NASA Wants to Ride-Share to Get to Mars
Loading portions of the Orion service module into a NASA transporter in Florida.
Source: Kim Shiflett/NASAAmid the Cold War scramble to best the Soviets in space, NASA got all the money it needed to put astronauts on the moon. Achieving the agency’s present-day goal of a Mars landing won’t be quite so simple. NASA officials have been coy about the total projected cost of the Martian mission, but analysts estimate that the tab could run anywhere from $100 billion to $1 trillion or more, making it inevitable that the U.S. will need help from its space-faring friends to reach the red planet.
On Nov. 30, NASA officials joined peers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and Airbus at NASA’s Plum Brook research station in Sandusky, Ohio, to mark an important milestone in the Orion program, which will ferry astronauts beyond the moon. The attendees witnessed the delivery of the first service module that will provide propulsion, power, air, and water for astronauts on the spacecraft.