Posted by Matt Purdue 
Over this weekend, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” aficionados and others in the plastic-pocket-protector brigade will be expoxied to their web browsers. They’ll be waiting for news that NASA’s latest baby, the Phoenix Mars Lander, has survived a fiery plunge through the Martian atmosphere and landed safely on the Red Planet’s surface. Phoenix’s mission, in a nutshell, is to spend about three months probing the Martian soil for signs that the planet once held liquid water. The project is running $420 million.
NASA, can I have my money back now? We’re already spending about $10,000 roughly every four seconds on the war in Iraq, and the Congressional Budget Office’s blog projects a 2008 federal deficit of nearly $400 billion. (Let’s not even get started on the money the CBO spends on a blog.)
According to the New York Times, the majority of spacecraft sent to Mars have failed. So there’s a better-than-even chance we’ll never hear from Phoenix again. And if we do, then what? I admit I’m not a geophysicist, but so what if there’s water on Mars? We already know ice exists all over the Red Planet. And NASA has time and again found evidence of water there. Proponents of these expensive, risky projects suggest that where there’s liquid water, there could be life. Again, so what? It’s not going to change our perception much. A large majority of Americans already believes life may exist on other planets. Finding microbes on Mars won’t prompt the Sunnis and Shiites to suddenly throw down their AK-47s and start harmonizing “Kumbaya.”
So how about we stop spending money on harebrained schemes to find water on other planets until we figure out how to find more on ours. I’m constantly amazed at NASA”s seemingly impenetrable public reputation. No matter how many failures they suffer, or how much money they waste on an unfinished space station that they have already made plans to abandon, American taxpayers continue to ignore their profligacy. All PR professionals should have it so easy.
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