NASA Hoping to Scrape Up Enough Cash for a 2018 Mars Mission

Since President Obama eviscerated NASA's 2015 budget, chopping it down to 189 million.....(yes, drop chin to chest and groan)

Wait!  Before I go any further, let's put NASA's PRESENT budget into perspective.  Not the chump change that they will be allotted.  The Army (just the army now) spends more just for air-conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan in that region's summer months than NASA's entire yearly budget! I am not busting on the military,  I just get tired of people telling me that all that money NASA spends is just so wasteful!  And to find out it doesn't even cover the AC bill for one arm of the armed forces!? Un frackin believable!

Anyway, NASA science chief John Grunsfeld wants to scrape together funds from the human spaceflight program and the space technology division to come up with about $700 million to make something happen by 2018.  Why the fascination with that date?   Well it all comes down to orbital efficiency.  Between Earth and Mars, a close approach happens about every two years and once in every sixteen years you have an optimal positioning of the planets that requires the least amount of fuel to transfer from Earth to Mars.  2018 just so happens is one of those super optimal times.  So now it comes down to a mission that can do as much as it can with extremely limited funds.

<- dvice article ->

****UPDATE*****
There seems to be some disparity between the Dvice article and the Nature article from which it was based.  Taking my information mostly from the DVICE reference lead to a bit of misunderstanding and I feel it best to clarify.   The budgetary numbers in question are for NASA's Mars program.  This is how the Nature article stated the cuts:  

• the Mars programme from $587 million in 2012 to $189 million in 2015

If you would like to read the Nature.com article - it can be found here  

US return to the Moon & Mars becoming highly unlikely

According to msnbc:

NASA's road back to the moon and onward to Mars, could fall short due to lack of needed funding. NASA's vision of extending the human touch beyond low Earth orbit is being subjected to lack of both White House and Congressional budget support. "The budgets are not there. We're seeing a business as usual approach that is not going to deliver the robust and broad-based exploration program laid out in the vision for space exploration," said Congressman Nick Lampson of Texas' 22^nd Congressional District that represents NASA's Johhnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Former shuttle astronaut, Michael Coats, now the 10^th director of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas has said - "The President's fiscal year 2008 budget request is absolutely vital to NASA after the cut we took with the continuing resolution this year".