National Academies to NASA: Admit it, we want to go to Mars

Rendered image of a sunrise over the Tharsis Plateau and Olympus Mons.

Data: NASA / Art: Kees Veenenbos, www.space4case.com

Back in 2010, the bill authorizing funding for NASA directed the agency to contract for an analysis of its long-term plans for human spaceflight. Four years later, the organization that received the contract, the National Academies of Science (NAS), has finally released the report.

That may seem like a painful delay, but the NAS has, like many others, determined that NASA's budget really isn't able to support a long-term plan for exploration anyway, so there wasn't really a rush to figure out where we're going. And the report took a while because the experts organized by NAS stepped back from the immediate problem and looked at the question of what we hope to accomplish from having a manned space program in the first place.

It found there was no single, compelling reason for extending human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO). But, with the right destination, a collection of less than fully compelling reasons could add up to a strong justification for manned space flight. And that destination is Mars.