The OSIRIS-REx mission is a billion-dollar NASA mission designed to retrieve some matter from an asteroid, and return it to Earth. It is rather hard for me to imagine a less worthy way to spend a billion dollars. Asteroids are lifeless dry rocks in space that contain nothing very interesting. We already have a pretty good idea of what makes up an asteroid. Many meteorites have hit the Earth, and scientists who have analyzed their composition have a basis for inferring the element composition of asteroids. A science site tells us that most meteorites "are fragments of asteroids."
Nobody is interested in the exact composition of asteroids other than a very tiny tribe of scientists such as planetary geologists. If we get back a little asteroid material from the mission, the results will be a complete yawn to 99.9% of the people who read the results in their science news feeds. It will be some very boring result such as "80% iron and 20% a combination of nickel, iridium, palladium, and magnesium."
Will we be able to know from such a retrieval what is the average element composition of asteroids? We certainly will not. This is because the mission is only getting material from one little part of one asteroid. The material retrieved could easily be not representative of the average element composition in the asteroid that the craft landed on, and could easily not be representative of the average element composition in asteroids in general. You can no more tell the element composition of asteroids by getting a sample from one little spot of one asteroid than you can tell how North Carolina will vote in the next election by randomly picking a single house in North Carolina and asking the owner how he will vote.
The mission successfully landed on a near-Earth asteroid, and is coming back to Earth with the sample it retrieved. But now we hear that the sample is spilling into space. A news report tells us that the mission was designed to retrieve 60 grams of material, but the spacecraft is "continually losing between 5 to 10 grams of material." Will there be any of the sample left by the time the spacecraft returns to Earth? Only time will tell.
Even if the spacecraft does return with some asteroid material, it will return with an essentially worthless payload. Why did we spend a billion dollars on such a project of so little interest to the public, when so many scientific projects of high interest to the public are not being undertaken?
I can give two reasons. The first is that NASA is now a privileged fiefdom that believes it is entitled to billions of dollars of annual funding, even for projects not very useful or interesting. Submitting exorbitant budget requests each year, NASA is now like some billionaire's daughter who thinks she is entitled to a weekly allowance of a million dollars. The second reason is that a thousand worthy scientific projects that are of high interest to the public are not being undertaken because scientists have taboos against doing various types of research, and seem to be afraid that there might occur observations defying their cherished dogmas. For one tenth the cost of the boondoggle OSIRIS-REx project, you could do a hundred "bang-for-the-buck" scientific research projects relating to topics such as hypnotism, ESP, inexplicable healings, deathbed visions, near-death experiences, UFOs, fortean phenomena, apparition sightings, humans who seem to have inexplicable powers, and people with high cognitive abilities and highly damaged brains. Such projects would be of very high public interest. Previous investigations on these topics give strong reasons for thinking that very important and very interesting results will come from further investigations into these topics. But research into such topics is not federally funded largely because many of our scientists have effectively declared most such things as taboo areas unworthy of further inquiry. Maybe our scientists are afraid that investigations in such areas might lead people to think things that our scientists don't want them to think, such as the idea that people have souls, or that the dogmatic proclamations of professors can be cast into doubt by observations from people who are not professors.
And so we spend a billion dollars retrieving a worthless, boring clump of dust and rock that only a tiny tribe of specialists are interested in, rather than using a tenth of that money to get results that have great relevance to who we are and the fundamental nature of life and mind, results that almost everyone would be interested in.
The current NASA budget is about 22 billion dollars. Using 2020 equivalent dollars, we could calculate that over its history of more than 60 years, more than a trillion dollars has been allocated to NASA. But if asked to name a single important thing that was ever discovered by NASA, the average person would be unable to think of anything.
Here is a reasonable proposal:
(1) Reduce NASA's budget by 50%, which would prevent it from running boondoggle projects.
(2) Use one-half of the savings to help reduce the ever-more-out-of-control US budget deficit, currently at 3 trillion dollars.
(3) Use the other half of the savings to fund a new government agency called the National Discovery Administration, which would have a mandate of producing important new discoveries, by funding many small research projects with a potentially high bang-for-the-buck, regardless of whether they had anything to do with outer space, and regardless of whether they violated the belief taboos of the professors.
(4) Every five years evaluate how many important discoveries this new administration has made, and sharply decrease its budget if it has not made any important new discovery of general interest to the public.
Postscript: A tiny piece of asteroid material gathered from a Japanese has been analyzed by scientists. The result is completely boring. But you wouldn't know that from the very misleading headline in the Daily Mail: "Water and organic materials essential for life on Earth are found on the surface of an ASTEROID for the first time." The actual details in a scientific paper with the give-you-the-wrong-idea title "Organic matter and water from asteroid Itokawa." In the paper we find that this water is merely about 100 parts per million (less than in the sand dunes of the Sahara desert), and that the organic matter is biologically irrelevant carbon stuff, not any of the amino acids or nucleotides that are the building blocks of the building blocks of life. We already knew from meteorites that asteroids have water in such very tiny trace amounts, and that asteroids have such biologically irrelevant carbon compounds. All in all, this tends to confirm my opinion that sample retrieval missions from asteroids are pointless boondoggles.
A 2024 paper tells us of the risk of contamination in any mission returning samples to Earth from space. When contamination occurs, earthly chemicals may be mistakenly identified as being part of a sample returned from space. We read this:
"Currently there is an ongoing discussion on how best to obtain pristine samples from Solar System bodies where life may have started, either by future on-site missions or by sample-return missions. The decision will be based on time, cost, risk of contamination, and payload [87]. While on-site analysis will constrain the risk of contamination, the equipment onboard will be much more limited than what can be done in laboratories on Earth. On the other hand, sample-return missions will allow the use of a diversity of state-of-the-art equipment, but the risk of contamination of the samples is high, and curation facilities need to be in place. Even if contamination controls are implemented, minimal levels of terrestrial contamination will always occur, so that scientists must be able to distinguish between extraterrestrial organic matter and terrestrial organic matter [173]. "
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