With no more than three months of his mandate, President Barack Obama highlights once again the importance of the NASA project to deliver people to Mars.
Since he first endorsed the idea six years ago, the team has made tremendous progress. In 2010, Obama gave a speech at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where he fist promoted the concept of sending astronauts to the Red Planet by mid-2030s.
His pitch was published in an opinion column for CNN days before the Frontiers Conference, a one-day brainstorming discussion held in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The event is co-sponsored by the White House and it gathers specialists and scientists from around the country.
"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time," Obama said.
Aside from being an opportunity for scientific dialogue, the conference will aim at promoting the space mission to the new administration and help sponsor the journey to Mars. Its advocates will be given the chance to fully support and pitch the costly mission, involving a deep-space rocket and the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle, originally created for a go-back to the Moon.
Some Congress members, mostly Republicans, have criticized the president for not allocating a sufficient budget to the critical components of this mission, while dismissing NASA's decision to use an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars instead of the Moon.
The presidential support for this mission comes alongside various private company owners striving to create their own projects to get to the Red Planet.
While the Boeing CEO declared that he was sure the first person to go to Mars will ride a Boeing rocket, a Dutch venture named Mars One works on colonizing the planet by 2025, with help from major aerospace companies for transportation.
Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO, announced the intentions to build a rocket system public in September, wishing to transport the first passengers to the Red Planet on the same year as the Dutch company.
"I'm excited to announce that we are working with our commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space. These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth — something we'll need for the long journey to Mars," Obama added in his editorial.
