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

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

[Kjella]

This comment. On slashdot "news for nerds" everyone. I'd say "Fuck it, I'm out," but I'm more intrigued by the train wreck I'm witnessing. It's a nice distraction from the train wreck occurring at a national level being driven by the same types of douchebags.

Well, why do we want people on Mars?
1. Science - why not unmanned probes/rovers at 100x the current budget?
2. Colonization - Apollo proved man can live in a tin can in space, what's new?
3. Flag-planting - billions of dollars for chest-thumping, really?

I mean, look at the aftermath of the Apollo program. We put less than a dozen men on the moon, then we stopped for 45+ years and counting. The way NASA does Mars, if they managed to find the budget it'd probably be exactly the same. Bigger rocket, bigger rock, longer trip, been there done that, let's not do it again. I'm not sure if Musk is crazy or not. But I like the plans to actually bootstrap something on Mars, start a real outpost. NASA can't afford to even make dreams like that, because at their rates that would be a trillion dollar program. Which is why you end up with the SLS + an as-of-yet-unfunded chest thumping expedition. Which doesn't really contribute much of anything to anything, except people will feel Mars is checked off the bucket list.