Space

Separation of Congress from budgeting beyond a government wide yay/nay vote might help. As it stands, much like most of the military Nasa is a congressional district jobs program that occasionally outputs something useful more than an actual public service.

You get the output of what you incentivize, and Nasa’s funding incentivizes jobs in key districts no matter how much more efficient it would be to put all their buildings in the small town they own in Florida.

If it's too late to free up the budget, then by all means continue the program. But no more long shots like this until we have a solid plan. I love NASA, I love the prospect of getting these things done, but no one nation can do something like a Mars sample collection effectively. It needs to be a planetary effort. And I don't mean getting an actuator from the UK and a commemorative plaque in 40 languages from Luxembourg or whatever, I mean serious funding. It's long past time we turn our symbolic collaboration to actual funding, agreeing to match the expenditure with 20 countries as percentage of federal budget or what have you. Like if the EU matched the percentage of our budget (however many billions) from their budget. Now add China, Russia, India, Japan, Australia - even 10mil or however little the percentage would add up to from South africa would help if every moderately big county on Earth did that.