Is Hillary the “Red Planet” candidate?
Check out this piece from The Verge:
“Election years are a tense time for NASA. A new president can completely alter NASA’s long-term goals by resetting the space agency’s agenda. Whoever is elected will be faced with a choice: change the focus or scope of NASA’s goals, or keep things going on the same track. And given the uncertainty that has plagued NASA for a while, it’s very possible that major changes are on the horizon.
NASA’s human spaceflight program stands at a significant crossroads. For the past five years, the space agency has been moving from the now-dead Space Shuttle program to the “Journey to Mars” — NASA’s goal of sending humans to the Red Planet by the 2030s. But this transition has lacked direction. NASA has yet to lay out a timeline of the missions it plans to do to get humans to Mars, nor has it outlined the architecture needed to keep people alive on the planet — such as habitats, landers, life support systems, and more. This lack of detail has been criticized by Congress, which has also questioned if NASA even has enough funding for a Mars trip. And on top of that, the vehicles that NASA is building to take people to Mars will likely run over budget and miss important deadlines, according to government reports.”
This election has given voters little insight into what either candidate would do; the candidates’ views on space policy have been more or less absent from political conversation. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s remarks on NASA have been brief, vague, and — at times — confusing. Clinton has offered her support for NASA, but won’t elaborate on what that means exactly, and Trump is eager to make America great in space again, but also doesn’t delve into specifics.
