Today, the US space agency NASA has officially acknowledged the fact that with the current budget, they cannot afford to send people to Mars. The agency's next steps in this direction will depend on how much their funding from the US government changes. But at the moment the colonization of Mars depends most of all on private companies like SpaceX, and not on an agency directly dependent on the state.
NASA has been actively discussing in recent years that sending a man to Mars is one of the primary tasks. The agency's specialists even developed a specific step-by-step plan to achieve this goal and began to implement it. But in the end, it all came down to funding, which is always in short supply. William Gerstenmeier, the head of the department of manned space flight, made a statement that NASA could not afford the continuation of this program at the current budget.
“I cannot tell you the date of sending people to Mars. And the reason for this lies in the fact that even the agency's budget that has grown by 2% does not allow us to create a soft landing system on the surface of the Red Planet. Descent and landing is one of the main challenges that Mars presents to us,”Gerstenmeier said.
NASA has recently invested heavily in the development of the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft. As a result, the agency has not even started developing a means of landing and taking off from the surface of Mars. Gerstenmeier admitted that plans for Mars will have to be postponed indefinitely. In the meantime, NASA will focus on more real-world missions. For example, on further exploration of the moon. At the same time, Elon Musk promises to publish his future plans for Mars in the fall. Maybe at least he will please us with news.
Sergey Gray
