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Third president in a row to offer something like this related to the Moon. Obama: He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a pre

Third president in a row to offer something like this related to the Moon. Obama: He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars. Bush: President Bush has unveiled a new vision for space exploration, calling on NASA to "gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own." In other words - same old unless $ is put in the budget and approved.

azemetre 9y ago
Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle. Hardly sustainable. Is there a reason why we can't let NASA be NASA and pursue objectives they want without a butting President or Congress?
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  My more cynical belief is that the issue is intent - specifically that these moves are not intended to create functioning space programs, but to move money to interested parties and look good in the news.
- dmode 9y ago
  I am curious how other countries operate their space programs that gives them some autonomy from voting cycles. You cannot run a space program with budgets and priorities changes every 4 years.
  - garmaine 9y ago
    The Russian space agency is semi-commercial at this point. The Chinese space agency is run by the military. Not that election cycles would be a problem in either case regardless. But he real answer as pointed out by the sibling is to use a more academic model like NSF and NIH does, rather than flagship missions. Look at how the Discovery program authorizes planetary probes, for example. That approach could be done for flagship and human missions too.
  - wil421 9y ago
    Yes you can and NASA does this today. Otherwise we wouldn’t have any of the mars rovers or the late Cassini Saturn probe.
    - Rooster61 9y ago
      Cassini-Huygens wasn't purely NASA. The ESA and ISA were heavily involved. The Huygens probe was purely European in origin. Doesn't really take away from your argument, but it's worth mentioning.
    - Bluestrike2 9y ago
      Certainly. Despite those successes however, the political and budget process still has a significant effect on NASA operations. A number of past programs--including unmanned ones--have been cancelled or altered due to those pressures. Others have been killed during budget battles while still in the early planning stages. Even during the Apollo era, NASA has had to very carefully pick its battles. And it's not always successful. But it's not a zero sum game: NASA can achieve major successes, while still being tied down by politics. Speaking in very broad terms, unmanned missions tend to have a significantly lower public profile up until the moment they reach their destination. Unmanned missions can die during budget battles, but that's usually the extent of things. Manned missions, on the other hand, have a much higher profile throughout the entire process. They can take longer, are more expensive, and require additional political support from politicians who will in all likelihood not be in office to take credit for the mission's eventual success. There are also far greater PR incentives for an incoming administration to dabble with NASA policy in order to differentiate itself from the previous administration. It's relatively high profile, makes a new POTUS appear "presidential" and forward-thinking, and comes with very little political risk compared to other federal programs they could touch. Explaining that manned spaceflight missions are developed over the course of years, and that bold new policy proclamations are counterproductive is a tricky political argument to make. If someone attacks them for the policy changes, they get to just argue that NASA is still getting money and "working towards the future." Whether the changed goals ever come to fruition is largely secondary. Which sucks, but it's the nature of long-term programs. JFK pushed NASA to the moon, but even if he hadn't been assassinated, he still wouldn't have been in office to for the moon landing. Nixon never once publicly acknowledged JFK's role. When there was a push to name the Apollo 11 craft after JFK, Nixon's congressional relations assistant Bryce Harlow quipped "we have gone far enough in ‘Kennedyizing’ the mission" while another senior advisor, John Ehrlichman noted "such an action would win us neither friends in Congress nor votes in 1972,” suggesting “fall prey to this and the next step will be renaming the moon because NBC thinks it would be a good idea." H.R. Haldeman killed the proposal, literally double underlining the point (Logsdon 14). Despite everything that's been thrown in their way, and how election-oriented thinking can impact its missions, NASA has managed to continue pushing scientific boundaries since the beginning. That's damned impressive. - Logsdon, John. After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program.
- hux_ 9y ago
  NASA isn't a high priority budget item. China is due to do a few interesting things in space over the next couple years. After that priorities are likely to change.
- vkou 9y ago
  Because without a butting President or Congress creating pork for their constituents, NASA would not exist.
  - natch 9y ago
    You’re referring to the pork barrel politics analogy. Are you saying NASA programs are the pork in that analogy?
