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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

NASA has enough funding, they are just spending it on SLS and Orion(¹). It appears that if they were to pay the "new space" companies to get them to Mars, the money would be enough.

(¹) because Congress wants them to, because ... jobs (as if "new space" companies weren't creating jobs, too... even competitive ones)

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How do you propose we would get man to mars without a heavy lift rocket or manned capsules?

EDIT: the previous comment used to say that SLS and Orion was a 'waste of money'. I accept that spaceX proposals among others are cheaper, however NASA, the US government, and many scientists also have a vested interest in keeping at least some orbital capability in the public sphere, even if only for military reasons

Use Falcon Heavy by SpaceX or New Glenn by Blue Origin for a fraction of the cost of SLS.

Orion may be worth keeping. It is limited to 4 astronauts which is probably too small a crew for a 2.5 year Mars mission. I do think that it could be built much cheaper, however.

I don't think FH is enough for manned mars missions. It has enough delta V to land there but not to come back.

You're right. FH would be only an intermediate step until ITS becomes available.

The Falcon Heavy could send Red Dragons with supplies in advance of the ITS missions (this is in fact the plan).

A Falcon Heavy has close to the capacity of the first SLS version, and about half the later versions. But you can launch 20 Falcon Heavies for the cost of one SLS.

With $10B and <10 years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA

SpaceX's ITS could be developed for a similar cost as SLS+Orion, while being vastly more capable.

I doubt the ITS will cost remotely that much, because it won't be a source of grift for the citizens of Alabama.

They should outsource this to India or Israel.

That is insane. Take a USA tax funded public entity and spend the budget of it's most ambitious project in Israel or India. What are you talking about? And we already send money to Russia for Soyuz to get to ISS via ULA.

Actually, Orion is already outsourced to ESA.

We already outsourced it to Alabama, and they stole 90% of the money.

I think he was being sarcastic.

You want to outsource an incredibly ambitious space program to another country? That'll never happen and I don't know if it should either. Parts of it can be outsourced for sure, but that's it. Like Europe taking over parts of some space projects. Russia being paid for deliveries.

You didn't notice the sarcasm?

Hard to tell on HN. Much easier on places with less decorum than HN. Aka most of the web.

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