The Race to Mars – Who Will Get There First?

November 2, 2018 – The number of players is growing in the competition to return to the Moon and from there make the leap to Mars. Who is likely to win? Let’s look at the contestants.

NASA – In this horse race, NASA is the odds-on favourite at 10:1. First to the Moon and back five times, and a major partner in the development of the International Space Station (ISS). The Space Shuttle diversion is over with that white elephant, as pretty as it was, put to pasture.

My only concern is that I’m not sure NASA is in it to win it. The agency is budget-constrained. It moves at a snail’s pace. The Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spaceship look like a giant boondoggle. NASA has too many projects and programs and is subject to the changing whims of the U.S. government.

Currently, NASA has announced plans to return to the Moon in the mid-2020s and has set a goal to reach Mars in the 2030s. Its science missions with robot landers and rovers are focused on Mars. It has announced plans to build a space station in lunar orbit which it calls a Gateway. The Gateway is likely to be a multi-national venture involving Europe, Russia, Japan, and Canada.

NASA’s primary contractors for so much of its human space program are Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, and their United Launch Alliance (ULA) venture. Both companies are primary contractors for lucrative defense department business and their budgets reflect this when it comes to building stuff for the space agency.

At some point, however, NASA needs to find a way to do more with fewer dollars. So far they haven’t shown that this lesson has been learned. That’s why it’s hard for me to imagine that, in the end, NASA will be first to land a human crew on Mars. Maybe a return to the Moon before anyone else is far more probable.

Roscosmos – The Russian space agency is long in the tooth and short of money. I put the odds at 20:1 that they will be first to Mars.

Russia has made a number of bold announcements about building new launch capacity, constructing a permanent lunar settlement before the end of the next decade, and eventually matching SpaceX and its reusable rocket capability. Roscosmos may, or may not participate in the Lunar Gateway project. Russia may by 2024 pull out of the ISS. Roscosmos may soon lose its largest source of external revenue, being the sole launch vehicle for sending humans to the ISS. Russia doesn’t have the money.

The Soviet and Russian space programs have milked Soyuz for the last forty years. The country and its agency have had little success in missions beyond Earth orbit. And Mars has just been one bad break after another. So unless Roscosmos and other Russian agencies involved with the space program partner with someone else, possibly NASA, China, Europe, or a commercial space company, it is highly unlikely that they will be putting humans on the Moon in the late 2020s, and certainly not on Mars in the 2030s.

ESA – The European Space Agency is all about collaboration. The odds that they will be first to send a human to the Moon or Mars are infinitesimally small. I put the odds at 100:1.

By its very nature, ESA is a consortium of national space programs with Germany, and France taking the lead. The United Kingdom in its plans to leave the EU will have to find a way to continue to work with ESA that is acceptable to the other participants.

ESA today partners with other national agencies including NASA, Roscosmos, China, India, and Japan. It is building the support module and systems for NASA’s Orion spaceship. It has partnered in ISS and Europeans have worked on the space station. It is likely going to be involved in the NASA’s plans for a Lunar Gateway.

ESA has announced plans for a permanent lunar colony and has indicated it plans to collaborate with Roscosmos to meet this objective. If it were to go to Mars ESA would likely follow this pattern of collaborating with partners to achieve the objective.

China – The China National Space Administration (CNSA) began its climb to space by taking Russian designs and modifying them to become their own. Today China has its own independent human space launch capability. It has placed two temporary space stations in Earth orbit and populated them with crews. So is China ready to go to the Moon and Mars? I’d put the odds at 15:1. That’s better than Russia because China has a lot more money to throw at the technological challenges.

China has learned to go it alone for much of its early space successes. It is building new iterations of its Long March rockets that will give it payload capacity to send a spaceship to the Moon probably by the late 2020s.

It has been talking with the Europeans and the Russians about a lunar space colony. And it has found ways to leapfrog its competitors by learning from their past history through the public record and academia. So it may not be as difficult for China to get to the Moon and Mars in the next two decades if they continue to make the progress they have demonstrated to date.

Other National Space Agencies – India and Japan have developed independent launch capability. India’s Space and Research Organization (ISRO) has displayed its space capsule in a recent technology show and it has in its current rocket inventory, the capability to put a human payload into low-Earth orbit. The country has announced plans to do this in the early 2020s.

Japan has taken a different path from India. Like ESA, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) is more likely a collaborator than a go-it-alone program. So the odds for these two agencies are astronomical when considering them as likely candidates to get humans to the Moon or Mars.

Private Space Companies – The evolution of private space companies is  a 21st century phenomenon. Most of these new players originate in the United States. Among them are SpaceX, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace, and the ULA partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.

All of these companies have been nursed along by NASA through subcontracted work. And two of them, SpaceX and Boeing, will soon be used to send American and other nation’s spacefarers to the ISS.

Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have been primary contractors in the development of Orion and the SLS. Lockheed-Martin recently showcased a Martian gateway and rocket landing system.

But it is SpaceX that has captured the imagination of the public with its reusable space capsules and launchers, its Falcon Heavy, currently the rocket with the largest payload launch capacity, and the development of the BFR, the next evolution of its private rocket program.

SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, has been sharing his vision of human space exploration. The company plans to send a space tourist around the Moon in 2019 using its Dragon 2.0 spaceship and a Falcon Heavy rocket. Musk has laid out plans for getting humans to Mars using the BFR by the mid-2020s, a full decade ahead of NASA’s current timetable.

Then there is Bigelow Aerospace and its plans to work with companies like SpaceX to provide inflatable habitations for lunar and Martian colonists. Bigelow has been demonstrated the feasibility of its inflatable modules for the last few years on the ISS.

And then there is Blue Origin, owned by the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, who plans to launch a next-generation rocket called New Glenn that will be capable of delivering humans into space. Blue Origin also has plans for future iterations of its launch vehicles with capacity to reach for the Moon and beyond.

These private companies represent the new space race ending the hegemony of national space programs like NASA, Roscosmos, and ESA in the very near future. I rate their odds of getting to Mars before anyone else at 7:1. That’s better than NASA.

What’s most interesting about these private ventures is they are in it for the profit. They also manage money better and have delivered launch capacity at a fraction of the cost that NASA spends.

Note that I have considerable reservations about sending humans to Mars without first assuring ourselves that no life exists there in the present day. So I am hoping that no humans land there until we have thoroughly determined that the planet is lifeless. And I place the odds that we will find life there at 2:1. So this race may become a moot point once we realize in pursuing colonizing Mars we could be destroying the only other place where we will have found life in the Universe.