    - vkou 9y ago
      Yes. NASA was created to fight communists. Now that there are no more communists, NASA continues to exist only as a form of corporate welfare. Congress cares far more about where NASA sources from, then it does about what NASA does. The science (Which half of Congress doesn't believe in) is just an accidental side effect of keeping aerospace jobs in Georgia, Indiana, Arkansas, etc.
      - natch 9y ago
        So in your opinion there are no benefits or insufficient benefits to justify the government taking an active interest and investing money in ensuring that the US has good continuing access to space that is at least somewhat under our own control? (As opposed to potentially under the control of governments of other, possibly enemy, countries)?
        vkou 9y ago
        This is a loaded question. 1. I believe that the Department of State's obsession with maintaining the American empire through globe-spanning military dominance is insane. 2. If I did not believe that #1 is insane, yes, I would say that NASA is playing an important role in the US offense industry. (Maybe? Who knows, it's all classified.) 3. Most of the people on HN who strongly support more funding for NASA do so out of either their scientific work, Star Trek romanticism, or both. Military applications rank a distant third.
      - Bluestrike2 9y ago
- rbanffy 9y ago
  > Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle. With adequate funding, it's not that bad. Just build modular ships, probes and landers. You can get more done by custom building, but a generic backbone can resist political changes. If the focus goes back to robotic exploration, your lander can, at least, carry the robot. The same propulsion system that would take a crew to Mars could take a small probe to Pluto and slow it down so it can enter orbit. Or drop a couple smaller probes on its way out. The design of the ISS changed as it was being built. We can certainly do the same with a craft that can leave Earth orbit.
gozur88 9y ago
There's not much the president can do about that since it's up to Congress to allocate the funds. House terms are only two years long, and if you allocate funds to this kind of thing you have nothing to show for it in the next election cycle unless the project brings jobs to your district.
- guelo 9y ago
  That's absolutely not true, especially when the president and congress are of the same party. The President has the veto so congress and the president have to come to an agreement to pass a budget.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    In theory, sure. But Congress packs everything into one bill and puts it on the president's desk. Realistically, he can't not sign it without paying an enormous political price.
giantsloth 9y ago
Here is Obama's space fact sheet https://web.archive.org/web/20081107061417/https://barackobama.com/pdf/policy/Space_Fact_Sheet_FINAL.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20081107061417/https://barackoba... Human spaceflight is important to America’s political, economic, technological, and scientific leadership. Barack Obama will support renewed human exploration beyond low earth orbit. He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars. - pg 3 paragraph 4
- vermontdevil 9y ago
  I'm not criticizing Obama or Bush or Trump. It's Congress. I'm sure every president since Nixon wants to go back to the Moon. But again it's Congress. Allocate the $ and we will go back. Hopefully this time it's for real. I'm not holding my breath. We'll see.
  - giantsloth 9y ago
    I didn't think you were criticizing, I just find the source material and the homogeneity of their promises interesting.
    - vermontdevil 9y ago
      Gotcha. I always get excited when they do this but have to remind myself that Congress has to come up with the $. Here's hoping.
      - valuearb 9y ago
        Congress came up with the money. And forced NASA to spend it on the SLS to ensure we'd never explore deep space.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    I'm not sure we can cut taxes and go to the moon. Unfortunately most Americans want low taxes over much anything else including their own healthcare. It's good for your health not to hold your breath.
garmaine 9y ago
Obama explicitly stopped an effort to get to the Moon with a massively ignorant “been there, done that” (exact quote!) attitude. If he signed legislation authorizing it, it was due to being part of a huge authorization bill for which space policy is not important enough to quibble over. The brief history is that NASA has a legacy of not taking cost effective routes to exploration and rather preferring the too expensive to sustain Apollo model. The first George Bush gave a directive to get to Mars. The massive program that they came up with would have bankrupted the economy. Congress instead forbade NASA from spending any money towards people to Mars. Clinton took the focus away from destinations and supported the ISS as a post-cold war olive branch to Russia. George W Bush lifted that ban and gave the same goal towards boots on Mars with explicit direction to pursue a commercial space settlement approach that through cost sharing and reuse would have kept total cost reasonable and bootstrapped a self sufficient extraterrestrial economy. That directive was ignored and we got what NASA literally described as “Apollo on steroids”. Obama killed that albatross without a replacement or any intention of providing one other than giving them permission to do something like visit an asteroid, as pointless an exercise as that would be, just so long as it could be done within a frozen budget, meaning minimal if any tech development (a directive to do tech development and a budget was provided, but it was substitutive not additional and eventually gutted anyway). Congress overruled and started giving their own directions for NASA, including the pork driven SLS that serves no purpose really. Now Trump seems to be sending the pendulum back in the humans to Moon, Mars, and beyond direction. