In a stumbling statement this week, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson presented the NASA position on Mars Sample Return: “The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long,” he said April 15. Actually, it was his top line — NASA had already signaled they would not support Mars Sample Return (MSR) — indeed the budget decision had been made a couple of months ago and had resulted in layoffs of much of the MSR workforce. 

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Louis Friedman is the co-founder and Executive Director Emeritus of The Planetary Society. Prior to that he was Manager of Advanced Programs and the post-Viking Mars Program at JPL.