How Trump Offered NASA Unlimited Funding to Go to Mars in His First Term

As usual for modern journalism, the headline isn’t exactly correct. In 2017, Trump rather offhandedly *asked* the NASA administrator if it would be possible to land a man on Mars by the end of his first term if NASA was given unlimited funding.

It’s not a particularly unreasonable sort of question to ask. And it is an interesting question. Ditch the personalities and the politics: if it was determined that We Must Get Our Asses To Mars ASAP, how quickly *could* NASA do it, given all the funding it could use? Obviously, infinite amounts of cash would not be helpful… after a certain point, you’ve got as many experts as you can use, and you’re working them at maximum output.

Additionally, if you expand beyond just NASA, you might end up with a different, better answer. SpaceX, a year or so ago, seemed to think they could get manned-capable rockets to Mars by 2022 or so. Well, maybe. But if they had NASA-level funding… that “maybe” becomes more likely.

And it also speed things along if you are flexible in your goals. Getting a man to Mars is a whole hell of a lot easier than getting a man *back* from Mars. So you could throw a couple guys in a lander-habitat with a truckload of C-rations to Mars a whole lot faster than you could prepare a round trip mission. This sort of thing has been looked at since the early 60’s; Bell Aerospace seriously examined the concept of sending a single man on a one-way mission to the Moon, with continual resupplies and *eventual* recovery by Apollo. This idea was met with a mix of repulsion and denial, but did lead to one of the dullest hard sci-fi movies ever, “Countdown.” And a few decades later it helped inspire the “Mars Direct” concept at Martin-Marietta, and more recently the rather oddly conceived and possibly scamulous “Mars One” project.