Huge cost overruns. Important dates are getting in the way. Problems of exceptional difficulty, and a decade’s worth of technological progress contingent upon solving them.
That’s the latest position of Mars Sample Return, the idealistic yet imperiled NASA vision whose quickly ballooning expenditure has  , price jobs , at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and drawn , threats of cancellation , from politicians.
But not all that long before, those similar dire situations described the James Webb Space Telescope, the founding infrared reach that , launched , on Christmas Day 2021.
The largest space telescope has so far demonstrated both NASA’s academic and marketing success. The spacecraft’s performance has surpassed all expectations, mature project professor Jane Rigby said at a , meeting , lately.
Its primary pictures were so passionately anticipated that the White House scooped NASA’s news, releasing a , dazzling view , of hundreds of stars the day before the space agency shared the first , shipment of photos. Since then, dozens of experts have submitted applications for study time.
Rigby told the council for astronomy and astrophysics that” the world has been cheering for this telescope’s success.”
Yet in the decades before release, the success and admiration Webb today enjoys was far from guaranteed.
The camera cost , half as much , as originally anticipated and launched seven decades behind its unique schedule. Some members of Congress at one stage tried to , take funding , from the venture. Yet the book Character referred to it , at the time , as the “telescope that ate science”.
After a thorough examination of the program’s requirements and flaws, NASA was able to move the troubled walk about. Followers of Mars Sample Return are optimistic that the goal will move in the same direction.
” A lot of great scientific may come out of” Mars Sample Return, said , Garth Illingworth, an astrophysicist professor at UC Santa Cruz and former assistant director of the job that is now the James Webb Space Telescope. ” But they’ve got to get genuine as to how to manage this”.
Last year was a turmoil level for Mars Sample Return, whose purpose is to collect stones from the Red Planet ‘s , Jezero crater , and bring them back to Earth for review.
In July, the U. S. Senate presented NASA with an ultimatum , in its proposed resources: Either provide a schedule for completing the quest within the$ 5.3 billion budgeted, or chance withdrawal. A sobering , independent review , found in September that there was “near no possibility” of Mars Sample Return making its proposed 2028 launch day, and” no credible” way to fulfill the vision within its current budget. This month, NASA is expected to respond to that report.
When it reached a similar crossroads in 2010, the James Webb Space Telescope was further along in its development journey six years after construction started. The U.S. House of Representatives proposed no funding for the telescope in its proposed budget, which would have ended the project if the Senate had ratified it due to the ballooning budget and persistent delays in the launch date.
In a statement, lawmakers castigated , the mission , as “billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management”, foreshadowing the criticisms that would be leveled at Mars Sample Return more than a decade later.
To forestall cancellation, Sen. Barbara Mikulski ( D- Md. ) ordered an independent evaluation of the project, which was being built in her state.
The board determined that Webb’s problems stemmed from a , “badly flawed”  , initial budget. The evaluators came to the conclusion that all the technical expertise required to finish this ambitious project was there. However, it would be nearly impossible to accomplish it with the amount of money available at this time.
Illingworth remembered that review when he read the Mars Sample Return , assessment, which offered a similarly stark conclusion.
” Some of the words are very familiar”, he said with a chuckle.
Illingworth served as the deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which later became the James Webb Space Telescope, when the Mikulski review was released in 2010.
He was understanding of the difficulties managers of Mars Sample Returns, but he was disappointed that James Webb’s hard-earned lessons had apparently vanished so quickly, especially the importance of having a start-up realistic budget.
Very smart people with proven track records of carrying out difficult tasks manage NASA missions. How do they continue to be sucked up by something so terrestrially uninteresting as budgeting?
The issue is that the models you have as a cost estimator, and they have very complex proprietary software models that attempt to understand these kinds of things, are all based on events that have occurred in the past tense, according to Casey Dreier, the Planetary Society’s chief of space policy.
” By definition, when you’re trying something completely new, it’s very hard to estimate in advance how much something unprecedented will cost”, Dreier said. ” That happened for Apollo, that happened for the space shuttle, it happened for James Webb, and it’s happening now for Mars Sample Return”.
Mars Sample Return also faces some mission-specific difficulties that Webb did n’t have to deal with. For one, it’s happening at the same time as , Artemis, NASA’s wildly expensive mission to return people to the moon.
Expected to cost$ 93 billion through 2025, Artemis got , a 27 % increase , in its budget over the previous year, while Mars Sample Return’s guaranteed funding is 63 % less than last year’s spend.
And while NASA’s ambitions are growing, its funding from Congress, adjusted for inflation, has  , been essentially flat , for decades. There is therefore little room for unanticipated extras.
” We are tasking the space agency with the most ambitious slate of programs in space since the Apollo era, but instead of Apollo- era budgets, it has  , one- third of 1 % of U. S. spending , to work with”, Dreier said. The wolves will come for you if you stumble right now. And that’s what is happening to Mars Sample Return”.
Not all ambitious scientific endeavors can withstand the scrutiny required for a sample return. In 1993 Congress , canceled , the U. S. Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider, an underground particle accelerator, citing concerns about rising costs and fiscal mismanagement. 14 miles of tunnel had already been dug by the government, which had already invested$ 2 billion.
But , in the same week , that Congress ended the supercollider, it agreed — by a margin of a single vote — to continue funding the International Space Station, a similarly expensive project whose cost overruns had been widely criticized. ISS launched in November 1998 and is still going strong. ( For now, anyway — NASA will intentionally , crash it into the sea , in 2030. )
After that agonizingly close vote, the space station’s future never came under serious scrutiny, just as Webb’s future did not.
JPL, the institution managing Mars Sample Return, has already paid dearly for the mission’s initial stumbles,  , laying off more than 600 employees , and 40 contractors after NASA ordered it to reduce its spending.
However, projects that survive this kind of reckoning frequently come out” stronger and more resilient,” Dreier said. They are aware that NASA and Congress are in the eyes of the country, so you must work.”
This month, NASA is expected to reveal how it intends to proceed with Mars Sample Return. Those with whom the mission is familiar say they still think it can happen and that it is still worthwhile.
Do I have faith in NASA, JPL, and all of those involved in carrying out the Mars Sample Return mission with the care and technical integrity it requires? Absolutely”, said Orlando Figueroa, chair of the the mission’s independent review team and NASA’s former ,” Mars Czar”.
” It will require very difficult decisions and levels of commitment, including from Congress, NASA and the administration, ]and ] a recognition of the importance, just like was the case with James Webb, for what this mission means for space science”.
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