The simple answer is, because it's really, really difficult, for a very limited benefit.
Getting people to Mars is hard. Keeping people alive on Mars is hard. Getting anything to work on Mars is hard. Manned settlement (which is pretty much the only point of sending wetware there), would require underground buildings. (No magnetosphere or atmosphere really to speak of in terms of protecting soft squishy humans from radiation means you need to bury your buildings under the regolith at the very least.
Beyond that, you've also got issues of power generation once you're there, consumables and resupply (growing food at scale means lots of buildings, which means some form of underground or buried village). Plus social issues involved with sending people in a small can into space for several months, landing them and enough stuff to keep them alive (because it's easier to land rovers than humans, generally speaking).
Beyond that there's more subtle issues - comms takes a while. If anything goes wrong, it's a very long way to send help. And that's before you work on getting people back.
You'd have to plan a multi-month mission at least to just send people there and back purposefully, or multi-year mission to make it really worthwhile.
And as it turns out, every single part of it is really difficult.
Kennedy's deadline: "by the end of the decade" was crucial. It became "the president's deadline" and everyone rallied to fulfil it.
A human Mars mission now is comparatively less difficult than the challenge that Apollo faced, with far superior technology, knowledge and funding. NASA has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven. Mind you, it's doing great stuff still with the robotic exploration program, but undertaking a deep-space human mission involves the kind of determination a bureaucracy on autopilot is just not capable of.
NASA is also more than anything a creature of the President and could respond to such a challenge once more, given the chance.
Greater than any technological or Presidential initiative challenge is the challenge of culture and media. Human lives matter a whole lot more now than they did during the Apollo missions, and a disaster resulting in the deaths of astronauts is the worst thing that can happen to NASA. As long as it is subject to public scrutiny and criticism that affects its budget and goals, it will continue in the fashion of the medical industry -- accepting all the consequences of do-nothing neglect instead of doing something that carries the risk of the deaths of a few individuals. In the medical industry, hundreds of deaths some of which could have been averted with not-yet-FDA-approved surgeries or drugs; in the space industry, the always looming threat of an extinction-level asteroid or other existential threats.
I think the key difference is that the Apollo program was ridiculously well supported by the populous and mass media. I casually follow what's going on with NASA and honestly I think I heard about Bush's lunar outpost thing one time.
> "NASA has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven."
NASA manned spaceflight has, which is distinguished from unmanned spaceflight, which doesn't have the same problem.
This is because the propulsive force of the Apollo program was primarily LBJ, who was a master politician. He made the Apollo program a constituency-driven project by wheeling and dealing in congress, to great effect. But those deals outlived the Apollo program and LBJ as well. They twisted NASA manned spaceflight and resulted in the mis-step of the Shuttle program and the diminished capabilities and high costs of the post Apollo era.
It's worth keeping in mind that a lunar landing was considered technically feasible in a relatively short timespan by NASA planners _before_ the Kennedy speech. All they needed was the cash, otherwise the timescale would stretch as cheaper lift vehicles and techniques were invented (perhaps into the 1980s, I've read). Kennedy acknowledges this reality in the speech: "accelerating the existing space program".
Compare that to a Mars landing today. Here in 2015 we have many more unsolved problems than the lunar landing planners did in 1957. How do you cope with radiation? What about long-term nutrition? Gradual loss of vision due to microgravity and loss of skeletal mass? Psychological issues? I sincerely doubt that these problems are "comparatively less difficult than the challenge that Apollo faced".
Apollo's key areas of advancement were in manufacturing and spaceflight control. Life-support was disposable and mission durations were short enough to make solar flares unlikely and skeletal degradation very slight. While it's true that we have far greater manufacturing and control technology than we did in the 60s that's only a small subset of the total technology we're going to have to invent to get more than corpses to Mars.
In microgravity fluids get redistributed throughout the body. The upper body and head get comparatively more (as opposed to normal gravity), which causes immune problems (swollen sinuses) and increased pressure in the eye and blood vessels around it, sometimes headaches and other issues. Microgravity is not a must for the Mars trip, however.
