NASA's decision to pull the funding for the modest VERITAS mission to Venus, which was both on track and on budget, in order to accommodate other missions facing cost overruns has left the team members outraged and confused.
"This mission that was on track is being effectively martyred for all those missions that are going over budget," Suzanne Smrekar, VERITAS' principal investigator, said Tuesday (March 14) during a NASA headquarters briefing. "It is a much more complicated and dire situation than the community realizes."
