Elon Musk Unhappy With NASA $19.5B Funding, Mars Project Overhyped

Elon Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, the private company committed to sending people to colonize Mars. Recently, NASA was given the official go-ahead to do the same, with President Donald Trump signing the appropriations bill that gives the space agency a $19.5 billion budget. Rather than be happy about it, Musk admits that he finds nothing in the new deal to rejoice over since it basically changes nothing.

The legislation that came with the new budget had a mandate that NASA should put people on the red planet by 2030, a goal that the agency and SpaceX share, CNET reports. Many are hailing this project for not only being one of the most significant goals by NASA in years but also for arousing practically no friction from either of the major US political parties.

For Musk’s part, the Tesla CEO believes that the development is nothing but a smoke show. He asserts that there was actually no additional budget and the goals of NASA was the same before the legislation. Musk made these claims in an exchange he had on Twitter with Kara Swisher, a Recode co-founder.

Swisher started the conversation when she re-Tweeted a post by Trump with the caption “Somewhere @elonmusk is smiling.” Musk responded in short order to tell Swisher that he was not, in fact, smiling at the news.

“@karaswisher I am not,” reads Musk’s reply. “This bill changes almost nothing about what NASA is doing. Existing programs stay in place and there is no added funding for Mars.”

Musk then followed that up with an expression of hope that NASA might actually get better support for a Mars project down the road. It would seem that the Tesla CEO is not alone in this assessment either.

As Futurism notes, George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute director Scott Pace is also skeptical of the overhyped development. Pace said that the legislation was nothing more than the leaders keeping the status quo.