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NASA Finally Admits It Doesn't Have the Funding To Land Humans on Mars (arstechnica.com)
For years, NASA has been chalking out and expanding its plans to go to Mars. The agency's Journey to Mars project aims to land humans on the red planet during the 2030s. For years, the agency has been reassuring us that it will be able to make do all those audacious projects within the budget it gets. Until now, that is. From a report: Now, finally, the agency appears to have bended toward reality. During a propulsion meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics on Wednesday, NASA's chief of human spaceflight acknowledged that the agency doesn't really have the funding it needs to reach Mars with the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. These vehicles have cost too much to build, and too much to fly, and therefore NASA hasn't been able to begin designing vehicles to land on Mars or ascend from the surface. "I can't put a date on humans on Mars, and the reason really is the other piece is, at the budget levels we described, this roughly 2 percent increase, we don't have the surface systems available for Mars," said NASA's William H. Gerstenmaier, responding to a question about when NASA will send humans to the surface of Mars. "And that entry, descent and landing is a huge challenge for us for Mars." This seems like a fairly common sense statement, but it's something that NASA officials have largely glossed over -- at least in public -- during the agency's promotion of a Journey to Mars.
Folks, the little data we have (compared to those who have all the data), it was becoming obvious. Only recently it was revealed that Mars' surface has a cocktail of substances that would "wipe out living organisms" (see this link https://www.theguardian.com/sc... ). The length of time, the sending of supplies, and trying to terraform, it's undertaking that would take an incredible amount of resources. And that is assuming the first manned mission even got there (which is question). I think many, many people questioned whether we would actually go to Mars in spite of all the hype. Funny enough the hype have information suggesting more and more that this is harder than anybody thought. So...we'd better start taking better care of our planet because it all likelihood, we aren't going anywhere. Perhaps like the North American expedition, someone will hock "The Queen's jewels", but save a few insanely rich tycoons sending a bunch of "serfs" on a possibly doomed test mission, this Mars dream, I suspect will postponed for a LONG time.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Considering NASA costs next to nothing (about 0.5% of the US govt's total budget), and the studies I've seen referenced show its return on investment to be about $10 for every $1 used (granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate, but even if assuming a huge error margin that's still great ROI), it's no wonder you chose to post that anonymously.
which space other program is better than NASA?
We don't even have a ship capable of putting a man in space anymore. So pretty much all of them.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Except they haven't even been developing all the equipment - they've developed a big ass rocket that might get a capsule into orbit. They haven't developed one bolt of the hardware necessary to deorbit, land safely, and get out of the atmosphere back into orbit.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
But there was the Orion program. Sure, he talked a lot about it but he also tried to accomplish the rhetoric and directed NASA toward it. You can argue it was the wrong way for NASA or w/e but to say Bush didn't do anything to try and get NASA further along is wrong. Orion was cancelled by Obama.
But there was the Orion program. Sure, he talked a lot about it but he also tried to accomplish the rhetoric and directed NASA toward it. You can argue it was the wrong way for NASA or w/e but to say Bush didn't do anything to try and get NASA further along is wrong. Orion was cancelled by Obama.
It was all just smoke and mirrors. There may have been projects, but even if Orion was a realistic proejct, there was never been any realistic funding. It's pretty much always been like this since Apollo funding was axed, which is why TFA is here, NASA is finally admitting to things we all already knew. Nasa's budget barely does some research, sends a few probes every decade, and keeps the lights on. A Mars mission at best is projected to cost $200 billion and probably two or three times that. Unless Nasa starts getting an additional $20 billion a year, any talk of a Mars mission is just vapor and even then, it won't happen for another decade and we'll see it coming as that decade will be spent actually building stuff. Still, more realistically, we're looking at an additional $20 billion a year and three decades if the government ever wants Nasa to be serious about going to Mars.