NASA Has Not Been Asked To Send Humans To Mars By 2024
Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto — by his second term ‘at worst’, Washington Post
“TRUMP: “Tell me: Mars, what do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when would you see that happening?”
WHITSON: “Well, I think as your bill directed, it’ll be approximately in the 2030s. As I mentioned, we actually are building hardware to test the new heavy launch vehicle, and this vehicle will take us further than we’ve ever been away from this planet. “So, unfortunately space flight takes a lot of time and money so getting there will require some international cooperation to get the – it to be a planet-wide approach in order to make it successful just because it is a very expensive endeavor. But it is so worthwhile doing.”
TRUMP: “Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we’ll have to speed that up a little bit, okay?”
WHITSON: “We’ll do our best.”
Lightfoot: WH has not asked us to look at Mars by 2024
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) May 12, 2017
Given how things are going, with Trump’s Presidency, with SLS and with Orion, neither of these will be flying while Trump is in office. I’d estimate another five years before they fly.
My guess is EM-1 (unmanned) in 2021. EM-2 (manned) will necessarily need to be two to three years later to fix any issues found with EM-1.
I’d say that is about right-at best. Trump will finish up as President no later than 2020 (Jan 2021). Maybe sooner. If the Democrats win, you can count on as little support for NASA as they can stand in subsequent years. That’s the Democrats’ MO. I’m not sure the Republicans will be any more supportive. Another reason why it was a mistake to stop Shuttle instead of fixing it. With Shuttle there was hope for continuing to do big things in space. With SLS/Orion the best hope are some of the commercial carriers.
Of course not, since it was just another needling sarcastic comment like his comment on needing to fixing pothole first when he signed the NASA Authorization Act. I guess folks just don’t recognize needling sarcasm anymore. But I notice he really enjoys making them, not surprising given the type of business he was in. Its probably one reason his tweets drive folks nuts, a reaction I am sure he enjoys 🙂
Precisely. Much of the silly stuff he says is to drive the DC and media establishments into hysteria. People then tune them out, white noise, while other moves are lost in the ground clutter. He did the same thing in NYC, then settled back and watched heads explode.
“Much of the silly stuff he says is to drive the DC and media establishments into hysteria”:
I don’t think I realized that the President actually exercises (or has) any sort of conceptual control over what he says. That being the case, I appreciate any effort or technique that would help separate wheat and chaff; as it stands now, without some sort of code book it all looks the same.
Only this time, he is dealing with the media not as a business man or entertainer but as a governing politician. Heads won’t “explode” this time, they will simply block everything he wants to do, then paint him as a do-nothing president.
I don’t know. The Hollywood elite and Democrats seem to be doing a pretty good job exploding. And look at how much time space policy bloggers have spent discussing his Mars and pot hole comments on their blogs.
As for a do-nothing President, really the best times for the U.S. economy and workers have been during the stability of government gridlock.
Either stability or situations where changes benefit the small to mid sized businesses which create most jobs.
I wish I understood that POV.
Trump’s comment was widely reported in the media as a “joke”. I think most people understood it.
As I pointed out earlier, if Trump had sufficient understanding of human spaceflight to have known whether or not a human landing on Mars was feasibly by the end of his second term, he would not have ordered a million dollar study on whether humans could be put on the first SLS launch.
Nasa is in need of a massive a complete overhaul if it’s ever to do anything meaningful in manned spaceflight again. It’s nothing but a money wasting bureaucracy with no plan or vision. Tear it down and rebuild it.
I disagree. NASA wasn’t responsible for wasting billions on the Shuttle, Ares/Constellation, and now SLS. NASA has always done their best with the funds they are given and what they are told to do. Overhaul NASA and absolutely NOTHING will change.
“Best” and “NOTHING” strike me as extreme. Could NASA, even given congressional mandates and a lack of presidential leadership, have been more efficient or more able to meet the budget and schedule? If they could have, they were not doing their “best.” If they could have, overhauling​ the way NASA does things would result in _some_ improvements. Congress and the President have certainly delt NASA a bad hand, but I wouldn’t say NASA is totally blameless.
