Put another way, I’m pretty sick and tired of planing 30 year long missions, with all the money an engineering and human resources, for rocks.
It was almost certainly not going to tell us conclusively about past life on mars. And if it could, let humans collect it.
The next person who suggests an $11B mission for rocks should get smacked with a yardstick.
> Put another way, I’m pretty sick and tired of planing 30 year long missions, with all the money an engineering and human resources, for rocks.
The engineering and Human Resources involved are a feature, not a bug! That's how you keep knowledge around, people employed, and strategically important industries alive, even if they nominally do not have enough orders to survive. You can't just decide "let's launch a rocket" and do so quickly when it's critically important--those capabilities have to be tended to.
The US just recently learnt this the hard way when it turned out nobody knew how to build icebreakers anymore, and had to buy them from Finland.
> It was almost certainly not going to tell us conclusively about past life on mars. And if it could, let humans collect it.
Sending humans to Mars is mindbogglingly complicated, has a massive chance of death by one of a thousand exciting possibilities, and doesn't add anything to returning samples that a robot can't do cheaper, faster, and most importantly now.
Yes, at some point it might be worthwhile to send humans there, but there are a lot of challenges that have to be overcome before we are actually ready. All the while there are samples sitting around idle.
> The next person who suggests an $11B mission for rocks should get smacked with a yardstick.
I seriously hope the yardstick hitting en vogue right now will soon be displaced by civilised discussions again.