The Complicated Reason the US Hasn’t Sent Humans to Mars…Yet

Over the past century, NASA scientists and researchers have been steadily engaged in devising plans that could one day take humans to Mars.

In May 2024, NASA announced its plan to fund a revolutionary high-thrust rocket that could take humans to Mars in about two months. This is over seven months quicker than what projections estimate it would take using available technology.

The new rocket has excited the scientific community. However, it is simply the latest development in a long line of potential crafts that have been proposed over the past century, each aimed at finally taking humanity to Mars.

Regarding the setbacks that have resulted in the cancellation of numerous Mars projects, politics has played just as much of a role as the lack of technology.

To better understand the complex situation surrounding our inability to successfully get to Mars, we must return to the first proposed mission set up by Wernher von Braun, a former member of the Nazi party. After WWII, von Braun was brought to the US as part of Operation Paperclip.

Theodore Taylor was the next man to envision a plan to take humans to Mars. In the late 50s, Taylor, who had worked on the first atomic weapons at Los Alamos, devised a plan to build a nuclear-explosion-powered craft alongside theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson.

Despite focusing most of its efforts on getting humans to the Moon during the 1960s, NASA continued to work on side projects that could eventually land manned craft on the surface of Mars.

Very little progress was made in the 70s due to President Richard Nixon, who appeared to have no interest in funding a mission to Mars. “If you’re a proponent of human Mars exploration, this is the problem you’ve faced ever since the 1970s,” Shindell said.

When President George H.W. Bush., took office, reaching Mars never seemed closer. “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.”

Over 15 years after his father’s speech, President George W. Bush shared the Constellation program with the world in 2004. The ultimate goal was to get humans to Mars. In 2010, President Obama canceled the project but did insert his own plan of getting astronauts on Mars by 2030.

NASA’s Artemis Program was established in 2017 during Donald Trump’s tenure as US president. Its core goal was deep-space exploration and the creation of a lunar space station on the moon. According to Mars. Dayna Ise, who leads NASA’s Mars Campaign Office, said this would actually help humans reach Mars.

While extensive efforts are being made to reach Mars today, it appears, like always, that we are still two decades away from reaching the Red Planet. According to Ise, problems centered on cost, lack of the correct technology, and ensuring the astronauts arrive safely continue to plague potential missions.

Mars has long been on NASA’s list of “to explore” places, as it is one of the only places we know could sustain life within our solar system. This is because liquid water once flowed on Mars, and may still exist below the surface.

As space-based telescopes like James Webb can look for planetary-scale chemical signs of life, missions to Mars hope to find physical and chemical signs of life preserved in rock and ice. We are talking about Martians, but creatures that may be or have existed on the planet.

On top of this discovery, Mars could tell us more about Earth’s past and future, helping answer questions about life outside our planet.

While engineers and scientists are working hard to develop the new technology that is necessary to get astronauts to Mars and safely back home, one of the biggest challenges is creating enough energy to make the mission possible.

NASA’s Mars Dune Alpha simulated an experience for four crew members who would live in a space that replicated what a mission to Mars would feel like.

Kelly Haston, Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell, and Nathan Jones were the four members who emerged out of the 1,700-square-foot food, 3D-printed habitat at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas on July 8, 2024.

The program researchers how crew members respond to the conditions and constraints of a year-long mission, which could approach in the next decade.

The CHAPEA crew embarked on its simulated Mars mission with a 22-minute one-way communication delay, which included messages with mission control and communications with the crew’s family and friends.

Studying crop growth played a massive role in the simulation since the team had no fresh food deliveries. This meant they were limited to prepackaged, shelf-stable foods and the crops they grew during the mission.

“I’m grateful for the chance to live the idea that we must utilize resources no faster than they can be replenished and produce waste no faster than they can be processed back into resources,” crew member Brockwell said during the press conference.

Suzanne Bell, the lead for NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, told ABC News that the on-the-ground simulation helps the team collect data so they can learn about how humans survive and thrive in those circumstances.

While humanity may not be ready for Mars, robots are still laying the groundwork for the day when humans are ready to launch off to the Red Planet.