It is a destination that has long tantalised the public’s imagination, inspired film-makers — and repeatedly punctuated presidential ambitions.
Welcome to Mars, a once warm waterworld up to 250 million miles from Earth that is now a desert where temperatures average minus 65C (-85F) and whose sole inhabitants — at least as far as we know — are robots.
When President Trump included a vision for its exploration by humans in his inaugural address on Monday, it was a passing mention but one that complemented his promise of a “golden age” for America.
“We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump enthused, invoking a term coined by 19th-century explorers who believed American territorial expansionism to be divine providence.
Innovative as it may have seemed, it was merely an echo of previous presidential articulations and an affirmation of projects and programmes already under way. Nasa has been pursuing the human exploration of Mars as a specific goal for three decades, more recently in partnership with the commercial space industry. And presidents have been invoking the red planet in their agendas for even longer.
“For every generation there is a destiny,” Lyndon Johnson said in his 1965 address. “We meet in this solemn period to rededicate ourselves to the great task of achieving the goal of sending a rocket to Mars.” He spoke amid the tensions of the Cold War space race and in the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy, whose goal of sending astronauts to the moon was realised in 1969.
Many Martian missions followed.
In 2004, George W Bush published Vision for Space Exploration, his hopes for getting humans back to the moon as a stepping-stone to Mars. In 2010 Barack Obama’s Space Policy Directive cancelled Constellation, the architecture Nasa was building to do so, and shifted resources to a phased pathway to Mars via the Space Launch System (SLS), with crewed missions to Mars envisioned for the 2030s.
The SLS in action over Florida, November 2022
JOE RIMKUS JR/REUTERS
Under Trump’s first term and during Joe Biden’s presidency, the Artemis programme drilled down on a more specific lunar timeline, bringing in commercial partners to help speed progress towards putting humans back on the moon for the first time since 1972.
There, crew will establish a sustained presence, developing necessary technologies for the onward march to Mars, with the first lunar landing set for mid-2027 or beyond. Whether that onward march is slow or fast will be determined, first and foremost, by how much money is allocated to solving the challenges of not only launching astronauts to Mars, but ensuring they survive.
“We can hope that some day we’ll get humans to Mars, because this has been a goal all the way back to the 1960s,” Laura Forczyk of Astralytical, a space industry analyst, said. “We’ve been developing technologies and launching new spacecraft since then, it’s closer than ever, but what we don’t have is the budget and that’s holding us back. Is it realistic that we’ll have humans to Mars within this new Trump administration? No. But we can start preparing in a way we’ve never done before.”
Interest in branching out to Mars has never been in short supply. When a Dutch entrepreneur announced plans in 2012 to establish a permanent human colony on Mars, reactions ranged from outright dismissal to fascinated curiosity.
The colony envisaged under the Mars One project
REX FEATURES
Within the spaceflight industry, Bas Landorp’s Mars One project, which set a goal of landing crew on the red planet by 2025, was ridiculed as a “suicide mission”. Scientists and engineers pointed out the lack of critical technology and infrastructure to make it feasible, such as a spacecraft, surface habitats, life support, power and communications systems — and funding.
Yet 2,761 people applied for the opportunity, thrilled by the prospect of becoming Martian pioneers and apparently unconcerned that Landorp’s travel plans would not include a return leg. This was, he promised, the “next giant leap for mankind”.
“It will be one of the most exciting things ever,” he added. “Five hundred years from now, kids will learn how humans landed on Mars in the 21st century. It doesn’t matter who does it first; it will happen. It will change the world completely. People will believe that anything is possible.”
Mars One collapsed in 2019, more than $1 million dollars in debt and with no real progress to show for it. By then, however, Elon Musk had risen to the forefront of the commercial space industry with his company, SpaceX, and set out plans of his own in a presentation to the 2016 International Astronautical Congress, sharing his vision for developing a mega-rocket that could take 100 people to Mars at a time.
