By Dr. Robert Zubrin, The New Atlantis, 01.31.25
Between SpaceX’s breakthroughs and Trump’s inaugural promise, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity. But it can’t be realized as an eccentric’s project or a pork banquet. Here’s a science-driven program that could get astronauts on the Red Planet by 2031.
America now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to open the space frontier by initiating a sustained program of human exploration of Mars. Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship launch system will soon be operational, offering payload delivery capability comparable to a Saturn V Moon rocket at about five percent of the cost. Musk has positioned himself close to President Donald Trump, who at his inauguration in January promised that his administration would be “launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” As far as meeting the central political and technical conditions for making a bold reach to the Red Planet are concerned, it’s game on.
There are, however, several problems. First and foremost, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the government agency that one would expect to lead such an endeavor, is currently not competent to do so. And while SpaceX is far more competent, it should not be put into the position of executing a Mars mission alone, as some would like. NASA needs to be leading the effort because America should go to Mars, not just a private space enterprise. But to effectively lead human space exploration, NASA first needs to be fixed.
The Problem at NASA
The NASA of the 1960s did a brilliant job leading the Apollo project, which, starting from near-zero spaceflight capability, got men to the Moon within eight years of program start. In contrast, despite possessing vastly superior material and technical resources and more than six decades of human spaceflight experience, the NASA of today has made a total mess of its Artemis lunar effort.
Following President Kennedy’s 1961 directive to get men to the Moon within the decade, the Apollo leadership developed a solid plan to conduct lunar missions, identified a coherent set of hardware elements to implement that plan, and proceeded to develop all the technologies needed to create those flight systems. These included large liquid-fueled rocket engines, multi-staged heavy-lift launch vehicles, in-space rendezvous, life support, power, lunar landing, spacesuits, reentry systems, and deep space communication and navigation technologies. The flight systems, which all fit together and interfaced nicely because they were planned in advance to do so, were then built and eleven piloted missions flown, with six actually reaching the lunar surface. Not only that, but all this was done between 1961 to 1973 — along with building and launching the Skylab space station and flying several dozen lunar and planetary robotic probes — on an average inflation-adjusted budget no greater than NASA’s budget is today, roughly $25 billion per year.
In contrast, while it has now been seven years since President Trump announced the start of what eventually became the Artemis program, we have not returned to the Moon. Instead of implementing a clear plan, NASA has supported a random set of expensive projects to develop an assortment of flight systems that simply do not fit together. The SLS launch vehicle upper stage is the wrong size for its lower stage. The Orion capsule — NASA’s crewed spacecraft — is too heavy for the SLS to deliver into low lunar orbit with enough propellant to come home, even by itself, let alone with a lunar excursion vehicle added on. This is because of a design change from one powerful engine, which NASA once considered “critical to the development of the Space Launch System,” to four less powerful ones that don’t add up to the same amount of thrust. The SpaceX Starship, whose adaptation as a lunar lander NASA is also funding, makes both the SLS and the Orion capsule unnecessary, but they must be used by all missions anyway to make their makers happy.
This is quite unfortunate, since the SLS is projected to have a launch rate of only one every year or two, compared to an average two launches per year of the Apollo program’s Saturn V. Starship would be an excellent choice for Artemis’s primary launch vehicle. But NASA did not assign it to that role. Instead they funded it to serve as the program’s lunar human landing and ascent system, a task for which its 100-ton dry mass makes it seriously suboptimal compared to the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module’s 2-ton ascent stage.
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