Why The USA Can’t Send Humans To Mars
- Humans have long imagined life on Mars, though our understanding of the planet has changed a lot.
- Some of the US’s earliest plans assumed humans could reach the Red Planet by the 1980s.
- Over the decades, technology and funding challenges have hampered the nation’s hopes of crewed flights.
Earlier this month, NASA announced its funding of a revolutionary high-thrust rocket called the Pulsed Plasma Rocket (PPR), which could potentially transport crewed missions to Mars in just two months.
This new technology could cut the travel time by seven months compared to current methods, significantly reducing the risk and cost of a manned mission to Mars, according to Howe Industries, the company developing the concept. NASA highlighted in a statement that the PPR “holds the potential to revolutionize space exploration.”
The PPR is one of the latest advancements in the United States’ longstanding ambition to send humans to Mars. In the early 1960s, for instance, there were proposals for nuclear-bomb-powered spaceships to make the journey.
Since before NASA successfully landed the first humans on the moon, the U.S. has invested substantial resources and effort into crewed Mars mission proposals, only to see these plans never come to fruition. However, technology is not the only barrier; politics also plays a significant role.
“That’s kind of like a joke within the space community or the Mars community,” said Matthew Shindell, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, in an interview with Business Insider. “Putting humans on Mars is always 20 years away.”
Shindell explained that the timeframe is short enough to seem achievable but long enough for the political landscape to shift, complicating efforts to realize the goal.
To understand why the U.S. has yet to send humans to Mars, despite sending more robots there than any other country, we need to look back at the history of America’s most promising crewed Martian missions that never happened.
1950s: The Mars Project
In the 1940s and 1950s, people were uncertain about what they might discover on Mars, but they were well aware that reaching the Red Planet would be a formidable challenge. One of the pioneers in addressing this challenge was Wernher von Braun.
During World War II, von Braun was a member of the Nazi party and was instrumental in the development of V-2 missiles. After the war, he moved to the United States under Operation Paperclip, continuing his work on missile technology with the US Army. Simultaneously, he worked on a novel called “The Mars Project,” where he detailed the first comprehensive plan for a manned mission to Mars.
Von Braun envisioned a 260-day mission, set to launch in 1985, involving 10 spacecraft and a crew of 70. “He sat down and did the math and created a whole story around it,” explained historian Roger D. Launius.
In the late 1950s, von Braun contributed to NASA’s first 10-year plan, which included sending initial probes to Mars. The concept of sending humans to Mars remained a longer-term goal. What began as science fiction edged closer to reality as von Braun’s career progressed at NASA, where he played a crucial role in shaping the future of space exploration.
1960s: Mars by 1965
In the late 1950s, Theodore Taylor, a nuclear weapons expert from Los Alamos, and Freeman Dyson, a renowned theoretical physicist, embarked on an ambitious venture to create a spaceship powered by nuclear explosions.
Dubbed Project Orion, their proposed spacecraft would take 12 years to develop, cost $100 million annually, and accommodate 150 people comfortably. Their bold motto was “Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970.”
However, NASA had significant concerns about the potential dangers if any of the hundreds of bombs needed to propel the rocket detonated unexpectedly.
By 1963, the project was struggling to secure increased funding. Additionally, that same year saw the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which severely restricted the team’s ability to test their vehicle.
Ultimately, Project Orion was canceled in 1964.
1965: Mars’ first close-up
Though NASA was feverishly working toward the moon in the ’60s, it didn’t fully abandon its plans for Mars.
In 1962, the German rocket scientist Ernst Stuhlinger was working at NASA on a project to get five crewed ships to the Red Planet by the early 1980s.
Stuhlinger’s planned ships were huge, almost 500 feet long. For comparison, NASA’s Space Shuttles are under 200 feet. But as NASA raced to land the first humans on the moon, it shifted focus to smaller, lighter spacecraft. This helped speed things along toward the moon, but it was a step back for Mars.
