Trump wants to put humans on Mars: what scientists think of the plan
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Hi listeners, Benjamin here with another one of our check-ins on all things going on in the US. This time we're looking at space exploration and space science and how these fields may be affected by the Trump presidency. To find out, yesterday afternoon UK time, I spoke with Alex Witsey, who covers all things space for nature.

Alex, hi, how are you doing today? I'm good. How are you? Doing A-OK, thank you. Thank you for joining me. You had an article this week looking at US President Donald Trump's challenge to NASA, and that challenge is to land the first humans on Mars. Before we get into it, let's get some background to this decision. This is kind of an expansion of what Trump did during his first presidency. So back in 2017, Trump said he wanted to send astronauts to the moon. And he did.

And rather surprisingly, NASA has been working on a course to do that. The agency has been sort of putting together a bunch of rockets and other equipment and other hardware to get astronauts around the moon on a new rocket and down. And then sort of earlier this year, Trump started making noises about Mars. So now Trump is kind of redoing what he did for the moon. But he's saying he wants to go to Mars. He sort of hinted at this earlier.

in his inaugural address, and he hinted at it at the State of the Union. And then we had a budget rollout, which is where the pedal hits the metal, so to speak. And there's words in there and some amount of money to kind of really maybe start thinking about whether NASA might send humans to Mars. Because, of course, this has been a long-term aim of NASA's for

I'm in a very, very long time, but it seems like this is a concentrated effort he's calling for. Yeah, I would say in the decades up and covering NASA, it's always been sort of 20 years in the future that just keeps rolling forward. But this is probably the most serious push in a while. And there's kind of a number of things that have enabled it. And a lot of it has to do with actually having the equipment for once.

So if you want to send humans to Mars, it's hard. You need to keep people alive for essentially three years, all the way to Mars, on the surface and back. So you need a big rocket with a lot of propulsion, and it has to carry a lot of stuff to keep these humans alive. And the U.S. did not have one until just recently as part of

many other prior canceled programs. NASA now has a big rocket, the SLS rocket, which is the first thing that can take people to deep space, essentially since the Apollo era in the 60s and 70s. So NASA's got a heavy lift rocket. It's flown once. It's got a long way to go. It's not human rated yet, but we'll see where it goes. And then there's some commercial companies also that are developing heavy lift rockets. You will have heard about SpaceX Starship,

That has not yet even gotten to Earth orbit, but there's a company called Blue Origin as well. They have their own heavy lift rocket that flew in January for the first time. And all of these things are potentially vehicles that could carry humans and all their stuff to Mars. And we haven't had that before. But one thing that all of these things share is they cost an awful lot of money. Now, President Trump...

proposed spending what a billion dollars potentially in future on Mars plans. But really, that seems like a drop in the bucket in terms of what this actually could cost. Yeah, so a billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But to send humans to Mars, there's not a price tag, of course. But all the experts I talked to, I mean, we're looking at hundreds of billions of dollars, right? You can't do this for 10 billion. The James Webb Space Telescope was 10 billion. And

It's not probably going to cost a trillion, but somewhere in those hundreds of billions of dollars. And so if you wanted to do that, and you would probably have to do it over, you know, like 10 years or something, you need to be investing a lot more than $1 billion a year. And that's an awful lot of money on a project. It's way more than NASA spent on the Apollo project to get humans to the moon. So there's a big question of...

Is there political will? Is there popular will? Do people want to do this? And if so, it's going to cost a heck of a lot more than a billion a year. And this really comes at a time when the president has made calls to slash budgets across the board. And maybe we could get into that. But let's stick with Mars for the time being. It seems like opinion is divided about this effort and its pros and cons. Yeah.

Yeah, so there's a lot of people who want to send humans to Mars because of the exploration aspect, right? I mean, this is kind of, is this what humanity wants to do? Do we want to go and visit other worlds? Do we want to become a multi-planetary species, as some people talk about? But there's a lot of criticism as well, too. It's a lot of money, like we just said. We have our own planet to take care of and a planetary crisis of our own right here on Earth, where our time and money might be much better spent.

And just an awful lot of technical challenges to doing it. So planetary scientists, a lot of the ones that I've talked to will say they would like to see humans on Mars, but they maybe don't think it's worth the cost and especially the cost to all the other space science that NASA could be doing instead.

As you've alluded to there, and as I've covered on the podcast before, there are multiple hurdles to overcome, not just protecting astronauts getting there, having a delivery system that works well and all the kinks are ironed out. But of course, Mars is a terrible place, right? It's full of toxic soil, electrostatic dust that clings to things and cuts into them. And yet it's really something that has captured the imagination of astronauts.

clearly the president, but also multiple scientists and politicians as well. Yeah, this is a long-running debate. There's a writer who had a piece in The Atlantic, Shannon Sterone, famously called it Mars is a hellhole. And Mars is a hellhole. You don't want to be there. As you say, the soil is toxic. There's hardly any air. There's, you know, solar storms, radiation blasting you all the time. There's like no resources. You can't even talk to Earth in real time because you're so far away, so you can't get help right away. But...

