>>13598942This comment stinks. Claiming Red Dragon "deselected from funding" makes absolutely no sense if you understand how planetary missions are selected. Red Dragon was never actually submitted as an official proposal, it never even had the opportunity of getting funded. Proposals get money for studies, but that doesn't mean they're funded by default from there onwards. Most concepts die as concepts. Red Dragon could not be "deselected" because it was never selected in the first place.
>Who just doesn't submit a proposal? Nobody.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(NASA_spacecraft)And I'm sure there were dozens more examples of studies which were started and dumped for one reason or another. But generally these ideas don't get much coverage. You can find lots of proposals from ESA mission slots which were not resubmitted in later rounds. Also this is a retarded conspiracy theory. If they wanted to stop it they would just reject the proposal, the vast majority of white papers would be rejected. Why would evil JPL take the risk of claiming it wasn't submitted, a fact which could be easily disproven by the person who submitted it?
