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]

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

[MikeDataLink]

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.

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

[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.

We kinda knews this already, right?

[evolutionary]

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.

Re:NASA is obsolete anyway

[Mascot]

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.

10 ways to get funding

[BarbaraHudson]

1. Tell Trump there's coal on Mars - jobs for coal miners!
2. Start a rumour that Mars has no vaccination regulations - kills 2 birds with one stone as all the antivaxxers pour their money into a modern version of the B Ark.
3. Flatly declare that it is impossible. Someone will come along to prove you wrong
4. Tell the MRAs about the martian slave women. Then tell the SJWs about the MRAs wanting the martian slave women. See who gets to Mars first.
5. Tell the Christian and Muslim Taliban about the martian slave women walking around "all bare neked".
6. Tell the GOP that Martian women have multiple pussies to grab.
7. Tell the states that have passed bathroom bills that there is no such thing as a Martian male, so there's no such thing as a martian transsexual wanting to pee in their women's toilets.
8. "Gotta build a wall on Mars to keep the illegal aliens at bay."
9. Get Alex Jones and Breitbart to say that NASA doesn't lobby for enough money because Mars is full of Republican martians and refusing to go to Mars is a democratic plot to suppress voters.
10. "Russia and China and even India are all going. There's going to be a "planet gap" between the US and those countries that makes the missile gap look like a blip in history."

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.