Donald Trump is a gambler by nature. The fact that he won two terms as president suggests he wins more than he loses.
So it's not really a surprise that Trump has decided to throw the unmanned U.S. space program under the bus and put all his chips on sending humans to Mars. There's no timetable, per se, only getting there as soon as possible. He is asking Congress for $1 billion to fund research projects on going to Mars.
“Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers,” Trump said during his inaugural address last year. He pledged that the U.S. would “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.”
He's doing it at the expense of some truly spectacular unmanned missions. The biggest casualty of the drive to send Americans to Mars is the Mars Sample Return Mission. The Perseverance Rover has already collected numerous samples of Martian soil that indicate the probability of past life. The plan since the rover's 2020 launch has been to send another lander to pick up the samples and return them to a laboratory in Earth orbit to limit the possibility of contamination.
Independent reviews in 2023–2025 deemed the original mission architecture too complex and expensive (a $7 billion initial estimate grew to over $11 billion with a 2040 return date). With that timetable, it makes some sense to wait until humans are on the surface (perhaps by 2045) and retrieve the samples then.
I'm sure Trump has been briefed about the numerous problems that must be overcome to achieve his Mars goals. He's taking the right approach in making the effort a public-private affair, with commercial space companies supplying more of the infrastructure for such a mission. A nuclear-powered rocket will take Americans to Mars, and an entirely new crew vehicle will be developed.
The launch itself may be from the Moon, after the U.S. establishes a base from which a rocket could be built. Getting back to the Moon has been a priority for the Trump administration, but due to delays in the Artemis program, we may not step foot on the Moon again until 2029. China could beat us there by a few months.
That's what this is all about. Trump is trying to beat China to winning this newest space race. It may not be as dramatic as the original space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union. But it's projected to be far more consequential.
Since his return to office, Trump has issued multiple executive orders aimed at countering the Chinese threat and ensuring American space superiority. He has ordered NASA to return astronauts to the Moon by 2028 and to establish the first elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030 to “prepare for the journey to Mars.” Every part of the US space program is being redirected at the red planet.
There are other projects that are being abandoned to meet that one goal. The US-led International Space Station is also soon to be retired, and Trump wants a series of smaller, commercially built stations in its place. Once that happens, China will have the largest low-Earth orbit station, Tiangong.
Should China win those three races – the return to the Moon, the largest space station and proving life existed on Mars – it could reshape the international order back here on Earth. Much of the world will conclude that China holds the keys to the rest of the century. That is why Trump has gambled it all on a manned mission to Mars.
Broad budget requests targeted dozens of robotic planetary, space physics, and Earth-observation scientific missions for phase-out or outright cancellation. NASA proposed consolidating several ongoing, extended-phase space science operations into a single operational hub to trim overhead costs. The kind of basic exploration that NASA has been noted for is getting phased out to win the race to Mars.
Related: China Delays Critical Moon Mission Until Next Year
Trading robotic science for a manned mission doesn’t make sense, according to John Grunsfeld, the former head of science at NASA. Yes, but to quote the film The Right Stuff, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." As always, manned missions have been the driving force of the NASA budget. For better or worse, NASA's public support does not depend on spectacular photos of Pluto or Mars rovers. It will always be tied to the success of our manned missions.
Even with private companies making the bulk of investments to get us to Mars, the mission to the Red Planet is going to be massively expensive, perhaps as much as $70 billion in tax dollars. And that's if we can even get humans there and back alive.
What is the effect on the human body of spending almost three years in zero-gravity? No one knows. What are the psychological pressures of humans living so close together for the mission's duration? How about solar radiation? Cosmic rays?
There are a thousand questions that would need to be answered before NASA can justify sending humans to Mars. It's nice to imagine Americans on Mars, but then what? After finding (or not finding) life or evidence of past living things, what can humans do on Mars that robots can't?
It's a question that we're going to have to answer before we can fulfill our "manifest destiny" and go to the stars.
