Crazy Congress & Naughty NASA

[Nibb31]

Of course they want to, but there is no budget for it.

There is nothing currently planned between the EM-2 mission in 2021 where the SLS and MPCV are declared operational, and a hypothetical 2030 Mars expedition. That's a 10 year gap during which NASA would be designing and building MTV hardware.

During that time, in order to keep SLS operational, NASA still needs to keep flying the SLS at least once a year. Otherwise, they are just throwing money away maintaining the infrastructure and personel. So they have to find 10 more missions before the MTV is ready, which means that they will need to develop and build hardware for one interim SLS payload every year, whether they get money for Mars or not.

Guess which part of that plan gets cut when Congress has to vote the budget: interim payloads to keep the SLS running, a Mars expedition and a 10-year gap in SLS flights, cut the SLS and fly Orion on a smaller launcher, or scrap all of it and just assemble an MTV in LEO in smaller chunks and buy Dragon tickets to ferry people to it.

Edited February 26, 2014 by Nibb31