T
hirty years ago, the White House was in the midst
of choosing members of a National Commission on
Space to satisfy a requirement of the fiscal 1985
NASA authorization act. A year earlier, President Ronald
Reagan had said in his State of the Union address that
NASA should build a space station and invite other coun-
tries to join. Congress agreed but it wanted to know where
the space shuttle and this new space station were taking
the U.S. NASA sold the space station as “the next logical
step” in human spaceflight. Congress wanted to know “the
next logical step to where?”
I was privileged to be executive director of the commis-
sion and confess to being astonished that 30 years later we
are still debating that question. Congress asked for a report
that looked out at the next 20 years, but also said the panel
could not make any recommendations about the space shut-
tle or space station. They were “givens” and since they would
consume many of those 20 years, we received permission to
extend our time frame to 50 years—to the year 2035.
Former NASA Administrator Tom Paine was our chair-
man. Paine was a true visionary whose zeal for human explo-
ration of Mars was well known. Thus it was no surprise that
landing humans on Mars was the long-term goal expounded
in the commission’s report. But it was much more than that.
Our 15-member panel included astronauts Neil Armstrong
and Kathy Sullivan (now head of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration), scientists Laurel Wilkening
(our vice chair) and George Field, commercialization guru
Gerry O’Neill and other exceptional individuals with broad
expertise including Luis Alvarez, Chuck Yeager, Jeane Kirk-
patrick and Gen. Bernard Schriever. Paine met with key
members of Congress who agreed we should make bold rec-
ommendations, and bold they were.
Our overarching recommendation was to open the in-
ner solar system for science, exploration and development.
Human spaceflight was a big part of it, with a return to the
Moon by 2005, landing on Mars by 2015 and establishing a
base there by 2035. The key was establishing a permanent
inner-solar-system transportation system: a “Highway to
Space” and a “Bridge Between Worlds.” We wanted to es-
Landing people on Mars
is a goal on which there is
widespread consensus.
The problem is agreeing on
the steps in between.
“
“
Go to Mars
Nonstop
Viewpoint
BY MARCIA SMITH74 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/JANUARY 15-FEBRUARY 1, 2015 AviationWeek.com/awst
NASA CONCEPTtablish infrastructure, as boring as that sounds, to avoid
another dead-end efort like Apollo. Involving international
and commercial partners was essential.
So what happened? The Challenger tragedy occurred
midway through our deliberations and that certainly had
an efect. Our report was formally released in July 1986, six
months after Challenger, when the appetite for bold recom-
mendations about the future of the space program was at a
low point. Commercial space ventures that planned to use
the space shuttle fell by the wayside (although the accident
opened the door to commercial space launch services).
More important than Challenger, however, is that it took
25 years to build the International Space Station instead of
10 and it cost between $60-100 billion (depending on how one
does the math), instead of $8 billion. Whatever the merits of
the program now, it was an impediment to moving beyond.
Many “future-of-space” reports have been written since
ours, including the excellent National Research Council’s
“Pathways report” just last year. But they are just reports.
It is time to take action. NASA is developing interesting
ideas in its “Evolvable Mars Campaign.” It is heartwarm-
ing, in fact, to see so many similarities between what is de-
scribed there and what we recommended—good ideas may
languish for decades, but sooner or later they resurface.
Will NASA’s newest plans languish as well, or are we
finally ready to move out on the next phase of human ex-
ploration? Can we avoid diversions like the Asteroid Redi-
rect Mission? Will Congress sustain the level of funding it
provided for NASA in fiscal 2015—$549 million more than
what President Barack Obama requested? Is that enough
to make real progress? The “Journey to Mars” hype asso-
ciated with the Orion test flight last month seems to have
made clear to the public that NASA has not, in fact, gone
out of business. Yet won’t many people wonder what hap-
pened when several years pass with no more Orion flights?
Landing people on Mars is a goal on which there is wide-
spread consensus. The problem is agreeing on the steps in
between. Perhaps this will be the year that debate ends. If
Congress can continue to find the funds, and if Congress
and the White House can agree on the steps, perhaps the
first humans will land on Mars by the end of the Paine Com-
mission’s time frame: 2035.
Some may think my views are too government-centric.
I wholeheartedly support the private sector charting its
own path to the stars, but rash eforts—by anyone—that
unnecessarily risk lives would prove a setback to efective
human exploration of Mars. It would be extremely unfor-
tunate if the first human trip to Mars was the last because
of public backlash. cA veteran space policy analyst, Smith is the president of the Space
and Technology Policy Group and the founder and editor of the
website SpacePolicyOnline.com.