We're fairly sure we understand the mechanism--there's an experiment ongoing to confirm now, especially with regard to Commander Scott Kelly and his year-long mission on the ISS--but we're not entirely sure what to do about it if we're right. We're pretty well obligated for the next fifty years--give or take--to microgravity environments for long-duration spaceflights for lack of research into spinning toruses or tether systems.
Microgravity is a tough environment for a human to live in, physically.
Radiation is less of an issue than what it's made out to be. Indeed, only solar flares present dangers, but they travel slowly and there will be at least a day's notice for the crew to seek shelter. The entire spacecraft can't be shielded from a solar flare, but a smaller part can be. That could be a room (pantry) in the centre which houses the food and water supplies, lining the outside.
Microgravity can also be avoided at small costs by keeping the last upper stage tied to the main spacecraft with a long tether. Rotate that as a counter-weight against the main spacecraft (and the spacecraft itself) to give the crew a ground to stand on.
Psychological issues are certainly a problem, but there have been comparatively long or longer sea voyages in the past, so humans can survive isolation. And the crew won't be random people stuck together, they'll be rigorously selected based on psychological criteria.
Manufacturing-wise, the main ingredient is a heavy-lift vehicle on the scale of Saturn 5, capable of lifting at least 100 tons to LEO, preferably 150 tons. Life support is not insurmountable either, although we've seen in the past that NASA needs a better focus at estimating danger (Challenger, Columbia). But, all these enterprises are risky. If your objective is to avoid it, then you never go anywhere.
You can find this and more in Zubrin's book: "A case for Mars", if you're interested.
> Radiation is less of an issue than what it's made out to be.
That statement is counter to everything I've ever read about persistent low-level radiation exposure over long periods. Curious if you have a source?
> Indeed, only solar flares present dangers, but they travel slowly and there will be at least a day's notice for the crew to seek shelter. The entire spacecraft can't be shielded from a solar flare, but a smaller part can be. That could be a room (pantry) in the centre which houses the food and water supplies, lining the outside.
Sure. In fact, I believe that's the plan for Orion. This limits both the total crew capacity, their operational capability and puts further constraints on scientific and computing equipment (which can't be easily moved).
> Microgravity can also be avoided at small costs by keeping the last upper stage tied to the main spacecraft with a long tether. Rotate that as a counter-weight against the main spacecraft (and the spacecraft itself) to give the crew a ground to stand on.
Maybe... except we've never built anything like that and new construction in vacuum has a way of causing interesting surprises. In the future, sure, there will be at least some microgravity generation and there are a lot of proposals but none are near-term engineering projects. What is the tether made out of? What's your backup when it malfunctions in some fashion? Where do you get the energy to spin the weight and it's counterweight up and down at need? Where do you get the long-duration, vacuum rated gear housing for the tether control mechanism?
> Manufacturing-wise, the main ingredient is a heavy-lift vehicle on the scale of Saturn 5, capable of lifting at least 100 tons to LEO, preferably 150 tons.
Lift vehicles are now well-known enough that corporations can build them in for-profit enterprises. That's simple enough. With an eye to manufacturing, for long-distance space voyages, you've got to look at field-reparable spacecraft. This is a complete unknown for human habitable craft (though Hubble, the space stations and some of the later Gemini missions have given some sense of how that will go) out of range of resupply. There are plans but no operational experience which'll lead to fun surprises.
> Life support is not insurmountable either, although we've seen in the past that NASA needs a better focus at estimating danger (Challenger, Columbia).
That... is a weird statement. There's been no crew loss due to life support systems. Re-entry and launch vehicle mishaps yes, but not life-support.
The primary engineering challenge around life support is, again, we have no experience with closed ecosystems out of range of resupply. We can store food--so agriculture can be dumped, potentially--but carrying enough disposables to manufacture and recycle an atmosphere is a no-go in terms of weight. You've also got the challenge of illness--an inevitability over several years--which we don't have any experience with save "tough it out; it's a short mission".
> You can find this and more in Zubrin's book: "A case for Mars", if you're interested.
I've read Zubrin's book. It's well done but overly optimistic with regard to basic engineering challenges in a like matter to mid-50s proposals for a lunar landing. The discrepancy between those is fascinating and, when it's all said and in the history books, will be in a like fashion to Zubrin's book. Given present levels of technology, we're more likely to send--in the near future and without substantial, multi-generational investment in basic R&D--something like a current-tech space station with a rocket on the ass-end of it.
