NASA wants to send humans to Mars in the 2030s — here's the step-by-step timeline

The Trump Administration plans to axe funding for the International Space Station in 2025, but Trump won't be in office then.
Handout/Reuters

NASA may say an early goodbye to the International Space Station (ISS) in order to kick-start missions to Mars.

The Trump administration's priorities for NASA, outlined in the proposed 2019 budget, suggest a hard, early cutoff for funding the ISS. The budget would also halt work on a high-end next-generation telescope and gut NASA's $100 million dollar education program.

It's all with an eye toward the administration's ultimate goal of getting humans to Mars by the 2030s. That's a vision former President Obama shared, but his ideas for what to do at the space agency in the meantime focused more on exploring asteroids and previously undiscovered corners of the solar system, not putting people back on the moon, which Trump wants to do soon.

Astronomers aren't happy about the changes, but the space agency says it has to make hard fiscal choices in the name of ferrying people back to the moon and eventually to Mars on a limited budget. After all, if you're going to travel almost 35 million miles into space and touch down on the surface of Mars, you might need extra cash.

The final decision on the plan is up to Congress, which will either greenlight the administration's new NASA proposal in full or make changes.

Assuming that the administration's plan gets approved as-is, here's what NASA is planning to do in order to reach Martian soil:

The launch, which was originally scheduled for 2016, has been delayed a couple years, as the agency redesigned some parts. That effort added $153.8 million to the cost of the lander, according to Space News, but it is expected to launch some time between May and June.

Bruce Banerdt, the mission's principal investigator, compared the InSight lander to a doctor that will give Mars a long overdue checkup.

"We'll study its pulse by 'listening' for Mars quakes with a seismometer," Banerdt said in January. "We'll take its temperature with a heat probe. And we'll check its reflexes with a radio experiment."

The mission is now going to cost NASA more than $828 million, Space News reported.

3/

In 2019, NASA wants to spend $10.5 billion to get close to the moon again. That's over half of the space agency's annual budget.

Just one example of what a lunar 'pit stop' might look like. This design's from Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace.
Facebook/Bigelow Aerospace

The idea is to build a kind of lunar pit stop that would eventually help humans get to Mars.

The agency's latest plan includes a push for more public-private partnerships on outfits near the moon. That might lead to some swanky new moon accommodations from companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or the newly formed Bigelow Space Operations.

4/

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recently floated the idea that future missions to Mars might even use the moon as a gas station.

The Mars 2020 rover will check for Martians.

Mars 2020 uses a lot of the same hardware as the Mars Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012.

The main reason NASA wants to send a new rover is to look more closely for tiny Martians. Mars 2020 will use light (a spectrometer) to search for various kinds of organic molecules in Martian soil samples.

NASA aims to devote $50 million in 2019 to developing methods for collecting Martian rocks and soil and bringing them back to Earth for study.

Scientists suspect there may still be elements of life, either extinct or alive today, lying hidden on Mars. Researchers studying the Earth's driest desert recently found some new microbial life there, just waiting for rain. They think it could be a clue that life may silently be humming along somewhere on Mars.

Astronauts are going to need interstellar lodging if they're going to Mars. NASA wants to start developing such accommodations in 2022.

An artist's concept of NASA's Deep Space Gateway (left) space station near the moon.NASA

NASA's not ready to send bunk beds into space just yet.

Instead, the agency announced it would like to build a kind of solar-power station, called the "Power and Propulsion Element" (PPE), by 2022. The design and maker of this first-stage power supply will be picked through a competitive bidding process, in which NASA will request proposals from commercial partners.

Eventually, that PPE will power a full-scale "lunar orbital platform gateway": a moon-adjacent version of a space station.

But the new moon station wouldn't be just for astronauts. Because the gateway will be built by a to-be-determined private company, that enterprise could also ferry civilians there. In a way, NASA would kind of be reserving spots in a space dorm built by a commercial entity.

The space dorm could run for more than a decade, NASA says. But first they have to decide who will build it.

9/

Forget the space station. Under the Trump administration, NASA may cut off all funding to the ISS by 2025.

The administration isn't just pushing to go to Earth's moon: In 2025, NASA wants to send alien scouts out to Jupiter's moons.

The Jovian moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto as seen by the Galileo spacecraft.NASA/JPL/DLR

The agency is planning to launch a "clipper" toward Jupiter's icy moon Europa in 2025 to investigate if that's a place where life could survive.

NASA is earmarking $50 million for the Europa Clipper mission in 2019 alone.

11/

But can NASA really get to Mars by the 2030s?

Actor Matt Damon on "Mars" in the 2015 film 'The Martian.'
Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

It's important to note that a lot of these plans won't happen until President Trump leaves office, even if he were to serve a second term through 2024.

Like other areas of the federal government, NASA's work depends on each administration's priorities for how to spend money in space. That can make it tough to predict which of NASA's projects ultimately get funded or finished (and lead to spending waste, since NASA's missions often last much longer than a single presidential administration).

It's clear for now that the Trump team seems gung-ho about getting to the moon.

But they're not making the task easy — the federal government's notional proposed budgets for NASA from 2020-2023 slash the space agency's annual funds down to $19.59 billion. That number doesn't take inflation into account, and is even less money than the $19.65 billion that was earmarked in NASA's 2017 operating plan.