Holdren: Current NASA Budget Is Insufficient To Send Humans to Mars
Before NASA Pioneers Mars, Orion Spacecraft Faces Tests, PBS NewsHour
Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren: (8:28): “I don’t think that the current budgets amount to kicking the can down the road. They amount to – within reasonable limits – getting done the steps that we need to achieve in order, ultimately, to get to Mars. Eventually, yes, between now and the 2030s, we would need to ramp up the budget. At the current budgets we would not get to Mars, that’s correct.”
Statement by John P. Holdren on the Successful Test Launch and Recovery of the Orion Spacecraft
“We congratulate the men and women of NASA and their commercial partners for this successful test launch, and we look forward to future milestones on the journey to Mars.”
My 11-year-old son: "When will @NASA_Orion launch people?” Me: “Not until you’re 19 or 20.” #apollo-on-qualudes
— Brian Berger (@Berger_SN) December 5, 2014
NBC News: "If those Mars missions are 20 years away then those astronauts are in preschool." #Orion #EFT1
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) December 6, 2014
Duh! Sorry Keith, I couldn’t resist.
And the scenario for the budget going up is what? And how much?
A “duh” observation, yep.
Slightly more useful would have been talking about how a steady NASA budget plus up might happen, and how much.
An actually useful observation would have started with “ain’t going to happen” and “here’s what we need to do to change NASA, so exploration can happen and grow within foreseen budgets”.
It’s sad scrolling through the #ORION feed on Twitter. So, so many people who are excited that we are going to Mars soon! Yay!
Er, except how we’re not. Not even any long term plans. Not even carrying people into low earth orbit for nearly a decade.
We may be going. The more people are excited about it, the more pressure the clowns in Washington will feel to make it happen. Let’s hope that they get the message.
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”
The history of the Shuttle Era:
http://davidstockmanscontra…
The future of the Orion Era:
http://www.firstrebuttal.co…
Well, good luck with that.
Most of the voting public falls into the “Don’t shoot my tax dollars into space” camp. They can’t grasp the magnitude of the impacts that a more robust NASA would have on the nation.
That gets right at the heart of the matter. A successful campaign to increase NASA’s budget would seize this moment and relentlessly inform the public of the huge returns waiting on investment in manned space exploration. It can be done. It requires will and resources.
Todd What are the huge returns you are talking about ???
The benefits to us all of the technologies that will be developed along the way, the stimulation of interest in science and engineering among our young people, the value to the human species of having a second home in the universe, …
The extra money, if any, will be sidetracked and squandered in needless management, overhead, and processes dreamed up by b-school know-nothings. Young people aren’t dumb. They see what gets rewarded and act accordingly. Science, engineering, and the people that pursue them will still be on the short end of the stick because nothing about these manned missions is about science. We’d do well to be better stewards of our first home in the universe.
NASA gets $18B a year. A lot of got that got lobbed up today in the form of a Delta IV Heavy rocket putting up a vastly overpriced capsule with nothing in it for two orbits.
http://www.theonion.com/art…
Exactly! Much of our problems in this day and age is in our value system. We seem to ignore the intrinsic value for something in favor of material value. It seems like the American taxpayer wants to turn the U.S. government into for profit organization, which is really sad, and destructive.
Spaceflight can be a spectacle, dangerous, expensive, and rare, in the Constellation model. Or, in the Commercial Crew model, it can be routine, inexpensive, and so commonplace we hardly notice it. Personally I’d be a lot more impressed by the latter.
Funding is just the first problem.
But there is still NO solution on sending man to Mars and returning them safely
to earth.
NASA is dreaming…
there’s a little technology we call spacecraft that makes that possible.
That’s pretty funny watching Holden contradict himself within the space of a few sentences. “We’re not kicking the can down the road! We’re just requiring that some other administration between now and 20 years from now take charge of the situation while we run it at the minimal budget possible!”
Come on. Space exploration is one of the few things where Obama would actually get Republican support if he wanted to up NASA’s yearly budget for the next couple of years (meaning actually up it – I don’t count the “$6 billion/year” that went to pay off all the contract cancellations).
It’s almost insulting, the way they’re wasting money and time in this process. I’d think better of them if they’d just cancelled any sort of future for the manned program aside from Commercial Crew missions to ISS and said we’re not going to spend money on a go-nowhere program.
not sure that history validates your statements. Congress has consistently given NASA a smaller budget than what Obama has requested them to have.
I agree with Doug. Obama has proposed NASA higher budgets than Congress has been willing to fund. I don’t see any chance that the House and Senate would pass a higher budget for a nondefense discretionary program like NASA. I absolutely agree with you that NASA cannot afford to spend any money on a program that has no possibility of accomplishing a useful mission. Our limited resources for human flight should be focused on CC, ISS, and space technology, as Obama originally proposed.