President Trump has ordered NASA to return Americans to the moon before making the United States the first country to send them to Mars. But massive challenges remain, threatening optimistic visions of another giant leap for mankind as early as the 2030s.
The early ‘30s could coincide with the second term of Trump’s successor, setting up a potential fulfillment of Trump’s vision akin to the first moon landing in 1969.
But there’s no guarantee that Trump’s Mars proposal will make it into textbooks as a parallel to John F. Kennedy’s call for sending men to the moon.
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NASA hasn’t requested funding specifically for a manned Mars mission. And space agency leaders aren’t yet sure how to send humans on a months-long journey to Mars, lacking either the propulsion system or radiation safeguards necessary.
Experts are well-aware that Trump is not the first president to speak of sending men to Mars before unfunded, vague ambitions were forgotten, such as under both Bushs. But the administration insists it’s moving forward.
“This is a serious effort,” said Steve Clarke, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration. “We’re looking at the 2030s. That’s been a consistent time frame that we’ve been looking at with the administration.”
Clarke said sending humans to the moon is a stepping stone, potentially in a literal sense. He said there’s active internal discussion about launching a spacecraft from the moon to Mars, or perhaps from a proposed lunar space station.
Although NASA hasn’t asked Congress for specific funding, the agency has already been working on exploring the planet. The InSight robotic lander arrives this year, and in 2020 NASA will send its fifth rover since 1997.
Clarke said advancing knowledge of the moon and Mars will help the mission. For example, discovering fuel resources — such as Helium-3 on the moon and methane on Mars — could allow for innovative energy sources for spacecraft.
“If we can indeed utilize the existing resources there, we don’t have to bring it from Earth … that allows us to bring more hardware and crew instead,” he said.
Scott Hubbard, NASA’s first Mars program director in the early 2000s, said he believes it’s still possible to send men to Mars by the early ‘30s, a timeframe put forward in a 2015 Jet Propulsion Laboratory report he helped author. The report envisions a manned orbit of Mars by 2033, with a landing around 2039.
Hubbard, popularly known as the nation’s first “Mars czar,” said going to Mars can be done at a surprisingly low cost by redirecting NASA spending away from the International Space Station, currently $3 billion to $4 billion per year.
“When I started going to Congress [in the late ‘90s to talk about Mars], they’d look at you like you were nuts,” Hubbard recalled. “Now when you talk with congresspeople and policymakers, there’s an assumption this is the goal.”
Still, he said, “I don’t think we are going to see a return to the Apollo era where NASA got 4 percent of the federal budget. I think it will continue to be half a percent.”
Hubbard, who also led NASA’s 2,500-person Ames Research Center from 2002 to 2006, now teaches at Stanford University and chairs the SpaceX Commercial Crew Safety Advisory Panel. He said a rise in potential corporate and international partners is promising.
Hubbard leans toward prioritizing Mars over the moon, though he thinks both programs can proceed in tandem.
“In my view, Mars is the prize, because it’s where life may well emerge,” Hubbard said, pointing to recent discovery of a possible liquid lake and evidence of organic material. “I don’t think anyone ever proposed that moon is a place where life could emerge.”
Despite the prize of a historic first with Mars and a potential second home for mankind — an idea floated by SpaceX founder Elon Musk — experts struggle to offer hypothetical business plans for the planet, though Clarke said exploitation of methane for fuel is one idea.
On the moon, several theoretical ventures don’t depend entirely on government funds, including mining potential fuel source Helium-3. The unawarded $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, a challenge to incentivize a private-sector moon landing, evoked ideas such as coalitions of academic institutions pooling resources for scientific missions.
“You have to meld the enthusiasm with the reality,” said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a trade group.“I don’t say this with enthusiasm, but I think Mars is on the backburner behind the moon.”
A lunar mission is daunting itself, requiring new technologies almost four decades after the U.S. ran out of Saturn V rockets.
Within the space community, there’s polite disagreement about whether Mars should get greater attention than the moon.
“Clearly, there’s far more enthusiasm for Mars than the moon,” argues Chris Carberry, CEO of the non-profit Explore Mars, which hosts annual conventions to build enthusiasm for martian exploration.
Carberry, who recently testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, believes there is “overwhelming bipartisan support” for sending men to Mars, but warns that “all other presidents have made space speeches that didn’t seem to go anywhere.”
“Congress has to be told what it’s spending the money on,” he said.
Clarke, the NASA leader, is still optimistic.
“I wouldn’t say that Mars is on the backburner. It’s really continuously on our minds as we are planning the near-term lunar campaign and how that will feed forward to the Mars campaign,” he said.
Clarke said NASA will include human exploration of Mars in future budget requests, and that burgeoning private space businesses may accelerate plans.
“Keep in mind, technology continues to mature, so you just never know when you may have the next innovative technology breakthrough to get humans to Mars even sooner,” he said.
