NASA’s Mars Sample Return Mission Needs to Die & Go Away: Send People to Mars Instead, Obviously!

NASA needs to just cancel the Mars Sample Return (MRS) mission and focus on sending humans to Mars to do the science themselves.

The latest estimates put the cost of the MSR program way, far, extremely over-budget at at US$8–10 billion. That’s “billion” with a “b”. All just to send a few kilograms of Martian dirt back to Earth. And as that linked article points out, the whole project is way off schedule, way over budget, and likely way too complex to work…