First you’d have to stop Congress from mandating things like SLS/Orion. The Obama Administration tried to kill a huge part of the waste by cancelling Constellation (i.e. Ares I, Ares V, and CEV) and pushing for both commercial cargo and commercial crew. With more than one provider in each “commercial” program there is real competition which improves schedules and lowers costs to about 1/10th that of what traditional NASA cost models predicted.
But, unfortunately, Congress resurrected the corpse of Constellation, tweaked it a bit, and renamed it SLS/Orion. NASA has been complicit in this by claiming repeatedly that SLS/Orion are the launch vehicle and spacecraft which will take us to Mars. That’s just marketing hype to keep the Congresscritters happy. With SLS/Orion sucking up so much of the manned spaceflight budget, there is no money left to design and build essentials like Mars (manned) landers, Mars habitats, Mars (manned) rovers, Mars spacesuits, and etc.
And President Obama, having gotten his Photo Op as a space visionary, choose not to spend one cent of his political capital to oppose it.
Hey, at least he tried. But do note that space is far less than 1% of the federal budget. Do you really expect any president to expend more than 1% of their political capital to make a major shift to space policy?
The days of the Cold War driven space policy died in the mid 1960s when NASA’s budget started shrinking. By then the politicians had spent their political capital to win the Space Race with the U.S.S.R. They only needed to wait a few more years for the actual flight to happen.
Yes, as bureaucracies age they become burden with procedure baggage and a reluctance to move out of their comfort zone in core areas. They also become prisoner to special interests and Congress critters seeking funds for their districts. It is indeed part of the swamp that needs draining.
I think it is very unlikely that Trump was being sarcastic. If he had either a meaningful understanding of spaceflight, or accurate and candid advice on the subject, he would not have spent a lot of money on a serous study of putting humans on the first SLS launch, a move motivated only by political visibility. If he was suggesting the Mars flight could be done by a commercial LV he could just as easily have used the money for a study to compare SLS to alternative launch vehicles. He likely believes that sending humans to Mars during his administration is something that can easily be accomplished if he simply insists that it will be done. Or he may assume that if he says it, his supporters will believe it will happen regardless of reality.
Then why hasn’t he asked NASA for a study? The very topic of this post disproves your belief.
As for the EM L1 study, it was a reasonable question given that the first flight of the Shuttle had a crew. Of course since its NASA they probably “spent” a couple of million on it. But then being NASA they probably spend that much changing light bulbs.
Actually its not nearly as bad as President Obama’s idea to grab a boulder from a NEO for the astronauts to play with in lunar orbit because he didn’t want to allocate the funds for a lunar landing since we “been there, done that.” How many tens of millions did NASA spend on that goofy idea? Probably a hundred times as much? Many two hundred?
It was an absurd question. Anyone familiar with the history of spaceflight knows that the Shuttle was not designed for unmanned operation, although by the lmid 90’s the autoland system was mature enough to make it possible, and that the crew of STS1 survived an unanticipated failure that should be all rights have killed them. There are few more convincing proofs of the folly of launching humans into space on an untested vehicle than STS-1.
It might actually be possible, and would of necessity involve NASA-paid employees, but not from any effort direct-funded by Congress and certainly not launched on SLS. It really saddens me to say it, but for all the money spent on SLS for the alleged purpose of a crewed Mars mission, it does not currently look like it will fly anything there anytime soon…if at all. Something that Trump and other politicians simply don’t understand is that new systems need vigorous in-flight testing before sticking breathing people inside them and sending them off on any year-long-no-emergency-return-possible jaunt.
I wonder if even New Space is in a position to do it by 2024. Timelines for that might be easier for wave-riders to predict once Dragon V2, Falcon Heavy, and New Glenn start actually flying.