Lori Garver Claims That NASA Is 'Wary' of Elon Musk's Mars Plans (arstechnica.com)

MarkWhittington writes: Ars Technica reports that former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver claimed, during a panel discussion at the Council for Foreign Relations, that many at NASA are "wary" of the Mars ambitions of SpaceX's Elon Musk. While the space agency has yielded low Earth operations to the commercial sector as part of the commercial crew program, it reserves for itself deep space exploration. Garver herself disagrees with that sentiment: "I thought, fundamentally, you just don’t understand. We’re not in a race in a swimming pool where everyone is racing against one another. We're in a cycling race where the government is riding point and the others are drafting behind us, and if someone comes alongside us and can pass us because they’ve found a better way, we don’t get out our tire pump and stick it between their spokes."

Comments

Musk isn't going to Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

Musk isn't going to Mars. Just a financial breakdown of the Apollo missions will demonstrate easily why Musk isn't going to Mars. He can't afford a spacecraft that big. He can't fund it, and can't build it. There's no business case for going to Mars. It's a frontier that business won't fund the exploration of. To be honest, I don't think America is smart enough to get to Mars anymore. The general population is too pacified/enthralled to pay for a Mars mission or even care about why they should go to mars.