NASA has been speaking about getting humans to Mars for years, and carries on to deliver updated plans for getting there. Unluckily, however, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, William H. Gerstenmaier, just declared that the agency can’t attain the Mars goal on its present budget.
Basically, the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft have cost the agency a lot. As a consequence, NASA hasn’t even been capable of starting designing vehicles to land on Mars or ascend from the surface.
“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 and that entry, descent, and landing is a huge challenge for us for Mars.” Gerstenmaier said during a propulsion meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics on Wednesday.
NASA’s next moves will rest on on finance. Gerstenmaier indicated the agency might be interested in a Moon exploration mission – one that is more widespread than the present plan to build the Deep Space Gateway in the Moon’s orbit. Further than just being a launching pad for additional space exploration, the gateway could “support a widespread moon surface program,” says Gerstenmaier.
A Team Effort
Luckily for our Red Planet dreams, it isn’t just up to NASA. Getting humans to Mars is a team effort. Organizations like NASA are actually at the mercy of political moods and budgetary limits, so they need to do as much as they can with what funds are there. One way they can maximize effect is to partner with private companies.
This month Elon Musk declared we might be receiving an update about the SpaceX Mars mission in September at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Australia. For now, however, SpaceX has set a target of 2018 for an unmanned Mars mission and 2025 for a manned mission. Both Boeing and Blue Origin are also preparing to put humans on Mars. It may turn out that the “we” in Vice President Pence’s comments about putting American boots on Mars is the greater American “we,” and not the government or NASA.