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets unwound by a democratic successor. If this seems rather political, it is only the mundane politics of traditional party bases and campaign contributions. There is a lot of overlap between NASA and defense contractors, typically republican supporting, and they stand to benefit directly from an Apollo like approach. Lots of waste to profit off of in the traditional NASA model. The saddest story for me is that George W Bush actually seemed to care and DIDN’T authorize the traditional republican battlestar galactica approach but rather tried to direct NASA towards the SpaceX model of lean efficient reusable commercial tech, not government programs. But he was ignored by a zealous NASA administrator with a “NASA glory days” obsession and congressional pork. Space Policy isn’t exactly what the president should be focusing on, especially with two wars going on at the time, so presidents tend to get their directives used by others with opposing agendas. Edit: down voters explain yourselves? I mention political parties only because the answer to the question involves politics. I tried to be explicitly non partisan about it. I worked at NASA during the second Bush and Obama years and saw directly the internal policy considerations as they were made. The above constitutes my high level summary of that.
giantsloth 9y ago
Here is Bush's promise: https://web.archive.org/web/20040116071139/https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040114-1.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040116071139/https://www.white... Third, America will return to the Moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for more ambitious missions. A series of robotic missions to the Moon, similar to the Spirit Rover that is sending remarkable images back to Earth from Mars, will explore the lunar surface beginning no later than 2008 to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, humans will conduct extended lunar missions as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods. - Third bullet under President Bush's Vision for U.S. Space Exploration
valuearb 9y ago
NASA actually has enough money. SpaceX Falcon 9 FT (mostly re-usable) 50,000 lbs to low earth orbit (LEO) Cost: Substantially less than $62M with re-usablity SpaceX Falcon Heavy (mostly re-usable) 140,000 lbs to LEO Cost: $90M Blue Origin New Glenn (mostly re-usable) 100,000 lbs to LEO Cost: expected under $100M. SpaceX BFR (fully re-usable) 330,000 lbs to LEO Cost: Expected less than Falcon 9 NASA SLS (Space Launch System) (disposable, destroyed every launch) Block 1 (2020): 150,000 lbs to LEO Block 1B (2022): 230,000 lbs to LEO Block 2 (2029): 290,000 lbs to LEO Cost: $500M+ per launch $1B+ a year in operational costs (for 1-2 launches a year) $20B+ in developmental costs NASA is blowing at least $3B a year paying Boeing and other contractors to build the SLS when far cheaper alternatives are either available or imminent. The cost of your Lunar or Mars exploration program is directly determined by your launch costs, and Congress has forced NASA to choose the most expensive possible launch system. Because it's built in Alabama. Using commercial launch capacity to operate the manned space program would not only free up billions a year, but accelerate it (the SLS won't be carrying humans until mid 2022 at the earliest). $3B a year could pay for a half dozen to a dozen Falcon Heavy manned launches a year with capsules, support, everything, starting in late 2019. They could be used to assemble lunar and mars size transit ships in orbit, and actually send people to the moon and mars before 2022. It could also pay for as many as six huge interplanetary robotic probes, every year. We could re-visit every planet yearly with ever more capable scientific instruments. Or a combination of the manned and robotic plans. But instead, the huge flow of money keeps the congressional delegation in Alabama secure in their seats, while crushing the dream of any actual NASA manned space program to the moon or mars ever. The SLS has missed every schedule date, and it's really unlikely congress is going to fully fund the program when the SLS is working. And the SLS spending is gutting actually super cost effective robotic probe spending. Even if funded, NASA's plan never has more than 2 launches per year, and it's first Mars launch is planned for 2033. If nothing else ever slips.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Your numbers are not quite right because you're mixing up the "let's expend the rocket" payload with the "let's not expend the rocket" prices for F9 and FH.

