LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Venus has clouds of sulphuric acid. Mercury has extremes of hot and cold. And then there's Mars. The red planet isn't exactly cozy, but it's a plausible place to go, though it will be difficult. And it's having a moment. Mars got a shout out in President Trump's inaugural address.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.
FADEL: President Trump is, of course, closely allied with would-be Mars colonizer Elon Musk. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on what all this might mean.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: President Trump is hardly the first president to talk about...
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GEORGE H W BUSH: A journey to another planet, a manned mission to Mars.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's the first President Bush in 1989, saying NASA should return astronauts to the moon and then proceed onward. Similar goals were set by President George W. Bush 15 years later.
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GEORGE W BUSH: Human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: President Obama directed NASA to forego the moon, but he did like Mars.
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BARACK OBAMA: By the mid 2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And landing on Mars will follow.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: During President Trump's first term in office, he issued Space Policy Directive 1. It refocused NASA on a moon landing with Mars missions to follow later. And President Biden continued this program, which is called Artemis. Artemis relies on a super expensive rocket that rarely flies. There's been lots of delays and lots of speculation about its future. Casey Dreier is chief of space policy with The Planetary Society. He says this administration could try to kill Artemis.
CASEY DREIER: Whether that will happen, I'm less confident. There's a lot of good reasons to still go to the moon.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And since the Artemis program really got its start under President Trump, he thinks it would be strange for this second administration to end it.
NASA says a capsule full of astronauts will orbit the moon next year. Landing on the moon is targeted for the year after that. But Dreier says, there's no clear path from this effort to Mars.
DREIER: We say we have a moon to Mars program now, but there's no to Mars part of it. It's all to moon.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Enter Elon Musk, who's busy shaking up government agencies on President Trump's behalf. Musk has long held that if humans just stay on Earth, we risk extinction. Here's one speech from nearly a decade ago.
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ELON MUSK: Eventually, history suggests there will be some doomsday event. Well, the alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi planet species.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Colonizing Mars is why he created SpaceX, the rocket company. In addition to ferrying astronauts to orbit for NASA, SpaceX is building a giant rocket and a vehicle called Starship that's designed to land on the red planet.
Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society.
ROBERT ZUBRIN: This is quite a singular moment for the prospects of getting to Mars.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He's spent decades waiting for a Mars mission and views this as a moment of real opportunity, but also peril.
ZUBRIN: I think it actually is pretty clear right now that we're going to get a humans-to-Mars program started.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The thing is, he says any such program to succeed would need broad bipartisan political support, and he worries that Musk has become a polarizing figure.
ZUBRIN: This is not going to work if this is understood to be a Elon Musk hobby horse.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Going to Mars is much harder than going to the moon. Just traveling to Mars takes months.
ZUBRIN: I do not believe there is any chance whatsoever of the Trump administration being able to land humans on Mars in the next four years.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Zubrin does think it's possible that SpaceX might land a starship there. Though so far, in test flights, the rocket has yet to reach orbit. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
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