Why Is Congress So Down On NASA's 'Journey To Mars?'

[Buster's Uncle]

Why Is Congress So Down On NASA's 'Journey To Mars?'
Uproxx
By danuproxx  February 5, 2016 11:00 AM






NASA and Congress have never really gotten along. Congress’ job is to be responsible with taxpayer money, and NASA’s job is to use taxpayer money to do things that have never before been achieved in human history. Still, even by that standard, yesterday’s hearing on NASA’s Journey To Mars took both pundits and space fans by surprise.

NASA’s plan to get to Mars is ambitious in just about every respect. With the goal of getting a human on an asteroid by 2025 and a human mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s, it’s the program’s bid for, essentially, a second moonshot; an enormous, difficult-to-achieve goal that requires a lot of time, money, and effort. Yesterday’s congressional hearing had experts question both the timeline and the cost.

At issue is whether NASA has a realistic plan to get there. Expert witnesses called before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology said NASA needed to offer far more details, not to mention a more detailed budget, or scrap the Mars mission in favor of more work getting on, and staying on, the Moon. They also questioned whether we’d manage to make the necessary technological leaps to make the mission feasible, and pointed out that ultimately, getting to Mars was likely going to cost half a trillion dollars.

On one level, the committee and the witnesses aren’t wrong. NASA’s plan is incredibly ambitious, and yes, expensive. On the other hand, as we noted above, doing things that have never been done before are not generally cheap, especially when they involve sending human beings to a series of environments that will kill them without very specific technology. Much of what NASA wants to do with the Journey to Mars is technology that’s largely theoretical right now; we’ve got to build it, test it, break it, figure out why it broke, and test it again. This is technology our best and brightest are going to use to survive, and that’s a task NASA takes enormously seriously.

It’s also worth considering that NASA research tends to have tangible results right here on Earth. NASA’s work on space travel problems has pushed forward everything from food safety and medical science to handheld appliances and digital music. It’s fair and reasonable to ask NASA to be efficient with how it spends a staggering amount of taxpayer dollars, but that should be balanced with an understanding that doing what’s never been done before will mean pioneering the forms and budgets as much as pioneering new forms of science.


http://news.yahoo.com/why-congress-down-nasas-journey-160007299.html