Mission to Mars: The new space race

0:04Thank you very much, everybody. Well, thank you very, very much. On January 20th, 2025, having been elected U.S. president for the second time, Donald Trump gave his inaugural address in Washington, D.C. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. The speech focused on one of his favorite themes, American exceptionalism. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. But in that speech, Trump's ambitions for America went well beyond the nation's borders.

0:49We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. Trump's 21st century frontier, the planet Mars. As the cameras panned across the assembled politicians and dignitaries, they caught space entrepreneur and tech billionaire Elon Musk grinning broadly, holding two thumbs up. With his words, the president had made the SpaceX founder's longtime ambition to send humans to Mars a priority of U.S. space policy. And he had cast it in the rhetoric of his MAGA followers, a milestone on the road to making America great again.

1:35I was saved by God to make America great again.

1:50This is Tectonic from the Financial Times. I'm Peggy Hollinger, the FT's space industry editor. And in this series, I'm exploring man's mission to land and live on Mars. In the last episode, we examined Elon Musk's ambition to land people on the Red Planet. An ambition, it seems, that's shared by the U.S. president. Trump's inaugural address put Mars back at the top of America's space agenda. But nine months on, that ambition looks a lot more complicated. Trump and Musk, founder of one of the most critical companies for the U.S. space industry, have gone from bromance to breakup. America's national space agency, NASA, is in disarray.

2:36And across the Pacific, China is pressing ahead with its own plans for space and for Mars. Who, if anyone, will make it to Mars first? What kind of worldview will they take with them? And what might that mean for the Martians of the future? Part 2. The New Space Race We have one of the most challenging assignments that has ever been given to modern man. Since the 1960s, the exploration of the cosmos has been synonymous with America's National Space Agency, NASA. We will be developing and launching into space. Vehicles needed to obtain scientific data and to explore the solar system. We will be preparing for the day when manned flight goes into space.

3:30That's Thomas Glennon, the first-ever head of NASA, speaking the year the agency was established, in 1958. One year earlier, the USSR had shocked the world by launching Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite, and the creation of a dedicated U.S. space agency was a direct response. The Cold War had taken on a new dimension. When in 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, President John F. Kennedy set a new bar, beat the Soviets 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.

4:16And, of course, they did it. That's one small step for man.

4:28NASA had won the decisive battle of the space race, but it quickly set its sights beyond the moon, to Mars. Just one month after Neil Armstrong took those famous first steps on the moon, NASA presented a plan for a manned mission to Mars that would reach the planet by 1982. According to the plan, landing on Mars was a logical focus, And the agency's ambitions got off to a good start. In 1976, Viking 1 became the first robotic spacecraft to successfully land on the Red Planet. Mars from the surface. Viking 1 soft-landed perfectly on the Martian surface and immediately began sending back photographs so spectacular, even project scientists were amazed.

5:15But crude missions to Mars never materialized. Over the next few decades, the agency did continue sending unmanned probes to the planet. And by the late 1990s, the U.S. had landed a robotic rover on the surface of Mars. But as U.S. presidents came and went, space priorities kept changing. Projects ran over budget and were scrapped. And there were the shuttle disasters. Challenger, go with throttle up. It happened just over one minute into flight. One minute, 15 seconds, velocity, 2 ,900 feet per second altitude. The shuttle was instantly a blazing fireball. In 1986, the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart shortly after launch, killing everyone on board.

6:07And in 2003, another shuttle, Columbia, disintegrated as it reentered the Earth's atmosphere. Columbia, Houston, comm check. Columbia, Houston, UHF, com check. Columbia was at 200 ,000 feet going 12 ,500 miles an hour when it suddenly broke up under stress that we still do not understand. 16 minutes from home. According to several former NASA directors I've spoken to, those shuttle disasters rocked the agency's confidence. It lost faith in its ability to manage risk and with it, its appetite for manned exploration of space. So, where are NASA's plans for Mars now? It's all TBD. It's all PowerPoint and AI pictures right now.

6:56None of it is actually real. That's Keith Cowing, a former NASA scientist. He now runs a website called NASA Watch, and he's skeptical about the agency's ability to carry out Trump's plan to plant the stars and stripes on Mars. We don't know what the Mars spaceship looks like. We haven't a clue. We don't know where it will land. We don't know how many people will go. We don't know how much it'll cost. We really don't know what they'll do there other than put a flag in the soil and do a TV interview. NASA's current plan is first to return astronauts to the moon, then an eventual manned mission to Mars.

7:34The moon missions are a much needed testing ground for a lot of the technology required for the onward journey. But, Cowing says, the problems with this plan start with getting astronauts off the ground in the first place. NASA has a rocket program called the Space Launch System, or SLS, which has been under development since 2011. Critics say it's being built with outdated technology, using fuel tanks and booster rockets originally designed for the Space Shuttle project. The SLS is supposed to fly in February next year, taking astronauts around the moon as part of NASA's Artemis program. But so far, it's been used just once.

