Back in 1969, Robert Zubrin remembers watching the first moon landing when he was a teenager. He says if someone back then had asked him to predict when astronauts would walk on Mars, "my guess would have been the early 1980's."
"And, in fact, NASA had plans to do that at that time, which were aborted by the Nixon administration," says Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who is president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars.
Over the decades, as administrations have come and gone, presidents have repeatedly promised future missions to Mars, holding this up as a key goal for human space exploration.
Never before, though, has a president had such a close relationship with a would-be Mars colonizer, one who has transformed the world of rocketry.
Elon Musk, President Trump's ally who is shaking up government agencies, founded the company SpaceX with the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species. In addition to ferrying astronauts to orbit for NASA, this company is currently building and test flying a new space vehicle, Starship, that's designed to transport massive amounts of cargo—including people—and land on Mars.
"This is quite a singular moment for the prospects of getting to Mars," says Zubrin, who sees this as a time filled with both opportunity and peril.
"I think it actually is pretty clear right now that we're going to get a humans-to-Mars program started," he says.
But to succeed, any such plan would need broad political support, and he worries about Mars suddenly becoming a divisive, partisan issue.
"This is not going to work," says Zubrin, "if this is understood to be an Elon Musk hobbyhorse."
The presidents and Mars
In his inaugural address in January, President Trump got the attention of the space community when he said the United States would "pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars."
In some ways, a president inspirationally referring to Mars is nothing new.
Back in 1989, for example, President George H. W. Bush called for a return to the moon, to be followed by "a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet: a manned mission to Mars." He envisioned footprints in the Martian dirt by 2019, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
"Within a few short years after President Bush's Kennedy-esque announcement, however, the initiative had faded into history," one policy analyst wrote.
A decade and a half later, President George W. Bush refocused NASA on a return to the moon by 2020, adding that "with the experience and knowledge gained on the moon, we will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond."
President Obama told NASA to forgo the moon, but did maintain Mars as a goal: "By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth," he said in a speech at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "And a landing on Mars will follow."
First, the moon?
During President Trump's first administration, he issued a space policy directive that refocused NASA on a human moon landing, with missions to Mars added as a future goal.
That program, called Artemis, is what NASA has pursued ever since. It continued under President Biden, although it's been criticized as relying on a super-expensive rocket that rarely flies.
Despite delays and cost overruns, NASA says it is poised to send humans to orbit the moon next year. A landing is planned for the year after that.
Trump's reference to Mars, but not the moon, in his inaugural speech had some in the space community wondering if this was a result of Musk's influence.
The new Trump administration could kill Artemis and its lunar plans, but Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, says that would be "strange in the historical sweep of things" given that the first Trump administration basically created this program
"There's a lot of good reasons to still go to the moon, one of which is that the U.S. has made a commitment to not just its allies, but to the broader commercial space and business community here in the country," notes Dreier.
Still, he thinks that the current administration might challenge NASA to really nail down how the space agency will move from lunar exploration to a Mars mission.
More difficult than the moon
NASA has a "Moon to Mars Program Office," notes Dreier. He thinks, however, "there's no 'to Mars' part of it. It's all 'to moon.' "
He says NASA has constrained budgets, and there's always been concerns that the agency hasn't had enough resources to pursue both the moon and Mars.
"It's hard to express verbally, I think, how much harder Mars is than the moon and how different it is," says Dreier.
A trip to the moon takes just three days. Going to Mars, in contrast, takes months—one way.
Recently, a NASA program aimed at retrieving pristine rocks from the surface of Mars and bringing them back to Earth ran into real trouble, as costs ballooned by billions and the mission timeline slipped. One decision the Trump administration will have to make is whether, and how, to pursue this science mission.
Dreier says in terms of human exploration, NASA needs to lay out how its lunar activities will actually help get the agency closer to going to Mars.
"That is the key reframing that could help the long-term exploration program be more efficient and effective," he says.
President Trump's pick to lead NASA is Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut who flew to orbit twice in SpaceX vehicles and completed the first commercial extravehicular activity, or spacewalk. He has yet to be confirmed.
A NASA spokesperson told NPR in an email that the agency is "looking forward to hearing more about the Trump Administration's plans for our agency and expanding exploration for the benefit of all, including sending American astronauts on the first human mission to the Red Planet."
A non-partisan planet
Because of the way the planets align, potential launch windows to Mars open up in 2026 and 2028.
Musk has publicly stated that he's aiming to send Starship to Mars as soon as next year.
Starship has yet to reach orbit, but Zubrin thinks it's possible that an uncrewed Starship might land on Mars by 2028.
He thinks NASA should take advantage of this and fill the ship with science equipment that would both lay the ground for future human missions as well as making it clear that the goal of going to Mars is science, not the Martian cities envisioned by Musk.
"We need to have bipartisan support. This cannot be viewed as a Trump program or a Musk program. It has to be America's program," says Zubrin, who fears that a close association with Musk, a polarizing figure, could draw political opposition in Congress and beyond.
So far, says Dreier, the dream of going to Mars has always been non-partisan. He also has real worries that this could change.
"Something as unmoored in ideology as Mars exploration could easily become partisan, if one party starts to embrace it and tie it to this whole other constellation of beliefs," says Dreier. "And that would be a tragedy, because something like going to Mars should be the unifying thing that we can do."
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