Today, Explained - Going to Mars

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

The president and Elon Musk still agree on Mars. Our close neighbor has captured the imagination of Americans for over a century. This episode was made in collaboration with Vox’s Future Perfect. It was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Pete Davidson during the Saturday Night Live "Chad on Mars" sketch. Photo by Rosalind O'Connor/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My name is Sean Ramosveram. For today, explain, I'm outside the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., with one question, do you think we should go to Mars? I don't think you should live in Mars, no. Well, I don't know why just Mars. I think as Earthlings, we are a nosy group of people, and I really don't think that we have any business going to Mars. Our knowledge about the solar system and the universe will grow substantially.

I think maybe we should just leave Mars alone, just sit with Earth. Like so many innovations are going to come out of it because so many different companies are going to be fighting to get, you know, that first ticket to Mars. So I feel like we should. But at the same time, we should solve some problems here first. I think we need to expand what we know, what we see. Honestly, for our own benefit. You should go way beyond. Today, Explained from Box is taking a summer sojourn on Mars.

Join us. Today, explained here with Lauren Grush, who has a very cool job of being a space reporter for Bloomberg. Lauren, we've spoken about Mars on this show before, but it feels like there's extra enthusiasm around Mars now. I mean, can you imagine how awesome it will be? To lead humanity into space. To have American astronauts. Plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond. For the first time?

Are we going to Mars? Mars is definitely on the menu. There's more of a push now than there was before to actually give government funding to Mars initiatives to send humans to the red planet. And where is that renewed push coming from? Is it the sitting president of the United States? United States? Yes. For those

who've been paying attention to Trump's speeches, he's definitely made quite a few mentions of Mars and sending humans to Mars within his term. And you're talking about the fact that he mentioned it in his second inaugural address, that indoor one. And we will pursue our manifest destiny

into the stars launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. Right. And not just his inaugural address, but also his winning speech. He had talked about Elon and SpaceX when he accepted winning the election. Oh, let me tell you, we have a new star. A star is born, Elon.

So space was certainly a theme of those early speeches and talks more so than I've seen from other presidents. And I want to talk to you about what Trump's trying to do and how much, Elon factors in. But before I do, we should give credit to prior presidents. This wasn't the first to mention Mars. Oh, absolutely not. For instance, back in 1989, President George H.W. Bush called for a return to the moon, followed by a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet, a manned mission to Mars. George W. Bush had proposed the Constellation Program, which was to send humans back to the moon. With the experience and knowledge gained on the moon,

we will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration, human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond. You know, most recently, under President Obama, he also called for a journey to Mars. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit, Mars, and return them safely to Earth. and a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it.

So what separates Trump from his predecessors, if anything? During Trump's first term, there was an event at the White House where astronauts from the Apollo 11 mission were there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of landing on the moon. And at the time, Trump mentioned that we were going back to the moon. but he also asked... Any way of going directly without landing on the moon? Is that a possibility?

And then during his first administration, there was also a very fun tweet where he had basically been watching one of the NASA executives on Fox, and then he tweeted out that... For all of the money that we are spending, NASA should not be talking about going to the moon. We did that. 50 years ago,

they should be focusing on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars, of which the moon is a part. Defense and science. Which confounded a bunch of people because he had actually signed that directive to send people back to the moon. So I'd say there were early signs that Trump was a Mars guy.

And then I think it kind of got sent into overdrive when he and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had that budding friendship during the election and the first part of his term. Elon! And so that kind of got a push because, as most people who follow Elon Musk know, the sole purpose of him creating SpaceX

has been to start a human settlement on Mars. Right. But the great irony of these two guys spearheading a program that sincerely intends to get us to Mars is that these two guys all, also trying to cut funding left and right from every department of the federal government. So how does that work when it comes to, say, NASA?

