This article reminds me of a passage from my space safety book (still in draft form, but nearing completion, with illustrations):
Unfortunately, Congress has been pretty much indifferent to missions, or mission success, or “getting the job done,” when it comes to space. Its focus remains on “safety,” and price is no object when it comes to it. In fact, if one really believes that the reason for Ares/Orion was safety, and the program was expected to cost several tens of billions, and it would fly (perhaps) a dozen astronauts per year, rather than fifty million dollars, NASA was implicitly pricing an astronaut life to be something on the order of several billion dollars.
As another example, if it were really important to get someone to Mars, we’d be considering one-way trips, which cost much less, and for which there would be no shortage of volunteers. It wouldn’t have to be a suicide mission – one could take along equipment to grow food, and live off the land, but it would be very high risk, and perhaps as high or higher than the early American settlements, such as Roanoke and Jamestown. But one never hears serious discussion of such issues, at least not in the halls of Congress, which is a good indication that we are not serious about exploring, developing or settling space, and any pretense at seriousness ends once the sole-source contracts have been awarded to the favored contractors of the big rockets.
For these reasons, I personally think it unlikely that the federal government will be sending humans anywhere beyond LEO any time soon, but I do think that there is a reasonable prospect for private actors to do so – Elon Musk has stated multiple times that this is the goal of SpaceX, and why he founded the company. There are a number of other people with similar goals and financial resources, and one or more of them is likely to achieve them, because they have a much different tolerance for risk than bureaucrats and Congresspeople. The real danger of NASA hypersensitivity to safety is not that it will prevent NASA from sending astronauts into space, but that its standards will osmotically bleed over into the regulation of commercial human spaceflight, making it more unaffordable for all.
Just as a tease…