The Real Reason Why NASA Isn't Going To Mars Yet | Unveiled

The Real Reason Why NASA Isn’t Going to Mars Yet

After Earth, Mars is probably the most popular solar system planet in the mainstream. For generations now, we’ve wondered over the secrets it could hold… and, as such, it remains a major target area for scientific research right at the cutting edge. However, when humankind successfully landed on the moon back in the late 1960s, many thought that Mars would be our next port of call… and that’s never really materialized. The question, then, is why?

This is Unveiled and today we’re taking a closer look at the reasons why NASA isn’t yet going to Mars.

To understand why we haven’t been to Mars, perhaps we first need to consider why we did go to the moon. Because despite the massive cultural significance and success of the Apollo manned missions, it can be argued that there actually weren’t a huge number of reasons for them. Of course, the lunar landings were a fantastic and unique research opportunity, but ultimately it was the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States that drove us there. So much of the motivation for the moon landings was linked to politics, diplomacy, and large-scale one-upmanship. The Apollo missions were a display of technological superiority and advancement… to the point where, if the Cold War hadn’t happened, getting to the moon may well not have happened either. History shows that the Soviets, in fact, didn’t get there, opting out shortly after they’d been beaten… and it’s not as though America has been hurrying back in the decades since Apollo. On a practical level, spending billions to walk the moon just doesn’t make sense… and perhaps that has dogged any proposed Mars mission, first and foremost. Whereas getting to the moon had a clear reason why at the time (being the endpoint of the space race) getting to Mars, until now, just… hasn’t really had the same.

But what’s increasingly obvious is that interest is building in the twenty-first century. And, today, NASA does have tentative plans in place and is reportedly under official pressure from the White House to put humans on Mars by 2033. But, also, there’s something of a new space race brewing. Both the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) want to send humans to Mars as well, but with less concrete time frames. ESA simply has an undefined long term goal, for instance, and it’s said that China wants to achieve it sometime between 2040 and 2060. Elsewhere, the Mars dream has famously spread across private companies, too… and some are betting on those private companies beating the space agencies to it. SpaceX, for example, is reportedly interested in not only getting humans to Mars but also establishing a permanent settlement there. If plans go ahead, it’ll be the first time that humanity has attempted to colonize another planet. The planned missions have been delayed until now, however, with initial targets of a mid-2020s launch now pushed back to the late 2020s or early 2030s.

But still, with so many groups seemingly pushing for the same thing, the question remains why it hasn’t happened already? With a “new space race” powering imaginations, why hasn’t NASA itself reached a similar stage as it did with the moon in the 1960s? Why aren’t we preparing for launch?

Again, the political landscape could be key. Arguably one of NASA’s greatest challenges is having to deal with the near-constant political change in America. NASA, of course, answers to the government, it relies on funding from the government, and to a certain degree its public image is driven by whatever administration is in power at the time. It’s perhaps telling, then, that (as of 2022) NASA has experienced thirteen different presidents since it was launched in 1958… and, apart from during the build-up to the moon landings in the ‘60s, funding has rarely been stable, and in more recent years has often fallen. America’s bipartisan backdrop has meant that the two sides of US government often don’t share similar goals. With regard to NASA, it can mean that what one president orders, the next cancels. For example, the goals set by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, across two decades between the years 2001 and 2021, have all varied. While Joe Biden again changed stance upon his entering office.

The chopping and changing has meant that NASA has had to continually react to the new parameters it has to work within – including at times having to recycle parts from past (but now shelved) missions to be used in new ones. On the one hand, having a rotating source of new voices to drive the Agency forward can be viewed as a major positive, ensuring that no one group has too much control… but, on the other, perhaps it makes it difficult for NASA to ever get too deep into any one project. The funding structure has been variously criticized to this end, as well. During the original space race funding was through the roof, and NASA reached new heights relatively quickly by narrowing toward one stable goal – getting to the moon. But just the moon (or just Mars) arguably isn’t enough anymore, leaving NASA to divide up its constantly changing budget across multiple initiatives that history shows might not even reach completion. According to Peter Diamandis, the CEO of space tourism company Zero Gravity Operations, and speaking to “Business Insider” in 2018; “The agency is unable to sustain consistent funding to do anything”.

But, really, it’s not as though politics should be seen as the only reason why we’re not on the Red Planet yet. There are a multitude of technical challenges, too. Put simply, Mars is not an easy trip. First, there’s the sheer distance between here and there. The moon is the farthest humans have ever been in space, but Mars is about 200 times further away. We’re talking months on board a ship in order to get there then, plus waiting for optimum launch windows (where Mars and Earth are closest together) which only come along roughly every twenty-six months.

Fuel type is also a major issue at Earth-to-Mars distances. Traditional fuel can be used, but it would take an incredible (and impractical) amount to make the journey. Which is why, in the meantime, NASA (and others) are investing in alternative technologies like nuclear fission engines… anything to make a spaceship faster and lighter. We’re really only just breaking ground with all the on-Mars tech, too, like spacesuits, habitats, and communications. All of which are essential for any proposed mission, and may well have been optimized long ago had it been a priority… but, again, until recent years when private companies entered the fray, there apparently hadn’t been as clear a need.

But, finally, care of astronauts is perhaps the chief concern for NASA, at this stage… as the longer the distance to cover, the more time there is for something to go wrong. And, out in the middle of space, even a tiny problem could prove fatal. The long-term physical effects on the body of changing gravity need to be factored in; of radiation; of the loss of night and day. And then, beyond the physical care of astronauts, NASA (and any Mars mission runner) has to account for the unprecedented psychological toll, too. Until now, we’ve seen rare examples of individual humans managing to stay in space for more than (or close to) a year, but those have always been on board our relatively close-to-Earth space stations. By contrast, a round trip to Mars is a multi-year ordeal, and for most of that you’re literally millions of miles away from home. While getting to the moon was no mean feat for those few that made the trip for the Apollo program, getting to Mars will require a whole new level of commitment. Once the rocket launches there’s no turning back, and so the screening process for astronauts is lengthy, as well. So far, we’ve seen various long-term isolation experiments take place, but still nothing to match a genuine journey to Mars. And, in fact, managing the mental strain remains one of the greatest and most important aspects for any vision of a Martian future.

Scientists, technicians, engineers, psychologists, and a whole host of others are having to navigate through a long, long list of unknowns with Mars. These, in themselves, might then be considered enough of a reason as to why we’re still yet to get off the ground. But, also, cast over all of that, there’s that constantly changing political and social backdrop – which is particularly significant for NASA. As a public agency, NASA’s targets can change year-to-year, government-to-government. Its budget can rise and fall. And public opinion of NASA’s worth can change over time, as well.

It remains to be seen whether the emerging “new space race” will provide enough need and enthusiasm to finally send us to a different planet; to finally turn us into an interplanetary species. But, for now, that’s the real reason why NASA isn’t going to Mars yet.