If USA Congress & POTUS Trump offer NASA all of the $$$ necessity to for round trip manned mission to Planet Mars. How long will it take?

Question

before NASA is ready to launch the round trip Manned Mission to Planet Mars

Answer 1

NASA by tiself? 15 to 20 years.

NASA collaborating with the rest of the world? 10 years is doable.

Answer 2

As long as greedy corporations run the rocket business, they'll ALWAYS find a way to hold dollars previously spent hostage, so that they can squeeze even more money out of Congress.



That's why good, not-so-greedy capitalists like Elon Musk are important. He'll underbid the greedsters in the competing companies and force the prices to stay low. And that's why nobody was talking about going to Mars until Musk showed them that he was going, and that if they didn't move fast he'd develop rockets that would put them in the shade, maybe forever. Now you hear lots of people yapping about going to Mars.

Answer 3

No less than 20 years. Even with unlimited budget it will take some time to mobilize NASA's and industry resources to start designing, testing and building hardware for the mission.



While NASA has some engineers working on the manned mission to Mars architecture concepts, it does not have a formal program aimed at developing any flight hardware for the manned mission to Mars; NASA's rhetoric about SLS and Orion MPCV "taking us to Mars" notwithstanding. While both Orion and SLS may have a role to play, NASA will have to develop many more systems before it is ready to go. So, don't expect any Kennedy-style "before next decade is out" speeches from Trump.

Answer 4

Well, ..., IMHO, they could do it in 10 years. We design, built, and tested every thing we needed for a moon launch in less that 10 years. Given our great advances in Design, Engineering, Technology. and manufacturing we should be able to do it easily in 10 years ... maybe even less.

Answer 5

JFK pretty literally made a "space race" in his famous speech. And people in the industry spoke of how much stress there was in the end to get the moon shot off before the clock ticked down. Since there is no such thing for Mars at this point.... Given money and will power I will beg to differ and say that it's going to be more towards 50 years but maybe not all of that. It will require a space dock to build it and that's only just been conceptualized at this point. We are far, far away from launch.

Answer 6

Well, there's a *lot* of equipment that needs to be designed, built, and tested; if they had the priority and equivalent funds they did to get to the moon in the 60's, I'd estimate a *minimum* of 18 years, but more like 25 years with a careful, measured approach.