>>23999291
So, did Elon [doge] find the money [aka secret space prog?]
News at Home
January 19, 2004
Is Bush's Mars Project Out of this World?
by Jonathan Coopersmith
Mr. Coopersmith teaches the history of technology at Texas A&M University.
For the first time since Project Apollo nearly four decades ago, NASA has a strong presidential commitment to human flight. By deciding to send astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars, President George Bush has followed a course many space enthusiasts have urged for decades.
President Bush's space policy will appropriately invite inevitable comparisons with his father's 1989 failed Space Exploration Initiative and president John F. Kennedy's 1961 decision to go to the moon. The major difference with Kennedy is the lack of Cold War competition. There is no corresponding race for national and international prestige, though it will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens with China's manned space program. Because there is not a race, NASA has the opportunity to build a more methodical, longer lasting program. Instead of a sprint, NASA will run a marathon.
Unlike the former president Bush's plan, this president carefully avoided setting firm dates or giving total costs, thus presenting a smaller target to critics. Moreover, by working with NASA, he gained its institutional support. If NASA seriously contorts itself to meet all the new objectives, however, that might change.
While a reasonable expansion of the human presence in space, the Bush policy has two major flaws. First, there appears to be no effort to reduce cost of reaching space from Earth. Such an effort could open space to human exploration and exploitation far more greatly and far quicker than sending people to Mars. To send a pound into orbit costs approximately $10,000. By comparison, sending a pound of passenger across the Atlantic Ocean demands approximately $3-6, depending on one's skill in ticket buying. Bringing down the cost of reaching Earth orbit would allow greater use of space by private enterprise and universities.
Second, the Bush Administration is trying to explore space on the cheap. Over next five years, the administration intends to provide NASA only $1 billion more for a total of $86 billion (less than the $87 billion the U.S. is spending on the occupation of Iraq this year). Like the president's tax cuts, the ultimate cost will balloon in the future which other presidents will have to confront.
The problem is that space exploration cannot be done on the cheap. Historically, space operations have been very expensive and cost overruns are normal, reflecting the challenging environment and difficulty in developing and deploying new technologies. The first satellite program, Vanguard, cost $120 million instead of the $10 million originally planned.
The space shuttle and space station incurred billions of dollars in unexpected costs. The National Reconnaissance Office has already experienced $4 billion in overruns in its Future Imagery Architecture program and it is still years from launch. Only Apollo came in as predicted and that was partially because the NASA administrator, James Webb, told his engineers to be honest in their cost estimates and then he doubled them before presenting them to Congress.
There is a very good chance costs will increase beyond official expectations, forcing NASA administrators to either ask for more funding or cut elsewhere. That "elsewhere" historically has been robotic spacecraft. Scientists, while applauding the expansion of human exploration, will justly worry that their immensely productive projects will be sacrificed to keep astronauts in orbit.
Explicit in the lack of new money is the expectation that NASA will reprogram most of its money internally. The space shuttle will not receive any funding after 2012 and the space station will lose its funding after 2017. Will any of NASA's centers close?
In sum, this new policy continues the Bush Administration political strategy of proposing high-profile policies that sound good and cost little initially, but push off the full costs for another president in the future.
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/is-bushs-mars-project-out-of-this-world