Saturday, March 16, 2024 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
By 9 a.m. May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard had already been sitting in the Freedom 7 Mercury space capsule, mounted atop a Redstone 3 rocket booster, for four hours.
The United States had already lost the race to send the first person into space three weeks earlier. NASA was cautious, and if delays continued to hamper the Mercury project, the Soviet Union might send a second person to space before the United States had sent its first.
Shepard was ready to launch, now.
When mission control came over the radio to inform Shepard of yet another potential problem, Shepard’s response was direct: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”
At 9:34, the candle was lit and Shepard became the first American in space, paving the way for NASA to put people in orbit, walk on the moon, construct and operate the space shuttles and the international space station, and bring humanity one step closer to manned missions to Mars.
None of NASA’s many accomplishments have been cheap or easy. To the contrary, as President John F. Kennedy said in a speech at Rice University, NASA does things because they are hard.
But while the cost of space exploration is high, so are the returns.
Cellphones, laptops, GPS navigation systems, air filtration systems, LED lights, CAT scan and MRI machines, and even baby formula, all have their origins in the pursuit of space travel. The materials research NASA conducted alone improves our lives literally every moment of the day. Entire industries have grown from the basic research NASA delivered.
These innovations have helped drive the U.S. economy for generations, and they are but a small sampling of the technological advances made possible by investing in space sciences.
Now, NASA is in need of further investment. The Mars Sample Return project, its most ambitious planetary project since the Apollo missions put Americans on the moon, is in danger of running out of money.
The mission is straightforward. In February 2021, the Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars and began collecting air and soil samples, as well as rock cores. The samples received a basic analysis from the equipment on board Perseverance but were ultimately designed to be stored within the rover and picked up by retrieval lander that would return them to Earth.
The samples will provide invaluable insights into the geologic history of Mars, provide a more definitive answer as to whether the planet ever hosted microbial life and give us a more detailed understanding about the changing atmosphere and conditions that future astronauts might encounter over time.
Just like the Apollo moon samples, the rocks, soil and air collected now will be studied for decades, giving new scientists with new theories and new technologies a means to study Martian materials without launching another rover.
Perhaps most importantly, the technologies being developed to land on the surface and retrieve the samples are essential to future missions that are intended to supply human beings on the surface of the Red Planet — or to mine asteroids, establish space colonies, etc.
One example: In terms of complicated semiautonomous telepresence required for this mission, the technologies NASA develops to retrieve the samples could have direct benefits on Earth for everything from hazardous waste handling, to various rescue scenarios, to deep sea mining, to surgery.
Our investments in space exploration have always netted massive benefits here on Earth.
Despite the fact that the first phase of the mission is almost complete (23 of Perseverance’s 38 sample tubes are full and securely stored), in its proposed budget released last week, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies offered only a third of the funding NASA says it needs to complete the mission. The committee has since doubled down and threatened to cancel the project outright.
NASA has already taken significant efforts to reduce the cost of the program, laying off more than 600 staff members this year from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but the cuts have yet to pull the projects total lifetime cost to under $5.3 billion that was originally estimated for the mission.
While it’s hard to argue against the need to justify and explain the ballooning costs of the program, it’s also hard to argue that NASA could reasonably have been expected to anticipate every cost or hurdle to doing something that has never been done before in the history of humanity.
Moreover, defunding the project now would accomplish little more than wasting the time and expense that has already been put into phase 1 of the project.
As evidenced by the failure of the Japanese moon lander Odysseus last month, the fact that the United States successfully landed Perseverance upright on the surface of Mars is a rare feat in itself. We should capitalize on that accomplishment and see the mission through to completion.
Congress should demand accountability for the money that has already been allocated for the project but should not refuse to provide additional funding simply because NASA underestimated a legitimate rise in costs or failed to anticipate a hurdle on a first-of-its-kind mission.
The United States spends trillions of dollars annually on defense funding for wars that may or may not ever occur and billions more resource caches for famines and shortages that may or may not ever occur. The Mars Sample Return mission is not hypothetical. A rover is already on the surface of the Red Planet collecting samples. Congress need only fund the return trip.
It’s time for Congress to fix its little problem and light this candle.
