The push is on to get NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) off the Earth and onwards to Mars by 2009.

The primary MSL launch period is scheduled to extend from September 15 through October 4, 2009.

NASA is engaged in a variety of creative accounting steps to try and get the over-budget mega-rover through this fiscal year.

The rover project being led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California is now roughly a $2 billion mission, with the hope of keeping the cost overrun under $200 million.

“It’s a tough mission. It is a spectacular mission. We want to see it happen,” said Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. He said the space agency would like to keep the cost overrun under $200 million…”but there are always the unknown unknowns,” he explained March 31st at the meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group in Boulder, Colorado.

If the sky rocketing cost for MSL can’t be contained, then NASA will have to report the overrun to Congress, Green said, as the project busts the Nunn-McCurdy Amendment that’s designed to curb cost growth in government-financed programs.

If MSL isn’t on the way to Mars in 2009, Green said it would be “disastrous” - particularly to the Mars community and to the health of NASA’s Mars program overall.

Green also said that the MSL project team at JPL is working under a revised schedule, part of which includes working double-shifts. “We actually believe they can make it. There’s a couple miracles along the way…miracles are not cheap, we know that,” he noted.

NASA is removing all barriers from JPL, “making sure that they have everything they need both financially and anything that [NASA] headquarters can do to help them make that schedule,” Green said.

What went wrong with MSL is now being tagged as a “lesson learned” experience that needs exploring, to help chart the scientific, technical — and financial trajectory — for NASA’s next outer planet mission.