Unless SCOTUS officially rules "Unconstitutional", essentially. That's the check and balance we have.

You seem to have a problem understand the word "over". It isn't a lump sum at the end of the decade, it is accumulated over the 10-year period -- like like the spend.

Congress and their powers to tax and spend in general. That doesn't vary by specific technologies like solar vs oil, etc.

Not free, paid for by large corporations. The Inflation Reduction Act raises $300 billion over a decade by requiring large corporations to pay a 15 percent minimum tax on their profits and by enacting a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks and redemptions.

Just over a month ago, Google announced its VLOGGER AI that does this. (Yes, there's a demo video in there too.)

This is pretty cool stuff and I can't wait to see how it's employed as lossy video compression for video calls: why transmit what you can render closely enough? This should be super-additive to the concurrent research being performed on recovering from data loss (Opus 1.5 just got such a feature).

But a bigger problem is risk of a "Mars pandemic". There could be microbes on Mars that Earth life has no immunity to.

Meh.

If there is life on Mars, and if it can survive a few centuries/ million years in vacuum below the surface of a lump of rock, then samples have been raining down on Earth since the Hadean. Despite Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe's best efforts, nobody has yet been convinced of any cases of "Mars Flu", despite the constant (if thin) rain of such projectiles. We have found and identified hundreds, possibly thousands (I can't be bothered keeping count), of Martian meteorites, which means there are millions or billions out there on Earth's surface which haven't been identified. Yet.

If Mars had infective biota, and that can be naturally transferred between the planets, then it has already arrived here. Repeatedly.

Now, personally, I don't think it is very likely that such a transfer (of organisms)could happen, in the Solar system. And it's even less likely to happen between stellar systems. But the possibility is just possible enough that people don't get laughed at (much, in public) for suggesting that Earth life originated on Mars. It's about 99 times as likely as all Mars life having originated on Earth. But it's not quite an insane speculation - the mechanisms exist, even if the stack of probabilities against is pretty daunting.

But if you grant that possibility, then there is no way you can have that without Earth having been repeatedly inoculated with Martian organisms. Therefore, the surviving life on Earth today are descendents of survivors of, say, the last time that 96% of genera of life on Earth were wiped out. (Permo-Trias "Great Dying" Mass Extinction, I'm looking at you!) And since that "Great Dying" didn't get us (our ancestors), the next delivery of "Death from Martian Skies" is pretty unlikely to either.

(There are very good terrestrial-only explanations for the "Great Dying" - but not for all the major extinctions in the Phanerozoic Era ("Era of Evident Life"), and I'm not claiming that was the cause of that mass extinction - I'm just arguing that IF Mars had Earth-infective biota, then our ancestors have already have survived an encounter.)

I've also got a philosophical contempt for the concept of "panspermia" - but I grant that it's physical mechanisms aren't impossible, just bloody unlikely.

That is not a recipe for launch from Earth, or the "Entry, Descent, Landing" phase of a mission, invariably described for Mars as "seven minutes of terror" (for the flight engineers).

JWST was on the drawing board for the thick end of a quarter century, and it only contains one class of instruments (optical). Now add isotope measurements (for dating), equipment for grinding and preparing thin-, thick- and polished sections of rocks. An XRF lab for heavy element analyses. An IR lab for your organic analyses (because light elements are pretty indistinct on XRF ; not enough nuclear electric field to give narrow fluorescence signals). An XRD lab for potential bio-materials, and for understanding the clay minerals.

Then freeze the instrument designs in (say) 2025 for a 2038 launch (2040 EDL). And lose access to whatever advances in analytical techniques happen between 2025 and 2040. And the option of re-analysing the samples with the incredible new techniques that will be discovered in 2050.

Since Lowell's self-delusion of being able to see an "annual wave of greening" on Mars, from Earth, we have known that any life on Mars is not as blindingly obvious as that. You don't hear much about it, but every single rock examined by a Mars rover in the last 19 years has been pored-over by a considerable number of experienced geologists (and innumerable internet wingnuts) and the total number of fossils discovered remains at a big fat zero. And that is on missions aimed and, and steered onto, interesting areas with a relatively good chance of hosting fossils.

