A not particularly revelatory look at NASA’s ever-deferred humans-to-Mars efforts: The Deferred Dreams of Mars
Still worth a read, even if it is mostly a recitation of the conventional wisdom on the topic – not to be harsh on Brian Bergstein, it’s just that there’s nothing really new in what he has written. Apart from references to SpaceX as a synechdoche for the emerging private space industry, the substance of the article is little different from Bob Zubrin’s complaints about NASA’s lack of vision for Mars from 1996.
Funny, though, that there’s no mention of SLS in the article, but he does (in the SpaceX paragraph) repeat the conventional assumption that ginormous rockets would be required for manned missions to Mars. There is also no serious discussion of Mars settlement, only sortie missions, which I have to suspect comes from Bergstein interviewing mainly NASA employees.
Why blame NASA employees? The sad fact is space settlements have essentially been ruled out by all levels of the US government, from the White House to OMB to Congress, since the beginning of the space age, and 40 years of nothing but NEO activity has pretty well convinced the majority of taxpayers that human activity in space is limited to space stations and Apollo-like sorties.
Sure, it’d be nice if this perception would change, and I trust someday it will. But I don’t it expect it anytime soon, and I doubt the USA will be the leader. Let’s hope the Chinese or the Indians or the Brazillians or ever the Russians get really really rich around the end of the century!
I’m not interested in what they do around the end of the century. I want settlement to start now.