There is a lot of interest in Mars these days for some very sound reasons, and human landings on Mars now seem to be more a matter of 'when' rather than 'if.' This is not a new goal: the first successful flyby of the planet was by Mariner 4 in 1964, and we have had ongoing robotic missions ever since -- including NASA's Opportunity and Curiosity rovers. We have also been advocating human landings on Mars for decades, but politics, budget, and significant technological challenges, among other factors, delayed these ambitions every time.
Circumstances may finally be changing. Over the past several years, support for human missions to Mars has been increasing, not only in the space sector, but also among policymakers. Congress has been notably supportive of NASA's strategy, and that consistent support is needed for this multi-decade effort.
Public interest also appears to be on the increase, based on the number of news stories and social media related to Mars exploration. Consider the remarkable success of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian. It originally became a blockbuster largely by word of mouth. Later this week, the highly anticipated film adaptation will be released. Although a work of fiction, the film will generate a new wave of excitement and debate about whether we will finally land humans on Mars.
And it's not only NASA that has Mars ambitions. Public companies and organizations have been developing concepts for going to Mars. It's uncertain whether any of these efforts will succeed, although their efforts mark a remarkable historic trend of non-government entities extending humanity's reach to another planet.
The overarching challenge is that all destinations beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO) are much harder to reach than LEO. It takes significantly more energy to get to deep space, and once there, humans are in a much more challenging environment. Astronauts need to be autonomous for many months (or years), in contrast to the International Space Station (ISS), which communicates with Earth instantly and receives frequent resupply missions. As a result, a number of technologies need to be matured before we can successfully go to Mars.
NASA has been building a strategy for advancing the necessary capabilities for sending humans to Mars. It has started by stimulating commercial industries to leverage the technologies developed by NASA over the past 50 years to service ISS and elsewhere. At the same time, NASA and our international partners are utilizing the ISS as a near-term proving ground to advance deep-space technologies and to investigate the physiological and psychological challenges to astronauts. Robotic missions like the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers -- as well as our Mars orbiters -- also provide vital information that will help us to select compelling landing sites and to assure that we can keep future Mars astronauts as safe as possible. These robotic science missions must continue throughout the 2020s if we hope to be prepared to send human explorers.
NASA is developing a heavy lift rocket and spacecraft to put humans in deep space, potentially in cis-lunar space (that is, the vicinity of the moon) or to asteroids before we voyage on to Mars. These precursor missions (robotic science and crewed) are critical to achieve a better understanding of environments and challenges -- and to provide compelling missions and interesting results to keep the public excited and engaged over a multi-decade program. Gaining experience in a cis-lunar environment prior to sending a crew on a 2 year mission to Mars will greatly improve the odds of success.
The journey to Mars has the potential of combining exciting science, human interest stories, exploration, technology development -- and to seed core technologies to improve quality of life on earth. As with the Apollo program in the 1960's, it will also increase interest in STEM education and will maintain US prestige as the world's technological leader -- something that can have a dramatic impact on our overall economy and prosperity.
Within a very few years, we expect that the challenges to human travel to Mars will be understood and the technologies will be ready. A new adventure will begin, one that will take its place among the great human explorations of all time. Mars awaits!
Kent Rominger is the Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for Orbital ATK's Propulsion Systems Division. Kent is also a five time Space Shuttle astronaut.