Is Trump’s NASA To Design Sanctuaries To Colonize Mars That May Never Get Used?

Robin Wordsworth is a professor of planetary sciences at Harvard University. He has been writing about Martian geography and climate, and how the planet could be made habitable for humans. He describes a plan to restore Mars to the way it was during the Noachian and early Hesperian periods, more than 3 billion Earth-years ago, when the atmosphere was thicker and the planet could support rivers, lakes and oceans.

Wordsworth has modelled early Mars as well as studied the current state of the planet, noting that increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and other greenhouse gases, a greenhouse effect could be renewed.

Such a project would require considerable geoengineering sleight of hand. One way this could be accomplished would involve placing highly reflective satellites in orbit to target sunlight on Mars’ polar ice caps. The Martian ice caps contain frozen CO2 and water. Gasification of the CO2 would increase atmospheric density and air pressure and create the beginnings of a greenhouse effect. The initial warming would help to melt water elsewhere on Mars, just beneath the surface. This would add water vapour, a potent greenhouse gas,  to the atmosphere and stimulate a Martian water cycle.

Wordsworth describes the habitability project as possible first in the equatorial regions of the planet. He notes that Martian soil could be remediated by removing perchlorate using bioengineered bacteria, which would thrive in the CO2 atmosphere. Perchlorate has been detected in Martian soils since the first Viking landers in 1976. Get the perchlorate out, and plants can begin to grow in Martian soils. We are already demonstrating that feasibility here on Earth in experiments that simulate Martian conditions. As plants do their thing in the soil of the Red Planet, they will expel oxygen and further alter the Martian atmosphere. These first plants would grow in sealed domes, greenhouse oases, that might eventually be future homes for humans and other Earth life colonists. How long would this Martian makeover take? Wordsworth estimates no more than two Earth centuries.

It sounds like science fiction. Could it become a reality? Wordsworth has his backers in people like SpaceX’s Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and the soon-to-be confirmed new head of NASA, Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut who has funded and flown two missions into near-Earth orbit. If it were to happen, however, reliably getting to and from Mars, delivering sufficient payloads of materials and robots would be essential.

In the heady days after Trump was elected to his second term, SpaceX and some at NASA started talking about optimal launch to Mars in 2026 and 2028. SpaceX announced ambitions to send several Starships to the Red Planet and begin using Martian local resources (in-situ resource utilization or ISRU) to prepare the planet for its first human colonists by 2030.

Based on the latest Starship launch failure this week, it is increasingly difficult to believe that these plans are no more than a pipe dream. SpaceX has yet to prove the Starship technology can fly to orbit and do it repeatedly. The first booster reuse failed, and the Starship that would be the vehicle to go to and from Mars also blew up shortly after reaching low-Earth orbit. Nobody is going to Mars, let alone the Moon, on SpaceX technology based on the company’s present performance.

Trump has talked about American astronauts on Mars by the early 2030s. He has waxed about the 2030s as being the pivotal decade for space ambitions rivalling those in the 1960s, with the race to the Moon. The current trajectory of American technology for humans going to Mars, however, is far from perfected. The Starship failure has put even the lesser ambition of the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon in 2027 in jeopardy, because the first Human Landing System (HLS) to take crews to the surface is based on Starship, so far, an unreliable choice.

Meanwhile, NASA continues to work on assembling the Space Launch System (SLS), the successor rocket to the Saturn V, and the Orion capsule, the successor to Apollo, with the Artemis II circumlunar mission scheduled for sometime in 2026. That mission doesn’t land on the Moon, so the lack of the HLS is not an issue. The HLS, however, will need to be a proven landing platform before the 2027 planned Artemis III landing on the Moon. If not, NASA will have to consider contingency plans, possibly using Blue Origin’s lander under development, or move the mission date to later in the decade.

In any case, NASA hanging its hat on SpaceX technology is making flying to Mars a pipe dream for now. The Wordsworth terraforming cannot begin without a proper means of reliable transit between the two planets.  Getting to Mars with SpaceX won’t happen without dramatic improvements to the latter’s technology, and we are halfway through this decade, which means the timelines are starting to look very iffy.

I don’t know why NASA isn’t fast-tracking nuclear rocket propulsion instead. To me, the chemical rocket route has too many challenges when talking about missions to and from Mars. Several nuclear options can be developed that would be better than relying on the chemical rockets that began the Space Age. Nuclear rockets would also make it to Mars much faster, cutting down transit time between the two worlds by more than half.

That’s why people on Mars by 2030 and an established American presence on the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s based on SpaceX technology and NASA systems like the SLS and Orion are no more than a Trump-Musk fantasy.