Earlier this month, NASA announced it was funding a revolutionary high-thrust rocket — called a Pulsed Plasma Rocket — that could make crewed missions to Mars in just two months.
That’s seven months faster than it’d take with current technology, and it would drastically reduce the risk and cost of a crewed Mars mission, according to Howe Industries, which is developing the concept. It “holds the potential to revolutionize space exploration,” NASA said in a statement.
The PPR is just one of the latest developments in the US’s decadeslong discussion to send humans to Mars. In the early ’60s, for example, nuclear-bomb-powered spaceships were proposed for the trip.
Since well before NASA landed the first humans on the moon, the US has poured money and time into proposals for a crewed Mars mission, only to see its attempts never leave the ground. But technology isn’t the only thing standing in the way. Politics also plays a big role.
“That’s kind of like a joke within the space community or the Mars community,” Matthew Shindell, a curator with the National Air and Space Museum, told Business Insider. “Putting humans on Mars is always 20 years away.”
He said it was short enough to seem tangible but long enough that the political situation would change before it could be realized.
To fully understand why the US hasn’t sent humans to Mars despite sending more robots there than any other country, it just takes a trip down memory lane. Here’s a history of the US’s most promising crewed Martian missions that never were.
In the ’40s and ’50s, no one really knew what they might find on Mars, but they knew getting there would be tricky. One of the first to seriously tackle the problem was Wernher von Braun.During WWII, von Braun was a member of the Nazi party and created V-2 missiles. After the war, he continued his work on missiles with the US Army as part of Operation Paperclip while also working on a novel called “The Mars Project.” In it, he laid out the first detailed plan to send humans to the Red Planet.
He envisioned a 260-day mission that would launch in 1985 with 10 spaceships and 70 crew members. “He sat down and did the math and created a whole story around it,” Shindell said.In the late ’50s, von Braun consulted on NASA’s very first 10-year plan, which included sending the first probes to Mars. (Sending humans to Mars would come later.) What started as fiction got closer to reality when von Braun started working at NASA a couple of years later.
In the late 1950s, Theodore Taylor, who worked on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, and theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson embarked on an ambitious plan to build a nuclear-explosion-powered spaceship.
Called Project Orion, the resulting ship would take 12 years to develop, cost $100 million per year, and comfortably hold 150 people. Their motto was “Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970.”However, NASA was concerned about what would happen if any of the hundreds of bombs required to fuel the rocket exploded.By 1963, the team was having trouble getting increased funding. That same year, the nuclear test-ban treaty was signed, hampering the team’s ability to test its vehicle.The project was canceled a year later.