Anything else is speculative and more akin to near-future scifi than not.
The only reason it happened was because we were in a race with the Russians.
> By the time the SEI reached Congress, its price tag—conservatively ballparked at an eye-popping $450 billion—alarmed key members of Congress, who spiked the initiative altogether.
If China were preparing for a Mars mission, you bet the anti-NASA Republicans would suddenly do a 180.
(I don't know where I stand on a manned Mars mission, but I do know it shouldn't be determined by kindergarten politics.)
Please consider the last stanza of JFK's Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, you may not have heard the whole thing before (emphasis mine):
> We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
Isn't that the whole point? The main reason we want to go to Mars in the first place is because it's really, really difficult. Humans like doing things that seem impossible because when we prove that they are possible, our capabilities expand. That's what evolution has programmed us for. We need to do more shit. You can't just say "we know we can go to Mars but it's too expensive and dangerous", because until you demonstrate you really can, that actually means "we can't go to Mars".
one can only imagine how human space programs would immediately fire up if we find an alien probe with yellow note attached clearly stating that the invasion is going start on 1st January of 2025 :) Nothing stimulates the creativity and enthusiasm like a firm stick.
See also: Neal Stephenson's newest novel, Seveneves, in which instead of an alien probe with a post-it, something just blows up the Moon. A great book with tons of interesting ideas.
If we have to try hard things, how about eradicating poverty across the world? That's gonna be really, really hard, and accomplishing that will fill anyone's heart with justifiable proud.
...With an added benefit that once you accomplish that, there will be several billion people who no longer have to search for food all day long, and they can start to worry about other hard and interesting stuff, like going to Mars.
Solving poverty is a much harder problem than going to Mars. It's not that we don't have the resources - by most estimates everyone in the world could have a comfortable working-class lifestyle if wealth was evenly distributed. The difficulty is political. Nobody, not even the superpowers, has enough power to make changes like that. Even if they did, they would have to trample on the rights of hundreds of millions of people to exercise it, and that would inevitably turn violent. Changes like that have to be slow and according to the will of the people. No amount of money can help. But the governments of individual countries can work towards it in small steps, and most liberal-leaning countries actually are. Relatively uncontroversial socialist policies like progressive taxation, social security, universal healthcare, welfare payouts, and public works projects reduce inequality within countries over time. More controversial policies like free immigration and free (really free, not TPP) trade reduce inequality between countries. Continuing advances in worker productivity and growing support for things like universal basic income mean the situation will only get better with time.
On the other hand, going to Mars is just an engineering problem. A whole 10-year campaign of Mars missions could cost less than what the US spends on its meager socialist policies in a single year. Progress down here and progress up there aren't mutually exclusive.
I think Vasco De Gama and Magellan would completely agree with you, especially on the issues like "comms takes a while" or "social issues involved with sending people in a small can into space for several months". Though it was much easy back then i guess - for example they could just flog or hang an offender. On the other side they didn't have 3D printers which could just print all your habitats out of sand and sunshine.
They also didn't have to worry about basic life support. Sure, sweet water supply and scurvy are issues on long sea journeys, but compared to a Mars mission, they really had it easy.
>but compared to a Mars mission, they really had it easy.
man, i can't agree. We have only pure engineering/technological issues to solve. In addition to those (which i don't think were easier for them at their level of tech), they also had the Kraken who could end their journey and lives at any moment and they didn't even know what is waiting for them where they were going and even where that where actually is. They were sailing almost into Black Abyss ...
18 of 237 men who set sail with Magellan made it back to Europe alive.[1] Of the men who set out to land on the moon, 12 of 14 landed, and 2 had to abort their mission; all 14 made it back alive.[2] Please explain why you think that modern (1960s-2020s) space travel is riskier than journeys like Magellan's.
If they had gone to Mars, the tally would have been 0/237.
The reason why? Because the differences of scale between going and coming back from Mars vs the Moon is about as much as the Circumnavigation of Earth and doing an average sail voyage between two well known ports in the Mediterranean Sea. There were plenty of sailors that survived those too, but the difference of scale did matter at the end.
