We could've been on Mars 30 years ago. At the peak of the Apollo era in the early-'70s, NASA was already planning its next step into the unknown.
Its plans included building multiple space stations, continued trips to the Moon, and its first crude mission to Mars by the 1980s. Can you imagine watching astronauts walk on Mars the same time the Walkman came out?
But of course, NASA never sent humans to Mars in the '80s. And here we are, 30 years later, still dreaming of the possibility.
But the reason isn't necessarily a matter of technology or innovation. It actually comes down to politics.
As a government agency, NASA's goals are determined by the executive branch. Since its inception, NASA has served under 12 presidents.
And it was clear near the start that not every president would support NASA equally. By the end of the Nixon Administration in 1974, NASA's budget had plummeted from 4% of the federal budget to less than 1%.
Fully funded Apollo missions 18 and 19 were abandoned, along with Apollo 20. At the same time, Nixon pulled NASA's focus away from the Moon and Mars and instead towards low-Earth orbit.
His parting gift was to sign into effect what would eventually become NASA's Space Shuttle Program, but this was just the beginning. So, what's happened throughout all of space history after the Apollo program was over was we had this start-stop-start-stop-cancel.
So, a president comes in, like President Bush comes in and says we're gonna go to the Moon, back to Mars, and then the next president comes in and cancels that. And the next president sets their objective, and the next president comes in and cancels that.
The agency's unable to sustain consistent funding long enough to do anything. It wasn't until the Space Shuttle Program was nearing its end that a crude mission to Mars was finally considered and funded by a US president. George W. Bush, in 2004, announced:
