NASA and the ESA have announced they intend to tie together the two agencies' Mars programmes, signing a letter of intent in Washington DC. The first mission will be launched in 2016 and will continue until 2018.
The agencies aim to bring Mars rocks and soil back down to Earth for study. They believe they can achieve more by jointly studying the Red Planet than they can on several separate missions.
The ESA will help fund the Orion program, as the Obama Administration doesn´t seem too keen on a necessary budget boost to get the Orion program on schedule.
Except the Constellation Program was started by GW Bush. And compared to the TRILLIONS of dollars the federal government is spending on stimuluses, bailouts, health care reform, 2 wars, etc., $18B/yr for science and exploration through NASA is peanuts.
Exactly. BUT the repubs won´t care that Bush started it instead of worrying about other stuff. They´ll only care that Obama is doing stuff with that instead of the economy.
They set up the problems so we can really "take it" later.
But they have been much more supportive of NASA in recent years than Democrats. NASA also seems to be predominantly conservative, so any extra support from the Obama Administration would be surprising.
