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Did Trump Really Want Humans On Mars By 2020?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 22, 2019
Filed under ,
Did Trump Really Want Humans On Mars By 2020?

Trump Reportedly Demanded That NASA Fly a Manned Mission to Mars by 2020, Splinter
“What if we sent NASA’s budget through the roof, but focused entirely on that instead of whatever else you’re doing now. Could it work then?” Lightfoot told him he was sorry, but he didn’t think it was possible. This left Trump “visibly disappointed,” Sims wrote. “But I tried to refocus him on the task at hand. We were now about 90 seconds from going live.”
How Trump Offered NASA Unlimited Funding to Go to Mars in His First Term, New York Magazine
“Lightfoot explained to the president — who, again, had recently signed a bill containing a plan for Mars — that NASA planned to send a rover to Mars in 2020 and, by the 2030s, would attempt a manned spaceflight. “Trump bristled,” according to Sims. He asked, “But is there any way we could do it by the end of my first term?” Sims described the uncomfortable exchange that followed the question, with Lightfoot shifting and placing his hand on his chin, hesitating politely and attempting to let Trump down easily, emphasizing the logistical challenges involving “distance, fuel capacity, etc. Also the fact that we hadn’t landed an American anywhere remotely close to Mars ever.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

40 responses to “Did Trump Really Want Humans On Mars By 2020?”

  1. Matthew Black says:
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    Just goes to show that Mr Trump, like many people, doesn’t know anywhere near enough about how difficult putting human bootprints on Mars will be. If you tripled NASA’s or Elon Musk’s budget: there would still be no way to make it there by 2020. Very best anyone could have managed would be an ‘Inspiration Mars’ style crewed flyby in 2021 or thereabouts.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Trump doesn’t have the depth of understanding of much of anything to understand how complicated anything is:

      Trump: “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated”

      Um, yeah, pretty much everyone who was actually involved in healthcare policy discussions in the US knew just how complicated the US healthcare system is (it’s an overly complex, overly expensive, mess that gives worse health outcomes when compared to other developed countries).

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      Remember the Old NASA went from Alan Shepar’s suborbital flight in a capsule to placing humans on the Moon is just in 8 years and 2 months. I expected he believed a modern NASA with nearly 60 years of space technology experience could do better than that in going to Mars. The reality that it’s taken NASA over 8 years to go from the flying the giant Space Shuttle to using tiny crew capsules again is a bit difficult to believe if you look at it from that perspective. Especially if you don’t follow space.

      • tutiger87 says:
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        Mars is a whole another problem. Reentry of heavy structures. Reliable closed loop ECLSS. Food. Radiation countermeasures. Long term microgravity, then wanting to be functional upon landing.

        Even your Saint Elon knows better.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          Yep, its too hard, its expensive, its risky… But that is the way will all frontiers. But NASA is too conservative and risk adverse to risk frontiers anymore, which is why the first Starship to Mars will be carry “tourists”, just like the Dear Moon flight.

        • fcrary says:
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          None of those are obstacles to a near-term Mars mission. Some of them are obstacles to assured safety and success. But by NASA’s current standards, the Apollo program was very unsafe, and Mercury was insanely risky.

          We have some experience with the reentry of heavy structures, and it isn’t clear how heavy a Mars lander would have to be. Certainly smaller than a Space Shuttle.

          Closed loop life support and food are non-issues. You need to close the gas loop, probably with over 95% efficiency. That’s nothing terribly new or complicated. Reliability is an issue, but not much of one when you have people around with plenty of time to maintain and fix the hardware. With the gas loop closed, people are a net source of water. Food isn’t a big deal when you look at the numbers. Dehydrated, a quarter of a kilo per person per day should do. That’s just 275 kg per person for a long (three year) mission.

          Radiation, by relatively conservative estimates, is a matter of a slightly increased risk of cancer later in life. That assumes our current (and limited) understanding of high mass energetic particles is correct, but I did preface all this by saying it’s all a matter of how much risk one is willing to accept.

          The same is true of microgravity. People have spent the requisite time in microgravity, and were reasonably functional within a few days of returning to Earth. Schedule in a few days off after the Mars landing, and as long as there are no emergencies, everything would be fine. Assuming there are no emergencies gets back to accepting risk.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Also instead of going to the surface of Mars you could probably target the two moons, which would required a lot less propellant and no need for heat shields, etc. That actually would probably be the wiser thing to do until we know if their is life on the Mars surface. A couple of rovers controlled from orbit , or from a base on one of the moons, with HD links could also do a lot of science work in the interim. It also solves any issues of moving from micro-gravity to Mars gravity.