8:18And according to the Planetary Society, has cost the U.S. taxpayer in excess of$20 billion. You spend a lot of money and a lot of time to make sure it's absolutely right. And then when it flies, it's OK. But you spend a lot of money and you only launch these things every couple of years. Now compare NASA to Elon Musk's privately run SpaceX and the speed with which he is developing his latest rocket, Starship. Meanwhile, with Starship, they decided that we're going to launch rapidly and improve based on whatever didn't work right in the previous one. When one blows up, you just see the picture in the news the next day of nine of them lined up ready to go.

8:55He builds them like corn silos. It's done in a manufacturing process that uses continuous improvement so that when something doesn't work on one mission, All right, well, we won't do it that way. We'll do it this way. And if you're willing to live with that, you can kind of get a big fancy system working sooner than the NASA approach, which takes forever and costs a lot of money. Which is why today NASA is heavily reliant on other SpaceX rockets to take agency astronauts to and from the International Space Station. And why NASA is planning to use SpaceX ships for future missions back to the moon.

9:31And it's not just the technology that's lagging. NASA's budget has been trending downwards in real terms since the mid-1960s. And despite Trump's Mars pledge, he is slashing the agency's overall spending. The Trump footprint dropped across our government's agency everywhere, more or less equally, like a big thump. And they just said, we want to do things quicker and we're going to cut your budget. Trump's administration is planning to reduce NASA's budget by almost a quarter, which would make it the biggest cut ever made to the agency. Everybody's upset. I have people crying, calling me. I've gotten people who I thought were like made out of steel, bending and saying, I can't go on.

10:16I would do this for free if I could, but they won't even let me work here for free. It's widespread desperation. So it's a very depressing, frustrating, angry, professionally cosmic downer sort of situation amongst the smartest, most dedicated people on this planet, bar none. It's really a bizarre situation. And we just want to get back to land on the moon, put people there, do a flag thing and then go on to Mars. The White House says it wants to refocus NASA on returning to the moon, then putting the first human on Mars. But with less money to spend overall, and no clear plan on how they're supposed to get to Mars, Cowing says NASA staffers don't know whether they're coming or going.

11:02Everybody's running in the direction they think they're supposed to be going. There's no formal plan other than go to Mars. What does that mean? Two people, five people, we could have 10 missions, we don't know. So everybody's running sort of off of what they think it means. It's more like Brownian motion, a beehive, a riot, a rock concert. I mean, pick your chaotic metaphor here. And then, by the way, everybody's kind of quiet about it because if you complain too much, you're gone. NASA's problems are being compounded by a lack of leadership. Right now, the agency doesn't even have a permanent leader and not for want of trying.

11:40Distinguished members of the committee, I'm honored and very grateful to be here before you today as President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the National Aeronautic and Space Administration. That's Jared Isaacman, the man Donald Trump nominated to head NASA at the end of last year. On paper, he looks like an ideal candidate. He's a serial entrepreneur and passionate about space. He's been into orbit twice aboard a SpaceX rocket, and on the second of those trips in 2024, he became the first private citizen to conduct a spacewalk. When I spoke to Isaacman in September, he was confident that NASA could fly both to the moon and Mars, even with limited resources.

12:23Well, I mean, I guess it's just, you know, NASA's, you know, current budget is$25 billion a year. Even under the president's proposed budget, it drops to approximately$20 billion a year. You know, who's saying that that's not enough? I mean, if you ask me, that's an awful lot of, you know, resources that the agency has been entrusted into. So, yeah, I do think with good, you know, capital allocation and some urgency around getting, you know, important objectives solved, you know, that you could dual track those efforts. Isaacman told me that the private sector, companies like SpaceX, would be an important part of the plan.

13:05The division of responsibility should be that NASA should be pioneering the absolute cutting edge technology that no one else would underwrite, that has no commercial use case, no revenue model that you can build out from it. And when they crack the code on that, they should hand it off to industry so that competition can drive innovation and lower costs. And then NASA should refocus or recalibrate on something that no one else is doing. Until May this year, Isaacman looked all set to be the next NASA administrator. But some members of the U.S. Congress were worried that Isaacman was too close to Elon Musk.

13:47Not only were his trips to space in Musk-built rocket ships, one of his companies invested in SpaceX. And then this happened. Elon Musk has one more government job to cut, his own. The billionaire who became President Trump's chief cost cutter is leaving his temporary government position. After days of simmering tension, today was an all-out brawl on social media. Musk now claiming President Trump would have lost the election without his help. It seems as though we saw kind of the unraveling of a bromance real time. Look, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we're well anymore.

