NASA finally talks Mars budget, and it's not enough

On Thursday NASA released a glossy 35-page report on its "Journey to Mars," reaffirming its intent to put human boots in the planet's red, dusty soil by the 2030s.

But the plan did not address the specific cost of a human mission to the Red Planet, which has been standard practice for the space agency in the five years it has been talking about it.

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To get some idea of how NASA intends to pay for its Martian dream, one would have had to be in attendance at a Space Transportation Association luncheon on Capitol Hill earlier in the week where Robert Lightfoot, NASA's associate administrator, essentially declared it could be done without raising the agency's current budget.

That may have been the analysis Congress, which has more or less held NASA's human exploration budget steady at $8 billion annually and is disinclined to raise it, wanted to hear. But it also probably means NASA isn't going to Mars any time soon.

The National Research Council has studied this budget scenario in depth and concluded in its 2014 Pathways to Exploration report that "With current flat or even inflation-adjusted budget projections for human spaceflight, there are no viable pathways to Mars."

At the Capitol Hill luncheon, Lightfoot said a Mars program would have to be accomplished with a budget that is one-tenth of the budget that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon.

"From a NASA perspective it'll be done for about one-tenth of the budget that we were doing back then," Lightfoot said, according to Space News.

Congress frustrated

A NASA spokeswoman said after Lightfoot's speech that he was comparing the Apollo budget and the agency's current budget based on percentages of the overall federal budget. NASA received 4 percent of the total federal budget during the height of the Apollo Program, and today NASA has 0.4 percent.

"We intend to carry out our current ambitious exploration plans within current budget levels, with modest increases aligned to economic growth," NASA's Lauren Worley said.

The release of the "Journey to Mars" report that contained no specific budget for a Mars mission frustrated some members of Congress.

"Regrettably, this proposal contains no budget," Lamar Smith, a San Antonio Republican who chairs the House Science Committee, said Friday. "It contains no schedule, no deadlines. It's just some real pretty photographs and some nice words. That is … not going to get us to Mars."

Another Republican, Dana Rohrabacher, of California, was more blunt: "We don't even have a budget? This is insane."

In declaring that with the current budget there are no "viable pathways to Mars," the National Research Council cited several reasons. Among them are the high costs of developing Mars hardware, low flight rates - if NASA doesn't fly often stakeholders wonder what it is doing, and it's difficult to keep employees engaged - and maintaining a program across multiple presidential administrations.

With its current human exploration budget, plus inflation, the influential Pathways report found that the agency would only accumulate about $100 billion between now and 2040 for Mars-related work.

Without a clearly defined plan or the types of rockets, spacecraft and landers needed to pull it off, it is impossible to estimate how much it would cost to land astronauts on Mars. But industry sources offer rough estimates that, using NASA's current practices, the cost is likely between $200 billion and $400 billion.

A daunting task

Last year Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana Governor and current Purdue University president who co-led the Pathways report, said what struck him most during the process of researching and writing was how incredibly daunting it would be to reach Mars, both from an engineering and political standpoint.

"The nation's approach will have to be fundamentally changed if we are to succeed," Daniels said. "I don't think most amateurs like me understand how steep those challenges are."

Mark Albrecht, an aerospace executive and principal space adviser to President George H.W. Bush, does. He was part of Bush's team that, in 1990, tried to set NASA on a course to Mars.

That effort failed when NASA submitted a report that called for a tripling of its budget to eventually land humans on Mars.

Albrecht said NASA, now with a total annual budget of more than $18 billion, has enough funds to pull off a Mars mission.

"NASA has enough money, more than enough money," he said. "The problem is it is spent on a jillion different things."

When it comes to setting the budget, the agency spends billions on space science, Earth science, airplane technology and education. All may be worthy investments, but if NASA set Mars as its core goal and turned all of its field centers toward that aim, it could reach the red planet by the 2030s, Albrecht said.

But NASA's leaders, Albrecht said, are worried that if they go all in for a human mission to Mars the next president could come in, cancel that program, and there would be nothing left of the agency.

"The problem with that attitude is, essentially, NASA's leaders are saying the existence and sustainability of the organization is their number one priority," he said.

Leadership needed

Breaking that mold would require strong, committed presidential leadership. NASA has really only had that kind of sustained direction from a president once, under John F. Kennedy, who propelled the agency to the moon.

A couple of years ago the JFK Library released some tapes from 1962 in which Kennedy confronted NASA's administrator at the time, James Webb. This was a month after Kennedy's "We Choose to go to the Moon" speech.

During the exchange Kennedy makes clear to Webb that the primary goal is to safely send men to the moon and back.

Webb replies that there's a lot of science that goes along with that, and that the scientific community isn't going to be happy if this is simply an engineering exercise. The scientists want to learn a lot more about space and other things.

"If I go out and say this is the number one priority and everything else must give way to it, I'm going to lose an important element of support," Webb says.

"By whom? Who? Who?" Kennedy asks.

Particularly the "brainy people," Webb replies.

Kennedy is having none of it. "We ought to be clear," Kennedy says. "Otherwise we shouldn't be spending this money because I'm not that interested in space."