According to Bloomberg, the money NaSA need to send the Orion capsule to Mars are astonomical. And even if they get the $22billion they need for starters, Orion may not make it to Mars...
"The Orion space capsule that launched earlier today has been under development by NASA since the mid-2000s. But, watching it splash down in the Pacific ocean four hours later, you'd be forgiven for thinking of the 1970s. The capsule, which by some reliable estimates cost over $10 billion, didn’t accomplish anything that wasn’t somewhat routine for NASA in the era of the Apollo moon landings.NASA, however, is encouraging a very different view. Rather than admit Orion's many shortcomings, it has boldly promoted the mission as the first step in America’s journey to Mars -- or, as NASA tweets it, America's #JourneyToMars
It's laudable, of course, that a perpetually under-funded government agency -- one that hasn’t sent a crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit in forty-two years -- is able to muster this sort of long-term optimism. But optimism alone won’t send a jumbo-sized space capsule to Mars. You need money, and lots of it: a recent National Research Council study looked at several mission pathways to Mars, including Orion, and saw no possibility that any mission could be accomplished for less than hundreds of billions of dollars. In contrast, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) expects to spend $22 billion on Orion and the Space Launch System rocket by 2021 (according to the Government Accountability Office, a true accounting of Orion’s costs has not been provided by NASA). There's no reason to believe that greater volumes of money will ever materialize. NASA, in other words, intends on spending vast sums of money on a Mars capsule that will not be going to Mars."
Now this may not be such a bad thing after all. Lets take a look at what we know about Mars. Theres not a whole lot going on there. In fact, fuck all goes on there. You might as well send the astronauts to the Sahara for a year or two and save them the discomfort and danger of the take-off, the 2 year journey, and the touch down. Even if there is no touch down, and they just bypass Mars and carry on to someplace else, and frankly who could blame them,they still need to bring Orion back home at some time hence.
If anyone thought for one second that Martians were going to materilise I'd be all for it. Never mind Martians, if anyone thought the tiniest worm might crawl out of the red sandy surface, it might justify a few dollars to go there. Then we could all say - "hurrah, its ET !"
But even that seems a forlorn hope. So NASA is going to send those privileged sops to the most boring planet ever discovered. Id rather they went to Planet Hollywood and ordered 50million burger and fries for the undernourished Africans who need a good meal. Go to to see Spurs play, go to the jungle and bring national treasure Carl Fogarty back to Bolton, Go to Russia and call Putin a pansy...you never know what might happen.
But going to Mars is a round trip to nowhere useful, entertaining and not worth terraforming. Go the other way NASA, arent Neptunes moons worth a quick(ish) trip?
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