14:26I was surprised. And I'll tell you, he's not the first. People leave my administration and some of them actually become hostile. Musk announced he was leaving his government job on the 29th of May, 2025. Just two days later, Isaacman's nomination to lead NASA was withdrawn. Did Donald Trump see Jared Isaacman as Musk's man? I think people falsely assume that we're somehow friends or old buddies or whatever, and I was his guy to go in and refocus on Mars. is I've spoken to Elon like, you know, six, seven times my whole life. I wasn't like Elon's guy. You know, I think that I was caught up in between a little bit of a falling out from some folks.

15:12By some folks. Well, I mean, I think there was a very public, you know, divorce that took place at that time period. And I went into this whole process, eyes wide open to the risks that, you know, that you serve at the will of the president and, you know, people's positions can change at any time. So I think really the only disappointment of it all, it came at the expense of NASA having a confirmed leader. I think, you know, NASA is the most accomplished space agency in the world. I want to see it stay that way. So, you know, the Senate invested, you know, five, six months into my confirmation process for it to be pulled at the end, which means a lot of months will go by before somebody else will get in there.

15:52And I feel bad for the agency, you know, NASA does deserve better. We asked NASA about upheaval at the agency, as well as their current plans for Mars amidst all the budget cuts. But it was during the federal government shutdown and they didn't get back to us. What's clear is that, for now at least, America's space program is lacking strong leadership and its budget is shrinking. But those don't seem to be problems for the world's other superpower. China is gearing up to put Chinese astronauts on the moon and then, perhaps, plant its own flag on the surface of Mars.

16:43In the 1960s, the space race pitted the United States against the Soviet Union. Today, America's chief rival is China, and it's moving fast.

17:08In 2021, on its very first attempt, China successfully landed its Tianwen-1 spacecraft on the surface of Mars, deploying a rover to take pictures and record sounds. That was just the beginning. China is aiming to send a craft to Mars again, this time to collect soil samples and bring them back to Earth, something that's never been done before. China hasn't yet formally announced plans to send people to Mars. It's planning to land its first astronauts on the moon by 2030. But top officials, including Zhou Jianping, the architect of China's manned space program, have said that crewed missions to Mars are the long-term goal.

18:00Little wonder the Trump administration is worried. My name is Greg Autry. I was nominated to be chief financial officer of NASA in 2020. and I am now the nominee again to be the chief financial officer of NASA. Greg Autry is the man the White House has nominated to oversee NASA's finances. And he says China is well-placed to threaten America's leadership in space. They've been methodical. They are on schedule, which is super important, something that has not happened in the United States in a long time. They don't have to worry about their budget being re-approved. They've got support for their global space ambitions, which includes becoming the world's dominant space power by 2045, although I think they're on track to do it much sooner.

18:48And their government at the highest level, Xi Jinping, has a China space dream, and he's not going to be elected out anytime soon. So China's executing well. They're capable. They have the money and the political determination to do these things. I think it's extremely realistic to believe that they can best us in civil space and military space if they put their mind to it and continue doing this, and if we in the West are not clear about our response to that. For Autry, China's authoritarian system of governance is reason to worry about the country's influence elsewhere. I wrote a book in 2011 called Death by China, where I enumerate their threats to our global environment, their threats to our institutions commercially and otherwise their general disdain for individual human rights, freedom of speech.

19:41He's concerned that China's influence could extend to space. We're in this place right now where China's going to begin to use space to subvert the power of the Western world across the globe. China might do that, Autry says, by providing cheap satellite internet access in other countries and potentially interfering with what its users can see and say. Or by putting high-powered weapons in space that could potentially devastate cities on Earth. or by taking command of the moon. That, Autry says, would allow them to control the strategically important area between the moon and Earth. They will own the high ground and it will be very, very hard for any nation on Earth to oppose Chinese interests or Chinese authoritarian commands.

20:35At that point, they will be the global superpower. The fear is that Chinese dominance of the moon could give China a military advantage in space. And both the U.S. and China see the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. I think going to Mars is important for a lot of reasons, both as national psyche issue, where we prove that we're still capable of going out and doing great and amazing things to the world, but also because the folks that do that first, I think, can be the people who carry humanity's seed into the solar system and eventually the stars. And for me, the question is, are we carrying Xi Jinping thought and Chinese authoritarianism and brutality to the stars?

21:21Or are we going to carry, again, that candle of enlightenment? And will that represent humankind for the next thousand years? What Autry is saying is that it's all about first-mover advantage. Whoever gets to Mars first will get to make it in their own image, just as American settlers did when they moved west in the 1800s.

