So, Perseverance found a rock. Big deal. NASA's all excited, calling it a "visitor from outer space"—Phippsaksla, they're calling it. A freakin' meteorite. Like they haven't found those before. According to Perseverance rover spots mysterious 'visitor from outer space' rock on Mars surface after 4 years, the rover has been on the planet for four years.

Is This Really News?

Let's be real: this is what they do. They drive around Mars, take pictures of rocks, and then try to spin it into something groundbreaking. "Oh, look, it's shiny! It must be alien!" Give me a break. They're probably just bored.

The article says it "stood out from the flat, broken terrain around it." Okay, and? So does a discarded beer can in the desert, but that doesn't mean it's from another galaxy.

They used the SuperCam to vaporize "tiny bits of material" with a laser. Sounds like something I did with my magnifying glass and ants when I was ten. Except, you know, with way more taxpayer money involved.

And get this: they're saying the iron and nickel content "strongly suggests a meteorite origin." Strongly suggests? So it's not even confirmed? Great. More speculation disguised as science.

Where's the Payoff?

The real kicker is this Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. They want to bring these rocks back to Earth. Why? So some lab coat can poke at them for a few years and write a boring paper nobody will read?

We're talking billions of dollars to retrieve some Martian dirt. Billions! I could think of a million better ways to spend that cash. Like, I don't know, fixing the damn potholes on my street.

Oh, but it could tell us about "ancient microbial life." Right. Because if there was life on Mars billions of years ago, I'm sure it's just sitting around waiting to be discovered in a rock sample. It's not like billions of years of radiation and cosmic whatever have probably turned it to space dust or something.

And now the Trump administration wants to axe the whole thing! Calling it "financially unstable." Offcourse it is! It's a freakin' space rock retrieval mission! What did they expect, a bake sale would fund it?

The China Factor

Here's the best part: China's planning their own sample return mission. And they might beat us to it. So now it's a space race to bring back rocks. Fantastic.

NASA has plutonium power source with 10 years left, which puts a deadline on handing off the samples. "If construction does not begin in the next two years, I don’t think it’s going to make it,” says some scientist. Well, maybe they should have thought about that before spending four years taking selfies with rocks.

So, What's the Point?

It's all just a giant circle jerk of scientists patting themselves on the back while draining our wallets. It's space tourism for nerds, plain and simple. And I'm tired of paying for it. Maybe I should move to Mars. At least there's no property tax... yet.