azemetre 9y ago

Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle. Hardly sustainable. Is there a reason why we can't let NASA be NASA and pursue objectives they want without a butting President or Congress?

TaylorAlexander 9y ago
My more cynical belief is that the issue is intent - specifically that these moves are not intended to create functioning space programs, but to move money to interested parties and look good in the news.
dmode 9y ago
I am curious how other countries operate their space programs that gives them some autonomy from voting cycles. You cannot run a space program with budgets and priorities changes every 4 years.
- garmaine 9y ago
  The Russian space agency is semi-commercial at this point. The Chinese space agency is run by the military. Not that election cycles would be a problem in either case regardless. But he real answer as pointed out by the sibling is to use a more academic model like NSF and NIH does, rather than flagship missions. Look at how the Discovery program authorizes planetary probes, for example. That approach could be done for flagship and human missions too.
- wil421 9y ago
  Yes you can and NASA does this today. Otherwise we wouldn’t have any of the mars rovers or the late Cassini Saturn probe.
  - Rooster61 9y ago
    Cassini-Huygens wasn't purely NASA. The ESA and ISA were heavily involved. The Huygens probe was purely European in origin. Doesn't really take away from your argument, but it's worth mentioning.
  - Bluestrike2 9y ago
    Certainly. Despite those successes however, the political and budget process still has a significant effect on NASA operations. A number of past programs--including unmanned ones--have been cancelled or altered due to those pressures. Others have been killed during budget battles while still in the early planning stages. Even during the Apollo era, NASA has had to very carefully pick its battles. And it's not always successful. But it's not a zero sum game: NASA can achieve major successes, while still being tied down by politics. Speaking in very broad terms, unmanned missions tend to have a significantly lower public profile up until the moment they reach their destination. Unmanned missions can die during budget battles, but that's usually the extent of things. Manned missions, on the other hand, have a much higher profile throughout the entire process. They can take longer, are more expensive, and require additional political support from politicians who will in all likelihood not be in office to take credit for the mission's eventual success. There are also far greater PR incentives for an incoming administration to dabble with NASA policy in order to differentiate itself from the previous administration. It's relatively high profile, makes a new POTUS appear "presidential" and forward-thinking, and comes with very little political risk compared to other federal programs they could touch. Explaining that manned spaceflight missions are developed over the course of years, and that bold new policy proclamations are counterproductive is a tricky political argument to make. If someone attacks them for the policy changes, they get to just argue that NASA is still getting money and "working towards the future." Whether the changed goals ever come to fruition is largely secondary. Which sucks, but it's the nature of long-term programs. JFK pushed NASA to the moon, but even if he hadn't been assassinated, he still wouldn't have been in office to for the moon landing. Nixon never once publicly acknowledged JFK's role. When there was a push to name the Apollo 11 craft after JFK, Nixon's congressional relations assistant Bryce Harlow quipped "we have gone far enough in ‘Kennedyizing’ the mission" while another senior advisor, John Ehrlichman noted "such an action would win us neither friends in Congress nor votes in 1972,” suggesting “fall prey to this and the next step will be renaming the moon because NBC thinks it would be a good idea." H.R. Haldeman killed the proposal, literally double underlining the point (Logsdon 14). Despite everything that's been thrown in their way, and how election-oriented thinking can impact its missions, NASA has managed to continue pushing scientific boundaries since the beginning. That's damned impressive. - Logsdon, John. After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program.
hux_ 9y ago
NASA isn't a high priority budget item. China is due to do a few interesting things in space over the next couple years. After that priorities are likely to change.
vkou 9y ago
Because without a butting President or Congress creating pork for their constituents, NASA would not exist.
- natch 9y ago
  You’re referring to the pork barrel politics analogy. Are you saying NASA programs are the pork in that analogy?
  - vkou 9y ago
    Yes. NASA was created to fight communists. Now that there are no more communists, NASA continues to exist only as a form of corporate welfare. Congress cares far more about where NASA sources from, then it does about what NASA does. The science (Which half of Congress doesn't believe in) is just an accidental side effect of keeping aerospace jobs in Georgia, Indiana, Arkansas, etc.
    - natch 9y ago
      So in your opinion there are no benefits or insufficient benefits to justify the government taking an active interest and investing money in ensuring that the US has good continuing access to space that is at least somewhat under our own control? (As opposed to potentially under the control of governments of other, possibly enemy, countries)?
      - vkou 9y ago
        This is a loaded question. 1. I believe that the Department of State's obsession with maintaining the American empire through globe-spanning military dominance is insane. 2. If I did not believe that #1 is insane, yes, I would say that NASA is playing an important role in the US offense industry. (Maybe? Who knows, it's all classified.) 3. Most of the people on HN who strongly support more funding for NASA do so out of either their scientific work, Star Trek romanticism, or both. Military applications rank a distant third.
    - Bluestrike2 9y ago
rbanffy 9y ago
> Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle. With adequate funding, it's not that bad. Just build modular ships, probes and landers. You can get more done by custom building, but a generic backbone can resist political changes. If the focus goes back to robotic exploration, your lander can, at least, carry the robot. The same propulsion system that would take a crew to Mars could take a small probe to Pluto and slow it down so it can enter orbit. Or drop a couple smaller probes on its way out. The design of the ISS changed as it was being built. We can certainly do the same with a craft that can leave Earth orbit.

