Ars Technica recently reported that NASA has issued a request for a proposal to private companies for commercial Mars missions. The space agency apparently intends to apply the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) approach to exploring Mars.

Taken to its logical conclusion, NASA could upend the historical model of going to Mars just as it has with going back to the moon.

The proposals that NASA is soliciting are modest enough. They consist of satellites and communications relays. The space agency is not contemplating commercial landers on Mars for the time being.

Still, the idea of commercializing Mars exploration will have profound implications for how NASA handles voyages beyond the Earth-Moon system, even up to the first human expeditions to the Red Planet.

NASA has always envisioned the first humans to Mars as an Apollo program writ large.

From the first crewed Mars expedition that would have taken place in the 1980s as proposed by the Space Task Group report released in 1969, to the Obama-era Journey to Mars, the first footsteps on the Red Planet would have been an all-government program. President George H.W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative and President........

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