It’s like President Kennedy said, We would go to Mars not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Pascal Lee: The reality of Mars is unforgiving, but that’s what makes it interesting and challenging and exciting. So what should be the primary motivation for going to Mars? You’re looking at far more complex exploration setup than Apollo. ![]() We’d also be looking for life, and for that we’ll have to develop technology that can dig down beneath Mars’ inhospitable surface to find ice or water, and also develop the means of transporting ourselves to locations where that water exists. So there’s a technical challenge to cut the mass of the space suit we currently have in half. But on Mars, the gravity is only about one-third of the Earth’s, so you have a space suit with a felt-weight of 125 lbs. ![]() On the moon, where gravity is six times less than Earth’s, the space suit has a felt-weight of 50 lbs., so that was manageable. For example, right now, we have a beautiful space suit, but it weighs 300 lbs. The biggest cost is actually to develop all the new systems that would allow us to go to Mars and be productive explorers there. When Elon Musk presented his vision last October in Mexico, no one questioned his ability to make something big. They are able to cut corners, take more risk, do a quick and “not as clean” version. Pascal Lee: It’s not rocketry - the rocket is actually the easiest part, thanks to the private sector. There’s another group that wants to turn a Mars mission into, essentially, a reality show, and fund it through commercials, that has other cost estimates, but I find those unrealistic. We instead envision something like Antarctica, where you have maybe a handful of people there at a time performing research for a few decades. Mars is an incredibly lethal environment there are several things that can kill you and result in a horrible death if you’re exposed unprotected, so, talking about kids growing up on Mars, it’s not nearly as soon as you’d hope or think. This is going to Mars, so you multiply that by a factor of 2 or 3 in terms of complexity, you’re talking about $1 trillion, spread over the course of the next 25 years.Īs far as sending an 'average Jane' to Mars, you’re talking even further out in terms of years. So the number I find believable, and this is somewhat a matter of opinion, a ballpark figure, doing a human mission to Mars “the government way” could not cost less than $400 billion. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense gets $400 billion a year. ![]() Now, 50 years, later, today’s NASA budget is $19 billion a year that's only 0.3 percent of GDP, so that’s less than 10 times less than what it was in the 1960s. So basically, going to the moon with funding spread over 10 years cost the same to run the Department of Defense for one year in wartime. To put things in perspective, we also spent $24 billion per year at the Defense Department during the Vietnam War. That means NASA set aside 4 percent of U.S. ![]() Pascal Lee: The Apollo lunar landing program cost $24 billion in 1960s dollars over 10 years. Money spoke with Lee about the challenges facing Mars missions, and why it's important to launch Mars exploration missions despite them.Īt this point, what would it cost to send someone to Mars? Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate at NASA and Pascal Lee, the director of the Mars Institute, an international non-profit research organization partially funded by NASA. It’s being billed as the largest event ever dedicated to human exploration to Mars: From May 9 to 11, leading scientists and engineers will gather in Washington for the Humans to Mars Summit.Īmong the headline speakers will be Buzz Aldrin,William H.
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