New Report Reveals NASA Human Spaceflight Program is Not Suitable for Mars Trip

The National Research Council (NRC) released a 286-page report on Wednesday asserting that human spaceflights to Mars will not be achievable by the 2030s because NASA's strategy is both unsustainable and unsafe.

NASA has been working to revamp their agenda in order to prepare for long-term spaceflight missions, most notably the human trips to Mars scheduled for the 2030s. Their budget proposal for 2015 requests funding for experiments that will examine astronaut health during a prolonged spaceflight as well as technology/spacecraft to conduct landings on rough terrain.

Congress is still in the process of reviewing the 2015 budget proposal, and in the meantime they mandated an 18-month investigation to be conducted by the National Research Council in order to determine whether or not NASA's plan for the Mars missions are suitable and safe for humans. And today NASA and other space companies planning to visit Mars received some bad news.

The National Research Council's Committee on Human Spaceflight determined that current spaceflight programs are not suitable to send humans to Mars, and they suggest other ways to send astronauts to the Red Planet. They ask that the United States return to the moon and establish a lunar habitat to further develop pertinent technology that could be used on a future Mars mission. Additionally, the committee was in support of NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which aims to both send astronauts to a nearby asteroid and alter an asteroid's orbital path so it circles the moon.

"This committee found a number of compelling reasons to include the moon as a stepping stone on the way to Mars," co-chair Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell, said in this Washington Post article. "From the point of view of a destination - scientific, technical, and also in terms of our international partners - it is attractive."

President Obama has already suggested that NASA conduct lunar missions in order to prepare for the deep space Mars missions, but the space agency has said it's unnecessary. But NASA might not have a say on the issue, since Congress has the power to amend, approve, or reject the agency's budget proposal.

The NRC concluded that if Congress were to approve the 2015 NASA budget, it would "invite failure, disillusionment, and the loss of the longstanding international perception that human spaceflight is something the United States does best," as stated in the Washington Post article.