WASHINGTON – NASA scientists, engineers, and space legends like Buzz Aldrin met at the Humans to Mar Summit this week to discuss the growing interest of sending humans to the Red Planet by the year 2013.
Presented by the George Washington University Space Policy Institute and a slew of corporate sponsors from Boeing to Google, the summit tackled the most obvious questions concerning a manned mission to Mars – technology, resources, and of course the budget.
NASA has estimated that a round-trip human mission to Mars would take more than four years to complete and estimates by the University of Washington put launch costs alone at more than $12 billion dollars.
In President Obama’s proposed 2014 fiscal budget $17.7 billion was allocated to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. However, if a another round of spending cuts were to occur, NASA’s overall budget could be reduced to as low as $16.1 billion.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R – Ala., came to the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing for NASA’s 2014 budget with concerns about the administration’s current investments.
“There are many unanswered questions about NASA’s plan for the future and how it plans to achieve that vision,” Shelby said.
In the April 25 hearing, committee members voiced concerns that the budget focused too heavily on privately funded commercial launch vehicles, rather than investments needed for actual human space flight.
“I’m concerned… that the budget before us is an example of chasing the next great idea while sacrificing current investments,” Shelby said.
According to a poll sponsored by Exporemars.org and Boeing released in March, 75 percent of American “strongly agree” or “agree” that it is worthwhile to increased NASA’s percentage of the federal budget from half a percent to a full percent.
President Obama voiced his support for the mission in 2010 when he visited the Kennedy Space Center, according to Gen. Charles Bolden, NASA’s current administrator.
“He set a goal of sending humans to an asteroid for the first time in history by 2025 and making a crude journey to mars by the 2030s.”
There were hopes that the U.S. would have commercial crew capability for the nation by 2015. When the necessary funding did not come through, NASA then set its sight on 2017 – although Bolden has concerns for that deadline as well.
“It will be my unfortunate duty to advise the Congress and the President that we probably will not make 2017 for the availability of an American capability to get our astronauts to space,” he said. “I will have to tell you that I’m going to have to come back and ask for authorization to once again pay the Russians to take our crews to space.”
There are not definitive plans for a Mars mission, but this week’s Humans to Mars Summit was the first step in producing a path for the necessary technology and policy developments needed to meet that goal.