NASA has a bold plan to reach Mars by 2030, but that doesn’t mean it’ll actually land on the red planet. In fact, it looks like the space agency is finally ready to admit that, at current costs for such operations, it doesn’t have the money to land humans on Mars and then bring them back. Revisiting the Moon is a different business, and both require billions.
“I can’t put a date on humans on Mars, and the reason really is the other piece is, at the budget levels we described, this roughly 2 percent increase, we don’t have the surface systems available for Mars,” NASA’s William H. Gerstenmaier said on Wednesday during a propulsion meeting at the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. “And that entry, descent and landing is a huge challenge for us for Mars.”
NASA’s new space toys, including the Space Launch System and spacecraft Orion, are expensive endeavors meant to get us close to Mars. But the agency also needs to design landing vehicles that would actually do the landing and ascending parts, Ars Technica explains.
That doesn’t mean the Mars mission is canceled. Of course not. NASA should get additional few hundred billion in funding in coming years to sustain the effort, or perhaps team up with the private sector to work on cheaper solutions to get people to Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqq4C1J3ioM
Or, simply fake the entire thing, and then destroy all video/photo evidence of the visit, like we did with our pretend visit to the Moon. That’s right, NASA “lost” all of their data, video, photo and telemetry evidence that anyone has ever been to the Moon.
