As successful as many of the robotic missions to Mars have
been in the past forty years, most space experts believe that in order to
completely understand the Red Planet, eventually human explorers must follow.
Robots can perform only the tasks they are programmed to do. An imperfect
solution is using teleoperation, which is when an Earth-bound human commands a
robot on Mars, such as Opportunity and Spirit, to do a
task. As much as 20 minutes must pass between a command beamed from Earth to
the command being executed on Mars, eating up time and limiting the tasks that
can be performed.
A human can accomplish in a day or so what a robot can do
during the entire life of its mission. Traveling across miles of unknown
terrain, he can observe all sorts of intuitive clues, as his eye can see the
equivalent of millions of high-resolution images, picking up details easily
missed by any robot's camera. With delicate pick-and-spade work, he can collect
samples of rocks and other materials and take them to a lab to examine them
more closely, reacting immediately to unexpected results. No robot can do all
of that with the skill and speed of a human being.
For nearly sixty years, since Wernher von Braun proposed
sending a fleet of ships with seventy astronauts to Mars in his 1946 study Marsprojekt, there have been dozens of human Mars
expedition proposals, American, Russian, and private. By the 1960s, NASA had
settled on a space craft concept using the NERVA nuclear thermal rocket which
had been tested successfully on a static test stand. The Soviets had a number
of concepts using a nuclear electric engine in a space craft to be launched by
their super heavy lift rocket, the N1. A Mars expedition was seriously proposed
for NASA as a part of a post Apollo space program in 1969. The first Mars
expedition would have taken place some time in the 1980s. Budget politics of
the time foreclosed any consideration of a humans to Mars program for the
foreseeable future and the idea was soon shelved. With their N1 rocket proving
to be unworkable, the Soviets soon followed suit.
Proposals for Mars
expeditions appeared in reports issued by the National Commission on Space and
the Ride Commission in the 1980s. President George H. W. Bush proposed a human
expedition to Mars in 1989 as part of his Space Exploration Initiative.
However, as in 1989, budget politics and the huge cost of sending people to
Mars foreclosed the idea. President Clinton, upon winning election to the
Presidency, cancelled the Space Exploration Initiative.