16 thoughts on “Is NASA Serious About Mars”

    1. They are pretty serious about spending a majority of the planetary exploration budgets on Mars. Maybe because its comfortable and known.

    1. > deep space

      Something of an aside, but the cited article is interesting because in it Mr. Bolden says, “Today, that spacecraft, Orion, has had a successful (uncrewed) flight into deep space…” Since EFT-1 carried Orion to an apogee of 5,800 km, we now know that, for NASA, “deep space” begins at less than one Earth radius (~6, 370 km) altitude.

  6. If NASA were serious about Mars, they’d be doing a whole lotta prep work that’s not on the table.

    The health impacts of long-term Mars gravity, for instance, make a pretty good impact on mission planning. You can test that on animal analogues on the ISS with existing hardware that NASA owns. You can test it on on humans pretty easily in LEO, and maybe even try out some cruise-phase artificial gravity techniques at the same time.

    It takes years to prove life support systems that need to work, with minimal spare parts and maintenance, for years. You can do that on the ground, and ISS could sure be useful in proving such systems. Heck, ISS could use some better systems itself.

    These things, and more, are all scheduled for half-past never. Conclusion: NASA is not serious about Mars. And they’re right not to be, ’cause in the current climate they aren’t going there.

  7. At least among the ‘more’ sophisticated there, the reason for an unstated agreement at NASA to play at this “Journey to Mars” farce is their hope that it will convince Shelby et al that they are all his good little soldiers, and so maybe they’ll get enough crumbs to complete Commercial Crew and a few other useful things on the side.

    Well, you can see how well that’s going with CCP Appropriations underfunded again in FY 2016.

    Meanwhile the unsophisticated and the young and naive get taken in for another generation. Or at least some of them. Like the kid working for Orbital who came up to me in a park (because I was wearing an XCOR cap) the day of the F9 failure. After exchanges about that unfortunate event, he went on to say he was a big supporter of SLS because his generation had missed (by decades) Apollo and he wanted to see a human Mars flight.

    I told him that the best way to prevent himself from seeing such a flight in _his_ lifetime was encouraging the SLS fraud to continue.

    Footnote: BTW didn’t Bolden even say the New Horizons flyby was part of NASA’s “Journey to Mars?” They have to meet their quota of mentioning it, I guess…

    1. “Meanwhile the unsophisticated and the young and naive get taken in for another generation.”

      And when they find out NASA has been less than honest, NASA may find it loses support for funding. Pumping people up then popping the bubble wont turn out well in the long run.

  8. The architecture they’re using is regurgitated Constellation, which was designed to explore cislunar space. So it’s not a surprise that what NASA’s architecture is showing so far is something that has no capability beyond cislunar space. Of course, it costs so much that they don’t have any hardware in the pipeline to do anything even in cislunar space once they get there. So NASA is reduced to making vague noises about ARM and Mars.

    It *is* still possible to do something on the Moon, as we have seen with the Charles Miller study. But realistically, on current budgets, the Moon (or one of its Lagrange points) is our effective limit for manned exploration for the time being. Unless political priorities change, Mars is off limits for decades to come, even with a more sustainable architecture, which the SLS is not.

    1. It *is* still possible to do something on the Moon, as we have seen with the Charles Miller study.

      Charles also thought ISS would turn into Alpha Town and the Bush Vision for Space Exploration would be a great success. He gets caught up in rosy optimistic scenarios and fails to recognize the more likely outcomes given real-world politics.

      But realistically, on current budgets, the Moon (or one of its Lagrange points) is our effective limit for manned exploration for the time being. Unless political priorities change, Mars is off limits for decades to come

      There’s another way. Instead of increasing the budget, reduce the cost. Manned exploration does not have to be limited to NASA (or a few “public-private partners” selected for their political connections).

      Even if you could raise the NASA’s budget enough to get to Mars, all that would get you is very expensive trips to Mars. Affordable access to space would open the entire solar system.

  9. As far as I can tell from twitter, NASA is just AGW PR and pretty pictures. To the extent NASA does science, it acts more like a gatekeeper to other people doing science.

    I can’t blame them for the rent seeking PR. They have to fight against so many other worthy priorities to spend other people’s money on. So what if they sex things up a bit more than they should?

    1. I have this “vibe” that the AGW PR out of NASA is just “stuff” whereas if you want to get serious data out of the gummint you go to ORNL (Oak Ridge National Lab).

      I suppose both NASA and ORNL are repurposed in order to stay in business, but what is it about ORNL that appears to be more serious, and what is it about NASA that seems so fluffy?

  10. NASA is able to do (in some cases) and fund (in other cases) excellent robotic missions. The decadal surveys give guidance that is well matched to the needs of the communities that make them, the funding/construction timescales, and the available funds (with a few notable exceptions like MSL and JWST).

    NASA’s HSF program, for anything beyond LEO, has timescales and funding requirements that are utterly mismatched to the political and economic environment. The agency casts about for something–ANYthing–it can do with the money it can expect to get in the next 10 years. The answer is “not much,” but if NASA just throws up its hands and admits this, its funding will be cut by about 1/2. So there’s the endless kabuki of Powerpoints and videos and nonsense.

    1. “The answer is “not much,” but if NASA just throws up its hands and admits this, its funding will be cut by about 1/2. So there’s the endless kabuki of Powerpoints and videos and nonsense.”

      Yes, so we get endless articles about how we are going to Mars, the Moon, an Asteroid, or a lagrange point as if there was an actual plan or program to go to these places and in reality, we are only going to the ISS. Could SLS take us to one of these places? Maybe. But NASA portrays all of these destinations as active programs that we are doing at the same time.

      Just a tad dishonest.

Comments are closed.