NASA won’t be taking humans to Mars anymore

We have been continuously hearing about NASA’s plans about getting humans to Mars. However, NASA recently announced that they won’t be able to get humans to Mars because of their current budget.

NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, William H. Gerstenmaier said during a propulsion meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics on Wednesday, “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.”

Because of the huge costs of the SLS rocket and Orion craft, NASA has been unable to manufacture vehicles that can land on Mars or ascend from the surface. However, NASA’s further moves would only depend upon funding because Mars landing would cost more due to the large expandable rocket approach that requires five or more launches per person, reports Arstechnica.

Moreover, Elon Musks’s SpaceX has also set a deadline of 2018 for an unmanned Mars mission and 2025 for a named mission. Boeing and Blue Origin are also preparing to put humans on Mars soon.

Furthermore, Gerstenmaier pointed out that the agency might be interested in a Moon exploration mission – one that is more widespread than the existing plan to construct the Deep Space Gateway in the Moon’s orbit, as per Futurism.

“If we find out there’s water on the Moon, and we want to do more extensive operations on the Moon to go explore that, we have the ability with Deep Space Gateway to support an extensive Moon surface program. If we want to stay focused more toward Mars we can keep that,” concluded Gerstenmaier.