gozur88 9y ago

There's not much the president can do about that since it's up to Congress to allocate the funds. House terms are only two years long, and if you allocate funds to this kind of thing you have nothing to show for it in the next election cycle unless the project brings jobs to your district.

guelo 9y ago
That's absolutely not true, especially when the president and congress are of the same party. The President has the veto so congress and the president have to come to an agreement to pass a budget.
- gozur88 9y ago
  In theory, sure. But Congress packs everything into one bill and puts it on the president's desk. Realistically, he can't not sign it without paying an enormous political price.

giantsloth 9y ago

Here is Obama's space fact sheet https://web.archive.org/web/20081107061417/https://barackobama.com/pdf/policy/Space_Fact_Sheet_FINAL.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20081107061417/https://barackoba... Human spaceflight is important to America’s political, economic, technological, and scientific leadership. Barack Obama will support renewed human exploration beyond low earth orbit. He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars. - pg 3 paragraph 4

vermontdevil 9y ago
I'm not criticizing Obama or Bush or Trump. It's Congress. I'm sure every president since Nixon wants to go back to the Moon. But again it's Congress. Allocate the $ and we will go back. Hopefully this time it's for real. I'm not holding my breath. We'll see.
- giantsloth 9y ago
  I didn't think you were criticizing, I just find the source material and the homogeneity of their promises interesting.
  - vermontdevil 9y ago
    Gotcha. I always get excited when they do this but have to remind myself that Congress has to come up with the $. Here's hoping.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Congress came up with the money. And forced NASA to spend it on the SLS to ensure we'd never explore deep space.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  I'm not sure we can cut taxes and go to the moon. Unfortunately most Americans want low taxes over much anything else including their own healthcare. It's good for your health not to hold your breath.

