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Exploration

Humans to Mars: Show Me The Money

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 23, 2014
Filed under

NASA’s lofty goal of a manned Mars mission doesn’t match budget reality , opinion, Washington Post
… But our current trajectory won’t get us there anyway; estimates of the cost of a human trip to Mars run into the hundreds of billions. “We’re going to have to figure out ingenious ways to do it based on the present budget plus modest increases,” Bolden said at the summit. Or maybe more than modest. William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration, told the same audience of the need to “break the paradigm” of current funding. “We cannot do it at the same budget level we’re at today. It’s just not going to work.”

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5 responses to “Humans to Mars: Show Me The Money”

  1. Victor G. D. de Moraes says:
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    I believe that on a limited budget, only using creativity. But I have heard many people say that, although NASA encourage creativity, NASA does not. NASA is bureaucratic and does not move on to something new. It’s a shame.

  2. Veeger says:
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    They can’t do a Human Mars Mission for the budget they have, but they also cannot likely do the Mission they outlined in the ARM BAA. Rough Industry estimates are on the order of 1.25B, I am not sure if that includes the cost of the SLS, which by itself has to be on the order of $1B. If you assume the low number, which requires the development of a new EP Stage and a capture system, and if they do the “grass hopper” my sense is that is more like $2.5B, assuming no JWST kind of deviation. There is a way to do the mission, but not if NASA is prescriptive in how its done. My guess, Humans to Mars is doable too, but not if the guys at 300 E St are driving the ship

  3. Littrow says:
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    What is perplexing to me is that everyone in the world, including this Washington Post editorial writer, is fully aware that NASA does not have a workable plan. I guess Holdren caqme up with the idea and Obama (naively) said so and Bolden, Gerstenmaier and the rest will stick to the Obama story but no one inside or outside of the program believes him. It really make you question what Bolden or Gerstenmair really believe and when you start questioning that then their credibility goes out the window.

    I am frequently in the outside world and the most common question I’ve been getting for 3 years is “what are you doing now that the program is over”. No one is even aware that NASA even does anything anymore.

    • Jonna31 says:
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      It’s because the International Space Station program is about as exciting and as relevant as unseasoned gluten-free crackers.

      But really solving this money problem is relatively straight forward. We should dispense with the charade that the ISS is a launching pad anywhere, or a testingground for anything, and rid ourselves of the $3 billion / year stop-gap to nowhere, and turn that into $3 billion for SLS missions/cargo or cargo to go on Falcon 9/Heavy/whatever else.

      Exactly how much longer are we going to waste time growing crystals and playing with insects in Low Earth orbit, just because no one has the courage to admit that while building the ISS was certainly an historically important engineering achievement, the 3rd and 4th rate science actually done on it is not worth this nation’s space-future.

  4. libs0n says:
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    Except the ingenuity of non-SLS/Orion approaches has been summarily ruled out.