Jan. 28 marked the 30th anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and its crew of seven. Since then, the United States lost another space shuttle, Columbia, in 2003, and ended the shuttle program altogether in 2011.
It is easy to forget that the shuttle was created as the next logical step toward a manned Mars mission. The shuttle was to fly safely, reliably and economically to a space station, from which a human mission would then depart for the Red Planet.
The end of the space station is also approaching, but still NASA and many of its supporters remain focused on Mars.
This fascination with sending humans to Mars began in the early 1960s. Why have we been trying for so long and making so little progress?
There are two main reasons. First is cost. Estimates for sending humans to Mars range from $100 billion to $1 trillion.
Space enthusiasts pine for the halcyon days of Apollo, when peak funding for NASA reached 4.4 percent of the federal budget. But they fail to note that this would now amount to about $180 billion a year, or almost 10 times NASA’s current budget. And NASA already spends more on space than the rest of the world combined.
The second great reason why no humans are on Mars or headed there anytime soon is the lack of a compelling vision of what they might do when they arrive. The most futuristic visionaries imagine colonies on Mars, but the cost of such an expedition dwarfs the cost of just getting there. When we first put people on the moon, we could find no justification for colonies there, or even for return visits. Mars is vastly more difficult and expensive to reach than the moon, more hostile to human habitation and less useful to humans back on Earth.
Mars exploration can be done better by automated machines controlled from Earth. They can stay longer, roam farther, and do more work than humans at a fraction of the cost and risk.
Yet, there is one argument for a human mission to Mars that blends the romantic vision with a practical payoff. Instead of simply getting to Mars, the United States might well lead an international consortium of public and private entities to collaborate on a Mars mission.
Some cooperation is already underway. The European Space Agency, for example, has delivered an initial module to support NASA’s Mars spacecraft. And several companies are demonstrating how the private sector can develop innovative new technologies to lower the cost of spaceflight.
Drawing the world’s spacefaring nations and aerospace industries into a collaborative enterprise would be a heroic undertaking in its own right — well worth doing no matter when or even if it succeeds.
ALEX ROLAND is an emeritus professor of history at Duke University and a former NASA historian. He wrote this for The Philadelphia Inquirer.