Bruce Jakosky, Scott Hubbard and their colleagues have given us a masterclass in pragmatic systems engineering. Their recent SpaceNews editorial titled “Laying the groundwork for the first human mission to Mars” rightly argues that integrating engineering, human health, science and planetary protection from “day one” is non-negotiable for a successful Mars mission. Their workshop dissected the hardware, the biology and the contamination risks with surgical precision.
Yet, as I read their urgent call for NASA to charter internal workshops and launch new imagers, a profound and unsettling silence was felt. A key component is entirely missing from their architecture: global governance, international cooperation and explicitly space ethics.
We cannot build a Mars mission in a United States-centric vacuum. To send humans to Mars and bring them back safely, we must go not as a nation, but as a planet.
The authors of that editorial treat Mars as an engineering problem for NASA to solve. But a $500 billion mission simply cannot — and should not — be bankrolled or executed by a single country. More importantly, the political, legal and moral fallout of a unilateral footprint on Mars would be catastrophic. While fretting over the technicalities of back-contamination, they ignore the elephant in the room: resource conflict and ethical implementation. Their scenario includes mining subsurface ice for fuel and life support. But who owns that ice? Under the current Outer Space Treaty, celestial bodies are the “province of all humankind.” Yet the Artemis Accords, while well-intentioned and important, are bilateral agreements that risk carving the moon to Mars pathways into geopolitical fiefdoms. If many countries (China, the EU, India and the U.S.) all target the same equatorial landing site for its resources, do we really think a NASA-internal “integration committee” will solve that standoff without a more inclusive multilateral dialogue?
