Posted: September 21, 2023 8:17 pm ET | Last Updated: September 21, 2023 8:17 pm ET | A second Independent Review Board on the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission concludes that the mission cannot be completed on the cost and schedule NASA advertises. The current design would cost $8-9.6 billion and alternatives could cost as much as $11 billion. Launches cannot take place until at least 2030. The IRB-2, chaired by Orlando Figueroa, also criticized how NASA is managing the program and communicating the importance of returning samples from the Red Planet.
That sounds laughingly cheap to me - that’s the price for the James Webb Space Telescope. It isn’t “cheap” compared to science budgets, but compared to the US’ society budget, it’s nothing.
Also Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could pay for about 40 of those missions, but instead they’re just sitting on and hoarding that money.
Reminder that Elon Musk bought Twitter, just to ruin it, for the price of 4 of those Missions.