Yeah, so when it comes to the proposed budget for NASA, yes, it does look pretty bleak. The White House has proposed cutting the budget by around 24%, which, if enacted as is, would be the most significant. significant budget cut that NASA has pretty much had in its entire history. So get us to Mars with 24% less of your budget. Right. The key, though, is how they plan to allocate the money that they have proposed. So the majority of the cuts that are being proposed to NASA's budget at the moment, mostly target robotic science missions, things that don't actually require humans to be on board.

those are getting most of the targeted cuts. However, there has been proposed increases for the human exploration programs that would be sending humans back to the moon and then potentially onto Mars, the so-called moon-to-Mars program. And so the budget included $7 billion to continue initiatives to send humans back to the moon,

what's known as the Artemis program, And then there's an extra $1 billion that's being proposed to help jumpstart Mars exploration with humans. And so there's been a discussion of creating a commercial Mars landing competition and using existing contracts to develop a lander that could potentially land humans on Mars. Yeah, it's kind of funny to think about a billion dollars for Mars. when ICE just got like an extra $75 billion? How serious is this president all told at this point? Well, I think he's also mentioned it himself. You know, it's not his top priority.

No, there's a lot of interest in going to Mars. Is it number one on my hit list? No, it's not really. But it is something that would be, you know, it would be a great achievement. It would be a great thing if we could do it. And so I think that's a good indication of where his mind is at. And that's usually where most presidents are at when it comes to space policy.

But, yeah, I think a billion dollars is a very, very small investment when it's going to probably be one of the costliest endeavors that humanity ever does in the most complex feat that we ever achieve. When it comes to how people view, you know, the priorities for space exploration, you know, I think there is definitely. a positive view of things like NASA, you know, there's been polls that show that people favorably want to send humans back to the moon and onto Mars. However, I think there might be some debate in terms of what NASA's priorities should be in terms of how it's spending its money. So Pew Research polls often ask Americans what they think, you know, the space agency's priorities should be. And usually at the top of the list is monitoring the space around Earth for asteroids to make sure that they don't hit Earth, which I totally understand. I don't want to do

that either. Everyone saw Armageddon. Yeah, exactly. It's what we call a global killer. The end of mankind. And then sending humans back to the moon and to Mars often is at the bottom of the list in terms of priorities. Huh. So I think it's something that people think would be cool. and, you know, aren't necessarily opposed to, but whether or not that should be the highest priority for NASA and taxpayer money doesn't always reach the top of the list. Lauren Grush, reader at Bloomberg.com.

You can also pick up her book, The Six, about America's first women astronauts, It's being made into a movie. No big deal. Mars might not be our top priority, but it has been our obsession for well over a century. How we got there when today explained touches down. Support for today's show comes from Select Quote.

If the news these days makes you, Do you want to hide under your bed? Do you listen to our show from Under Your Bed? Let Noelle know, Noelle at King.com. Anyway, you're probably not alone if that's happening, but honestly, there are better ways to protect yourself than with an old box spring. Wow. Oh, they brought it back to the bed.

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slash explained today to get started. That is selectquote.com slash explained. I'm Jesse David Fox, scene writer at Vulture, and host of Goodwin, a show with the best interviews with your favorite comedians ever.

And this week on our podcast, stand-up comedian Bill Burr. Yes, that Bill Burr. My new perspectives, there's nothing wrong with being a billionaire, but if somebody is working 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month, and they can't make their rent,

you're not paying them enough money. Maybe you should just be worth 900 million. You can watch Good One every week at YouTube. or listen and wherever you get your podcast. New episodes drop on Thursdays. Have a good one. Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of channels, the show about what happens when tech and media get mashed up. And this week, I'm talking to comedy journalist Jesse David Fox about the comedy boom and why it's fueled by a combination of TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and podcasts. Which, as Jesse reminds us, should rhyme with stories we've heard before.

