The Mars Rover

By: Nicholas Rose

Two weeks ago, celebratory recognitions for the landing of NASA’s rover, Perseverance,  on the surface of Mars filled social media and news outlets. This was certainly a momentous occasion as Perseverance’s mission of searching for extraplanetary life is groundbreaking. NASA has demonstrated for the third time that it can put a robot on the Red Planet, but when it comes to a human, the future doesn’t look too impressive. 

As an avid follower of everything space-related, I’ve watched NASA slip in their projected deadlines for their Mars schedule. This is an important aspect the media neglects, and one that could hint at present and future problems facing the administration. However, if NASA focuses their attention on increasing government funding through the boosting of national interest, they have the potential to reverse this unfortunate pattern and get back on track. 

In 2010, NASA announced its goals for the next thirty years; they aimed to have humans on an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by the 2030s. A mission called Artemis would begin launching in 2019 to return astronauts to the moon and experiment on possible technologies for the future. It sounded reasonable at the time, but here we are, more than ten years since their announcement, and not a single NASA rocket has even left the ground. As missed deadlines pile up, it seems less and less likely that these goals are attainable—and that’s without factoring in the present COVID-19 pandemic.

So what is going on with NASA? The situation boils down to funding. During their push for the moon in the 1960s, NASA was working with a budget of 45 million dollars; today it is only 20 million. Despite the recent technological advancements, reaching the moon, even Mars, with half of previous funding is difficult. 

But this monetary deficit is not just happening on its own; from its inception in 1958, NASA’s budget has been directly related to interest. I am only aware of their massive future plans because I have attended NASA Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. The average American does not know that NASA is building the most powerful rocket ever created, and this is a problem. At the same time, if you ask any student here at Exeter what SpaceX has been up to, most would mention their relandable rocket which has been all over the news. 

If you look at a graph of the NASA budget over the past forty years, small upticks occur at the onset of headlining projects such as the Space Shuttle or the ISS. For this reason, the administration might need to take a small break from the hundreds of smaller projects in the works and focus all its energy on getting Artemis on the moon by 2025. Events like the landing of Perseverance are noteworthy, but they are not enough. 

Imagine an American once again walking on the moon; this would surely raise national excitement and pride, perking the interest of the government and convincing our population that NASA is indeed working on great things. 

Besides the funding issue, raising national excitement for NASA would help secure its future in another way. High school and college age kids at schools like Exeter, who may be interested in the aerospace field, simply do not have NASA on their radar right now due to its seemingly dormant status; when the time comes, they will instead join the private sector with companies like Space-X. While NASA does not need to be worried about this effect at the present, in ten years at the height of the Mars campaign, they’ll need young talent. Now is the time that NASA should be heavily advertising to kids like me, but they are failing. 

Gaining interest should not be rocket science. If NASA does not fix its lack of urgency soon, it could cause serious problems in the future—problems that my generation will be forced to deal with. The step of a single astronaut on the moon would fix their funding and interest problem.

That is not to say this solution is simple, but given NASA’s prior record with attaining insurmountable goals in record time, a temporary reprioritization of their projects should not be too difficult. The “Space Age” is often cited as the period between the launching of the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 and the end of the Space Shuttle period in 2010. However, the real “Space Age” is sitting right in front of our eyes. Nobody outside of NASA recognizes that fact. Only through the presence of this conversation in the national stage will a human actually be looking at Earth from the Red Planet before the next twenty years are through.