"Cancel all your research projects and focus on a rushed, unsafe, mission to Mars within the next four years" isn't an offer I'd take either.
And that's even supposing he has the political power to actually give them the money he was offering. Which he doesn't.
There's a Tyson show on it, perhaps still on Netflix if interested.
They are going to try. Just a month before, Trump himself had signed a bill outlining a manned Mars mission, and the timeline to actually do it.
What they said no to was a spur of the moment request, made without discussing feasibility (or anything else about it) with anyone else before making it, to do it way way way faster than that.
Here's an article with the details [1].
[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/trump-offered-nasa-un...
NASA is an enormous entity with many different branches, and each aerospace mission must be planned and funded carefully. Upper management at NASA must also consider the politics of a situation; what would happen to NASA if they agreed to such an offer and failed to deliver results?
This seems like it was a political move by Trump that allowed him to look good by making a risky request. If NASA says "yes" and gets to Mars, Trump wins. If NASA says "yes" and fails to get to Mars, Trump says "I gave the money and you didn't do your part". If NASA says "no", Trump says "I offered them the money but they didn't take it".
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/trump-ma...
There was a story where Trump basically tried to get NASA to try and do a manned mars mission within 10 years. He said he’d offer them an unlimited budget. They said no.
Now, feasibility of any of this aside: that just depresses me more than anything I’d heard in a long while. You won’t even try? C’mon! What happened to “we are doing it not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard”? The mentality that we can do literally anything we put our minds to?
Look at the way that people want to vilify Elon Musk. Here’s a guy that embodies everything I grew believing was the American spirit, and apparently that makes him a bad guy. So sad.