I agree but I would say, the simpler answer is because there is only one super power.
few decades ago the limited benefit of putting a man on the moon was compensanted with the symbolic ass kickery of the soviets.
Lack of competition kills innovation. For something as difficult and expensive as putting a man on Mars, there needs to be something more than short term commercial success.
In Mars you have: gravity and solid ground, but you don't have atmospheric pressure or comfortable temperature.
Giving up on solid ground, a floating habitat 50+ km above the surface of Venus might have almost Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperatures, also gravity, but lacks solid ground.
Is it sure that solid ground makes everything so much easier that colonizing Mars would still be easier than floating colonies in the atmosphere of Venus?
Now, I was much too lazy to read the article, but reading through the comments here I must ask: Why not send the necessary supplies, equipment, and essentials now, on unmanned craft's, and once all the important items are present in Mars we then send humans?
If I were an Astronaut, I'd rather see Pluto than Mars. If you managed to figure out how to survive the extremes of Mars over an extended time, you probably will already know what you need to survive Pluto long term too. That's where it's at, the edge of our Solar System; a launch point for intergalactic travel. Launch from Earth then keep hitting the engines to build speed, cutting the travel time to Pluto from years down to weeks. Orbital slowdown would also probably take several weeks.
That makes a lot of sense. If we manage to get to Pluto in weeks and survive there, we may stand a chance at interstellar travel. Mars in that sense tells us little.
There's nothing much interesting at Pluto. And it won't ever be a stop-over for interstellar travel, because stopping doesn't make sense. Also, intergalactic travel won't happen any time soon.
Perhaps sending a crew to Mars will be trivial by the time we have the technology and know-how to keep people alive, sustainably, on Mars in the first place.
We could maybe put a team on Mars in a few years, perhaps, but they'd have to find a way to turn around and come back almost immediately. And we wouldn't be able to follow up on that mission for decades. It would be a symbolic effort at best, and a PR nightmare at worst if anything went wrong. The risk/reward just seems so badly skewed in favor of risk right now.
Shame on us for the wishy-washy way we have handled our space program over the last few decades, sure. But we are not suddenly ready just because everything has been on an apparent pause for awhile. In the meantime, we should continue sending robots up there and perhaps launching supplies and equipment.
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[ 9.3 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadGetting people to Mars is hard. Keeping people alive on Mars is hard. Getting anything to work on Mars is hard. Manned settlement (which is pretty much the only point of sending wetware there), would require underground buildings. (No magnetosphere or atmosphere really to speak of in terms of protecting soft squishy humans from radiation means you need to bury your buildings under the regolith at the very least.
Beyond that, you've also got issues of power generation once you're there, consumables and resupply (growing food at scale means lots of buildings, which means some form of underground or buried village). Plus social issues involved with sending people in a small can into space for several months, landing them and enough stuff to keep them alive (because it's easier to land rovers than humans, generally speaking).
Beyond that there's more subtle issues - comms takes a while. If anything goes wrong, it's a very long way to send help. And that's before you work on getting people back.
You'd have to plan a multi-month mission at least to just send people there and back purposefully, or multi-year mission to make it really worthwhile.
And as it turns out, every single part of it is really difficult.
A human Mars mission now is comparatively less difficult than the challenge that Apollo faced, with far superior technology, knowledge and funding. NASA has become a constituency-driven project rather than mission-driven. Mind you, it's doing great stuff still with the robotic exploration program, but undertaking a deep-space human mission involves the kind of determination a bureaucracy on autopilot is just not capable of.
NASA is also more than anything a creature of the President and could respond to such a challenge once more, given the chance.
Greater than any technological or Presidential initiative challenge is the challenge of culture and media. Human lives matter a whole lot more now than they did during the Apollo missions, and a disaster resulting in the deaths of astronauts is the worst thing that can happen to NASA. As long as it is subject to public scrutiny and criticism that affects its budget and goals, it will continue in the fashion of the medical industry -- accepting all the consequences of do-nothing neglect instead of doing something that carries the risk of the deaths of a few individuals. In the medical industry, hundreds of deaths some of which could have been averted with not-yet-FDA-approved surgeries or drugs; in the space industry, the always looming threat of an extinction-level asteroid or other existential threats.
NASA manned spaceflight has, which is distinguished from unmanned spaceflight, which doesn't have the same problem.