You know, you think of all the science fiction writers who have talked about colonies on Mars and stuff like that. Clearly, it has captured popular imagination over many, many years. Again, we're sort of left with, is it worth the cost? Is it worth the time? Is it worth...

the other things that don't get done because of a push like this. And let's talk about the other things that don't get done then, Alex. You and our colleagues have been looking at funding, and it seems like proposed cuts to NASA's funding could affect a huge amount of future research efforts.

and missions. Let's look at it in the round. What sort of numbers are we talking about? So NASA is a $25 billion a year agency. That's basically how much it spends on everything. So not just space science, but also the human exploration side of things. It's aeronautics programs, you know, it's earth science, many, many things that it does. $25 billion a year sounds like a lot, but it doesn't get very far. So about $7 billion of that is science.

Now, every year, the president proposes a budget and then Congress decides how to allocate that money. So there's a bit of a back and forth always between a president's budget proposal and then what Congress ends up allocating. But this year, Trump has proposed slashing that $25 billion budget.

down to about $19 billion. So that's a pretty significant reduction. And this is at a time where he's saying he wants the agency to start some enormous new push to send astronauts to Mars. The space science community, the planetary science community, earth science community are extremely upset about the proposed cuts to the science budget in NASA because space science has been proposed to be cut by 50%.

So iconic missions that are operating, these things would be canceled or cut back in operations. In fact, a number of the things that are proposed to be cut are Mars programs. There's Mars missions that are orbiting the planet right now. There's one that when there's a solar storm that washes across Mars is the only one that gets a good view as to how that radiation could affect the planet's surface.

So Trump is proposing turning that one off at the same time that he's talking about sending humans to Mars. So there's there a possibility then that if these funding streams get cut, that spacecraft just what gets switched off and left dormant in space? Yes. So when a mission stops operating, the controllers stop talking to it. When a mission stops operating, no data comes down and they just switch it off and stop talking to it. And it just orbits like a dead piece of metal.

And what about future missions as well? We've talked obviously a fair bit about Mars, but you also talked about Earth itself. And Venus is something that has been of intense interest to space scientists too. Yeah, these proposed cuts would slash very hard at all those things. So there's three missions to Venus. There's two NASA missions to Venus and a European one that NASA is going to participate in.

Nobody has been to Venus in decades. This would be robotic spacecraft, of course. And the planetary science community is really keen to go and study Venus. It's a greenhouse analog. It could tell us things about, you know, how our own planet functions in a greenhouse world.

But all those, they just wouldn't happen. They would be cut completely. Missions to Earth, NASA has been planning a huge series of really important Earth-observing missions that would do things like study how the planet changes over time. So not just the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but...

Things like drought and fire and flood and all that kind of things from space. Really important data. And those just wouldn't get built and wouldn't get flown. And something that I've talked about with our other reporters in previous roundups like this...

are how people themselves are being affected, like the NIH folk getting laid off. Is the same thing happening at NASA or is the same thing expected to happen if these cuts go through? Yeah, the space science community's been a little bit different. We haven't seen the massive layoffs that we've seen at some other agencies like the NIH and elsewhere. NASA did close its Office of Chief Scientist with

No explanation as far as I can tell. And a couple other small offices, they've laid off a couple dozen people, but they haven't had the widespread layoffs yet. What we're really seeing in the space sciences is the impact to research funding through the community. So the scientists who are out there at universities and institutions are

worried about not getting funding. Or, of course, many of them have had their funding cut if they work on, for instance, diversity, equity and inclusion projects. So NASA has a big inspirational component, right? There's a lot of getting kids into science, getting underrepresented groups into science. And those projects have already been cut at NASA and have just been terminated completely. You said that these cuts are

aren't set in stone yet. These are proposals. There'll be some backwards and forwards between the president and the politicians and all the rest of it. What are researchers saying about the impacts that these could have if things come to pass?

as they've been proposed right now? The scientists I talk to are petrified about what might happen. So yes, we know people can fight about budgets and we know missions have been threatened before. In Trump's first presidency, he threatened to cancel a number of missions, especially a lot of Earth observing missions, things that were climate related. And Congress usually restored those. But

The level of cuts that are being proposed, one of the advocacy groups for space science calls this an extinction-level event, threatening NASA because of the sheer volume, the sheer numbers of what would be cut. And the scientists are petrified because we're playing in a totally different realm than we ever have before in terms of the relationship between the U.S. government, institutions and funds, the agencies that funnel those monies through, etc.

So many things are happening in the US research enterprise right now that are unprecedented. NASA, although it's weathered all sorts of storms in the past, it's really uncertain where it's going to go in the future to a level that I have not seen in all the decades I've been covering the agency. Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining me. And I'm sure we'll check in again once things are a bit clearer. Alex Whitsey, thank you very much. Thanks.