At Texas A&I’s commencement in May 1990, George H. W. Bush called for Americans to plant their flag on Mars before the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. That anniversary arrived in 2019, almost thirty years after his speech. The crewed expedition he described has yet to depart.
In September 2024, Elon Musk said the first uncrewed Starships would leave for Mars in two years. SpaceX now advertises cargo flights to the Martian surface no earlier than 2028. We were supposed to be using this fall’s departure window to begin proving the large vehicles that could carry Americans there, and it’s disappointing to lose the first Starship attempt.
We should be clear at the outset that humans on Mars is a stalking horse for a whole host of other technological developments and progressing the human frontier. We’ve already gotten a taste of that from Musk, despite his “optimistic” use of timelines: Boring, Optimus, Tesla, Starship… all of these are clearly necessary if one wants to build and sustain a colony on another world.
The problem that the United States has run into since the 1960s isn’t really about engineering. We know what we need to do to get people onto the Martian surface. It will be hard, but it’s not like we’re waiting for some magical futuretech that remains outside the reach of science. Unfortunately, it’s the ping pong nature of American spending, politics, priorities, and politicians that has led to a manned mission to Mars always seeming like it’s “20 years away.”
After several decades in the dark, the 2020s have seen private companies step up to provide a continuity across administrations that was sorely lacking from the 1970s to the turn of the millennium. However, the sad reality remains no matter how much optimism there is for the future: a crewed mission to Mars is going to miss the 2026 window.
The next departure
Earth and Mars offer favorable departure opportunities roughly every 26 months. A vehicle that arrives several months late for one can face a much longer wait for the next, depending on its trajectory. Engineers waiting for the first large-vehicle landing attempt also have to wait for the measurements it would return. We should organize a continuing American Mars program around those opportunities, with spacecraft under construction and money available to improve them after each flight.
SpaceX put Starship into Earth orbit for the first time on September 28, during its fourteenth flight, and deployed Starlink satellites. Several test vehicles had been lost in 2025 as the company developed the system. Its Mars architecture requires other Starships to refill the outbound ship in orbit, adding a demanding operation before the journey begins. SpaceX has transferred propellant between tanks inside a vehicle and still has to demonstrate transfer between separate spacecraft. NASA should use that flight program to advance its own exploration ambitions, supporting Mars experiments as the ship matures.
NASA has studied landing about 20 metric tons of usable cargo at a time for human Mars missions, roughly twenty times the payload delivered by the Curiosity mission. Equipment for people living on the surface requires a different scale of transportation from a robotic rover. Mars’s atmosphere heats an arriving vehicle while providing relatively little drag to slow a heavy load. An uncrewed Starship attempt could return measurements of the heat shield and powered descent even if the landing failed. NASA should support those experiments and the engineering that follows them, accepting the risk of losing an early ship while learning how to bring later ones down.
The presidents
Richard Nixon put Mars in America’s longer-range plans on March 7, 1970, saying we would “eventually send men to explore the planet Mars.” Apollo 11 had landed less than eight months earlier. Kennedy had announced the lunar goal in 1961, Johnson had continued the undertaking, and Nixon was president when the crew completed it. NASA’s budget had already begun declining before the landing, and Nixon proposed further reductions as he described the agency’s future. Nixon rejected rigid planning by the decade and favored a flexible program responsive to changing needs. His Mars ambition arrived without the fixed timetable Washington had pursued for the Moon.
George H. W. Bush announced his Space Exploration Initiative on Apollo 11’s twentieth anniversary in 1989. He proposed a permanent return to the Moon followed by human exploration of Mars, before adding his 2019 target the next year. NASA’s study put the long-term cost of the combined exploration program at roughly $500 billion. The estimate met opposition in the White House and Congress, and NASA repeatedly failed to obtain congressional support for its approach.
George W. Bush proposed returning Americans to the Moon by 2020 in his January 2004 space policy, with lunar exploration preparing the way for Mars. NASA developed Constellation to carry out the return. By 2009, the Augustine committee found that milestones were slipping and the program needed substantially more funding. Obama proposed canceling Constellation in 2010, then announced his own progression toward Mars at Kennedy Space Center that April. He put a crewed Mars orbit mission in the mid-2030s, with a landing afterward, adding, “And I expect to be around to see it.” That target remains in the future, sixteen years after the speech.
