NASA admin says political, not technical risk is reason humans haven't already been to Mars

If a few things had gone differently, you apparently could be reading these words from Mars.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told CBS' Margaret Brennan on Sunday's edition of Face the Nation that the space agency tried to get back to the moon and onto Mars in the 1990s and 2000s, but the programs that were brought forth in those days apparently took too long and cost too much money, increasing the political risk. Bridenstine said that without that political risk, Americans certainly would have returned to the moon, as well as gone on to Mars.

So in order to mitigate that political risk, NASA has decided to speed up the timeline to within five years, which is why the Trump administration's budget request was amended. Bridenstine says NASA will have the resources to make travel to the moon — followed possibly by flight to Mars — a reality.

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That may sound exciting, but there's another way to interpret Bridenstine's comments. He told Brennan that there are two types of risk in space travel: the aforementioned political risk and the technical one, which, frankly, sounds a lot scarier.

However, the way Bridenstine tells it, NASA isn't all that worried about the technical risk, even as Brennan pointed out moon travel relies on several things that have yet to be put into use; a rocket, space capsule, and lunar lander among them. In other words, in the attempt to lower the political risk, the technical aspects would seemingly get more challenging in a race against time. Bridenstine, though, confidently maintained that with the right resources in tow, the agency will get it done.