This pivot “reduced Apollo’s utility as a technological stepping stone to Mars,” David S. F. Portree wrote in “Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950-2000.”
In the meantime, NASA knew it needed more information about Mars before it landed humans there. So, in 1964, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched the very first probe to fly by Mars: Mariner 4.
The images the probe transmitted to Earth were fuzzy and showed a desolate, barren planet. But they were the first close-up images of Mars’s surface that anyone on Earth had seen.
1970s: The post-Apollo plans
In 1969, NASA made history by landing the first humans on the moon as part of its Apollo Program. With this monumental achievement, the agency set its sights on even more ambitious goals. That same year, President Richard Nixon’s appointed Space Task Group recommended human missions to Mars by 1982.
However, President Nixon decided to ignore most of the recommendations from the 1969 report, opting instead for what would become the Space Shuttle program, which did not include plans for Mars exploration. This decision marked a significant shift in NASA’s direction.
During the peak of the Apollo era, NASA enjoyed ample funding without much competition. But under Nixon’s administration, budget cuts began to impact the agency. This shift occurred during the Vietnam War, when many Americans believed the government should prioritize addressing poverty, environmental issues, and other domestic concerns.
“If you’re a proponent of human Mars exploration, this is the problem you’ve faced ever since the 1970s,” said historian Shindell. Sending humans to the moon was already a staggering financial endeavor, and Mars is much farther and more complex to reach.
1980s: Sally Ride’s report
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan appointed the National Commission on Space to envision the next 50 years of space travel, which involved the possibility of piloted vehicles to Mars.
But then NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. The disaster affected how the agency thought about human space travel as a whole.
“In general, there was a great deal of soul-searching within NASA about the use of expensive and risky human-rated launch vehicles like the shuttle,” William Sheehan and Jim Bell wrote in “Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet.”
Just a year later, though, NASA’s administrator tasked the astronaut Sally Ride with laying out the agency’s future space explorations. In her report, she explained what it would take for the US to land an astronaut on Mars by 2005.
To meet that timeline, NASA would need to triple its current budget in the next decade. That didn’t happen.
1989: 20 years to Mars
By 1989, a crewed mission to Mars seemed back on the table, according to a speech by the newly elected president, George H.W. Bush.
“Why Mars?” he asked. “Because it is humanity’s destiny to strive, to seek, to find. And because it is America’s destiny to lead.”
NASA’s response was the Space Exploration Initiative, an analysis of Bush’s space-exploration goals, which would cost an estimated $400 billion to $500 billion.
At that point, Mars was still a long way off. The missions weren’t expected to begin until after 2010.
But Sheehan and Bell said a lack of congressional funding and political support led to the demise of Bush’s Martian mission a few years later in 1993.
1990s: “Better, faster, cheaper”
By the 1990s, Mars enthusiasts were hopeful about sending humans to the Red Planet by the turn of the millennium. Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer, founded the Mars Society, a group dedicated to advocating for Mars exploration and ultimately establishing a human settlement there.
At the same time, NASA was grappling with the challenge of studying Mars after losing contact with the robotic probe Mars Observer in 1993. With much still unknown about the planet, the focus remained on uncrewed missions.
Daniel Goldin, the new administrator of NASA, introduced a new approach for these missions: “better, faster, cheaper.”
This strategy led to successful missions like Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor. Pathfinder delivered Sojourner, the first operational Mars rover, while Mars Global Surveyor provided incredible images and data from the planet.
However, just a few years later, NASA faced setbacks with the loss of two more uncrewed spacecraft: the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter.
2000s: But first, the moon
Despite the setbacks of the Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter, NASA achieved notable success in 2004 with the rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
Although NASA had faced a major tragedy with the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003, the successful deployment of these rovers rekindled enthusiasm for human missions to Mars.
