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Budget Cuts to Rover!
March 24, 2008 by Renaisauce, 1 year 35 weeks ago
Comment id: 28297
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The last few years have been incredibly exciting for Mars research. The success of the 2 rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, has been absolutely unparalleled. Here are two robots working remotely in a harsh alien environment, and they have exceeded their expected time frame by almost FOUR YEARS! And they were designed by ENGINEERS! Engineers that worked for the GOVERNMENT! And they've actually been PRODUCTIVE! How many projects do we have like that?
That's why it is absolutely staggering that the program is now facing budget cuts that are severe enough to force the tentatively temporary shutting down of one of the rovers.
Maybe it's justified. Running the rovers must cost a huge amount of money. It must be...wait, what? 20 million a YEAR? Isn't that a third of what it costs to pay for presidential candidates to telemarket? Can't we just find one professional baseball player to fund this for a year?
If any of you have any influence at all with the powers that be, please mention that we should not be cutting down on the programs that are working well, especially at NASA. We need to keep that program alive if only to emphasize that success on that level is a rare and valuable commodity that need to utilized to the fullest.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080324-mars-rovers-update.html