536 days from now, on October 17, 2026, Mars will begin to align with the Earth. Both planets orbit the sun at different speeds and distances, and most of the time, the two planets are very far apart. However, every two years, there is a two month period where Earth and Mars align. This two month period is known as the Mars optimal launch window for spaceflight; launching anything from Earth to Mars must be done during these periods, as trying to get to Mars as the distance between the planets increases requires staggeringly higher amounts of fuel.
With just over a year and a half until this launch window opens, public debate is entirely void of any discussion about how to capitalize on this opportunity, with a few notable exceptions. United States policymakers and elected officials are either ignorant of the potentials of utilizing Mars, or they simply do not care. This is a catastrophic mistake, and should it continue, will compound into the United States losing a space race to China, and eventually, becoming a “has been” nation. Mars is essential for any long-term national space plans; it has abundant resources that make settlement and expansion possible, it has relevant national security value as the Chinese space program plans to go there soon, and it can be used to secure the rest of the Solar System.
Our primary hope to make the 2026 window lies in SpaceX. SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever created, has seen remarkable progress in its development, and will hopefully have worked out its final kinks by this time next year. SpaceX intends to begin launching Starships to Mars during this launch window. The current plan is to send about five Starships in the 2026 window, but many more should be launched to obtain crucial data points about Earth-to-Mars transit while we can. However, the current state of Starship at present is that much more rapid testing and fixing is needed, and every time there is a failure, a significant amount of time is required for regulatory investigation. SpaceX needs to get a working Starship up and running, and fast, or else they might not be able to send even one Starship during this window.
The United States cannot afford to continue to treat Mars as a problem to be simply delegated to a private company to solve “in ten years time.” A true national strategy is needed.
Our Obsolete National Strategy for Space
In President John F. Kennedy’s historic speech at Rice University in 1962, he proclaimed a national strategy that the United States would land a man on the Moon “before the end of this decade.” The result of this proclamation was a mobilization of the nation’s greatest talent and industrial might toward a single goal, the scope of which had not been seen since the Manhattan Project two decades prior.
This was a good national strategy because it combined a clear objective (a flag on the Moon) with a clear geopolitical purpose: to beat the Soviet Union and to prove the technological superiority of the US system. But once the American flag was planted on the Moon, the goal was complete. The failure of JFK’s national strategy lies in the moments directly after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the Moon. There was no directed strategy for what was to come next; no reason for putting more Americans on the Moon. While some NASA officials made plans for further exploration and eventual expansion, a lack of political will that prevailed once the Soviets had been upstaged left these plans unfulfilled. Three years after the initial landing, after five more Apollo missions and a total of twelve astronauts on the Moon, no human ever returned.
The United States of today finds itself adrift: saddled with a legacy goal and a legacy purpose. There is somewhat of a national goal for spaceflight, but it fails to transcend Kennedy’s 1962 objective. The purpose of NASA’s Artemis program is to land American astronauts on the Moon for the first time since 1972, a purpose which has seen its geopolitical significance grow with the breakneck pace of China’s space program, which has a similar immediate goal. “Somewhere down the line,” the United States wants to build a lunar base to do research and to assist with getting to Mars.
We are failing even measured by these limited aspirations to recreate past achievements. Massive delays, due to a small budget for human spaceflight programs and issues with rocket production, have seen this goal slip from a 2024 landing goal, to a potential 2027 landing date. When examining the current state of the program and its troubled history, it is hard to imagine American astronauts walking on the Moon any time near that date. The Chinese space program, on the other hand, aims to land their astronauts on the Moon by the end of this decade, and are on track to do so, if not earlier. Their “International Lunar Research Station,” a lunar research base with several key international partners, has a detailed roadmap of development and is seeing significant progress.
But, we should question the value of the objective itself. If, by some miracle, American astronauts beat the Chinese taikonauts to the Moon, it will be another flag-planting prestige moment – nothing further.
