NASA's Bolden: Mars mission is 'closer than ever' … In the movie, "The Martian," Matt Damon was a fictional astronaut stranded on Mars. In reality, the head of NASA says astronauts could set foot on the Red Planet within the next twenty years. "We think we're on the right trajectory to get humans to Mars in the 2030's," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told CNBC's "On the Money" in an interview this week. -CNBC

More lies from NASA. This is an agency that apparently went to the moon 45 years ago but can't manage a repeat. And now its top bureaucrats are announcing they'll get to Mars within 20 years.

NASA is symptomatic of so much of what is wrong with the United States right now. It's an overstuffed agency relying on hype and mischaracterizations to secure its nearly US$20 billion yearly budget from Congress.

At NASA, lying has been institutionalized at the highest levels. Like another white elephant, the Hadron Collider, NASA makes a great many claims that when looked at closely are questionable at best.

-Iconic blue-marble earth photo is a photo-shopped composite: This is a photo so famous it was used on Apple's initial iPhone and was supposedly taken at great distance by moon-bound Apollo 17 astronauts. But here's the reality, according to FellowoftheMinds.com:

Rendered in simple English, NASA is [admitting] that the 2002 "Blue Marble II" is not a photo. Instead, the image is a COMBINATION and COMPOSITE of many "satellite-based observations" (whatever that means), which were "stitched together" (whatever that means) by scientists and "visualizers" (whatever that means).

-Famous moon rock is actually petrified wood: According to a 2009 UK Telegraph report: "Curators at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum … discovered that the 'lunar rock', valued at £308,000, was in fact petrified wood. Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation, said the museum would continue to keep the stone as a curiosity."

-Russian spokesman claims fakery: Just recently, the UK Daily Mail reported that Vladimir Markin a spokesman for the Russian government, implied the existence of faked reports regarding NASA moon landings. The admissions are being blamed on rising tensions between the US and Russia.

-Possible murder of outspoken NASA critic Virgil "Gus" Grissom: Grissom once hung a lemon on a NASA rocket and professed considerable doubts about the manned moon progtram.   He died in the Apollo 1 fire, January 1967, along with astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

Here, from a report in Star magazine (probably one of the only mass-market publications that would carry the allegations at the time):

[Grissom's son] said he recently was granted access to the charred capsule and discovered a "fabricated" metal plate located behind a control panel switch. The switch controlled the capsules' electrical power source from an outside source to the ship's batteries. Grissom argues that the placement of the metal plate was an act of sabotage. When one of the astronauts toggled the switch to transfer power to the ship's batteries, a spark was created that ignited a fireball.

-Thomas Baron's report goes missing: After Grissom's death, congressional hearings were held. One NASA inspector,Thomas Baron, provided a voluminous report that was highly critical of NASA.

Baron almost immediately lost his job and only a week after providing testimony died with his wife when his car was hit by an oncoming train. Investigators labeled the deaths of a suicide. Baron's report vanished and has never been seen again.