          • fcrary says:
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            That depends on the mission goals. I thought this was about doing something impressive while Mr. Trump is still in office. If that’s the goal, I’m not sure operating rovers from Phobos would achieve it.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Depends, the Obama Administration had going to asteroids as its goal and skipping the Moon and the media was playing it up. The moons of Mars would be far more impressive, especially with Mars looming in the background. And going to them is probably going to be a necessary first step before going to the surface as it is difficult to imagine the planetary protection folks signing off on any mission until we know more about the prospects of life on Mars’ surface. A base on one of the Martian moons really makes more sense than the “Gateway” being pushed by NASA.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        NASA had the luxury of the Space Race in the 1960s which afforded it the largest budget it’s ever had (when you adjust for inflation). You can do a lot of things quickly with a “waste anything but time” mentality and a young organization.

        Today’s NASA has a much smaller budget and has become a more mature organization with different priorities (safety vs. schedule).

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          You know NASA did not have a lot of money until President Kennedy asked a similar question. He received a better answer and so NASA got a bigger budget.

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            The Kennedy tapes prove that the budget increase was to win the Space Race which was a proxy war during the Cold War. Times have changed. That funding isn’t ever coming back. The public facing speech about going to the moon was just that, public facing. In the back rooms, things were different.

            https://history.nasa.gov/JF

            Kennedy (to the then NASA Administrator):
            But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.

            In the above quote, “them” is clearly the U.S.S.R. The U.S.S.R. is dead and buried.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Nor does it since the future of space has moved beyond NASA to private industry.

            BTW, the lunar lander for SpaceIL has arrived in Florida and will be launched by SpaceX next month.

            https://www.clickorlando.co

            Israeli lunar lander arrives at Cape Canaveral ahead of SpaceX launch

            Liftoff slated for mid-February

            By Emilee Speck – Digital journalist
            Posted: 2:04 PM, January 21, 2019
            Updated: 2:04 PM, January 21, 2019

            Its interesting to see how little coverage this private mission is getting compared to all the press on the Chinese landing.

          • fcrary says:
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            Actually, the Chang’e 3 landing in 2012 didn’t get much coverage outside China. (Although the Yutu had a massive social media following in China.) I think the difference is that Chang’e 4 was a landing on the far side. That gave a clear, one-sentence statement of why this is new and different.

            Chang’e 3 and Beresheet? So what if the Chinese or a private company can do something NASA did back in the 1960s. Yutu? That’s something the Russians did in the 1970s, and not even close to the Apollo lunar rover. But no one had ever landed anything on the far side of the Moon before.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            True, but since the launch is from the U.S. you would think it would get a bit more coverage, especially since it does have some NASA involvement.

            https://www.nasa.gov/press-

            “NASA has signed an agreement with the Israel Space Agency (ISA) to cooperatively utilize the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL’s commercial lunar mission, expected to land on the Moon in 2019.

            NASA will contribute a laser retroreflector array to aid with ground tracking and Deep Space Network support to aid in mission communication. ISA and SpaceIL will share data with NASA from the SpaceIL lunar magnetometer installed aboard the spacecraft. The instrument, which was developed in collaboration with the Weizmann Institute of Science, will measure the magnetic field on and above the landing site. The data will be made publicly available through NASA’s Planetary Data System. In addition, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will attempt to take
            scientific measurements of the SpaceIL lander as it lands on the Moon. “

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            To be fair the Israeli lunar lander is a secondary payload. It should prove quite interesting and I’d expect the press to give it more attention once it’s actually flying.

      • Richard Brezinski says:
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        Its really far worse than this. NASA has been working on the Orion/Constellation design since 2004. 2004 is equivalent to where NASA was in 1961 on Apollo. Except in 2004, NASA had the advantage of having designed, built, launched, and operated 8 manned space vehicles: X-15, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo CSM, Apollo LM, Skylab, Shuttle and ISS, so they should have known what was needed to get the job done. In 1961 they had essentially none of that experience. We are now 15 years into the new ‘safe, simple, soon’ capsule. They screwed up several times on the size, mass and systems of the capsule, and on the boosters, wasting tremendous resources on Ares 1 and 5 and then moving onto SLS. And they are still probably 5 years from a manned flight. It is amazing to me, with 40+ years experience in the program, to see that so little was learned from the earlier programs and so little carried over to the next generation of workers that when it came time to develop the next program, NASA was unable to do the job on anything like a realistic schedule or budget. NASA ought to be taking that lesson to heart and figuring out what they did wrong and how they need to do it differently in the future. I think a lot of us who have been there know exactly what went wrong, but we are not in a position to fix it. If NASA cannot fix itr, then its time to think about other options.

        • Vladislaw says:
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          “They screwed up several times on the size, mass and systems of the capsule, and on the boosters, wasting tremendous resources on Ares 1 and 5 and then moving onto SLS”

          You say screwed up and congressional members from space states call that good policy ..