Do you really think a "basic" analysis is going to actually answer the question? We already know that nearly 20 years of efforts have not detected any clear signs of life, and that's with some quite sophisticated tools being flown (I'd love to have a hand-lens with built-in XRF, even if it's only good to concentrations of a few hundreds of ppm.)

Try it, if it fails, send another one in 90 days with the problems fixed.

The cadence of orbital alignments between Earth and Mars is 2 years (actually, slightly over, IIRC), not 90 days. If you want to operate on a different cycle, you hugely increase your propellant costs, hence launch weights, hence overall costs.

You can fudge it to be a 21-, 22-, [...], 26- 27- month cycle at acceptable costs, but outside that, the planets, in a very literal sense, do not align for you.

some kind if lift to get samples up there from a rover

The samples have been dropped at several locations around the landscape, as the rover (I forget, Perseverance or Curiosity ; "Meh") geologised it's way across the scenery. You'd need to ship a "sample find and collect" rover to get them, and return to the launch vehicle.

Problem: you can't decontaminate a whole Starship

Non-problem. The samples are stored in metal tubes which themselves should be an adequate last-guard to prevent their being contaminated in transit, or at a reception lab on Earth. So, to achieve layered containment, you'd need some sort of storage vessel on the "pick-up rover", and another layer of containment that the rover's containment structure gets hoist into in the nose-cone of the (putative) Starship.

Since everything from the third layer of containment outwards won't actually land on Earth, it's state of cleanliness on lift-off form Mars is moot.

Since Earth routinely gets hit by rocks ejected from Mars - and has done for all the planets' lives - the question of Mars-to-Earth contamination is fairly moot too. Transferring rocks the other way (Earth-to-Mars) is harder - the flux ratio is estimated at about 99:1. But that's enough to make "planetary protection" in the other direction fairly moot too. The main reason for insisting on it (PP) is for avoidance of doubt in the event that sample return indicates the presence of Earth-like organisms on Mars. With the PP efforts, we (well, NASA, and the Russian and Chinese landers too) can say "we went to these efforts to prevent contaminating Mars with microbes ourselves, so these microbes were either transferred naturally in the past, or Mars was the origin of terrestrial life and transferred it here some time upwards of 3 billion years ago".

The exciting result (rather than the confusing and uncertain results described above) would be finding life on Mars that is considerably different to terrestrial life - which uses different amino acids, or different lipids, or a different genetic system. Then, we could say with high probability that it is reasonably easy for a "habitable zone" planet to produce life naturally. But finding Earth-like life on Mars would just leave us in a state of uncertainty.

Do you ever not get the "this check is taking longer than expected" warning? It normally takes several minutes for that page to load for me - I assume it doesn't like my mixture of ad-blocking and NoScript. Which is Cloudflare/ Slashdot's problem, not mine. If they don't want comments, comments they won't get.

Does Slashdot actually have advertising? I've had that "Advertising disabled because of your contributions" checkbox for so long, I can't remember when it appeared (Before or after the Millennium? I can't remember. I guess it switched on when I reached 100 or so successful submissions, but I've never made any effort to find out.

But they're definitely enshittifying the site, as Cory Doctorow would say.

Many people would not consider the idea of transit or driving not being much faster than walking to be a feature, but you do you.

You're confusing description with approbation.

Since we don't have ultra-diffuse suburbs here (typical house plots are 8~10m wide on the street frontage) we don't get the large distances where transit can get much above walking pace. With bus stops every few hundred metres, and a busy bus system (so many of those bus stops getting used for pick up, drop off, or both), the bus rarely gets up to the speed limit. And that's in slack hours, not the rush hour. Several addresses ago, I was in the habit of taking buses on some of the long boulevards to get to or from home, and I could be watching the next bus hove into view for 10 minutes before it got to my stop - and I'd have walked 3 or 4 stops in that time. But that was an unusual situation of long straight roads combined with moderate hills, so you could see a kilometre or more along the road. Most cities didn't have that phase of expansion and moving the city centre away from the medieval centre, so you didn't get those long sight lines.

Sounds rather ableist.

You should see some of the disabled-bike-chairs that are the norm in Africa. There's no profit margin in making them, so the market here is for motorised devices these days. But that's a failure of the infallible market, not a technological problem.