NASA: Nobody's getting to Mars without our help

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

During a session with the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology on Thursday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that he expected the agency will not only be the first to land a person on Mars, but that no other organization could do so without their help.

When asked about the possibilities of SpaceX, Mars One, or another entity beating NASA to the punch, Bolden bluntly responded that “no commercial company” would be able to make it to the Red Planet “without the support of NASA” and the US government, according to reports.

Reliance on third parties would compromise the mission

NASA is currently on pace to send its first manned mission to Mars in 2030, while Forbes noted that SpaceX has announced that it is hoping to land a human there as early as the mid-2020s, and Tech Times pointed out that the Mars One project intends to have a colony set up by 2027.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated last June that he was “hopeful” that people would take their first step on Mars in 10 to 12 years, and that it was essential to create “a self-sustaining city” there. It is a goal shared by Bas Landsorp, who founded Mars One in 2012 with the goal of setting up the first permanent human colony, though some have called those plans unfeasible.

In his comments, Bolden unequivocally stated that neither project would be successful without the support and resources of the space agency and the federal government. Furthermore, he said that relying on a third party would delay the mission’s progress, The Guardian added.

Ultimate focus is journey to Mars

During the meeting, the NASA administrator also answered questions about projects such as NASA’s climate-related research, the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, plans to send a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the Asteroid Relocation Mission (ARM) – all of which will play a role in the ultimate goal of sending a manned mission to the Red Planet.

“Our ultimate focus is the journey to Mars and everything comes back to that,” Bolden told lawmakers. “We need to understand Mars and what happened to it to understand what might happen to Earth,” citing the notion that the planet may have once been home to a large ocean of liquid water, and could have even been habitable in the past before losing its atmosphere.

He told representatives that the agency’s work in recent years has been about developing the technology that will be needed to allow humans to make a round-trip journey to Mars, and that ARM (which involves taking a piece of an asteroid and place it in orbit around the moon) will serve as a proving ground for some of the advances that will play key roles in the voyage.

The administrator also pointed out that NASA wasn’t investing so much time and money in the trip to Mars out of mere curiosity. He emphasized that humanity has a need to “get away from being Earth-reliant” and become “Earth-independent,” Forbes added, and since Mars is “the planet that is most like Earth,” it will be able to “sustain life when humans get there.”

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