NASA space missions have landed men on the moon, rovers to the Mars surface and probes to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto and beyond.
What the public may not know are ambitious missions that were canceled, whether because of budgetary concerns or failure the make the science work to accomplish them.
Here are six NASA space missions that never made it to the launching pad, but we would have liked to have seen happen.
1. Returning to the Moon — After the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s, returning to the moon would seem to be a walk in the park with today's technology. A 2003 plan by President George W. Bush to return to the moon by 2020 was scrapped by the Obama administration in 2010, shifting the priority to developing lower-cost vehicles that could act as space taxis, according to Investopedia.com. That plan also called for incentives for private company space travel, which has allowed companies like SpaceX to grow.
2. Pluto Kuiper Express — The spaceship was planned to launch in 2004, with the goal of studying the Kuiper Belt with a flyby to Pluto along the way, Investopedia.com noted. The cost of the mission, $350 million was hard to justify for a planet that would be downgraded later to a dwarf planet and plans were scrapped. Some of that mission, though, was achieved with the New Horizon's mission that gave the Earth stunning closeup pictures of Pluto in 2015.
3. Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter — According to InterestingEngineering.com, the robotic, nuclear-powered NASA's Prometheus orbiter was supposed to have studied Jupiter's frozen moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, but the plan was scrapped due to budget cuts in 2006.
4. Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher (MAX-C) — The mission, originally plans to liftoff this year, would have been part of the European ExoMars mission to hunt previous life on Mars with a specially designed solar-powered rover that would have performed astrobiological exploration, according to InterestingEngineering.com. Budget cuts ended the plans under the Obama administration in 2011.
5. Beagle 3 Mission to Mars — The Beagle 3 was also supposed to have enhanced NASA's search for life on Mars but never made if off the drawing board after Beagle 2 mission failed in 2003, the website noted. An effort to attach it to the Mars Lander was rejected by NASA as well.
6. Terrestrial Planet Finder — NASA's project to build a system of space telescopes to find extrasolar terrestrial planets never made it out of the idea stage, per InterestingEngineering.com. Work began on the ambitious project in 2002, but was constantly delayed and postponed indefinitely in 2011.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.