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The Human Mission To Mars In The New NASA Budget: Onward To The Red Planet Or Just A Giveaway To The Aerospace Industry?

By Daniel Ketchum
Published on: 07:54 PST, Sep 25, 2016

For fans of America’s space program, the news from Universe Today that the Senate has just passed a NASA fiscal year spending bill of $19.5 billion and that the principal focus is a human mission to Mars might seem like reason for celebration. But is this new budget really written to support exploration or is it designed to prop up the old, traditional aerospace industry at the expense of upstarts like SpaceX or Blue Origin?

It’s not unreasonable to ask this question. For four decades now, the path that the Senate and Congress have laid out for NASA has been one where the concept of exploration has been shoved aside for other goals.

The Space Shuttle and the International Space Station have provided enormous financial benefits for companies like Boeing and Lockheed, but they haven’t moved the human race one step further in the exploration of space. But they have consumed a sizable chunk of NASA’s budget.

In less than 10 years in the 1960s, the United States went from having virtually no space program whatsoever to landing human beings on the surface of the moon. Although several Apollo missions followed the pioneering journey of Apollo 11, politicians in Washington largely lost interest in the space program once it was no longer useful as a propaganda tool in the Cold War.

In the euphoria of the landing on the moon in 1969, many people felt there would be a human mission to Mars within a decade or so. But with the Shuttle and the International Space Station, the United States has done nothing but circle around the Earth thousands of times. Instead of exploring and colonizing another world, NASA has tried to make meaningless experiments in zero gravity seem important.

But just why have we maintained NASA’s massive and extremely expensive infrastructure for such pointless experimentation in low Earth orbit? If it wasn’t to prepare for a human mission to Mars, what exactly was the purpose?

A careful look at the way NASA contracts are doled out to the aerospace industry and how NASA facilities are spread across the country provides a clue to the answer to these questions. In short, for the last 40 years, NASA has served as corporate welfare to help maintain aerospace companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Hughes.

The space shuttle Atlantis rolls down Kennedy Parkway on its way to its new home at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. [Image by Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty image]

Indirectly, NASA is providing funding to help maintain these companies so that the military can then benefit from their expertise in their own projects. But the principal reason for this largesse on the part of the United States government – and the Senate and Congress in particular – is that all of these major corporations provide jobs to their constituencies.

And this is the reason – there is no logical rationale otherwise – for why NASA’s space missions are distributed far and wide across the United States. Rockets are tested in Alabama, launched from Florida and managed from Texas. As SpaceX has made clear with its own consolidation of its operations, the only reason to scatter these activities like this is political gain. Certainly, efficiency can’t be what they have in mind.

Speaking of SpaceX and the possibility of a human mission to Mars, it seems highly probable that long before the extremely vague 2030s date that NASA keeps putting forward for its own mission to Mars, Elon Musk will have already sent human beings to the red planet. Yes, Musk and his pioneering space company did suffer a recent setback due to a rocket explosion.

But the benefit of being a private company instead of a governmental agency is that he can simply find the problem, solve it, and move forward. Every time NASA suffers a setback, the political figures – who often helped to create the problem to begin with – leap in to blame NASA and redirect the agency on yet another new course correction.

Given the evidence of the last four decades when it comes to NASA budgets and congressional interference, it’s difficult to believe that the current $19.5 billion budget reported by WMFE News and being offered up by the Senate is anything more than another boondoggle. It seems clear it is designed to prop up obsolete aerospace companies in the face of stiff competition from SpaceX and others.

[Featured Image by U.S. Navy/Getty Images]

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