NASA spent 5 years drilling for life on Mars and just canceled the mission to bring them back
People have been left shocked to find out that after spending the last five years drilling on Mars, NASA will not be bringing samples that it has found back to Earth.
What was meant to be a mission to bring samples back from the Red Planet for the first time ever has now been canceled by the Trump administration following budget cuts.
The White House previously proposed to slash the space agency’s science budget in half, with the new bill now stating that the agreement ‘does not support the existing Mars Sample Return program’.
Trump administration has axed Mars sample return mission
The multi-mission plan by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) proposed to bring back ‘carefully selected samples’ collected on Mars back to Earth.
On the NASA website, it explained: “Returning Mars samples would fulfill one of the highest priority solar system exploration goals from the science community. Returned samples would revolutionize our understanding of Mars and our solar system, and prepare for human explorers to the Red Planet.”
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However, it looks like this will not become reality, at least not for the time being as Trump has made it clear that the money should be prioritized to other areas.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s recent keynote address detailed his hopes for the future of the agency, adding his thoughts on the issues surrounding the Mars sample mission, which so far has cost a whopping $11 billion.
Isaacman said: “The prior administration canceled the Mars Sample Return mission that was on track to cost more than an aircraft carrier. We created programs that were too big to fail, too costly to truly succeed in the hope that they would survive administrations.
“The results being a rocket that was designed when China was predominantly operating coal-fired locomotives and now becoming operational as China operates 25,000 miles of high-speed rail and is just a few years away from their own Apollo 11-like moment. Core competencies and tens of thousands of the NASA workforce were rented, outsourced, or lost, which turned what should have been months worth of progress into years at tremendously greater cost.”
The news of the mission cancellation has prompted many people to take to social media to share their own reactions, with one user writing on Reddit: “Another example of NASA (and the USA as a whole) not being a reliable partner to ESA and Europe.”
Another said: “What an embarrassment to humanity. I sincerely hope this gets picked back up in 2029.”
A third person commented: “I thought a separate sample return mission was a mistake. It was too vulnerable to be cut, which it has.”
And a fourth added: “And people seriously believe the Trump admins timeline that they must have a working moon base by 2030. We will be lucky if humanity gets a partially staffed moon base by 2060.”
US turns focus to establishing a lunar base
It seems that for now, the US government is more focused on establishing a permanent human-run base on the lunar surface.
This comes after China announced its own plans for building a Moon base, which appears to have spurred US efforts into that direction.
NASA is currently in the works of executing the $20 billion plan to construct the base near the lunar south pole by the early 2030s.
Humans are scheduled to land on the Moon for the first time in 50 years in 2028.