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NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

arstechnica.com

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Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#21

Post by Thaxll »

Nanite wrote: post #4
maxxxxx wrote: post #3

I have been watching this since 2000. New president comes in, scraps old programs, declares new "vision". NASA does a few incoherent things and the whole thing restarts after a few years. It's pretty sad. I wish they would commit to something and actually finish it.

NASA programs typically span multiple decades and run in the billions of dollars, The political pendulum sways from one side to the other side every 4-8 years, every new administration is looking for ways to cut down taxes. It's amazing they get anything done imho.

They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#22

Post by Tepix »

Thaxll wrote: post #21
Nanite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA programs typically span multiple decades and run in the billions of dollars, The political pendulum sways from one side to the other side every 4-8 years, every new administration is looking for ways to cut down taxes. It's amazing they get anything done imho.

They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.

Seriously! "The U.S. military budget is higher than the nine other biggest military budgets in the world combined." It's insane.

Btw for 2017 it's 773.5 billion USD.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#23

Post by JshWright »

snappyTertle wrote: post #10
spiritomb wrote: post #5

such a waste of time and (other ppl's) money.

Agreed. There's more important things to spend public money on at the moment (like servicing the $20T in debt). Let private companies, like SpaceX, voluntarily spend R&D on it.

A not insignificant amount of SpaceX's funding (especially considering the critical time of that funding) is from NASA. They are also leveraging decades of NASA research in their engine and rocket design.

I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, and think they (and other like them) represent the future, but they have a little ways to go before they are completely financing their own R&D (at the moment they're still spending a lot of public dollars).

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#24

Post by yellowapple »

Thaxll wrote: post #21
Nanite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA programs typically span multiple decades and run in the billions of dollars, The political pendulum sways from one side to the other side every 4-8 years, every new administration is looking for ways to cut down taxes. It's amazing they get anything done imho.

They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.

Slash it in half, give the slashed half to NASA.

Then we can have ourselves a Pluto colony.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#25

Post by giobox »

snappyTertle wrote: post #10
spiritomb wrote: post #5

such a waste of time and (other ppl's) money.

Agreed. There's more important things to spend public money on at the moment (like servicing the $20T in debt). Let private companies, like SpaceX, voluntarily spend R&D on it.

Given the huge investments NASA has made in SpaceX to date, I'm not entirely convinced that the split between public and private money in this space is as black and white as you suggest.

SpaceX arguably wouldn't be here today without NASA's cash.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-w...

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#26

Post by FiatLuxDave »

hueving wrote: post #9
veeragoni wrote: post #6

Bill Nye have a different argument. https://youtu.be/5ekUbzciyKg

Does Bill Nye have any relationship to NASA that would give him more knowledge than what is in this report?

Bill Nye is CEO of the Planetary Society, which has a very close relationship with NASA.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#27

Post by stevoo »

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #11

I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seeme…

Creating interplanetary projects like the one above are extemely expensive. As the ISS showed is that costed !150 billion USD to construct making massive leaps into space should not be burden to a single country. With that the funding would be less, and the return even smaller.

I believe a global space agency should be formed where each country can allocate the money they wish and set goals by panels to the direction that they wish to proceed. ( very hard i can assume ).

That will ease the financial burden of countries and create project on a global scale that will unite the world instead of finding new reasons be patriotic about.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#28

Post by maxxxxx »

Tepix wrote: post #13
maxxxxx wrote: post #3

I have been watching this since 2000. New president comes in, scraps old programs, declares new "vision". NASA does a few incoherent things and the whole thing restarts after a few years. It's pretty sad. I wish they would commit to something and actually finish it.

It's also Congress' fault because they insist on extremely expensive programs such as SLS and Orion. See https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/04/obama-resuscitates-o... and https://arstechnica.com/science/2009/10/nasa-panel-argues-fo... Quote: "The committee has concluded that NASA now has plans that don't reflect any sort of budgetary reality". This is back in 2010. More recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org…

Yeah. You can see it two ways: The SLS is an embarrassment or an admission by Congress that they don't care at all about spaceflight.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#29

Post by philipov »

stevoo wrote: post #27
FiatLuxDave wrote: post #11

I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seeme…

Creating interplanetary projects like the one above are extemely expensive. As the ISS showed is that costed !150 billion USD to construct making massive leaps into space should not be burden to a single country. With that the funding would be less, and the return even smaller. I believe a global space agency should be formed where each country can allocate the money they wish and set goals by panels to the direction…

> That will ease the financial burden of countries and create project on a global scale that will unite the world instead of finding new reasons be patriotic about.

Which is the opposite of what world leaders actually want. Jingoism is the name of the game right now.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#30

Post by sametmax »

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #11

I had a conversation a few years ago with Buzz Aldrin. He was talking about his idea for a Mars Cycler which would travel continuously between Earth and Mars. I told him that I thought it was a great idea (especially as it would be investing in 'permanent' space infrastructure instead of a single-shot mission) but that I thought it was unlikely that the government would allocate enough resources to build it. He seeme…

Right now Mars doesn't have any resource with crave enough to justify this enormous cost. If suddenly we discover that there is something we can get money from, and not just knowledge, you'll get investers.
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