      • fcrary says:
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        Well, he had been in office for a couple months, according to the story, and the trip to Mars is about nine months. And I think it’s reasonable to assume he knew we did not have anything that can put an astronaut in orbit. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for someone, even with limited knowledge of the subject and expectations based on the NASA of the 1960s, to realize setting foot on Mars is more than three years away. (I didn’t check the launch windows, since that’s not the sort of thing I’d expect many people to think of.)

        It’s not even clear we could do a return to the Moon that soon. I think it’s possible, although not for the NASA of the 2010s. But it would be tight. Development of the lander would probably be the limiting factor. It took six and a half years for Apollo and cutting that down under four would be pushing it. Even with the experience from Apollo, which doesn’t go too far since most of the technology is beyond obsolete, four years might be a very tight schedule.

        • GentleGiant says:
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          “And I think it’s reasonable to assume he knew we did not have anything that can put an astronaut in orbit.”

          ” I don’t think it’s unreasonable for someone, even with limited knowledge of the subject… to realize setting foot on Mars is more than three years away”

          I don’t think those are reasonable assumptions given that we know Trump only thinks of himself, has zero intellectual curiosity, and does not read anything except stories about himself.

  2. TheBrett says:
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    I’m sure he did, for a brief period of time. Even if Lightfoot hadn’t discouraged it, he probably would have lost interest quickly (and Congress wouldn’t approve the funding, as with SEI).

  3. Bernardo Senna says:
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    : D

  4. rb1957 says:
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    I understand talking to POTUS you need to be careful, even dipolmatic, but I think a reasonable response could have been “with unlimited funding we probably couldn’t land on the moon in 2 years, never mind Mars. It’ll take a good chunk of that time just to travel to Mars.” Starting now, with an Apollo style budget (ie national high priority) I think we’re at least 4 years from a Lunar landing, returning as an Apollo lander (very short duration). To build a Lunar base, well that is at least 10 years, like ISS; it’ll take years just to get the framework agreement between the partners.

  5. chrisfoster says:
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    Reader beware: both articles cite the same memoir as their single source.

  6. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Because decades at NASA have probably driven all the risk taking and excitement about space out of him… He probably lost the science fiction dreams that drove the Apollo generation at NASA and is driving the new space entrepreneurs now.

    • savuporo says:
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      I don’t seem to agree with you often, but in this case yeah. What a complete wuss answer – “no, not possible”

  7. BigTedd says:
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    I don’t like the guy but honestly he asked a simple Question probably in flippant way of the Chief Astronaut at the time. I doubt he meant anything by it accept making conversation!

  8. DJE51 says:
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    Well, the proper response should have been: No, Mr. President, but if you set us on this goal, and free up the restraints we have in our budgetary process, then you will still be credited with its execution. If we really try, we can divert funding to SpaceX, who are also attempting the same thing. And if we provide them funds, we can call it a NASA mission. They are already talking about landing two ships on mars of 100 cargo tons each in 2022, with humans and additional cargo to follow in 2024. So, possibly by the end of your second term. But regardless, this will be a monument to your extraordinary forward thinking, just think about how the Apollo missions were credited to John Kennedy who enunciated the dream, not to Richard Nixon who saw it through.

  9. mfwright says:
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    Since we are comparing humans on Mars with Apollo, besides lotsa money for NASA in 1960s, there was also extensive infrastructure as Dr Matula has said “there was an Ace Hardware store on every corner” as I think of back then Southern Calif had zillions of companies making all sorts of stuff from non-oil lubricants to strain gage balances.

    It seems Apollo had certain people that made certain design decisions that enabled the system to reach the moon. Another space program was the Air Force MOL program that didn’t result much.

    A lecture by NASA chief historian Bill Barry said the real purpose of Apollo was not to beat the Soviets to the moon but to demonstrate to other countries (many countries that were recently European colonies and did not have appreciative views of western powers) that US style of economy/political system is better than Soviet style. Berry said as a youngster he remembered Kennedy talking about a cooperative mission to the moon with the Soviets which confused him at the time, “I thought we were in a race?” See Barry’s presentation here https://www.c-span.org/vide

    • fcrary says:
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      The difference between the Apollo program and current NASA programs isn’t exactly the presence or absence of hardware stores. I think a big part of it is the willingness to use them. I once read a history of the Mercury program which mentioned some things I can’t imaging NASA doing today. At least for test articles, they did run down to the local hardware store for some parts. If some dimensions on a couple parts weren’t quite right, and they wouldn’t fit together, someone could just toss one in the back of his car, drive over to a machine shop and cut it down to fit. That’s not how things or done. I’ve heard comments like, “Well, we could do that if we were building a CubeSat, but for anything important…”

  10. chuckc192000 says:
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    As much as I hate Trump, he probably has about as much knowledge of the space business and what’s possible to do in space as the average American. I still run into people who think “The Martian” was based on a true story. Of course as president he SHOULD be more knowledgeable about MANY different topics, but he has zero curiosity.