Later, Mars: NASA's Future with the Red Planet

In 2010, President Obama said that going to Mars was a more important goal than returning to the Moon. He wanted astronauts on the red planet by the mid 2030s. But when NASA released its 2013 budget, that all changed. The planetary science department took a substantial hit, leaving the future of Martian exploration looking bleak.

In 2012, the National Research Council's Committee on Planetary Science published its decadal survey, a list of goals for the next ten years of robotic space exploration. The goals for Mars between 2013 and 2022 were audacious, with a launch every two years culminating in a sample return mission. Like Russia's ill-fated Phobos Grunt, NASA was planning to scoop up and return a number of small samples for scientists to analyze on Earth.

But this dream has been archived. The 2013 budget brings a 21 percent cut to the planetary science budget, and the lofty goals for Mars have been downsized to say the least.

The most drastic cut, and perhaps the biggest loss, is NASA's pulling out of the ExoMars mission. Developed in partnership with the European Space Agency, the mission played a central part in NASA’s long term goals on Mars. In 2014, NASA was to put a probe in Martian orbit that would measure the escape rate of the planet's atmosphere. In 2016, NASA was planning to launch another orbiter and an ESA-built lander. In 2018, NASA would send another lander to Mars. This was the mission that would collect and store interesting samples that a later mission would recover and return to Earth.

Since canceling its participation in the mission, NASA has left the ESA in a bad position: it has the pieces but can't complete the puzzle alone. Unfortunately, the ESA needed NASA's expertise where Mars is concerned. Landing on Mars seems to be an American talent; NASA has only lost six of its 20 missions to Mars while Russia (and its former iteration as the Soviet Union) has had virtually no success on Mars. For example, Russia’s Mars 6 lander reached the surface in 1973 but died after just 224 seconds. But without NASA, the ESA is left asking Russia and China to share the burden of the mission to Mars.

NASA, meanwhile, is left hoping funding for a 2018 mission to the red planet will go through. It's a year where Mars and Earth are at the closest points in their orbits, which means an opportunity for a short and fuel-efficient transit that comes about once every 15 years. But any 2018 mission will be greatly scaled down from what Martian scientists want. If we're lucky, it might go into orbit. It's likely NASA will set aside a mere $700 million for the mission. For perspective, the Mars Science Laboratory mission that is en route to the red planet with the rover Curiosity as payload has cost about $2.5 billion to date.

While the casual observer might be sad to see some daring Martian missions cut from the roster, scientists who have spent their lives studying the planet are livid. Stunned and depressed is how Stanford University professor Scott Hubbard described the general reaction. Phil Christensen from Arizona State University likens the cut to NASA's Mars program to abandoning the Apollo program after Apollo 10. Why put all the time and energy into studying a place and researching its properties if you're not going to go?

Beyond questions about whether NASA is pulling the plug on Mars when we're getting a step closer to unraveling its mystery, the hit to the agency's planetary program brings up a host of larger questions. Could pulling out of an international mission damage NASA's and the country's standing as a trustworthy partner? Is this the beginning of NASA stepping down as a technological power, and could a shift from NASA to, say, the Chinese space agency in technological dominance have consequences for the country's international standing?

It is, unfortunately, one of those "wait and see" things.