NASA budgeting reveals dim hopes for humans going to Mars

Enlarge / The Sun sets on Mars in 2015, as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover. When might humans see this view with their own eyes? (credit: NASA)

When it comes to spaceflight, there are crazy optimistic schedules like those that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sometimes tosses about, and then there's just plain crazy. Some recent comments from the chief executive of Boeing, an aerospace company that simultaneously holds the most lucrative contracts in NASA's exploration, International Space Station, and commercial crew programs, seem to fall into the latter category.

Speaking at a recent forum about NASA's plans to send humans to Mars, Boeing's Dennis Muilenburg offered his own opinion. "I anticipate that we will put the first person on Mars in my lifetime," he said. "I think in this decade, and the first person that gets there is going to be on a Boeing rocket."

This is a preposterous statement. NASA may one day send humans to Mars on a "Boeing rocket"-the Space Launch System-but it will not happen in this decade or the next. In fact, on the present schedule, and because the staggering development costs of Boeing's rocket will measure in the tens of billions of dollars, NASA seems unlikely to land humans even on the Moon in the 2020s. Mars remains a distant, evanescent dream.

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