Twenty-two billion, five hundred and fifty million dollars.

That was NASA's budget in 2020 and unsurprisingly, a huge chunk of that staggering amount was allocated to its Mars 2020 mission.

But half of that budget - over 9 billion! was spent on designing and perfecting 43 titanium tubes. What exactly was its purpose and was it worth the 9 billion?

Welcome to Future Mission.
Join us today as we explore the importance of NASA's billion-dollar titanium tubes, why it took over 1 year to design just one of these tubes and the unbelievable role it will play in the success of NASA's mission to Mars.

To understand why these tubes are important, we need to go back to the time of Galileo Galilei. In 1610, the legendary Italian astronomer was the first human to spot the Red Planet. 400 years later and that groundbreaking discovery has inspired generations of scientists to channel all of their attention and curiosity towards one agenda; discovering extraterrestrial life on Mars.

In the beginning, before technological advancements, the closest we got to this goal was through our curiosity and art. We wrote books, painted art, and sang poems about it. But in recent times, most of our artistic speculation about life on the red planet has become more practical and scientific.

With our modern technology, we now have the capacity to discover the truth to the question that has plagued humanity for almost half a millennia;

Is there life on Mars?

While technology has made it possible to answer this question, the journey towards that answer has not been easy. We have had some wins and many embarrassing failures.

In 1962, the Soviets were the first to try it. They launched 9 probes to the red planet with the relatively unambitious goal of achieving a flyby and hard impact landing on Mars.

Every one of those missions turned out to be a resounding failure.

It wasn't until 1965 that NASA's Mariner achieved the first successful flyby and it wasn't until 1971 that the Soviet Union made history by landing a successful probe, Mars 3, on the surface of Mars. However, the craft did not last up to two minutes before it stopped working.

Still, it was the right step in the right direction.

Five years would pass before NASA's Viking 1 became the first Mars landing that yielded results. The Rover operated for over six years and transmitted several images back to earth. Those images immediately became the subject of a debate that is still on to this very moment.

Some scientists believed that the mission had discovered life on Mars while others refuted that claim with their own theory.