{"id":1831,"date":"2024-11-27T09:31:17","date_gmt":"2024-11-27T06:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2024-11-27T09:31:17","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T06:31:17","slug":"why-the-us-cant-send-humans-to-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/2024\/11\/27\/why-the-us-cant-send-humans-to-mars\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the US can’t send humans to Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Why<\/p>\n

To fully understand why the US hasn’t sent humans to Mars despite sending more robots there than any other country, it just takes a trip down memory lane. Here’s a history of the US’s most promising crewed Martian missions that never were.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1950s: The Mars Project<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"1950s:<\/p>\n

In the ’40s and ’50s, no one really knew what they might find on Mars, but they knew getting there would be tricky. One of the first to seriously tackle the problem was Wernher von Braun.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

In the late ’50s, von Braun consulted on NASA’s very first 10-year plan, which included sending the first probes to Mars. (Sending humans to Mars would come later.) What started as fiction got closer to reality when von Braun started working at NASA a couple of years later.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

1960s: Mars by 1965<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"1960s:<\/p>\n

In the late 1950s, Theodore Taylor, who worked on nuclear weapons at\u00a0Los Alamos, and the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson embarked on an ambitious plan to build a nuclear-explosion-powered spaceship.<\/p>\n

By 1963, the team was having trouble getting increased funding. That same year, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed, hampering the team’s ability to test its vehicle.<\/p>\n

The project was canceled a year later.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1965: Mars’ first close-up<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"1965:<\/p>\n

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:\u00a0Mariner 4.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1970s: The post-Apollo plans<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"1970s:<\/p>\n

NASA had just landed the first people on the moon in 1969 as part of its Apollo Program and was ready for the next big step. That same year, a Space Task Group appointed by President Richard Nixon issued a report that supported human flights to Mars in 1982.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1980s: Sally Ride’s report<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"1980s:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Just a year later, though, NASA’s administrator tasked the astronaut\u00a0Sally Ride\u00a0with 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.<\/p>\n

To meet that timeline, NASA would need to triple its current budget in the next decade. That didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1989: 20 years to Mars<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"1989:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1990s: “Better, faster, cheaper”<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"1990s:<\/p>\n

By the 1990s, Mars enthusiasts were dreaming of getting humans there by the end of the millennium. The aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin formed the Mars Society, an advocacy group pushing for the planet’s exploration and eventually establishing a human settlement there.<\/p>\n

Just a couple of years later, though, NASA lost two more uncrewed spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2000s: But first, the moon<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"2000s:<\/p>\n

Despite the setbacks of the Polar Lander and MCO, NASA again had success in 2004 with rovers\u00a0Spirit and Opportunity.<\/p>\n

Though NASA had recently suffered another tragedy with the loss of the\u00a0Space Shuttle Columbia\u00a0and its crew in 2003, the agency’s rovers seemed to reignite some of the desire for human missions to Mars.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2010s: Mars goes commercial<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"2010s:<\/p>\n

In the 2010s, private space companies \u2014 such as SpaceX \u2014 started planning projects to get crews to Mars.<\/p>\n

SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk, said in 2016 that he’d\u00a0get people there in less than a decade. He later revised the date to 2029 with robust colonization by 2050.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2020s: Simulating life on Mars<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"SpaceX's<\/p>\n

The private space companies have been busy this decade. This year, SpaceX had its first mostly\u00a0successful Starship launch\u00a0after several fiery attempts. The mega-rocket is set to play a huge role in Musk’s plans to colonize Mars.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2030s and beyond: Getting humans to Mars<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"2030s<\/p>\n

Despite its moon-first agenda, NASA knows Mars has its own challenges that the lunar surface can’t prepare them for. In addition to taking a lot of time and fuel to get there, the trip is expected to result in\u00a0communication delays\u00a0of at least 20 minutes between the crew and Earth.<\/p>\n

All that will take time. NASA’s administrator, Bill Nelson, has said there’s potential for the agency to\u00a0send humans to Mars by 2040. Ise compared it to eating an entire elephant. “We’re doing it one bite at a time and building on everything that we learn,” she said.<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen whether private US companies will reach Mars first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To fully understand why the US hasn’t sent humans to Mars despite sending more robots there than any other country, it just takes a trip down memory lane. Here’s a history of the US’s most promising crewed Martian missions that never were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1832,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1833,"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions\/1833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustedresponse.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}