Mars Future Explorations Have Uncertainties

By: Mary Couchman
Staff Writer
Published: Jul 22, 2008

Future explorations on Mars have doubts due to economic budget cuts and political pressure.

NASA's Phoenix lander has capped a decade of robotic technologies and discoveries by uncovering chips of ice on the barren surface of the Red Planet's north pole. The find proves the existence of water, a key ingredient of life.

"It's such a thrill to find ice under our lander," said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, chief scientist of the Phoenix mission.

However, economic and political uncertainties are casting doubts on the future of exploration as budgets are cut, priorities are questioned and the unknowns about the next president.

Barack Obama has called for debate on NASA's goals, and his opponent, John McCain, who says he supports manned missions to Mars, has called for a freeze on federal spending.

"In the first year of an Obama or McCain administration, there will be some hard decisions to make regarding NASA," says Eligar Sadeh of the Air Force Academy's Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies.

Mars has been a goal of space exploration for the United States since the days of controversial rocket expert Wernher von Braun, the leader of the team that developed the V-2 ballistic missile for the Nazis during World War II.

"Mars is the planet, although it's very different, that is most Earth-like in our solar system," says A. Thomas Young, a retired Lockheed Martin manager and vice chair of the National Research Council's Space Studies Board. "Phoenix is just the latest example. And Mars is one of those things that has really captured the imagination of the public."

When the Mars Pathfinder rover landed on Mars on July 4, 1997, the space agency has spent about 5 billion on exploring the Red Planet. The goal has always been to look for signs that water either exists or existed, which would clearly indicate the possibility of life, even if it's just microscopic.

President Bush outlined his "Vision for Space Exploration" in 2004, a strategy for finishing the International Space Station and retiring the space shuttle by 2010. A new spacecraft would land people on the moon by 2020. "With the experience and knowledge gained on the moon, we will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond," Bush said.

However, the extra money to support the plan and NASA's science goals hasn't come through in an era of budget deficits and a costly war in Iraq.