NASA Needs More Funding To Reach Moon or Mars

What was once planned as a mission to return to the Moon by 2020, maybe not happen at all now if NASA doesn't get a huge boost in their budget. NASA provided information to the White House on Friday that concluded a Mars mission would be way to risky on the limited budget that they have to work within.

The 2020 mission to the moon would take ten years of planning and developing new spacecrafts as well as $138 billion which NASA says was cut by $30 billion, making the mission too risky.

NASA also says that the moon may not be the best place for exploration anyway, even if they were able to obtain more funding. Many think, some NASA officials included, that Mars should be the ultimate goal for human exploration but again the budget is no where near the funding levels to even think about going to Mars.

To make things worst, the $100 billion International Space Station will run out of U.S. funding in 2015.

NASA will also be retiring its space shuttle fleet in the next few years and will then be forced to pay Russia for transporting cargo and astronauts to the space station.

The NASA panel that presented its findings to the White House said that they would need at least $3 billion more per year to have a "reasonable chance" of getting to the Moon or Mars. However, getting such funding could be proven very hard in times like these.