Inverse By Neel V. Patel on July 17, 2017
So, you know that whole “Journey to Mars” thing NASA is trying to accomplish? Well, it turns out the agency might actually be too poor to get there — and that’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth.
“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,” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s head of human spaceflight, said last Wednesday during a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
That’s discouraging to hear, but it’s also not much of a surprise to keen observers of the agency. Congress, while enthusiastically supporting NASA’s goal to put astronauts on the surface of the red planet sometime in the 2030s, has expressed severe doubts in the past about NASA’s ability to actually succeed in this endeavor. It’s never really been clear that the infrastructure and methods NASA has been discussing over the last couple of years can be built and launched with the kind of annual budget NASA is used to these days.
An obvious solution would be for the federal government to allocate more money to NASA’s Mars missions. But given the current clampdown on government spending spearheaded by the Republican party — which controls both the legislative and executive branches — it might be more prudent to go into a more unorthodox direction: NASA should team up with SpaceX to get to Mars.
More:
https://www.inverse.com/article/34277-nasa-doesn-t-have-enough-money-to-go-to-mars
