> 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?

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...