Another Blow for Space Exploration: NASA to Pull Out of ‘ExoMars’ Project with European Space Agency

Billed as the flagship mission to find life on Mars, 'ExoMars' was set for launches in 2016 and 2018. Renewed slashing to the NASA budget will likely kill the program.

Humanity’s continued curling up into a fetal position when it comes to space exploration is once again being spearheaded by the United States, as it appears by all accounts the 2013 U.S. Budget will be the death knell for a joint partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to further unmanned exploration of Mars:

NASA has told Esa it is now highly unlikely it will be able to contribute to the endeavours, which envision an orbiting satellite and a big roving robot being sent to the Red Planet.

The US has yet to make a formal statement on the matter but budget woes are thought to lie behind its decision.

Europe is now banking on a Russian partnership to keep the missions alive.

A public announcement by Nasa of its withdrawal from the ExoMars programme, as it is known in Europe, will probably come once President Obama’s 2013 Federal Budget Request is submitted.

This request, expected in the coming days, will give the US space agency a much clearer view of how much money it has to implement its various projects.

“The Americans have indicated that the possibility of them participating is now low – very low. It’s highly unlikely,” said Alvaro Gimenez, Esa’s director of science.

The ExoMars project, short for ‘Exobiology on Mars’ was to send two rovers and one orbiter to the planet with a mission duration of six months for the former and multiple years for the latter. This project was already scaled back to only include one rover and one orbiter in April of 2011, citing budget concerns especially from the U.S. side of the venture. It now appears that with the submission of the 2013 budget in the United States, NASA will be gutted yet again and this project will be one of the numerous that have to hit the cutting room floor in order to fund projects like tax cuts for upper-income Americans, continuing operations in Afghanistan, the Drug War, and other highly useful and well-intended usages for investment dollars.

One of the potential goals of ExoMars would have been to collect Martian rocks for eventual transport back to Earth.

The ESA will be sent running to Russia to see if it is willing to pick up the cost and provide the materials necessary to make up for what NASA can no longer provide, but that proposition looks fairly dim at this moment in time. It will start off another year that the United States has backed out of its commitment of scientific cooperation with Europe, coming on the heels of a 2011 that saw multiple cancellations of projects that had been running between the U.S. and Europe for years – damaging relations and wasting years of time for scientists in Europe, sending them quite literally back to the drawing board.

The goal for ExoMars was relatively lofty – the return of rocks harvested from Mars for study back on Earth, but like most lofty scientific goals in the United States, they seem to fade away at the behest of the austerity behemoth.  This is the latest mark of a country that continues to abandon the aspirational goals for science – paying the scientific fields lip service when it is time to campaign for making the U.S. more powerful and scientifically competitive in the future, and then when it comes time to send monies toward those projects commitments either evaporate or previous commitments are yanked.

A most bold indication of the running away from the scientific frontier was seen by last year’s ending of the Space Shuttle program with absolutely no viable “next program” waiting in the wings. I was extremely negative on America’s abandonment of science then and I remain so now. The spin at the time of the last shuttle launch against thinking NASA was walking away from the frontier was that in stead of taking the lead on programs, NASA was going to get involved in more international cooperative missions to divide up the costs more equally. Now NASA can’t even uphold that end of the bargain.