An influential lawmaker wants NASA to redirect billions of dollars it might spend on its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) to space exploration programs with connections to future Mars missions.
House Space, Science and Technology (SST) Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said Wednesday this money would be better spent on programs like deep space habitats or propulsion technologies. Smith said the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently estimated that the total ARM cost would be $1.7 billion. 
Smith slammed ARM as a “distraction” without any connection to a larger roadmap to explore our solar system and is without support from the scientific community or NASA’s own advisory communities. The Orion program, which NASA could eventually use to send humans to Mars, is managed at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston.
NASA says ARM, which Smith called “unjustified,” is a first-ever robotic mission to visit a large near-Earth asteroid, collect a multi-ton boulder from its surface and redirect it into a stable orbit around the moon. Once there, astronauts will explore it and return with samples in the 2020s. This is part of a long-term goal to gain experience needed for a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, NASA says.
Smith’s remarks came during a House SST space subcommittee hearing on deep space habitats.