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Mars: Are We Losing the Vision?

An Opinion by Louis Friedman

Executive Director of The Planetary Society

8 August 2005

Click to enlarge > Louis D. Friedman

Mars is a busy place right now: Global Surveyor, Odyssey and Mars Express are orbiting the planet, and Spirit and Opportunity are traversing it. This year the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will join that fleet and, in 2007, the Phoenix lander will be launched. In the works for 2009 are the U.S. Mars Surface Laboratory rover and the Russian Phobos sample return, and Europe has just moved closer to initiating a ExoMars lander. One can hardly complain that Mars is not getting enough attention from us earthlings.

Still, I am complaining.

In one of his first re-programming actions, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin deleted more than $two billion for Mars mission preparations from the Exploration program – the NASA program to implement the Vision for Space Exploration policy which calls for sending humans to the Moon and Mars. These funds were being used to develop a post-2011 Mars sample return mission, and to initiate Mars mission planning for the human exploration program. In addition, NASA is about to announce the cancellation of the 2009 Mars Telecommunication Orbiter (MTO).

Both cancelled programs were intended as links between the ongoing robotic exploration of Mars and a future human landing. The Mars sample return work was funded by NASA’s Exploration Office as a precursor to human flights, and the MTO was to be the first element of infrastructure for Mars base development. Eliminating the Exploration Funding for Mars, and canceling MTO, effectively removes Mars mission planning from the human exploration program.

The reason in both cases is the same: NASA needs the money for its nearer term objectives in the human spaceflight program.

Let me assert that I am very supportive of Griffin and the moves he is making to implement the new exploration policy for human spaceflight. His efforts to accelerate development of the new Crew Exploration Vehicle and move the U.S. past the old shuttle/space station focus are right on the mark. And, if oxen, such as Mars sample return, must get gored to enable the transition to the new human exploration program then so be it. We can always go back to the farm and buy a new ox.

I am not so concerned about my ox as I am about eating our seed corn. The deletion of Mars funding in the exploration program (after it was added only one year ago specifically for the new Vision for Space Exploration), and the cancellation of the first element of a Mars communication infrastructure signify that when the going gets tough (as it always does) the robotic connection with the human program will suffer. This is a bad sign for human space exploration. If the trend continues, human spaceflight will slowly, steadily be ratcheted back to a program without a goal, without exploration, without a destination, with tasks that are worth neither the cost nor the risk of human spaceflight. Then, when the next accident occurs, or the costs overtake the funding, the same argument about human spaceflight will start all over again.

Planning for a Mars sample return mission has started, and then stopped, several times since Viking landed on Mars in 1976. Each time the planning stopped in the second or third year, when financial implications ran into financial expectations. (I led one of those planning efforts at JPL around 1978 when Mike Griffin was working on it, too). It is clear by now that Mars sample return will NEVER happen without a connection to the human program. Such a mission will be expensive, and science goals alone will not support it. Humans want to see humans in space; that is the basis of the popular support for an ambitious space program. Even our wonderful robotic Mars program is a dead-end without the human connection.

By canceling the work on future human exploration of Mars in favor of more immediate goals, NASA is not merely putting first things first. That may be what Mr. Griffin intends, but we have been this way before and repeatedly seen the results. In the 1980s, Sally Ride led a “leadership” study for NASA, and a few years later Thomas O. Paine led a National Commission on Space. Both studies concluded that NASA’s ultimate goal should be the landing of humans on Mars. Dan Goldin instituted a Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS) program that boldly tried to tie the robotic Mars program to the human spaceflight. Experiments to pave the way for human explorers were even approved for robotic missions then being planned. But, at the first sign of budget trouble, HEDS was dropped. The human program was again left without a purpose, and the robotic program was cut back. By cutting the sample return mission and MTO, we are repeating the same mistake once more.

Mr. Griffin’s intentions are good, and there is an urgent need for him do just what he is doing: building the Crew Exploration Vehicle and getting the International Space Station minimally completed so that we can move on. Nevertheless, we are headed for the same old result: A purposeless human program and a dead-ended robotic program.