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Trump put Mars missions in the spotlight in his January inauguration speech. Experts don’t believe a flag-planting will be possible until well beyond Trump’s second mandate.
ADVERTISEMENTDuring US President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on January 20, he declared that getting to Mars would be America’s next frontier in space.”We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” he said to applause and a thumbs up from billionaire backer and founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk. That goal has raised many questions from experts, not least since humanity has yet to return to the Moon after delays in NASA’s Artemis II and III missions. So, how likely is it that humans will be able to plant any flag, much less the American one, on the Red Planet by the end of Trump’s term in 2029?What still needs to be developed for a Mars mission?Mars is an average of 225 million km away from Earth, the furthest humans will have travelled in space by the time we reach it. NASA has already landed robots on Mars, but only 12 out of 19 landings have been successful. Human missions, the agency continued, “introduce new challenges that must be addressed”.The planet’s thin atmosphere is filled with dust and consists of roughly 95 per cent carbon dioxide. Any craft that wants to descend on the planet has to be protected from overheating, which NASA said will likely need new advancements in navigation technology. On the planet itself, astronauts could encounter “weeks or months” of dust storms, reduced solar energy needed to power their devices, and tough winds, according to a 2024 NASA white paper. If anything happens to the crew’s equipment, Mars is so far away that limited repair options are available. For a successful mission, NASA said it still needs to build advanced propulsion systems with nuclear power, inflatable landing gear, space suits, labs, satellites, and surface power systems that can sustain the extreme temperature and pressure changes of the Red Planet. Euronews Next contacted NASA for an update on the development of these technologies but did not receive a reply. When the eventual mission does happen, the spacecraft that brings humans there will travel at least 1.6 billion km on its odometer, more than a thousand times the distance of the first Artemis I mission to the Moon, according to NASA estimates. NASA said it will take astronauts approximately six months to reach Mars and roughly two years to execute the mission from start to finish.Shooting for the Moon before MarsMany technologies NASA wants to bring to Mars will be tested on the Moon, according to Hermann Ludwig Moeller, director of the European Space Policy Institute. NASA has been working on the Artemis II and III missions that would send humans back to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s. ADVERTISEMENTAccording to NASA, the Artemis astronauts will land on the Moon’s south pole and spend about a week there conducting research. Their eventual goal will be to set up a consistent presence on the Moon. Following delays, Artemis II could launch as early as 2026, with Artemis II scheduled for mid-2027 due to engineering issues with Boeing’s Orion spacecraft. NASA has created a Moon to Mars Architecture, a series of policy documents and positions exploring how the two missions are interconnected. Landing spacecraft on the Moon, for example, will provide “valuable insight” ahead of the Mars landing.Moeller said that China, Europe, or India could win the renewed race to the Moon if the Trump administration works towards Mars while bypassing our satellite entirely. ADVERTISEMENT”If you cannot ensure Mars in a similar timeframe, somebody else would be reaching the Moon,” Moeller said. “I think it would be almost a Sputnik moment if China was on the Moon before the US returns”. The Elon EffectWhile Trump has yet to release his plans for the Mars mission, Moeller said that the president’s ambitions will most likely involve Musk. The billionaire footed $277 million (€266.4 million) in donations to Trump’s reelection campaign, and has since become one of the president’s closest advisors and the head of an unofficial government agency, DOGE. SpaceX is also one of NASA’s contractors, having already been chosen to build the human landing system that will bring the Artemis III astronauts to and from the Moon’s surface. ADVERTISEMENTOne of Musk’s main objectives through SpaceX is to make life “interplanetary,” by establishing the first humancolony on Mars. “If you’re the richest man in the world, what really can you have more than [the Mars mission?],” Moeller said. “[A Mars mission is] not just a matter of will and engagement and push and finance, it’s complex”.SpaceX plans to use the Starship mega rocket, a 123-metre-high launcher with a payload capacity of 150 metric tonnes when fully operational, to get people to Mars. The spacecraft took its seventh test in January, when it exploded minutes after its launch from a Texas facility due to a propellant leak. ADVERTISEMENTMusk has said that SpaceX will launch the vehicle on uncrewed missions to Mars in 2026 and, if successful, send astronauts there by 2028. Last May, a group of German researchers found “significant technological gaps” in Musk’s 2028 ambitions. “With the limited information published by SpaceX about its system and mission scenario … we were not able to find a feasible Mars mission scenario using Starship, even when assuming optimal conditions such as 100 per cent recovery rate of crew consumables during flight,” the analysis concludes.
