Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: "Mars simply represents the best target for the Human program due to a confluence of scientific interest and human potential."

That $15 billion dollar budget...
Larry J — (archived)

includes things that are unrelated to space. A lot of people forget that the first "A" in NASA is aeronautics. The NASA budget includes aeronautical research in a variety of areas, such as AGATE and GAP.

NASA is a bureaucracy. Like virtually all bureaucracies, the first goal is to survive and grow larger. A lot of the NASA budget goes to service the bureaucracy (salaries, facilities, etc). The actual percentage spent on manned space hardware and operations is pretty small. The amount spent on unmanned missions is much less. From this article, the NASA Budget request for 2003 was for $6.1 billion for manned spaceflight (ISS and Shuttle).

To put that into perspective, the GPS satellite constellation alone cost billions to establish and several hundred million dollars a year to sustain. Compared to sending a manned mission to Mars, that's chump change. As another price point, it costs over $200 million to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars. Manned missions are orders of magnitude more expensive.

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