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From the Executive Director

Scout Mission Slips: Are Future Mars Plans on a Slippery Slope?

Click to enlarge > Louis D. Friedman Executive Director of The Planetary Society Credit: The Planetary Society

January 8, 2008

On December 21, the day after the U.S. Congress recessed for three weeks, NASA announced the delay of the 2011 Mars Scout selection due to a potential conflict of interest with a member of the review panel. NASA officials were advised to start the proposal process over to avoid a long, contentious process of protest. The extended selection process means the launch will slip to 2013.

Congress has demonstrated strong support for robotic Mars exploration, and in fact, just one day earlier, Congress reasserted its view that Mars missions should be launched at every Mars opportunity -- approximately every two years. Now, we are going to miss the 2011 opportunity altogether.

While I'm disappointed to lose a launch opportunity, my major concern is how this slip will affect the 2013 orbiter and the following decade of planned missions: Will all future Mars missions slip?

Since President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) in 2004, the Administration has made five successive cuts to the Mars Exploration program in NASA. The most notable was the removal of Mars from the VSE itself -- cutting both advance work for human missions and nascent plans for development of Mars sample return.

This year, Congress compounded the Administration’s removal of Mars from the VSE by adding language to the 2008 Appropriations bill forbidding NASA to spend any money on items exclusively devoted for humans to Mars. Since NASA is not doing that anyway -- and since the goal of a human mission to Mars was pushed into the 2030s (or later) -- this isn’t a very substantive restriction. But it is a short-sighted one. The goal of one day sending humans to explore Mars is what bolsters support for human spaceflight generally. The public and political support for “Apollo on steroids” -- as the current Constellation program has been termed -- is tepid at best, and its appeal to the next Administration is likely to be weaker.

NASA Associate Administrator for Science, Alan Stern, exacerbated worries about cutting back on robotic Mars missions several months ago by broaching the idea of skipping one of the near-term Mars opportunities (2011, 2013, 2016) in order to free up funds for a future Mars sample return (2020 or later). Stern also made a budgetary decision to remove science instruments from the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory payload. The Planetary Society led a strong protest about this decision and helped get at least some of the instruments restored, a feat that was cited in a recent New York Times article.

While I strongly support Stern’s Mars sample return push (and in fact wrote a letter to Space News defending the idea), I can’t understand his suggestion to skip a mission opportunity. Good Mars sample return mission design requires spacecraft to be launched over two or three different Mars opportunities. To accomplish a Mars sample return requires more launches, not fewer.

Some of these launches could come from international partners, although there are no plans to do this. Europe is working on a big ExoMars mission for 2013, so they won’t likely be ready for even a small part in a Mars sample return mission until after 2020. And, to our knowledge, NASA has not yet considered Russian involvement in sample return plans. (Europe, however, is planning to partner on the U.S. 2013 Mars orbiter to supply telecommunications capability for ExoMars, so any slip to the 2013 orbiter mission would be bad for international planning.)

The 2011 slip is now a fact, but it need not push all the mission planning downstream. There may be a way for NASA to have their cake and eat it too. Both Scout proposals are for aeronomy orbiters with rather modest payloads. Perhaps the winning Scout mission could be combined with the Science/Telecommunications Orbiter now being planned for 2013. Maybe Scout could piggyback, or even have its payload integrated with the 2013 mission. The cost of the combination would certainly be less than the sum of the individual missions -- so money would be saved, even with the 2013 orbiter mission proceeding on schedule.

These are ideas that I hope will be considered before the Mars program slips further. Mars exploration is very difficult and proceeds slowly. But the rewards are great -- just look at the extraordinary voyages of Spirit and Opportunity.

We will be steadfast in our advocacy for continued robotic missions to Mars. Moreover, we will not accept the indefinite deferral of human missions to Mars. Mars is the only habitable extraterrestrial world humankind can reach, and The Planetary Society will keep pushing to extend human presence into the solar system, and to reach Mars.

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