Negative Reactions to the "Humans to Mars" Goal

Even before this presentation to the STG, Agnew’s call at the Apollo 11 launch for sending Americans to Mars had quickly produced a variety of negative reactions. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) said that he would rule out any such venture “until problems here on earth are solved.” He was joined in his criticism by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA).

Both Mansfield and especially Kennedy were already on record as opposing a high priority for post-Apollo space efforts. Even more telling was the skepti­cism of NASA’s traditional supporters. Senator Clinton Anderson (D-NM), chair of the Senate’s Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, on July 29 said “now is not the time to commit ourselves to the goal of a manned mission to Mars.” On August 11, Anderson’s counterpart in the House of Representatives, George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, called the setting of a Mars goal “premature,” suggesting that “five, perhaps ten years from now we may decide that it would be in the national interest to begin a carefully planned program extending over several years to send men to Mars.” The members of Congress were joined in their criticism by The New York Times, which as the Apollo H spacecraft was on its way to the Moon called discussion of a Mars mission “scientifically and technically. . . premature” and warned with some degree of hyperbole that “any forced-draft Martian analogue of the Apollo project would divert hundreds of billions of dollars that are more urgently required to meet the needs of men and women on earth.” The general public also was skeptical. In a nationwide poll taken just after the Apollo H mission, respondents were asked: “There has been much discussion about attempt­ing to land a man on the planet Mars. How would you feel about such an attempt—Would you favor or oppose the United States setting aside money for such a project?” Of those queried, 53 percent opposed a Mars mission; only 39 percent supported it. President Nixon was an avid consumer of poll data; this kind of response is likely to have caught his attention as he weighed his decisions on future space efforts.33

Even Paine, while still pushing for the kind of vigorous program he thought NASA should undertake, was by the time of the August 4 STG meeting sensing that commitment to an early mission to Mars was not in the cards. Using von Braun’s presentation material, he had made two speeches in the first days of August about a Mars mission. He described the speeches as “trial ballooning a little bit to see what kind of comment there would be to discussions of how a Mars mission could be carried out.” From these speeches “came the first rumblings of a public reaction, which was that those trial balloons were going to be shot down, and that Mars was not going to be the thing we were going to hang the program on, that the idea ‘after the Moon, Mars’ was too simplistic a view. We have to come up with a better program rationale than Jack Kennedy sent us to the Moon, Dick Nixon sent us to Mars.”34 Even so, Paine continued to push hard for a STG report that would recommend setting Mars missions during the 1980s as a national goal, primarily as a way for gaining support for NASA’s ambitious plans in the 1970s.