Dr. Priya Ramanathan is a space policy scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In December 2062, three weeks after General Secretary Voskresensky’s Kuzmin reactor address, she published “Three Paths to Mars: Elegance, Neglect, and Brute Force” in Foreign Affairs — the essay that became the standard framing of the mid-2060s Mars question as not one race but three programmes pursuing the same destination by fundamentally incompatible methods.
Her analysis of the Soviet path (Kuzmin fusion propulsion, Zvezda base, Kaluga Yard) is notable for its jurisdictional rather than purely technical focus: she identifies Zvezda’s refusal to accede to the Shackleton Framework Agreement — answering to Moscow rather than UNOLA — as the defining structural feature of the Soviet Mars programme. Her treatment of the American path (NASA ALSO-2 shrinking to a single four-person increment per year, no crewed Mars transit vehicle since the mid-2040s) and the North Korean path (Paektu-Sŏn nuclear pulse propulsion in the Project Orion lineage) completed the tripartite framework.
Her closing paragraph — “Kuzmin’s reactor is the only one of the three approaches that represents an actual advance in physics… NASA’s approach is the absence of one, arrived at honestly, one budget cycle at a time… And Pyongyang’s approach works, if it works, for the same reason a lot of things in this century have worked” — is the essay’s most quoted passage.