Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: NASA- Nobody's Going to Mars Without Our Help- Endgadget

NASA's top priority is still taking humans to Mars, and it says private companies who want to do the same don't stand a chance without its support. Administrator Charles Bolden tolda US House budget committee, "our ultimate focus is the journey to Mars and everything comes back to that," adding that the agency still plans to land there by the 2030s. A manned mission to Mars is crucial because the red planet was likely habitable in the past, and scientists must find out what went wrong to prevent a similar disaster on Earth. Bolden went so far as to say that humans need to "get away from being Earth-reliant... (and) Mars is the planet that is the most like Earth."

The key to Mars is the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which is scheduled to launch in 2020 with the crazy goal of putting chunk of asteroid into orbit around the moon. NASA will use it to trial critical technology, like Solar Electric Propulsion and autonomous robotic technology. ARM will also be a crucial test of the Space Launch System (SLS) designed to take astronauts and cargo beyond low Earth orbit. Bolden said that astronauts will even land on the moon, which will function as a way-station to Mars. As for private companies like Mars One and SpaceX? Bolden doesn't see them as any kind of competition to NASA: "No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars."

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ZenGalacticore2 hours ago

For the in any way "foreseeable" future, Bolden is probably right. Besides being a taxi to the (very) Low Earth Orbit ISS, all we're going to see private space companies do for a while is offer pricey joy rides into said vLEO, and lower orbits, for the super-rich.

That said, has anyone else ever noticed that a manned mission to Mars for NASA is always, "a few decades away"?

BrentMcKaskell4 hours ago

I think NASA has it backwards. America is moving away from government control of space. Lest they forget: the first American rocket pioneer was Robert Goddard, who built the most advanced rockets of his time - NOT government. In fact, he tried to get government interested, and they flipped him off. Also consider aeronautics. Who invented the airplane, private enterprise or government? Again, government loses. Who got us on the moon? You might think it was NASA, but you'd be wrong. It was a Nazi by the name of Werner Von Braun. Yes, he was a government employee, but the technology he created was for a different government, not the US government. So...the US government needs to keep its trap shut when it comes to advancements in science and technology. The future of space travel belongs to private enterprise and private inventors. In the meantime, I'm too busy reading Ward Kendall's sci-fi novel, "Hold Back This Day", which is partly set on Mars. Really un-PC, as novels should be.

Frangible41 minutes ago

Actually the Saturn V was created exclusively for the US Government. Every space accomplishment to date has been by a major government. Every design the private sector is attempting to use is derived from government designs.

Even Von Braun's original V2 was symptomatic of that. No private corporation would build it. It took the application of rockets as a weapon before progress could be made. (such as it was)

There is no profit or business case in going to Mars. Space exploration has been a dual-use of nuclear weapons technology and even then required significant government investment, brought to you by the jingoism and insecurity that marked the cold war. Ugly things, but great for space exploration.

The chances of the private sector contribting in a significant way to space exploration beyond being contractors are about the same as the private sector making an Art Deco styled underwater city in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

But to be fair, at the current level of funding, NASA won't be going to Mars either. When we landed on the moon, NASA's budget as a fraction of the GDP was much, much higher. And that was while getting the latest and greatest from the concurrent ICBM development at the time. Now we have basically no nuclear weapons program to help cost-share the R&D, no new developments, no cold war, and a NASA whose funding is a shadow of its former self. No Von Braun, no Korolev.

A couple private companies reusing old designs and tweaking them a little isn't going to change that. Much like honey badgers, rocket science doesn't care about Moore's law. Do not presume what happened to your smartphone can be applied to manned space exploration. It cannot.

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Remember that crappy, top-down Halo game that came out a few years ago, Spartan Assault? Well, it got a sequel that's available on Steam, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and as weird as it sounds, even iOS. Anyhow, Halo: Spartan Strike will run you $5.99 or, if you're using one of Apple's mobile gizmos or a PC, you can grab the first game and the new one in a bundle for $9.99. Spartan Strike's story is a simulation (much like the last one was) set during the events of Halo 2 -- but there's a twist. Remember the cool new enemies from Halo 4, the Prometheans? They're in this game too, which raises more than a few questions regarding its fiction and timeline.

And in case you haven't given up hope on The Master Chief Collection, playing the game on Windows 8 devices can unlock an exclusive emblem, nameplate and avatar for last year's notoriously broken game too. Hopefully Strike's delayed appearance -- it was supposed to launch last December -- helps it sidestep MCC's legacy.