21:57President Trump's inaugural address gave some clues about how he views the U.S. mission to get to Mars. His vision of planting a flag on the planet belongs to the future, but his language evoked the past. That of the 19th century American pioneer, driven by a search for land, for wealth, and for freedom.

22:25Just like those pioneers, there are advocates of Martian settlement who want to map unexplored lands. Some who want to go in search of riches. and some who want to break the shackles of the old world and live by their own rules. Here's Casey Dreyer, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society. You can see this projection of this, I'd say generally early 20th century, but some, you know, late 19th century, ideas of expansionism and colonialism and this idea of these untouched natural Edens waiting to be settled by humans, right? And, you know, you can tie it to manifest destiny, particularly in the United States, or just any sort of like colonial attitude of like, well, we might as well go there, right?

23:15I mean, you know, depending on who you talk to, I think there is a certain level of, among a lot of people, a fundamental human condition of just wanting to go somewhere and stake out their own kind of way of living in perceived as an untouched land. In the last episode, we talked about how Elon Musk wants to settle Mars as a refuge from Earth in case there's a war, a natural disaster, or some other catastrophic event. That's why he's building his starship rockets to ferry people to and from the Red Planet. But he also appears to see Mars as a new Wild West, a place beyond the reach of Earth-bound governments and their laws.

23:57For evidence of this, just take a look at the terms of service for one of Musk's companies, Starlink. Starlink operates thousands of satellites, providing Internet to millions of subscribers around the world, from space. In its terms of service, it says that on Earth, agreements with its customers are governed by the laws of Texas, Starlink's home state. But... For services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars, via Starship or any other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles established in good faith at the time of Martian settlement.

24:47New planet, new rules, right? Well, not exactly. That straightforwardly breaks international law. According to international law, when you go to space, you are the responsibility of some nation. You'll remember Kelly Wienersmith from Episode 1. She's a biologist and co-author of the 2023 book, A City on Mars. So it could be the nation you're a citizen of or the nation you launch from, but some nation is responsible for making sure that you follow international law. As much as Musk may wish, however seriously, that Mars is a blank slate for new laws, that isn't the case. The main document governing space is the United Nations 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

25:31And as far as space settlement on Mars goes, the important thing to know is that it says you can't claim sovereignty over anything in space. So, you know, Musk couldn't land on Mars and say, this is Moscow and it belongs to me or it belongs to the United States. You can't claim anything in space. The UN's Outer Space Treaty means that if people were to successfully land and settle on Mars, they couldn't just plant a flag and claim it as some kind of off-world territory. But beyond that, the rules for what you can and can't do on Mars remain pretty vague. Which matters if Mars turns out to be valuable.

26:10For example, if there are deposits of minerals that countries might want to extract. The U.S. has since drawn up some guidelines for space exploration called the Artemis Accords. Wienersmith says those accords don't say that countries can claim sovereignty over planets like Mars. But they come pretty close. So the Artemis Accords has this idea called a safety zone. And the idea is that space is really dangerous. And so if you set down a facility somewhere in space, you have a right to say nobody is allowed to come in this area. And right now they're still trying to figure out how big a safety zone will be.

26:46But you can go anywhere you want, plop down a habitat module, never leave and not let anybody else come into that area. And that feels at least sovereignty adjacent. And so now we've got the situation where you can go to Mars and say, I'm not claiming sovereignty, but I also don't plan on leaving. We're not saying that we're claiming this, but we're also not going to let you come in here. You can't extract resources. And if you do want to come, you have to ask permission and we can say no. The U.S. has signed up more than 50 countries to the Artemis Accords, but its chief space rival, China, isn't one of them.

27:23Plus, writing rules for Mars and actually being there are two different things. And if China gets boots on the ground first, those guidelines, well, they might not mean a whole lot.

27:42When American astronauts set foot on the moon in 1969, many hoped it would be the beginning of manned exploration of our solar system. In reality, it was the zenith of the Cold War-era space race. And since the last Apollo mission in 1972, no human has even left Earth's orbit, let alone traveled to distant planets. But the dream didn't die. There's still something symbolically powerful in the idea of planting a flag in the dust and dirt of another world. American and Chinese plans for manned missions to Mars are still uncertain. But already, people all over the world are working on what it might actually be like for the humans who eventually land there.

28:33How will they survive on Mars? You're going to be killed by the soil itself, by breathing it. What will life on Mars look like? I'm absolutely sure that there will be a lot of things that people on Mars will do that we cannot even imagine at the moment on Earth. And will it all be worth it? Certainly the most difficult part is the emotional, psychological part, the separation from your family and friends. You know, you're going to look back at Earth and not know which one of those white dots is Earth, even. That's coming up in the final episode in this series of Tectonic. Part 3. Bad Science Fiction.

29:11Thank you.

29:41he's acting co-head of audio.