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