The thing about comedy, because it is the cheapest to produce art form, in my opinion, whenever new technology exists, they're the first ones there. That's this week on channels, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. My name is David Barron, and I'm the author of the book The Martians, the true story of an alien craze that captured turn of the century America. Okay, so you are the person to ask why we care so much about Mars. Oh, yeah. I mean, as a culture, Mars has really kind of seeped into our collective psyche. There's something special about Mars. There's a sense of kind of mystery and romance. And part of it just has to do with the physical reality of Mars,

but it's more than that. And the more than that goes back a little more than a century ago when the public truly believed that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. Before Martians were staples of science fiction, they were believed to be science fact. You could open the New York Times in 1906 and read, in all seriousness. The only logical result that can be reached, from these fundamental, these demonstrated and demonstrable facts is that

there is conscious, intelligent, organic life on Mars. The New York Times, December 9, 1906. The New York Times. Oh, and the Wall Street Journal in 1907. The Wall Street Journal. In 1907, the Wall Street Journal at the end of the year said the biggest news of the year was... The proof afforded by the end of the end of the year was... The proof afforded by the astronomical observations of the year

that conscious, intelligent human life exists upon the planet Mars. The Wall Street Journal, December 28, 1907. Wow, hard to believe. Where did it come from? Where did the science fact that there were indeed Martians come from? Well, it really all started in 1877. You have to cast your mind back in time. In the 19th century, all we knew about Mars was what we could see through earthbound telescopes.

But in 1877, when Mars came especially close to Earth, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Scaparrelli decided he was going to make a detailed map of Mars. And so night after night, he studied the planet, and he saw what he thought were oceans and continents. but he also saw this network of thin, exceptionally straight lines that he imagined were probably waterways of some kind. They may disappear wholly, or be nebulous, or indistinct, or be so strongly marked as a pen line.

What could all this mean? Well, in 1894, an American astronomer came along who said, yes, indeed, they were canals, not navigation canals, but irrigation canals, that the Martians were using to survive on a planet that was running out of water, that all of Mars's moisture was locked up in the polar ice caps at the North and South Poles, and for the Martians to survive, they had created this global network of irrigation canals. And that's what these lines supposedly were. And they would come and go with the seasons.

They tended to appear in the spring and summer, and they would fade in the fall and winter. and when Percival Lowell, who was the American astronomer, who believed they were irrigation canals, his theory was you're not actually seeing the water coming down from the poles, you're seeing the greening up of the vegetation along these irrigation canals. And so that's why they would green up in the spring and summer. You'd see them appear, and then they would fade in the fall and winter when the leaves presumably died off. A solution of their character suggests itself at once, to wit, that they are oases in the middle, of that desert, the canals are constructed for the express purpose of fertilizing the Oasis.

But this was also a time when people were really looking for kind of a hope in outer space. Life on earth in the late 19th century, at least in the West, there was a lot of reason for despair. There was anarchism in Europe. There were heads of state being assassinated. The idea was that the Martians were these advanced beings who were what we hopefully will become in the future. And the fact that they had this global network of irrigation canals meant that they had pulled together as a planet, that they must have evolved beyond war, beyond divisive politics. Because it looked like they were cooperating across a planet.

Exactly. Yeah. So there was a real desire to believe in the Martians. Hmm. Was there anyone out there saying, guys, just because we see some canals, it doesn't mean there's Martians? Was there any... Oh, absolutely. There was a big debate in the astronomical community.

And, in fact, the astronomical community divided into the canalists and the anti-canalists. Wow. There were these two warring camps, Percival Lowell, who was not only... I mean, he was a self-made astronomer. He was an extraordinarily wealthy and articulate human being. He came from a very prominent family in Massachusetts. And so he was able to write articles for the Atlantic Monthly, promoting his ideas. The evidence of handicraft, if such it be, points to a highly intelligent mind behind it.

