This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Batcher. Hotel Mars episode in with my colleague

and co-pilot, David Livingston, Dr. Space himself of the Space Show. We're headed to Mars

is the intention. However, this is about decisions made at NASA, especially the Jet Propulsion

Lab, JPL, which is planetary geology, planetary search, planetary science. The really good stuff

that NASA does superbly better than anyone else. It's a project called Mars Sample Return.

It is the rest of the story of perseverance's hard work to find samples on the surface

of Mars as it goes about. Remember, we have two rovers working on Mars now, curiosity number

one, Perseverance number two, to deposit those samples in places to be picked up later. This

is the picked up later part. David and I welcome our friend and colleague Doug Messier, a

ParabolicArch.com editor and writer. Doug there's been an independent review board of the

Mars Sample Return mission, giving its report this month just now. And the report is

mixed, but how do you read this report? It's neither discouraging or encouraging. Good

evening to you, but Doug. Good evening to you. Yeah, the independent review board was

headed by Orlando Figueroa, who is the former director at NASA of the Mars program, and it

was pretty blunt in saying that there's a near zero possibility of this mission launching

in the 2027, 2028 window to get to Mars. And it said that the budget is completely out of

whack. The original budget estimate was 3.8 billion to 4.4 billion. It's now that has now

risen, I think internally, to 8 to 9 billion independent review boards said that that could

be as high as 11 billion dollars. And they made some recommendations for how to lower the cost.

And they also recommended that the possibility of the likelihood of moving it to the 2030

window for launch. Now these windows come up every 26 months or so when there's at

Mars gets closer to Earth and it's orbit. So they can only launch every two years.

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