This is because the propulsive force of the Apollo program was primarily LBJ, who was a master politician. He made the Apollo program a constituency-driven project by wheeling and dealing in congress, to great effect. But those deals outlived the Apollo program and LBJ as well. They twisted NASA manned spaceflight and resulted in the mis-step of the Shuttle program and the diminished capabilities and high costs of the post Apollo era.
Compare that to a Mars landing today. Here in 2015 we have many more unsolved problems than the lunar landing planners did in 1957. How do you cope with radiation? What about long-term nutrition? Gradual loss of vision due to microgravity and loss of skeletal mass? Psychological issues? I sincerely doubt that these problems are "comparatively less difficult than the challenge that Apollo faced".
Apollo's key areas of advancement were in manufacturing and spaceflight control. Life-support was disposable and mission durations were short enough to make solar flares unlikely and skeletal degradation very slight. While it's true that we have far greater manufacturing and control technology than we did in the 60s that's only a small subset of the total technology we're going to have to invent to get more than corpses to Mars.
I'm interested on this, as I'd never heard of it before. Can you tell more about it?
We're fairly sure we understand the mechanism--there's an experiment ongoing to confirm now, especially with regard to Commander Scott Kelly and his year-long mission on the ISS--but we're not entirely sure what to do about it if we're right. We're pretty well obligated for the next fifty years--give or take--to microgravity environments for long-duration spaceflights for lack of research into spinning toruses or tether systems.
Microgravity is a tough environment for a human to live in, physically.
Microgravity can also be avoided at small costs by keeping the last upper stage tied to the main spacecraft with a long tether. Rotate that as a counter-weight against the main spacecraft (and the spacecraft itself) to give the crew a ground to stand on.
Psychological issues are certainly a problem, but there have been comparatively long or longer sea voyages in the past, so humans can survive isolation. And the crew won't be random people stuck together, they'll be rigorously selected based on psychological criteria.
Manufacturing-wise, the main ingredient is a heavy-lift vehicle on the scale of Saturn 5, capable of lifting at least 100 tons to LEO, preferably 150 tons. Life support is not insurmountable either, although we've seen in the past that NASA needs a better focus at estimating danger (Challenger, Columbia). But, all these enterprises are risky. If your objective is to avoid it, then you never go anywhere.
You can find this and more in Zubrin's book: "A case for Mars", if you're interested.
That statement is counter to everything I've ever read about persistent low-level radiation exposure over long periods. Curious if you have a source?
> Indeed, only solar flares present dangers, but they travel slowly and there will be at least a day's notice for the crew to seek shelter. The entire spacecraft can't be shielded from a solar flare, but a smaller part can be. That could be a room (pantry) in the centre which houses the food and water supplies, lining the outside.
Sure. In fact, I believe that's the plan for Orion. This limits both the total crew capacity, their operational capability and puts further constraints on scientific and computing equipment (which can't be easily moved).
> Microgravity can also be avoided at small costs by keeping the last upper stage tied to the main spacecraft with a long tether. Rotate that as a counter-weight against the main spacecraft (and the spacecraft itself) to give the crew a ground to stand on.
Maybe... except we've never built anything like that and new construction in vacuum has a way of causing interesting surprises. In the future, sure, there will be at least some microgravity generation and there are a lot of proposals but none are near-term engineering projects. What is the tether made out of? What's your backup when it malfunctions in some fashion? Where do you get the energy to spin the weight and it's counterweight up and down at need? Where do you get the long-duration, vacuum rated gear housing for the tether control mechanism?
> Manufacturing-wise, the main ingredient is a heavy-lift vehicle on the scale of Saturn 5, capable of lifting at least 100 tons to LEO, preferably 150 tons.
Lift vehicles are now well-known enough that corporations can build them in for-profit enterprises. That's simple enough. With an eye to manufacturing, for long-distance space voyages, you've got to look at field-reparable spacecraft. This is a complete unknown for human habitable craft (though Hubble, the space stations and some of the later Gemini missions have given some sense of how that will go) out of range of resupply. There are plans but no operational experience which'll lead to fun surprises.
> Life support is not insurmountable either, although we've seen in the past that NASA needs a better focus at estimating danger (Challenger, Columbia).
