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The success of Artemis II should be a launch pad to Mars

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by Scott Hubbard, opinion contributor - 05/06/26 9:00 AM ET

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by Scott Hubbard, opinion contributor - 05/06/26 9:00 AM ET

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FILE – This image provided by NASA, shows a selfie of their Perseverance Mars rover, on July 23, 2024. The image is made up of 62 individual images that were stitched together. (NASA via AP, file)

Now that the Artemis II astronauts have circled the moon and come back safely to Earth, what’s next? At NASA, the country’s space agency, most eyes are focused on the moon. Private entrepreneurs who have done so much to invigorate American space flight are readying a new crop of human landing systems that will make a long term moon presence viable. Watch out, world, we’re coming back!

But heading back to the moon doesn’t make sense without the context of a bigger and bolder plan: Mars. The moon is an essential waystation to Mars, and only by looking to the red planet can we make the most of our human spaceflight program.

I was NASA’s first ever program director for Mars — the nation’s Mars czar. I got my job after the nation suffered two humiliating failures in 1999 — the Mars Climate Orbiter, which failed to enter orbit after a mix-up in units of measurement, and the Mars Polar Lander, which crashed on Mars after a software error. Getting to Mars safely is hard. Scoring engineering own-goals made it harder.

Over 20 years, NASA has invested in multiple missions to Mars, all successful, that have transformed what we know about the planet. Mars Odyssey, Spirit and Opportunity, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Phoenix, MAVEN and Curiosity created profound insight into information that has proven vital for science and any future human visits.

More recently came Perseverance, the rover we landed on the Martian surface in 2021. As a pandemic raged here on Earth, Perseverance poked, prodded, photographed and most importantly gathered samples. Still today, the rover is roaming. But as the older machines have ceased to function or are reaching the edge of spacecraft senescence, support for Mars has waned. Worse, the budget allocated for missions has plummeted in the recent administration budget.

However, sitting in the belly of Perseverance are those samples, including those that offer tantalizing hints at possible ancient life on Mars. As NASA looks to the moon for its next human landings, what we really need to be planning in parallel is how to bring the Martian samples home as soon as possible.

Retrieval of the Perseverance samples isn’t only about completing a job and the eureka moment of discovering life beyond Earth. It’s an engineering feat that will test most of the systems that will be needed for the technically harder next job — sending humans to the planet and bringing them back alive.

NASA’s budget is back on the chopping block and current reports suggest that the only viable trips to Mars will be low-cost projects that ride along other launches as is proposed for a telecom orbiter at Mars. Fortunately, Congress has already signaled in strong terms that the president’s budget request for NASA is unacceptable and will likely be replaced as it was last fiscal year. However the details for Mars are unclear, especially planning for returning samples and a future of sending humans to Mars.

Ignoring Mars is completely incompatible with the stated NASA goal of moon to Mars. It does not matter that sending humans to Mars is currently in the planning stage. Given the typical development time for a Mars project, work needs to begin now in order to be ready for the Mars-bound astronauts.

High resolution imaging for potential landing sites must be carried out. A search for usable resources such as ice is compelling. Human health experts worry about potential soil toxicity — a risk that needs to be ruled out by getting samples back from Mars.

Demonstrating that we can launch from Earth, land on Mars and return safely to Earth — even if the first returnees are sample vials from the belly of Perseverance — is a worthy mission. That will take time and must be planned beginning now if it is to launch, plausibly, by the 2030’s. This kind of robotic demonstration as a precursor to human flight is a nearly identical approach to what was done before astronauts first went to the moon.

Success will require leadership that is capable of bridging the unique cultures of human spaceflight and science. The right people can be inspired — as they were when we planned for the moon — to line up to fly the Space Shuttle. This also applies to private companies already working with NASA that are keen to lift payloads and people into space. There is no shortage of ingenuity whe