We need a new, genuine national strategy. There has been a failure across half a century of American spaceflight to set any meaningful strategy for what to do in space. Certainly there have been tactical advances made by the government and private industry; space shuttles to go places, reusable rockets to launch astronauts, orbital space stations for microgravity research, even rovers that have explored other planets, remotely teleoperated from millions of miles away. Yet these tactics have been folded up and presented as the national strategy itself. Instead of building space shuttles in service of establishing a lunar base, space shuttles became themselves the goal, and decades went by where astronauts went to orbit on these shuttles and came back down again; eventually the Shuttle program was retired. Instead of building a space station in low Earth orbit as a stepping stone toward the Moon, or Mars, or even for building more space stations with more humans onboard or for ship refueling for the journey to Mars, the International Space Station stayed in orbit alone, until China launched their space station, Tiangong. Now, after over twenty-six years, the International Space Station is falling apart, with no clear Western successor ready to take up the mantle.
Settlement of Mars offers a sharp goal and an enduring purpose that surpasses the objective of simply landing astronauts on the Moon. Settling the stars offers the United States the chance to rally national resources in pursuit of cutting-edge technologies, prove the superiority of US technological prowess, and deny China opportunities to expand throughout the galaxy. We must do all that we can to succeed in the brief launch window that comes next year.
Why Mars?
Mars is the ideal place to begin space settlement and establish a strategic foothold in the Solar System. It may be further away from Earth than the Moon, but there are several conditions which make it a more suitable candidate for settlement. The gravity on Mars is roughly 38% of Earth gravity, while the Moon is a much weaker 16.6% of Earth gravity. The effect of different gravity levels on the human body is still a mystery of space science research. Other than a few days on the Moon (not enough time to offer insight into the long term conditions of 16.6% gravity on the human body), scientific research has only examined two gravity conditions: Earth gravity, and the microgravity experienced by astronauts on the International Space Station. While there have only been a few cases of long term stays (over a year) in microgravity, the general consensus is that long term human exposure to microgravity leads to health issues, such as weakened muscles and bone density loss. In other words, the closer to Earth gravity, the healthier the conditions for humans. Science still has not provided an answer for what the gravity magic number might be that humans can easily adapt to, but it is probably fair to say that 38% gravity is better than 16.6%.
Moreover, Mars holds a stellar amount of resources that can be utilized to build an industrial settlement. It has an atmosphere made of carbon, an essential building block for any industrial process. With the right knowledge, a settlement could fairly easily use the Sabatier process to make methane from available resources. This methane could both power the Mars settlement and refuel Starships for a return journey, or a journey to the rest of the solar system. Several resources that are known to be on Mars (carbon, hydrogen, iron, aluminum, and calcium, just to name a few) are just a few steps away from being converted into valuable industrial processes, like factories, greenhouses, and underground tunneling for housing. These are already being worked on. This is in contrast to the Moon, where resources are much more scarce, and there is barely an atmosphere. This makes Mars the more effective base for further space exploration and settlement, since resources do not have to be expensively brought from Earth.
There is urgency to act now. When China gets to the Moon, they will build a base and live there. With Chinese nationals living there, their space program then intends to use the Moon as a springboard toward establishing a settlement on Mars. Dominance on both of these critical stepping stones will result in a sustained advantage against the United States in space exploration and settlement, leaving the rest of the Solar System to Beijing’s control over the long-run.
It doesn’t need to be this way. As China chases after Moon settlement as a first step, Mars is a leapfrogging opportunity. The planet has just about everything materially needed to kickstart a settlement of hundreds of Americans. But getting there is not possible without a massive revitalization of the United States industrial base. While SpaceX is miles ahead of every other player in the game in the US and in China, they are not being utilized at maximum efficiency by the American government. China may be steps behind, but it is massively investing in the infrastructure buildout, space program, and ecosystem of commercial launch companies that will allow it to eventually surpass what SpaceX will be able to do on its own.
The nation that is proactive about unshackling its builders will be the one to inherit the stars.
SpaceX cannot take Mars alone. The United States needs to relearn basic manufacturing, industrial processes, and how to build advanced technologies. This is in part because Mars itself represents a place where industrial manufacturing will need to start from the basics: mining material from the ground, refining it, and then manufacturing it into factories, houses, and vehicles that allow for rapid expansion across the planet.
In other words, for a Martian settlement to achieve industrial autarky, it must be able to vertically produce as soon as possible. There can be no outsourcing of production to other worlds; if the Martians need steel, they must craft it themselves, not wait 26 months for the next launch window from Earth. The same goes for agriculture, flowing water, but also medical bays, computer chips, and pharmaceuticals.
