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.

Comments

Divert just 0.5% of the military budget to NASA

[MikeDataLink]

And we'll have the best space program in the world.

Re:Divert just 0.5% of the military budget to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

The US got its ICBM delivery system in the 60s, no more need for government funded space I guess

Re:Divert just 0.5% of the military budget to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese and Russians can put men in space. US is unable to.

Re:Divert just 0.5% of the military budget to NASA

[Mr D from 63]

What am I missing. Who thought we already had funding in place to go to Mars?

Re:Divert just 0.5% of the military budget to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Opinions like this are why America is slowly falling into obsolescence. A population where only the rich are educated and have healthcare is generally a dumb population. Take the example of medical schools which have great difficulty, even in more advanced and progressive societies, with most students who attain high grades coming from a small subsection of society who perform well at exams but do not perform well beyond that. Medicine as a whole suffers from the reduced available talent pool. Social support and adequate healthcare allow everyone to have the opportunity to succeed and attain access to education which leads to technological advances. If only the rich kids were getting into science NASA wouldn't have enough of a talent pool to have any hope of technical advancement. Getting the largest talent pool into fields is reliant on having healthy parents who aren't relying on children immediately earning money and forgoing an education. It's been proven time and time again that greater taxes and state support creates a happier more productive society. The trickle down effect has been shown to be ineffective.

Re:Divert just 0.5% of the military budget to NASA

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Exactly. They are developing the stuff they know they need, like the rocketry to get the parts to orbit, and habitat stuff like the inflatable add-ons to th space station. There isn't much point in getting too far along with the de-orbit landing and return stuff until they actually have a budget for it. The SLS will have many uses beyond a MArs trip as well as the station parts. All in good time, as long as there is a budget that allows the stuff being built.

Re:NASA is obsolete anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupidity of the U.S. populace is astounding. It is self funded by tax dollars. The ROI is generated by all American businesses who use NASA's technology for free to create all kinds of things that enhance our economy which in turn creates taxes which then go back into the agency. NASA technological developments and spin offs are probably creating enough of a tax base to actually fund the whole military.

Re:Ultimately this failure belongs to science

[hey!]

The failure in this case isn't science. There is no scientific question about getting to Mars with SLS and Orion. The failure here is engineering.

Cost is an integral part of engineering. Many, many unfeasible engineering projects are physically possible. The art of engineering is finding approaches to achieve goals given the resources available, counting time as a resource of course.

So what they've been doing, while technically impressive, is just bad engineering: spending resources on an approach which won't achieve the objective within the given constraints, based on the wishful thinking that people will suddenly want to spend lots more money on the project in the future.

Sometimes when you can't achieve an objective, the smart thing is to find an alternative objective that's worth doing in itself and also leaves you better positioned to work on the original objective.