Certainly, what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the race of life. The Atlantic Monthly, August 1895. He was out there giving lectures about the Martians, and so he was able to convince the public, even if there were a lot of astronomers, he couldn't convince. When was, like, peak Martian? When was peak obsession with Mars in this era? That was 1908 and 1909. By 1908, the idea was so widespread,

you had pastors in church sermonizing about the Martians and expressing to their congregations that we should emulate the Martians. We should look to our neighboring planet for the kind of society that we should be. We see there off in space marching by our side a neighbor world, which shows at a glance by impressive signs that it is morally unified and civilized beyond the dreams of our reformers.

Alexander Graham Bell, who of course invented the telephone, but he was convinced that the Martians were real. He saw no question that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. Nikola Tesla, a great inventor who, who came up with our modern system of generating and distributing electrical power, he actually was convinced that he picked up radio signals from Mars. And when he announced that to the world at the beginning of 1901, it just set off an absolute craze.

Martians invaded popular culture. They showed up on the vaudeville and Broadway stages. There was a popular show called a Yankee circus on Mars. You've had a Martian that became a comic character in the newspapers. They showed up in Tin Pan Alley songs. In fact, I have an original wax cylinder recording of a song called A Signal from Mars, a musical piece from back then. The Martians were just everywhere in popular culture. How did it fall apart?

So astronomers, by the 1910s, had pretty well convinced themselves that this whole canal theory was bunk. But the idea had so taken hold in the brains of the public that the idea of canals on Mars persisted until the 1950s and 60s. In 1938, you know, there was the famous War of the World's radio broadcast by Orson Wells. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight, are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.

And there were people who actually believed listening to the radio that the Martians were invading. Why did people believe that in 1938? Because only a generation or two before, there really was belief in the Martians. And I actually found a letter to Orson Wells that was written by one of those listeners who was fooled, who was angry about it.

And what she wrote was... Has not science proved that there's life on Mars through their observations? Canals are supposed to have been discerned, which prove that there is a possibility of there being on a higher level than ours in scientific development. And that was 1938. The idea that there was something strange there persisted well into the 1960s when NASA sent its first mariner spacecraft flying by Mars to take the first close-up pictures of the surface.

And there was not only no sign of a civilization, there was no sign of straight lines, it just looked like a dead world. The picture suggests that Mars has never had an ocean or substantial atmosphere. Thinking back to what you said earlier when people were first enchanted by this idea of Martians in the early 20th century, it was this idea that we could all work together that really captured imaginations. And it's still a nice idea. Do you think there's still a chance that we could get together as a human race to unite in an effort to get to Mars, to unite with common cause? It doesn't look that likely when you look around and see fights about every last thing. No, in fact, I think what will inspire the United States to get to Mars more than anything is competition. It's because the Chinese want to get there.

But there is still this dream of Mars as this techno-utopia, this place that will be better than Earth, that will be more egalitarian, where we can start over again. And I think the lesson of the Mars craze of 100 years ago, there are two lessons. On the one hand, it's a cautionary tale. We tend to project onto Mars what we hope is there, not what's really there. So, 100 years ago, we believed in the Martians because we wanted to believe that there was a better world next door.

Today, I think a lot of the talk about Mars is that we're going to create this sort of this utopia next door. That's going to be so difficult. I mean, technically difficult. And as you said, getting humans together to make this possible. Lord knows if that's ever going to happen. On the other hand, a lot of good came out of that craziness of 100 years ago. It was the excitement about Mars and the imagination that spurred the next generations to say, well, maybe we can actually go there.

And how would we do it? And they built the rockets. And they had the enthusiasm to actually go there. And I think the same is true today. And if we're going to get there, we might as well start now. David Barron, his book once again is called The Martians, the true story of an alien craze that captured Turn of the Century America. It drops on August 26th, and if you happen to be in Boulder, Colorado that day,

there'll be a party celebrating it at the library. Abyshae Artsy produced today's show, which was made in collaboration with Vox's future perfect team. Jolie Myers edited, Laura Bullard, check the facts. Patrick Boyd mixed, and we'll talk about what it's going to take, to get us to Mars next week on Today Explained.