Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society reports on the latest budget request from the President, including a puzzling – or sad – reduction in funding:
The President’s Budget Request (PBR) for NASA’s next fiscal year was released on 10 February. And while the $3 billion increase for the lunar return effort garnered headlines, the PBR touches every program within NASA’s expansive portfolio, including planetary science, an area of particular interest to The Planetary Society.
Overall, NASA’s Planetary Science Division fares well in the FY 2021 budget request, with a few significant caveats. The promised start of a planetary defense mission to find and characterize hazardous near-Earth objects failed to materialize in the proposal. And 2 productive Mars missions—Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) and Mars Odyssey—face steep cuts that would dramatically reduce the quantity and quality of science data returned by the rover and functionally end the Odyssey mission.
The Mars Science Laboratory is the Curiosity rover. Landing on Mars on August 6, 2012, it has been exploring continuously since, and carries, according to its Wikipedia page, 14 instruments.
Mars Odyssey is a Martian orbiter that reached Mars and achieved orbit on October 24, 2001; at nearly 19 years of service, it is the oldest Martian vessel. It studies Mars for water resources, its radiation environment, and its geology. At least one of its experiments has terminated due to damage from the environment.
Here’s the thing. Sure, these are older missions. However, getting to Mars is a chancy business, so when a mission successfully reaches the target, it should be leveraged for every bit of scientific data that can be wrung out of it before the harsh environment knocks it down.
In other words, this is an investment. If the current Administration is going to characterize itself as being run by businessmen, well, they’d better try to pretend they know what that means. Throwing away a beach head that cannot be easily reacquired once our forces have left, if I may employ a military metaphor, isn’t what a good businessman does.
Yeah, it’s great that other research areas are getting increased funding, but how about these missions that are already there and are cheap to run? That’s economizing, even if you have to increase the NASA budget to cover those other targets, politically motivated or not.
This won’t become a political football – NASA’s not that important to the American future or psyche in the current political climate. But it does symbolize the foolishness that pervades this Administration.