Congress retained Orion when it confirmed Constellation’s cancellation in 2010. This April, Orion carried three Americans and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen around the Moon and returned them to Earth, ending the nine-day Artemis II mission with an April 10 splashdown. The spacecraft reached crewed flight through years of development and changes in the larger national program. NASA should give the teams building those capabilities Mars work they can carry through the next changes in Washington, extending the country’s ability to operate with people beyond Earth orbit.
Going this year
Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission, MMX, is scheduled to launch from Tanegashima on an H3 rocket on October 20. It aims to reach the Mars system in 2027, investigate Phobos and Deimos, and return samples from Phobos to Earth after a round trip of roughly five years. The spacecraft carries the French-German Idefix rover, which will examine the surface ahead of the main spacecraft’s sampling operations. NASA and ESA also participate in the Japanese-led mission. Japan has built a spacecraft for the journey and assembled international partners around work that’s approaching launch.
Idefix will explore a moon whose origin remains unsettled. Phobos and Deimos may have formed from debris produced by an impact on Mars, or Mars may have captured them as asteroids. MMX’s observations and samples could help distinguish those histories, giving scientists material to examine with instruments on Earth. JAXA also intends to develop technology for round trips between Earth and the Mars system. The mission will establish experience that later spacecraft can build on, while opening another part of our neighboring planet’s history to laboratory research.
NASA’s ESCAPADE spacecraft, Blue and Gold, launched on Blue Origin’s New Glenn last November. Rocket Lab built them for the UC Berkeley-led mission, which has followed a looping route near Earth while awaiting its Mars departure. A planned Earth gravity assist in November will send them toward arrival in September 2027. The pair will study how the solar wind interacts with Mars’s magnetic environment and drives atmospheric loss. NASA has brought American launch and spacecraft companies into a science mission beyond Earth, using an earlier launch to prepare for this year’s opportunity.
Building the route
NASA’s lunar-lander contract with SpaceX already supports work on orbital refilling, which the company also needs for Mars. Returning to the Moon will help pay for capabilities that make the longer journey possible. Mars entry and landing need their own experiments, because the Moon has no atmosphere to provide that test.
There’s also the possibility that using the moon as a launching pad to Mars could offset the key fuel-weight concern that launching from down the gravity well on Earth creates. Essentially, a pit stop at a lunar colony means more stuff can get launched more efficiently towards Mars rather than most of the weight of a vehicle being taken up by fuel. While the current plan is ship-to-ship orbital refueling, having a future waypoint on the trip to Mars or to the outer solar system is not as science fiction as it sounds. Not only is a lunar base a great proof of concept, it’s also a meaningfully useful part of the future Earth-to-Mars highway and beyond.
China’s space agency plans to launch Tianwen-3 around 2028 on two Long March 5 rockets and return samples from the Martian surface around 2031 if the mission succeeds. Collecting material and launching it off Mars would give Chinese engineers experience in a demanding part of any future expedition. Beijing is preparing a robotic mission with work to complete over the next few years. America should intend to lead in the larger transportation systems that human exploration will require, drawing on the companies already developing them here. Our industrial advantage should grow as those firms take on more ambitious missions.
Losing the red planet to red China is an unacceptable future.
NASA’s human-Mars studies have examined delivering cargo before sending a crew, including equipment needed to live on the surface and return from it. Heavy uncrewed landing attempts would begin proving the transportation for those deliveries. We don’t have to settle a date for the first astronaut to start developing it. Engineers can test the ship and revise its design while other teams advance the equipment for the expedition. Congress should sustain that work between departure opportunities, so flight results reach people still employed to build the next vehicles.
The 2028 presidential election will fall near the next favorable Mars departure opportunity. Washington should approach that period with an American program preparing hardware for flight, backed by work that will continue into the following administration.
SpaceX has already built the ships it’s using to develop a much greater ability to move cargo beyond Earth. NASA has brought a crew home from the Moon, and American manufacturers have supplied spacecraft now preparing to leave for Mars. We are not waiting for the discovery of some new material or a new set of scientific principles. It’s really just a question of proving the tech we have right now is reliable and then making the right planning decisions.
Over the coming decade, we should turn that work into transportation capable of landing large cargoes there, with later flights using what the first attempts reveal. Given the pace of private sector innovation, and the threat of the communists beating America in this next race, there is no reason that this should continue to linger on the back burner.
Though we are missing the 2026 window, there is no reason that we need to wait another full generation before an American flag and American boots are planted on Mars.