On Tuesday, Sept 25th, the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) presented to the public its recommendations for the next decade of Mars exploration. What we saw were multiple mission plans straining to exist in the brutal new cost cap from the FY13 budget, pushed far into the future.

I ended up writing a lot of background for this post, which can be interesting, but may be a little much for people. Click here to get to the meat of the proposal.

Let's quickly break down what, exactly, we're talking about here with the MPPG, NASA's Mars Exploration Program, and how this fits into NASA.

NASA's funding is allocated into separate programs and divisions within the agency. Some goes to human space flight, some goes to running NASA field facilities around the country, and some goes to scientific research. The science division referred to as the SMD (Science Mission Directorate) and is led by the Hubble-repairing astronaut hero John Grunsfeld. The SMD is responsible for all scientific exploration/funding at NASA, and it itself is broken up into five different sections: Heliophysics, Astrophysics, Earth Science, The James Webb Space Telescope, and our friend, Planetary Sciences.

Planetary Sciences is responsible for all missions and research funding for bodies in the solar system that are not the Sun or the Earth. This division was funded at around $1.5 billion/yr (~8% of NASA's total) but now faces cuts of about 21% from the proposed 2013 budget.

But we're not done! Mars represents such a large focus of our exploration resources over the past few decades that there exists within Planetary Science a program devoted to funding a cohesive set of Mars missions. This is the aptly named Mars Exploration Program, which is responsible for all of the recent missions: Mars Global Surveyor, Odyssey, Spirit & Opportunity, MRO, Phoenix, and Curiosity. The MEP gets its own funding line in the budget, which allows it to create its own mission proposals and goals. Having budgetary control and long-term goals means that the MEP (and therefore NASA) is able to very effectively implement a suite of missions that build on top of each other, feeding back information from one mission to the next, supporting R&D into technologies needed in future missions, and creating proper communications relays for getting data back from the red planet. Dr. Scott Hubbard, who helped formulate the current MEP, described it as modeled after the Apollo program in the 60s.

The great success of NASA's Mars program was rewarded with a proposed 40% cut next year, with further cuts in 2014 and 2015. Here's this is in graph form (the red line is the latest budget proposal):