NASA has already spent $1.5 billion dollars and four years working on the mission. To cancel it now to save $300 million would be a horrendous waste of taxpayer dollars. This is the most complicated piece of equipment that has ever been sent to Mars and initial budget estimates could not anticipate all of the challenges that needed to be overcome to make this rover operational.

"The MSL is the flagship of America's next efforts to explore Mars," said Mars Society President Robert Zubrin. "It turned out to cost more than NASA thought it would going in. So did Apollo, and Viking. So did the transcontinental railroad. So did the Panama Canal. So did everything this country ever did that was hard to do. An overrun is not a reason to quit. If we had taken that attitude as our guideline in the past, this country never would have accomplished anything.

"If we are going to continue to be a nation of explorers, we need to do what it takes to make the MSL mission succeed. If the technical problems can be solved in time to launch in 2009 and save money, fine. If we have to take more time and money to launch in 2011, then that's what we should do. But we should not give up."

All members of The Mars Society and the general space community need to join together to save MSL. Please contact your United States Senators and Representatives and tell them that MSL must be saved. In a time when the taxpayers of the United States already feel that hundreds of billions of dollars of their money is being wasted on Wall Street bailouts, the cancellation of MSL will mean that our government will be wasting at least another $1.5 billion that could have accomplished a mission of historic importance for the American space program and led humanity further down the path of its search for the nature of life in the universe. Quitting now is not fiscally responsible, and even worse, is a betrayal of the can-do pioneer spirit that not only built the space program, but America itself.