That... is a weird statement. There's been no crew loss due to life support systems. Re-entry and launch vehicle mishaps yes, but not life-support.
The primary engineering challenge around life support is, again, we have no experience with closed ecosystems out of range of resupply. We can store food--so agriculture can be dumped, potentially--but carrying enough disposables to manufacture and recycle an atmosphere is a no-go in terms of weight. You've also got the challenge of illness--an inevitability over several years--which we don't have any experience with save "tough it out; it's a short mission".
> You can find this and more in Zubrin's book: "A case for Mars", if you're interested.
I've read Zubrin's book. It's well done but overly optimistic with regard to basic engineering challenges in a like matter to mid-50s proposals for a lunar landing. The discrepancy between those is fascinating and, when it's all said and in the history books, will be in a like fashion to Zubrin's book. Given present levels of technology, we're more likely to send--in the near future and without substantial, multi-generational investment in basic R&D--something like a current-tech space station with a rocket on the ass-end of it.
Anything else is speculative and more akin to near-future scifi than not.
> By the time the SEI reached Congress, its price tag—conservatively ballparked at an eye-popping $450 billion—alarmed key members of Congress, who spiked the initiative altogether.
If China were preparing for a Mars mission, you bet the anti-NASA Republicans would suddenly do a 180.
(I don't know where I stand on a manned Mars mission, but I do know it shouldn't be determined by kindergarten politics.)
> We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
Isn't that the whole point? The main reason we want to go to Mars in the first place is because it's really, really difficult. Humans like doing things that seem impossible because when we prove that they are possible, our capabilities expand. That's what evolution has programmed us for. We need to do more shit. You can't just say "we know we can go to Mars but it's too expensive and dangerous", because until you demonstrate you really can, that actually means "we can't go to Mars".
...With an added benefit that once you accomplish that, there will be several billion people who no longer have to search for food all day long, and they can start to worry about other hard and interesting stuff, like going to Mars.
On the other hand, going to Mars is just an engineering problem. A whole 10-year campaign of Mars missions could cost less than what the US spends on its meager socialist policies in a single year. Progress down here and progress up there aren't mutually exclusive.
We're doing it. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/poverty3.jpg
man, i can't agree. We have only pure engineering/technological issues to solve. In addition to those (which i don't think were easier for them at their level of tech), they also had the Kraken who could end their journey and lives at any moment and they didn't even know what is waiting for them where they were going and even where that where actually is. They were sailing almost into Black Abyss ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan#Voyage_of_c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_astronauts
The reason why? Because the differences of scale between going and coming back from Mars vs the Moon is about as much as the Circumnavigation of Earth and doing an average sail voyage between two well known ports in the Mediterranean Sea. There were plenty of sailors that survived those too, but the difference of scale did matter at the end.
Let me know when Mars ceases to be anything but a colossal gravity well for us to throw money into.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Fur_Company
Of course, there were plenty of people already there, so it's only one aspect of many. Still though, those guys were a long way from home.
few decades ago the limited benefit of putting a man on the moon was compensanted with the symbolic ass kickery of the soviets.
Lack of competition kills innovation. For something as difficult and expensive as putting a man on Mars, there needs to be something more than short term commercial success.
Audiences today are going to expect much more than a grainy live feed that's recorded with a potato level camera.
But I have confidence in NASA rising to the challenge and eventually being able to fake this mission as well.
Giving up on solid ground, a floating habitat 50+ km above the surface of Venus might have almost Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperatures, also gravity, but lacks solid ground.
Is it sure that solid ground makes everything so much easier that colonizing Mars would still be easier than floating colonies in the atmosphere of Venus?
It doesn't fundamentally change the equation, and loads the project with upfront costs.
We could maybe put a team on Mars in a few years, perhaps, but they'd have to find a way to turn around and come back almost immediately. And we wouldn't be able to follow up on that mission for decades. It would be a symbolic effort at best, and a PR nightmare at worst if anything went wrong. The risk/reward just seems so badly skewed in favor of risk right now.
Shame on us for the wishy-washy way we have handled our space program over the last few decades, sure. But we are not suddenly ready just because everything has been on an apparent pause for awhile. In the meantime, we should continue sending robots up there and perhaps launching supplies and equipment.