal devious trick since they can't nuke it entirely via the executive
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Portugal was the first to find a direct sea route to India and had a 100 year head start with the trade route but they still got mogged by the Dutch East India Co in terms of cargo tonnage shipped.
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.
That is literally the only reason anyone has invested in outer space. Even scientific missions are done with a dual national defense purpose. Think of it like PR whitewashing of the military and geopolitical reasons that motivate funding.
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.
Not that I have a solution, but isn’t that kind of disappointing? Why don’t we just do it directly, rather than only as a side effect of needless conflicts?
People suffered under the totalitarian regime and corruption. The central planning was also a problem in terms of making sure that goods production could meet what people needed. China’s semi-capitalist system with the authoritarian government stepping in when the companies don’t cooperate is an attempt to adapt to retaining communism while letting go of central planning. And this system is acceptable by western capitalists. This is a criticism of the West and its adherence to capitalism rather than liberal ideas, not an endorsement of “communism”*
* 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.
There have been 20,000 voluntary communes in the US. They all failed. Communism doesn't work, whether it is forcible or voluntary. No commune or centrally planned economy has ever managed to feed itself. Hence the suffering.
In Israel about 74/270 are still communal with the rest having privatized, but they’re still communal living arrangements.
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.
Not sure where this claim comes from. AFAIK Kibbutzes are financially independent from the state. Are you perhaps confusing the early days when they were getting set up vs the situation today? Or are you talking about the contentious settlements?
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.
All the sources I’ve found say most became privatized. Can’t find a single source claiming all. Where are you getting this claim? The numbers I’ve found are that 10-15% are still communal.
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 where are these 20,000 communes that are not privatized? Do you think that 100 people in a commune with massive turnover shows that communism works in a country of 350,000,000?
> So I don’t think it’s fair to claim it’s sustained by constantly tricking new members into turning over assets.
Small business ventures have a 65% failure rate after 10 years. Tech startups and mining are up at around 75%. I wouldn’t say that capitalist companies do all that much better.
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're trying to compare 2 tiny communes to 36 million businesses.
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.
That's a valid response, and I think it gets at the core of why we do planetary science. There are no military or economic applications of knowing what Martian soil is made out of, or why it lost its atmosphere, or whether life evolved there too. So why do both the US and China fund these missions at all? And does it matter if China returns samples first?
First, I would say that in the process of answering these questions, we develop technologies that often have military or economic benefits (technology transfer). There's something about trying to solve problems humanity has not faced before that causes this. We talk a lot about solution spaces, but problem spaces are maybe more important!
Second, there are intangible benefits to answering these questions, which accrue to those who answer them, but also to all of humanity. Prestige, soft power, research expertise, for the one who answers them. And for all of humanity, we gain perspective, awe, wonder, togetherness, curiosity, joy, a whole suite of feelings.
If China discovers life on Mars first, which is absolutely a possibility, would we even bother with being second? I think it's too optimistic to assume it's inevitable that we will do a Mars sample return mission. And if we don't, we'd miss out on all the technology transfer benefits. Being in a race is very motivating.
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.
> There are no military or economic applications of knowing what Martian soil is made out of, or why it lost its atmosphere, or whether life evolved there too.
That should start with, "There is no _known_..."
Unknown unknowns are why people who care about economics and power (governments) care about science.
They put him on the Beagle to have dinner with the captain so that the captain wouldn't go mad. The captain himself was the one who went looking for a dinner companion.
Also, Darwin had to pay his own way (with his father's money) as a civilian passenger and received no salary for the trip.
Think of all of the science that goes into firing and controlling a precision guided missile. How much of that technology was created for military purposes.
One huge benefit that can't be overstated is the perception that we can still do great things as a society. Contrary to what many might think the program to put a man on the Moon wasn't particularly popular in the 60s. Yet when we landed on the Moon very near to 100% of households were watching the broadcast of it on television, and that achievement set the stage for what was possible - which was anything. And generally it's going to make you proud to be an American.
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.
It’s totally feasible that starship wouldn’t need to rely on humans to get the rock - a scouting mission to mars with starship could likely use robotics to grab a few rocks, sent years ahead of humans. The only really technical hurdle between then and now is proving starship orbital capability (this month), recovery and relaunch from mars, refueling, some robots.
Yall, we're not putting humans on Mars anytime soon.
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.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3
It's not as if there's no Mars sample retrieval, it's just that NASA has given up being the one to do it.
No need to. Mars delivers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/arts/who-owns-this-chunk-...
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...
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.
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.
So things like curing AIDS don't count?
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-...
The Space Race was a unique and limited phase during a time coming out of the atomic age where 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 where 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).
What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.? Is America ascending or declining?
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.
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.
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.
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.
China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately all across the West we see a new desire for fascism over individualism and liberty.
The website wasn't available anymore
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hpiuem/the_officia...
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.
Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu.
> 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.
And kicking people off of twitter and facebook for similar banned thoughts?
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.
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
Chinese speak English. I mean, you only need to watch youtube videos here.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
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...
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
* 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.
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...
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.
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)
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 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.
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
When launching large masses to high energies gets cheaper, payloads have a chance to get cheaper, too.
HN is social media. And is full of this brand of pessimism already.
"look guys 9/24 of the rovers are transmitting back, great success"
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.
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.
NASA is stuck in the past and does it consciously and voluntarily.
... 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
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.
The numbers above are notional, not literal. But you get the idea.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
[1] https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/beo
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCgC1yA7_w
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?
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.
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 and Memorial To That Loser That Got Assassinated.
Put another way, I’m pretty sick and tired of planing 30 year long missions for rocks.
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.
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
Yeah still looks like an overcomplicated project
Maybe that's why China can make it work
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
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
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
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...
I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
REI is not a commune at all. Neither is the Amana Society.
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%. I suppose people don't find communism that appealing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, Darwin had to pay his own way (with his father's money) as a civilian passenger and received no salary for the trip.
So "the British" didn't put Darwin on the Beagle.
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...
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.
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.