The US Senate talks a good game about sending humans to Mars. The group holds itself up as the protector of NASA and a champion for the space organization's grand exploration aims. For example, as part of this spring's appropriations process, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee with oversight of NASA's budget chided Charlie Bolden, the space agency's administrator, when his budget request didn't amply fund exploration.

"Mr. Administrator, you have traveled around the country in recent months touting NASA’s strong support for the SLS and Orion missions, when in reality this budget will effectively delay any advancement in a NASA-led human mission to Mars, or anywhere at all," Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican senator from Alabama, told Bolden during a hearing in March.

Shelby was upset with Bolden because the president's budget request did not seek a stratospheric level of funding for the Space Launch System rocket, which is being designed at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. And if there were any doubt about his parochial intent, consider Shelby's own position statement on NASA: "The ability of NASA to achieve our goals for further space exploration has always been and always will be through Marshall Space Flight Center."

In his efforts to rectify the budget, Shelby therefore increased the funding for NASA's heavy lift rocket by $840 million, a 60 percent bump. To help pay for this, his committee cut the space agency's technology budget request from $826.7 million to $686.5 million. Additionally, the committee specified that $130 million of the space technology budget should be spent on the RESTORE-L initiative to refuel the aging Landsat 7 satellite.

This week we learned one of the consequences of those cuts. According to a report in Space News, James Reuter, NASA deputy associate administrator for space technology, said Tuesday the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator project would get only a small fraction of its originally planned budget of $20 million for 2016. The cut exemplifies the political hamstringing of NASA's exploration efforts.

One of many significant challenges NASA must overcome to put humans on Mars is landing large payloads on the surface of the Red Planet. Most everyone remembers the daring Seven Minutes of Terror technology required to safely land the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012. However, Curiosity was still a comparatively small 900kg payload. Human and cargo missions to Mars would be much larger and therefore an order of magnitude more challenging. For example, even the relatively bare-bones lunar module used during the Apollo missions weighed 15,200kg at launch. Designing a landing system to put such a heavy payload on Mars, with only a very thin atmosphere for braking, represents a major engineering problem. The landing project NASA has now been forced to cut was to test inflatable decelerators and advanced parachutes for this purpose.

NASA's space technology program was created in 2010 to address the myriad challenges in deep space exploration. But Congress has generally not been supportive, only funding about half of what President Obama has requested since then. This year, some of NASA's limited space technology funds will go toward the rocket to speed up its development—never mind NASA doesn't have the funds to really develop meaningful missions for this accelerated timeline. And instead of spending space technology funds on Mars projects, they will go to an Earth-observing Landsat satellite managed by Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Perhaps that should come as no surprise. To get such a large increase for the SLS rocket, Shelby had to work with the vice chairwoman of the subcommittee, Maryland Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski. Prior to those negotiations, in March of this year, Shelby addressed Mikulski during a hearing: "I look forward to one last year of writing this Subcommittee’s appropriations bill together. It is my hope that we can get NASA’s budget right again this year."

Job done, it would seem. Thanks to their bipartisan deal, the Senate appropriators would have us believe all is well on the road to Mars. NASA would, too. When Mikulski announced her retirement, effective at the end of this year, she was feted as a champion of NASA, science, and human exploration. Bolden, the NASA administrator, said, “Senator Mikulski has been a tireless champion for NASA and has helped pave the way for future exploration and our journey to Mars."