garmaine 9y ago

Obama explicitly stopped an effort to get to the Moon with a massively ignorant “been there, done that” (exact quote!) attitude. If he signed legislation authorizing it, it was due to being part of a huge authorization bill for which space policy is not important enough to quibble over. The brief history is that NASA has a legacy of not taking cost effective routes to exploration and rather preferring the too expensive to sustain Apollo model. The first George Bush gave a directive to get to Mars. The massive program that they came up with would have bankrupted the economy. Congress instead forbade NASA from spending any money towards people to Mars. Clinton took the focus away from destinations and supported the ISS as a post-cold war olive branch to Russia. George W Bush lifted that ban and gave the same goal towards boots on Mars with explicit direction to pursue a commercial space settlement approach that through cost sharing and reuse would have kept total cost reasonable and bootstrapped a self sufficient extraterrestrial economy. That directive was ignored and we got what NASA literally described as “Apollo on steroids”. Obama killed that albatross without a replacement or any intention of providing one other than giving them permission to do something like visit an asteroid, as pointless an exercise as that would be, just so long as it could be done within a frozen budget, meaning minimal if any tech development (a directive to do tech development and a budget was provided, but it was substitutive not additional and eventually gutted anyway). Congress overruled and started giving their own directions for NASA, including the pork driven SLS that serves no purpose really. Now Trump seems to be sending the pendulum back in the humans to Moon, Mars, and beyond direction. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets unwound by a democratic successor. If this seems rather political, it is only the mundane politics of traditional party bases and campaign contributions. There is a lot of overlap between NASA and defense contractors, typically republican supporting, and they stand to benefit directly from an Apollo like approach. Lots of waste to profit off of in the traditional NASA model. The saddest story for me is that George W Bush actually seemed to care and DIDN’T authorize the traditional republican battlestar galactica approach but rather tried to direct NASA towards the SpaceX model of lean efficient reusable commercial tech, not government programs. But he was ignored by a zealous NASA administrator with a “NASA glory days” obsession and congressional pork. Space Policy isn’t exactly what the president should be focusing on, especially with two wars going on at the time, so presidents tend to get their directives used by others with opposing agendas. Edit: down voters explain yourselves? I mention political parties only because the answer to the question involves politics. I tried to be explicitly non partisan about it. I worked at NASA during the second Bush and Obama years and saw directly the internal policy considerations as they were made. The above constitutes my high level summary of that.

giantsloth 9y ago

Here is Bush's promise: https://web.archive.org/web/20040116071139/https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040114-1.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040116071139/https://www.white... Third, America will return to the Moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for more ambitious missions. A series of robotic missions to the Moon, similar to the Spirit Rover that is sending remarkable images back to Earth from Mars, will explore the lunar surface beginning no later than 2008 to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, humans will conduct extended lunar missions as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods. - Third bullet under President Bush's Vision for U.S. Space Exploration

valuearb 9y ago

NASA actually has enough money. SpaceX Falcon 9 FT (mostly re-usable) 50,000 lbs to low earth orbit (LEO) Cost: Substantially less than $62M with re-usablity SpaceX Falcon Heavy (mostly re-usable) 140,000 lbs to LEO Cost: $90M Blue Origin New Glenn (mostly re-usable) 100,000 lbs to LEO Cost: expected under $100M. SpaceX BFR (fully re-usable) 330,000 lbs to LEO Cost: Expected less than Falcon 9 NASA SLS (Space Launch System) (disposable, destroyed every launch) Block 1 (2020): 150,000 lbs to LEO Block 1B (2022): 230,000 lbs to LEO Block 2 (2029): 290,000 lbs to LEO Cost: $500M+ per launch $1B+ a year in operational costs (for 1-2 launches a year) $20B+ in developmental costs NASA is blowing at least $3B a year paying Boeing and other contractors to build the SLS when far cheaper alternatives are either available or imminent. The cost of your Lunar or Mars exploration program is directly determined by your launch costs, and Congress has forced NASA to choose the most expensive possible launch system. Because it's built in Alabama. Using commercial launch capacity to operate the manned space program would not only free up billions a year, but accelerate it (the SLS won't be carrying humans until mid 2022 at the earliest). $3B a year could pay for a half dozen to a dozen Falcon Heavy manned launches a year with capsules, support, everything, starting in late 2019. They could be used to assemble lunar and mars size transit ships in orbit, and actually send people to the moon and mars before 2022. It could also pay for as many as six huge interplanetary robotic probes, every year. We could re-visit every planet yearly with ever more capable scientific instruments. Or a combination of the manned and robotic plans. But instead, the huge flow of money keeps the congressional delegation in Alabama secure in their seats, while crushing the dream of any actual NASA manned space program to the moon or mars ever. The SLS has missed every schedule date, and it's really unlikely congress is going to fully fund the program when the SLS is working. And the SLS spending is gutting actually super cost effective robotic probe spending. Even if funded, NASA's plan never has more than 2 launches per year, and it's first Mars launch is planned for 2033. If nothing else ever slips.

greglindahl 9y ago
Your numbers are not quite right because you're mixing up the "let's expend the rocket" payload with the "let's not expend the rocket" prices for F9 and FH.