This is CBS. I, in the world, I'm John Baxter. Behind the black, these are hard facts.

NASA is delaying the planetary mission program. How vast is this disappointment? Bob Zimmerman

is here. He keeps the website behind the black. I ask for details, Bob, but right now

I'm worried that these missions in delay will be postponed indefinitely. Is that a risk here?

Could even two. Yes, John. It's absolutely a risk. I mean, you know, NASA believes as much

of Washington does that doing the same failed thing over and over again is a good thing in the

vein hope that it might work the next time. That's their philosophy. You know, the definition

of insanity according to Einstein. Because after they went through this with Web, where, where,

the James Webb data telescope over a period of almost 20 years construction with budget rose

20 times from a half a billion to $10 billion. During that period of time, they wiped out the

astrophysics program at NASA. They could pretty much launch no space telescopes other than Web

because all the money was going to Web and it just shut down that entire program for almost a decade

and a half. Well, well, it'll maybe work out better next time. So this last week, NASA revealed

that because of quote, budget uncertainty, it will not begin accepting project proposals for its

new frontier planetary mission program. This is a program that basically does all the major

missions. This program funded new horizons to Pluto, the Juno mission to Jupiter or Cyrus Rex

to the asteroid Danu. It was just three examples. And it had all plans to do a comet surface return.

They were there were draft proposals for doing a variety of sample missions such as going to the

volcanic moon of I.O. a comet surface sample return mission going to the moon's far side.

And a variety of other things going to Saturn, the two Saturn's moons. Well, that program now

is being delayed entirely for three years from they were going to start to accept proposals for

these missions for review and acceptance this fall. They've now and NASA has now said it's not

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