If the United States does not reacquire the knowledge and capacity to do this, then the Martian dream is dead on arrival. This can only be facilitated by a genuine national strategy for Mars.
A National Strategy for Mars
The race is on. To win Mars, the United States needs to be ready to send something when the launch window opens in 536 days. This will give us the critical data necessary to begin sending cargo and settlers in the subsequent window in 2028. The lucky thing about setting a comprehensive strategy for building a settlement on Mars is that there are a lot of ways to do it right – there is no singular correct way. However, there are a few key points that are necessary for success.
To start, there must be a codification of the Mars program into law. As has generally been the case in space policy for the previous few decades, every new Administration brings a new set of ideas, and traditionally, a new focus on where the next frontier will be. This often entails abandoning plans for going back to the Moon to instead focus resources on Mars, or vice versa. President Bush retired the Shuttle program, replacing it with Project Constellation, which was to build out a program to get Americans back to the Moon by 2020. President Obama canceled the project, and built out the Commercial Crew program, began the Space Launch System, and had plans for a crewed Mars mission in the 2030s. President Trump shifted focus to the Moon with the Artemis program. A continuation of this type of changing strategy is detrimental to U.S. interests in space. It is essential that any Mars settlement strategy have tools in place to prevent the transfer of resources to other programs upon a change in administration. The only thing worse than not going to Mars is stopping halfway there.
Second, there needs to be a complete shift in what is acceptable to do to progress these goals. Space settlement has long been delayed over the status quo opinion that extensive, decades-long research must be conducted on the long term effects of various gravities on the human body, and the effects of cosmic radiation, before astronauts can be sent to Mars. To be fair, these are serious questions that should be considered, and worked on. However, research of this nature has a status quo problem – no serious experimentation on human subjects can occur if it might upset people. Predictably, very little progress has been made on learning about the human condition in space, because human experimentation is anathema.
Martian settlement will never happen if decades continue to go by where the actualization of humans living in space is held back by ethicists with unmeetable conditions. A function of government is to do the things that private companies cannot. The United States government should have a key role as the facilitator of difficult, non-commercial research that will enable its citizens to do difficult tasks such as living in space. Entities conducting this research should be supervised, but should also be categorically excluded from the types of regulations that have hindered growth for the last half century.
Third, companies need to be able to work on everything that is critical towards vertically integrated space settlement. A successful national strategy is one that enables truth-seeking and tangible, rapid progress by the builder class. Channels need to be created for serious people to test out their ideas without spending costly years waiting in the bureaucratic process of permitting approval. There must be rapid deployment and testing of the most wonderful and important ideas of the future that will make or break the Martian dream – things like space manufacturing, nuclear fission, human longevity research, and materials science breakthroughs. Companies need a testbed for prototyping ideas of the future, and Mars can be that testbed.
To do this, the United States should declare Starbase in Texas a special economic zone, and invite key players from adjacent industries to move there and collaborate with the future Martian companies. It should create the conditions that attract the brightest, most talented minds to this project, and pair them with companies willing to pool research and development resources together to form a coalition to build Mars. The White House should declare a Mars Project, appoint a task force of key industry leaders, and move heaven and Earth to get it done by the time the launch windows are ready.
Finally, we need a government that is not afraid to consider Martian settlement a national security priority. SpaceX’s goal as a company is to have a million people living and working on Mars by 2050. To realize an American Solar System, we need a government that accepts the pursuit of this objective not as science fiction but as hard-nosed realism. Yet the opposite has occurred – NASA has publicly shown interest in every other space sector than human settlement on Mars. The word “settlement” seems to be the elephant in the room, something no one is allowed to say out loud, for fear of political repercussions. This fear is itself corrosive: the United States will never be serious about expanding into the solar system, at least until China captures low Earth orbit, lands on the Moon, and builds a base on Mars.
It is time to play for the most serious of stakes: Mars and the Solar System. The future will be forged by those who have what it takes: the people who will throw everything they have at the next 536 days. The future does not belong to the faint-hearted; it belongs to the brave. There are millions of Americans willing to build and live in the future. It is past time for the United States to enable them to do this.