In 2004, 15 years after his father’s historic space speech, President George W. Bush unveiled the Constellation Program. The ambitious goal of this program was to eventually send humans to Mars, though no specific timeline was provided for this mission.
A key part of Bush’s plan involved returning to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. However, in 2010, President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation Program. Instead, he set a new objective of sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s.
2010s: Mars goes commercial
In the 2010s, private space companies like SpaceX began developing plans to send crews to Mars. SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk, initially promised in 2016 to achieve this within a decade. He later adjusted his timeline, aiming for a Mars landing by 2029 and envisioning robust colonization by 2050. However, SpaceX has yet to send any missions to Mars.
During this time, President Donald Trump shifted the focus of U.S. space exploration, reversing the previous administration’s plans. NASA was redirected to prioritize lunar missions.
Under the Trump administration in 2017, NASA established the Artemis Program, its latest mission for crewed deep-space exploration. The program aims to return humans to the moon and develop a lunar space station where astronauts can reside for extended periods.
This moon-first strategy doesn’t preclude Mars exploration. Dayna Ise, head of NASA’s Mars Campaign Office, explained that lunar missions are stepping stones to Mars. “You learn a lot by going to the moon, but you learn even more by staying at the moon,” she said. “And so whatever we learn there will help with Mars.”
Ise also emphasized the importance of collaboration with private space companies. “It’s all hands on deck,” she said. “It is such a difficult engineering problem that we cannot exclude anybody from helping.”
2020s: Simulating life on Mars
In recent years, private space companies have been notably active. This year marked a significant milestone for SpaceX with its first mostly successful Starship launch, following several previous attempts that ended in fiery results. Elon Musk’s ambitious plans to colonize Mars hinge heavily on this mega-rocket.
Concurrently, the Biden Administration has maintained its backing for the Artemis lunar missions, despite encountering some setbacks. NASA recently announced a delay in its first crewed Artemis mission to the moon, now rescheduled for 2025, citing safety and technical challenges.
Artemis IV, NASA’s upcoming mission aimed at delivering a segment of a lunar space station to the moon, remains on track for 2028. NASA emphasizes that establishing a sustained presence on the moon will provide invaluable insights into prolonged crew survival in an extraterrestrial environment.
NASA’s efforts also extend to studying the psychological and physiological impacts of long-term isolation. The agency’s CHAPEA missions involve placing volunteers in a simulated Mars habitat for a year. These “analog astronauts” adhere to strict schedules, have limited contact with family and friends, and undergo close monitoring. The first crew is slated to exit the habitat on July 6 this year.
These endeavors underscore NASA’s commitment to advancing human space exploration capabilities, preparing for future missions to Mars, and establishing sustainable presences on celestial bodies beyond Earth.
2030s and beyond: Getting humans to Mars
NASA acknowledges the unique challenges Mars presents despite its primary focus on lunar exploration. The journey to Mars not only requires extensive time and fuel but also introduces communication delays of at least 20 minutes between the crew and Earth.
According to NASA, astronauts must be prepared to handle health emergencies and fix hardware issues autonomously due to these communication delays. Efforts are underway to enhance the autonomy of systems, particularly life support systems, to ensure they can operate effectively without constant troubleshooting from Earth.
Additional obstacles include protecting the crew from radiation, managing the planet’s abrasive dust, and establishing sustainable food sources. “We need to create a self-sustaining environment within the spacecraft to support the crew’s health and well-being,” said a NASA spokesperson.
Addressing these challenges is a complex and time-consuming endeavor. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has outlined a potential timeline for human missions to Mars by 2040, likening the process to tackling an enormous task incrementally. “We’re approaching it step by step, building upon each advancement and lesson learned,” he explained.
The race to Mars also involves private U.S. companies, though it remains uncertain who will reach the planet first.
Correction — May 28, 2024: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Virgin Galactic’s intentions regarding Mars exploration. Virgin Galactic has not announced plans to send robots or humans to Mars.