Donald Trum Would Probably End the Journey to Mars

On Saturday, January 7, 2017 at 2:09:45 PM UTC+13, JF Mezei wrote:
On 2017-01-05 21:52, William Mook wrote:

Campaigning along Florida’s “Space Coast� near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Trump vowed to revitalize the agency through cost-saving partnerships with the burgeoning commercial space industry.


Political time filling meaningless words.

That depends. If Space-X is an example of a burgeoning commercial space industry, and buying a reusable rocket is entering a cost-saving partnership, according to Musk the agency can expect to save a lot of money. Similarly, if NASA enters a cost-saving partnership with someone who is building a network of 4000 telecommunications satellites to blanket the Earth with broadband, then they can dispense with their own telecom satellites and share in substantial cost savings going forward. Ditto for working with companies that plan to settle Mars.

http://spacenews.com/spacex-opening-...nd-satellites/

https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/03/3...or-40-million/

http://www.space.com/34213-spacex-in...in-images.html




In fact, NASA has already done that by going with SpaceX, OrbitalATK,
and to a lesser extent giving Boeing subsidies to develop its CST100.

https://www.nasa.gov/launchschedule/

http://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

NASA is spending close to $20 billion in 2017 and very little of it is on partnerships that will save the agency money.

Trump has priorities, and NASA isn't one of them.

My guess is that he will deflect to Congress/Senate any stuff that he is
not interested in. And NASA may be one of many such things.

We'll see.


New opportunities for private sector initiatives will arise in the wake of NASA restructuring.