A new emphasis on Mars exploration was clear from the very beginning of the second Trump administration. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” President Donald Trump said in his inaugural address.
The inclusion of Mars was not entirely unexpected. Sitting behind the president was SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, a fierce advocate for human Mars missions and, at the time, a close adviser to Trump. Musk has said he wants to launch his latest and largest rockets, Starships, to Mars as soon as the next launch opportunity in late 2026, suggesting humans could follow by the end of the decade.
At the time, neither the White House nor NASA provided additional details about how that call to land astronauts on Mars would come to fruition, or when. That prompted speculation the administration might make a sharp turn toward Mars, abandoning the Artemis lunar exploration campaign and key programs such as the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket.
What has emerged, six months after that speech, is a more evolutionary approach. NASA is sticking with Artemis and missions to the moon for the time being. However, the agency is proposing to spend more than $1 billion in fiscal year 2026 alone on initiatives linked to human Mars exploration. Aside from those figures, NASA is saying little else about how those initiatives might accelerate a human landing on Mars.
New priorities
The top-level “skinny” budget released by the White House in early May offered the first glimpse of how the administration would implement the president’s vision of humans landing on Mars. Despite cutting NASA’s overall budget by $6 billion, or nearly 25%, the budget included $1 billion “in new investments for Mars-focused programs.” It did not include any additional details.
“We are looking at the priorities we are getting from the new administration, the focus on going to the moon, going to Mars with humans,” Vanessa Wyche, acting associate administrator of NASA, said during a May 28 appearance at the Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit by Explore Mars. She noted that of the $1 billion in the proposal for Mars exploration, “most of that has the focus of what it would take for humans to get to Mars.”
NASA’s more detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026, released May 30, elaborated on that new emphasis. The largest single effort, at $350 million, would “accelerate development of Mars technologies” at the Johnson Space Center and Marshall Space Flight Center. The budget proposed spending $200 million each on a new program for commercial Mars payload deliveries and on a near-term demonstration of entry, descent and landing technologies for a “human-class” Mars lander.
Smaller amounts would be allocated to other initiatives, from upgrading communications relay capabilities at Mars and development of Mars spacesuits to miscellaneous power and computing technologies. The overall proposed investment itemized in a briefing slide was $1.13 billion.
The budget documents did not provide more details about those projects, though. The entry for the $350 million Mars technology project in the 462-page detailed budget proposal, for example, didn’t identify what technologies would be funded. NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate at Headquarters, it said, “will continue to define the content of this new program and will brief Congress as soon as appropriate.” The slide that listed the Mars investments was prepared for a briefing the agency never held. Instead, NASA released the budget proposal with little fanfare late on a Friday afternoon.
NASA officials have kept quiet about those plans in the two months since the budget announcement. An exception was at a meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board July 25, when Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for exploration systems development, briefed the committee.
“The emphasis in the president’s budget request is to really start thinking how we can accelerate our ability for Mars exploration,” she said. “There’s nothing in here that says to go out and procure transportation services to start flying humans to Mars. What this is really focused on is where can we buy down risk, how we can accelerate our ability to be prepared to go to Mars.”
Of that $1.13 billion, $930 million would go to programs in her directorate, ESDMD. A $120 million program for Mars robotic missions and instruments would be in the Science Mission Directorate, while $80 million for miscellaneous technology development would go to the Space Technology Mission Directorate.
“We are agency-wide working together to collaborate very closely even as we’re thinking through these various Mars investments to help us buy down risk and accelerate the ability to start planning for an actual human mission to Mars,” she said.
NASA, Glaze acknowledged, has been studying Mars mission concepts for decades, but argued the new plan was a step change. “We’re ready to go beyond studies,” she said. “We’re ready to really start investing in the technologies that will help us be ready and help us to start making those important early decisions.”
Commercial Mars missions
While NASA describes the proposal as new investments, some of the projects included were already underway, or at least being studied, before the announcement.
Consider the Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS) program, which would receive $200 million in the request. In 2024, NASA awarded studies to nine companies to explore how they could provide commercial services such as imagery, communications and payload hosting at Mars. The results of those studies were promising enough that NASA incorporated commercial services into a strategy for future robotic Mars exploration that the agency published at the end of last year.
CMPS is patterned on NASA’s existing Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program supporting lunar lander missions. “I’m a huge fan of CLPS,” said Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, during a panel about CMPS at the ASCEND conference July 24. “I’d love to see the same kind of enabling of companies to go forward and do those things.”
Such a program could open the door for new players in Mars exploration.
Rocket Lab, which built the ESCAPADE Mars smallsats now scheduled to launch later this year, has been lobbying for roles in NASA’s Mars plans. It has put forward concepts for Mars Sample Return and also backed inclusion of $700 million in the budget reconciliation bill for a Mars telecommunications orbiter.
