It's now a definite go for humankind's first attempt to land on Mars. NASA, which will be in charge of this epoch-making mission, expects to land the first humans on the Red Planet in 2039.
This historic event will be preceded by a manned mission to orbit the Martian moon Phobos in 2033 and a mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by 2025.
The announcement was made by The Planetary Society, the largest nongovernmental space advocacy organization in the world, following the "Humans Orbiting Mars" workshop with NASA that tackled the space agency's human exploration program in the decades ahead.
NASA and its partners said the 2033 orbital mission to Phobos is the crucial first step of the plan. They compared it to NASA's Apollo 8 mission that took three astronauts into orbit around the Moon in December 1968 before the first men landed on the Moon on July 21, 1969.
The Phobos orbital mission is expected to take some 30 months, with nine months of travel each way and 12 months in orbit. Crewmembers will study Phobos and Deimos, Mars' other moon. They might also teleoperate rovers on the Martian surface. The partners said the current plan will use an Orion spacecraft.
Asked what potential roadblocks the Mars landing program might face, all of the panelists said the largest hurdles were political, not technical, a reference to budget cuts endangering funding for this multi-billion dollar project.
The Planetary Society thinks these missions are achievable but the decision on whether to adopt the plan is an issue for the next U.S. president.
"We believe we now have an example of a long-term, cost-constrained, executable humans-to-Mars program," said Scott Hubbard, a professor in the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of The Planetary Society's board of directors.
The detailed plan to get to Mars was proposed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The attendees "reached a consensus" on a series of key points. They agreed an orbital mission would be required prior to a crewed mission to the surface of Mars.
They also said an independent cost estimate showed the program would fit into the NASA budget, assuming NASA ends its lead role in the International Space Station.
Hubbard said Mars missions in the past might have been limited by technological or scientific challenges. This no longer appears to be the case, however.
"In the past, when the question of humans to Mars came up, I would typically cite a number of major hurdles: biomedical, launch systems and so forth," he said. "And as of today, I think that those risks have either been reduced or you know how to minimize them, and so I am at the same place that John [Logsdon] and Bill [Nye] [are], that I think the issue now is [...] political will."