It was judgement day recently for the next two robotic missions to Mars – the time when agencies would likely make crucial decisions to cut, delay, or otherwise alter the missions.
The results are in, and while NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory escaped with its schedule intact, ESA’s ExoMars wasn’t so lucky. That’s right, our group’s beloved mission has been delayed 3 years until 2016. Such delays are all too common in space exploration, and given the additional risks of a failed launch, a communication error, or a botched landing, it’s a pretty tenuous business. This episode only furthers my committment to diversification and lateral application of lab techniques.
The larger question to me is why budgets always spiral out of control. By now we’ve come to expect such over-runs, but why?
ExoMars started as a “modest” 650 million-Euro mission, but the current pricetag has nearly doubled. Along the way, mission planners continually saw ways to improve the mission, using newer technologies or implementing lessons learned from testing. The only problem is that this cost a lot of money: adding any new widget involves costs of both manpower for testing and rocketpower for transporting.
So it seems to be a difficult choice: do you a) stick strictly to the original blueprints and pass up opportunities to improve the mission, or b) indulge in upgrades while eating up valuable time and money?
Almost without fail, the popular answer has been b, and more often than not, funding agencies have been complicit. After all, wouldn’t want to quit now, having come this far, would you? It’s almost as if the scientific community is holding the funders hostage, and it’s hard for the funding groups to send a real message (as in, pulling the plug) without infuriating the public. What’s a funding body to do?
It’s a shame about ExoMars. Does this have any direct effect on your research, Jeff?
Exciting though these missions are, maybe a more cost-effective way of exploring Mars (for the US at least) would be to build more MER-style rovers, which have been tried, tested and succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. The chasis, wheels, platform could be constant, while the instruments are updated each time.
Jeff, what you describe really is true – although with a much ‘smaller’ price tag – for so many large-scale projects:
After all, wouldn’t want to quit now, having come this far, would you?
It’s a tricky one because (for example) the long-term data sets some big projects generate should – no, really have to – naturally be kept going… but sometimes that goes at the expense of small, new projects.
Now, the amounts of money involved in space exploration… are stunning.
Fortunately, the delay doesn’t appear to have any direct impact on me, and I’ll soon be off to the US to work on MSL, happily enough! But I do like your idea of assembly line rovers – might cut down on the exotic bells and whistles, but no need to have custom-built Bentleys when a Ford would be just as effective producing basic chemical and mineralogical data.
Very true Steffi, and and as you mention, there’s plenty of animosity in the space science community directed at Mars scientists. Many very promising smaller missions to other places like Jupiter’s moons have been scrapped as a result of a narrow focus on Mars.