“We’re excited about some of the upcoming opportunities,” said Richard French, vice president of business development and strategy in Rocket Lab’s space systems division, during that ASCEND panel. “How do we get involved? It has to be through new mechanisms and new opportunities.”
CMPS is still in its earliest stages, and Fox acknowledged NASA is figuring out how to structure it.
CLPS, she noted, is not a perfect analog for CMPS. One difference is that there are far more frequent opportunities to send missions to the moon than to Mars, which has launch opportunities just once every 26 months. “By that token, CMPS will be a little bit different,” she said.
While NASA has set a cadence of roughly two CLPS missions a year, spread among several companies, managing such a feat for Mars will be more challenging.
“How do you take advantage of every single Mars window to accumulate capability but also make sure you have the industrial capabilities that can survive from window to window,” Nick Cummings, senior director of civil and national security space at SpaceX, said on the panel.
There’s also the question of just how “commercial” a program like CMPS can be.
CLPS was based on the expectation that there would be customers other than NASA, such as companies and other governments, for lunar landers, although NASA remains the primary customer for most of the missions awarded to date. There is likely even less commercial demand for missions to Mars.
“Maybe there’s not an immediate market at Mars or commercial opportunities,” Cummings said. “If NASA is the only customer for a system, you can still do firm fixed price development, which you should do. You can still have competition.”
Fox said she hoped in the next year to have a better understanding of how CMPS will be structured. That includes both the cadence of missions as well as their types, such as orbiters or landers. “We can then start putting together the science program behind it, and how we will take advantage of all of these amazing things.”
The initiative is so new NASA is still figuring out how to pronounce CMPS. Unlike CLPS, pronounced since its inception as “clips,” there’s no agreement yet on how to say the acronym, with Fox settling, for now, on “sea-mips.”
“It does not roll off the tongue like CLPS,” she admitted. “Somebody called it ‘compass’ the other day and I was like, ‘that’s a stretch.’”
Addressing long poles
While NASA describes this initial investment of more than $1 billion as accelerating human Mars exploration, there is no discussion in the budget or other statements about schedule: by how much is this new effort pulling forward the timeline for sending humans to Mars?
At the Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit in May, Joe Cassady, director of civil space at Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris company, discussed a workshop from 2016 that examined the “long poles,” or major enabling technologies, needed for human Mars missions. They included spacecraft for getting to and from Mars as well as landing on the planet, along with life support and power.
Those long poles are still long, he said. “In the last nine years, those haven’t really changed. We are still thinking about all of those.”
That includes topics not explicitly mentioned by NASA in its new plans. “While there’s been a huge amount of work by lots of different groups looking at some of the engineering challenges, I think it’s really important for us to stop and think about the humans,” said Erik Antonsen, a doctor in the Space, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource-limited (SPEAR) Medicine Division at Massachusetts General Hospital, at the summit.
Humans, he argued, are often treated as an “afterthought” in mission planning. “We’ve been able to do good enough, and most of our spaceflight has been short enough,” he said, “that we really haven’t pushed humans beyond their limit.”
That’s unlikely to hold up on a Mars mission, given the far greater distances and mission duration involved. “The biggest long pole in my mind, coming from the human health and performance community, is demonstrating that we can actually achieve Earth-independent operations.”
An example of that is the dependence crews on the International Space Station have on ground controllers to avoid major mishaps, something that will be more difficult, if not impossible as the communications delay stretches into minutes.
“On the International Space Station, over the last 20 years, the average for the number of urgent events that probably would have killed the crew if we didn’t have immediate, real-time telemetry is about 1.7 times per year,” he said. “And we got better at it: over the first six years, it was about three to four times a year.”
Such issues are on NASA’s roadmap for long-term Mars exploration, part of the Moon to Mars Architecture that the agency unveiled in 2023 and has been refining on an annual basis since. That included identifying seven “priority decisions” NASA needs to make in the near term to support human Mars missions.
“These are the early decisions where we need to make choices now about what direction we want to go, because once we’ve made those choices, everything else will follow,” Glaze said at the Space Studies Board meeting. Those decisions range from the size of the crew for the first missions to science priorities.
NASA has, so far, decided on one of those seven, announcing in late 2024 it selected fission as the power source on the Mars surface for those crewed missions. But, she noted, the latest review of the architecture added five more priority decisions NASA needs to make, such as how long crews will stay on the Martian surface and how NASA will address planetary protection concerns.
That underlines how much work lies ahead for NASA even as it tries to accelerate planning for human Mars missions. “There was a lot of hope that was going to be a positive development,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA deputy associate administrator leading agency’s Moon to Mars Program Office, at ASCEND, referring to President Trump’s mention of Mars in his inaugural address. “But we have been working on Mars activities in the human spaceflight program for a long time.”
Given the magnitude of the task, NASA may continue to work on those activities for a long time before astronauts plant the flag on the surface of Mars.
This article first appeared in the August 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title “A $1 billion first step?”