Elon Musk appeared at a Trump rally last year with a T-shirt saying: “Occupy Mars”
BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS
Musk at Trump’s inauguration with his fellow space-hungry billionaire Jeff Bezos and his partner Lauren Sanchez
-CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS
“The base starts with one ship, then multiple ships, then we start building out the city and making the city bigger, and even bigger; over time, terraforming Mars and making it a really nice place to be. It is quite a beautiful picture,” he said.
Yet it is a vision estimated to take tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars — a tall order even if tight federal budgets are combined with the fortunes of space-hungry billionaires such as Musk, and Jeff Bezos through his Blue Origin company.
• Jeff Bezos v Elon Musk: who is winning the space race?
It is also one that will cost lives, Musk has conceded. Radiation exposure, equipment failure and the brutal realities of the harsh Martian atmosphere are significant challenges for which technological solutions do not even yet exist.
“It’s a high-risk endeavour and you might not come back alive, but it’s the future of humanity,” Musk said in 2016, followed in 2017 by: “I think the first mission to Mars, people are going to die.”
With Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut and fellow billionaire, expected to take the helm at Nasa under the Trump administration, America’s pathway to the stars will not lack ambition and excitement.
Jared Isaacman after leading the first all-civilian orbital space mission, Inspiration4, in 2021
AFP
But fiscal conservatives control the federal budget and Musk’s declared goal of sending uncrewed versions of his Starship megarocket to Mars in two years and the first humans in four to six years are broadly considered unattainable, coming also on the back of years of delays.
The sight of Musk’s moon-and-Mars spacecraft exploding 90 miles above the earth during its seventh test flight last week, raining debris over an area hundreds of miles wide also served as a reminder of an industry mantra: space is hard.
Debris from a SpaceX rocket spotted over Turks and Caicos, January 16
REUTERS
“Laying stepping stones from the moon to Mars was the goal of the first Trump administration,” Forczyk said. “Under his first term, there was an understanding that we need to send astronauts to the moon to prepare for sending to Mars. It remains to be seen whether those priorities and urgency will change.”
The window of opportunity to send humans to Mars from Earth opens only once every 26 months and lasts three to five weeks, due to the planets’ relative positions to each other.
The journey to Mars would take six to nine months one way. To live and work on the surface, there are logistical and engineering puzzles yet to crack. Astronauts will need oxygen, sustainable food and water sources, power, habitats, communications and spacesuits to stay alive.
Casey Dreier, senior space policy adviser at the Planetary Society NGO, said: “The moon is hard and Mars is a million times harder. It’s fantastically further away, we don’t know how to land there, yet let alone come back, and we don’t have the technology to sustain human life there for long. There are psychological consequences, health consequences from being in deep space that long. None of these are insurmountable — but it’s about much more than launching rockets. Launch is the easy part.”
SpaceX’s Starship is still at experimental stage, with transformative milestones yet to master such as reaching an orbital trajectory and demonstrating that it can be refuelled in-flight.
“At the same time, to get to Mars we need all the other stuff and who pays for that? Can we develop it? It takes time,” Dreier said.
Nasa is a non-partisan agency that operates independently from the federal government. Its budget and programmatic priorities, however, are influenced by the political environment. There are concerns over whether Trump and Musk, who share a close alliance, will help or hinder the ability to build political consensus — and thus, congressional funding — around America’s Martian ambitions.
“It can be an opportunity to have a big tent, a unifying experience, and Jared (Isaacman) has an opportunity to possibly do that because he himself isn’t openly political in his public persona,” Dreier said. “He can theoretically reach across the aisles and build that consensus. But Mars won’t happen naturally if the only people talking about it are the two most polarising figures in the US right now …therein would lie the potential tragedy if this becomes subject to the rancour of partisanship.
“The audacity of trying to land humans on Mars is one that will provide lots of scientific and social benefits — but approach it with some level of humility. You can’t just will your way to Mars.”