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According to the analysts, a trip to Mars costs between $100 billion and $1 trillion to execute the Mars mission. However, the budget that NASA has for 2016 is $19.6 billion. Even though this is a handsome budget, but not if you have Mars on your agenda, said Justin Bachman who wrote for Bloomberg.

"I think everyone expects that a multinational coalition is going to be involved at some level," Casey Dreier, advocacy director for the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space exploration, told Bloomberg. Even though the European Space Agency (ESA) may not be willing to send its own spacecraft to Mars, they are not averse to the idea of collaborating with NASA that "will actually lead to having a European astronaut on a future space mission," Nico Dettmann, head of ESA's development department, told Bloomberg at a collaborative event for the Orion program Nov. 30, as reported by The Christian Science Monitor.

NASA is expected to do the red planet without any company. ESA, known to be a NASA partner, has announced that they are planning to launch multiple organized missions to Moon but not Mars. ESA said in its blog post that they plan to launch series of missions on the moon that involves various space agencies, but not NASA. As reported by Ars Technica,

NASA's main objective planned for the next two decades is a landing on Mars and not coming back to the moon. However, for now their plans appear bleak at best as the space agency's partners are backing away from their ambitious project. Currently, the best way that NASA has a shot at Mars mission is through private sector collaboration. Elon Musk's SpaceX is making significant progress in that direction already. It is clear that NASA needs stable partnerships with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos to have a shot at Mars, reported Council Chronicle.