1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

We must complete the Mars Sample Return mission. Fully fund NASA. NASA Spent Billions to Bring Rocks Back from Mars. Trump Wants to Leave Them There. After billions of dollars in spending and decades of planning, NASA may be forced to abandon precious samples of air, rock and soil on the Martian surface. It’s the culmination of decades of planning by planetary scientists and many billions of dollars in government spending—the crowning achievement of Mars-focused interplanetary exploration efforts that began more than a half-century ago and still endure today. Unless, that is, the Trump administration gets its way: on May 2 the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) dropped a budgetary bombshell, proposing to cut NASA’s top-line funding by a quarter, slash the space agency’s science budget by nearly half and entirely eliminate MSR. This is beyond shortsighted; this is taking your carefully invested savings and lighting them on fire. Fully fund the MSR mission and fully fund NASA. The research and work it takes to achieve these missions are just as critical to America’s future as the science we will learn - about Mars and possibly life itself - from studying the samples. This sort of daring mission is what made America great. We should not give up on doing the world leading science no other nation can accomplish .