Parallel Burn: A Synchronized Push to the Moon and Mars

The Artemis program, launched in 2019, was designed to return humans to the Moon as a stepping-stone for future Mars missions. Since then, NASA has demonstrated meaningful progress, including a successful uncrewed test flight (Artemis I) and ongoing development of Orion, the Space Launch System (SLS), and SpaceX's Human Landing System (HLS). However, Artemis has suffered from persistent delays and high costs, particularly with the SLS and Gateway.

The Trump administration has proposed a dramatic recalibration: retiring legacy architectures like SLS and Gateway; accelerating Mars mission timelines; and pivoting to a commercial-first approach. Central to this strategy is the development of a new “parallel path” Mars mission architecture.

This report examines how the parallel path can be achieved by recommending a Mars program architecture and assessing how Artemis can be adapted to serve as a technology testbed. It outlines which capabilities are ready, which require urgent investment, and how NASA can better leverage commercial innovation. Notably, this dual-path approach utilizes Artemis missions to validate essential systems (e.g., orbital refueling, transit habitats, and in-situ resource utilization) before deploying them in Mars operations. This integrated approach not only supports a more efficient Mars timeline but also avoids duplication of effort and spending.

The analysis finds that several technologies (e.g., re-entry systems, life support, and surface power) are mature or near-ready. Others, such as Mars entry/landing systems, deep space habitats, and surface mobility, require further development and testing, ideally through Artemis follow-on missions. This roadmap enables a cost-conscious, resilient, and phased approach to human space exploration beyond low Earth orbit.

While recent changes, such as the withdrawal of Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator, may refocus the administration towards a Moon-first approach, it does not materially impact the recommendation of this report. The analysis in this report supports a human Moon landing before any Martian attempts but accelerates the Martian timeline by rapidly integrating learnings from a lunar program into a dedicated Martian program.

Recommendation 1: Phase out the costly SLS and Orion in favor of leveraging other private sector reuseable rockets like SpaceX’s Starship, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, or RocketLab.  This report recommends that SLS should still perform critical Artemis Phase II and Phase III missions; however, it is a sunk-cost fallacy to continue SLS beyond Phase III if another private sector competitor can offer a more affordable and higher performing alternative.  This report will detail its recommendations on what each future Artemis phase should aim to achieve, what technologies will be tested, and how it will help with informing the parallel Mars path. 

Recommendation 2: Offload responsibility for Gateway to its international partners given that it has minimal synergies with Mars and is not critical to developing sustained lunar presence, which could be achieved with Starship or other competitors.  Instead of Gateway and Artemis IV, this report recommends developing a vehicle that can land humans and cargo on the Moon without HLS and can return to Earth.  This would require a vehicle like Starship, which is meant to carry out all phases of launch, landing, and relaunch.  

Recommendation 3: After Artemis IV, conduct multiple moon missions with crews aboard new vehicles to further build out a sustained presence on the Moon, while also rigorously testing technologies that will be required for missions to Mars.  It is critical to establish longer duration missions on the Moon to test technologies and methods that would be needed for a Mars mission in which astronauts would likely need to live on Mars for over a year, such as habitation modules.  

Recommendation 4: Simultaneous with moon missions, a new 4-mission Mars program should be established (Ares Missions) that rapidly leverages technology demonstrations from the lunar program: 1) Entry, Descent & Landing, 2) Mars Return, 3) Base Buildup, 4) Crewed Landing. This architecture ensures that new technologies can be rapidly prototyped through Lunar missions before being deployed on costly and long Mars missions, accelerating America’s timeline for boots on the Red Planet. Beyond their primary objective, these missions aim to create a sustained demand signal for the private sector that will encourage new technologies and capabilities for further deep-space exploration.