Finding funding for Mars mission

“Our nation will return to the Moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” said Vice President of the United States Mike Pence, following his appointment at the head of the newly reformed National Space Council.

However, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced this week that they will not be able to follow through with their plans to send a manned mission to the Martian surface in the 2030s due to lack of funding.

A total of $19.1 billion will be budgeted to NASA for the 2018 fiscal year, up from the $18.5 billion allocated to NASA in 2016. Still, this represents a miniscule fraction of the federal budget.

William Gerstenmaier, chief of space exploration for NASA, explained the complications to an engineering society panel, “At the budget levels we’ve described—it’s roughly a 2 percent increase—we don’t have the surface systems available for Mars. That entry, descent, and landing is a huge challenge for us for Mars.”

“I can’t put a date on humans on Mars,” Gerstenmaier admitted for NASA.

Ambitious goals associated with space exploration have notoriously ambitious price tags to match, leading NASA to alter their schedule, or in some cases, abandon projects entirely.

The lack of increase in funding to match the desire for exploration is a challenge with inevitable consequences.

“NASA’s budget has been essentially flat for the last decade,” explained journalist Ryan Whitwam in an article for Extreme Tech.

“Landing on Mars is extremely challenging, and it will cost a lot of money to create systems reliable enough to send humans there... if you want them to come home,” Whitwam added.

He noted only seven of the 16 attempts to land on the Martian surface have been successful.

The answer, as opposed to abandoning the dream of sending a manned mission to Mars in the near future, lies within partnerships in private industry.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, outlined his solution last fall, “There’s a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars, and perhaps there will be interest on the government sector side to do that.”

As NASA announced, the reality of what it can do given its budget, the concept of a public-private mission to Mars is gaining popularity.

In fact, the concept is already taking shape.

“The Trump administration plans to focus more on public-private partnerships,” reported Kimberly Amadeo for The Balance.

Amadeo continued, “The budget provides incentives for businesses to partner with the government on space station operations, deep-space exploration and small satellite groups <and> will take a more active role in commercializing new space technologies.”

An example of this developing partnership is the Commercial Orbiter Transportation Services (COTS), a public-private program from 2006 to 2012.

With COTS, a NASA team looking to by-pass the inefficiencies of the government “began a competitive process… with two companies, SpaceX and OrbitalATK, contracted to fly supplies to the International Space Station at a fairly low cost,” explained journalist Tim Fernholtz on Quartz.

As increased reliance of public entities on private business led to success (including revenue) for NASA in the COTS program, Senior Vice President of SpaceX Tom Hughes proposed last week that NASA “kickstart a new public-private program” to help organize a manned mission to the Martian surface, among other projects.

“It is the most cost effective way to achieve US goals in space,” Fernholtz believes.

In order to make a manned mission to Mars possible, private industry will continue to play a greater role in publicly run operations.