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Buzz Aldrin has said that NASA should stop spending $3.5 billion per year on the International Space Station and relinquish low Earth orbit activities to private companies, such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Boeing, Bigelow Aerospace, and Axiom Space. This would allow for the funding of "cyclers" to enable a base on the moon and eventually a permanent presence on Mars:
http://www.space.com/36787-buzz-aldrin-retire-international-space-station-for-mars.html
Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" — spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth. "The foundation of human transportation is the cycler," the 87-year-old former astronaut said. "Very rugged, so it'll last 30 years or so; no external moving parts."
Step two involves the international spaceflight community coming together to build cyclers that ply cislunar space, taking people on trips to the moon and back. Such spacecraft, and the activities they enable, would allow the construction of a crewed lunar base, where humanity could learn and test the techniques required for Mars colonization, such as how to manufacture propellant from local resources, Aldrin said. Then would come Earth-Mars cyclers, which Aldrin described as "an evolutionary development" of the prior cyclers.
[...] NASA officials have repeatedly said that the ISS is a key part of the agency's "Journey to Mars" vision, which aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.
Is the ISS a key part of the "Journey to Mars" or a key roadblock?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 11 2017, @09:46PM
The NASA budget doubled would be about 1% of the federal budget. That's a good minimum. I have also said that it should be quadrupled at the expense of the military (which does some space stuff anyway like satellites and the X-37B), but the only one in the room who may have been in the position to cut defense spending and reallocate it to NASA chose to increase defense spending.
The good news is that NASA bureaucrats have wisely chosen to incubate SpaceX and other private companies, allowing them to grow into launch competitors that will be able to undermine and destroy overpriced pork projects like the Space Launch System [wikipedia.org]. If expenses like the ISS and SLS are eliminated, NASA will be able to focus on building satellites to launch on the $90 million Falcon Heavy, the future SpaceX ITS launch vehicle [wikipedia.org], or smaller rockets [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]