Why We Haven't Been to Mars Yet

Decades ago, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were first walking on the Moon, a panel of experts called the Space Task Group was putting together recommendations for what America should do in space next. One of those was a human expedition to Mars in the 1980s.

About a month after Armstrong and Aldrin returned from the Moon, the Space Task Group, which was comprised of some of the best scientific and technological minds of the time, duly presented their recommendations to President Richard Nixon and the nation. Besides humans to Mars, the Space Task Group recommended lunar bases, large space stations, and something called a space shuttle, which would be a reusable vehicle to take people and cargo to and from space.

The report of the Space Task Group made a brief flurry in the news. But already events were taking shape that would undermine any thought of carrying out the Space Task Group's recommendations. By the end of the year, the flight of Apollo 20 was cancelled and the production line for the huge, Saturn V rockets was permanently closed down. Within another year, Apollo 18 and 19 were also cancelled.

It was touch and go for a while whether there would be an American manned space program at all after the last Apollo moonwalker returned home. President Nixon's interest in space exploration wasn't very great. Liberal Democrats in the Congress were pontificating about the immorality of spending a lot of money on space exploration while poverty, hunger, homelessness, and a lot of other social ills ground down the American people.

Manned space flight in America was saved, however, because President Nixon, while not very interested in space, was very interested in registered voters. And there were a lot of registered voters in big, electoral rich states like California, Texas, and Florida who, having worked their hearts out to put men on the Moon, were being laid off in the tens of thousands, many to finish their working lives sacking groceries and pumping gas.