After US President Donald Trump expressed his desire to finally put a man (or woman) on Mars, following decades of efforts in this direction, the scientific community is divided over the feasibility of turning his vision into a reality in the near future.
Specifically, Trump has recently expressed a desire to land the first humans on the red planet through the White House’s new spending proposal that would allocate around $1 billion in 2026 to Mars plans, including new spacesuits and an astronaut landing system, per the Nature report on June 4.
This envisions accelerating NASA’s previous timeline that didn’t foresee it happening before the 2040s due to both technological and budget constraints – despite the space organization’s best intentions. Now, according to the new NASA budget plan, “these investments will provide the technologies necessary for future Mars exploration and eventual crewed missions to Mars.”
Debate among scientists
That said, scientists’ opinions on its feasibility in a shorter time frame vary. For instance, John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and former NASA astronaut who led the agency’s science programs between 2012 and 2016, isn’t optimistic. As he opined:
“Right now, with the budgets that are proposed, we can’t afford to send people to Mars.”
Meanwhile, Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist with the Outer Space Institute, based in Ottawa, Canada, is excited at the prospect of landing people on the red planet, arguing that astronauts could obtain quicker and better insight than robotic spacecraft into whether Mars has ever hosted extraterrestrial life:
“If we definitely want to answer the question of whether Mars had or has life today, I think we have to send humans.”
However, there are considerations that even those in favor of the new plan are warning about, such as the extreme isolation, higher doses of deadly space radiation than on the Moon or space stations, frigid and toxic environment with almost no air to breathe, and other that the astronauts would face, but some have suggested possible solutions.
These include living inside an underground lava tube created by volcanic activity, which would protect against radiation and dust storms in a hostile, hazardous environment. At a conference on human space exploration, Erik Antonsen, a researcher in space physiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said:
“I want to disabuse people of the assumptions that they have that humans are going to be fine.”
As it happens, one of the health-specific obstacles to the long-coveted dream of sending humans to Mars is a mysterious illness causing significant and potentially dangerous changes to astronauts’ eyesight, called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS).
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