Three weeks after General Secretary Voskresensky’s address, MIT space policy scholar Dr. Priya Ramanathan published what became the standard framing of the mid-2060s Mars question: not one race, but three programmes pursuing the same destination by methods so different they barely constitute the same competition.
The Soviet Path: Elegance
Ramanathan’s account of Zvezda base is the essay’s most detailed section, and its central argument is jurisdictional. Zvezda — operational since 2033, and by 2062 the largest single settlement on the lunar surface by resident population, having grown past Guanghan over the preceding decade on the strength of the fusion research programme Kuzmin’s group required — has never formally acceded to the Shackleton Framework Agreement’s (2055) administrative provisions. Its governing council, the Zvezda Soviet, answers by charter to the Council of Ministers in Moscow; UNOLA maintains a two-person liaison office under a standing arrangement Ramanathan describes as “tolerated, not recognized” — present for coordination, without enforcement authority over Zvezda’s internal affairs, safety inspections, or the Kaluga Yard orbital shipyard where the Pobeda is under construction.
Ramanathan: “Zvezda is the clearest surviving example of a settlement that answers to a single terrestrial government rather than to the multilateral framework the rest of the Shackleton arc has, however unevenly, accepted. It is not that the Soviet Union rejects UNOLA’s legitimacy outright — its diplomats vote for UNOLA resolutions in Geneva. It is that Zvezda itself has simply never been asked, by Moscow, to behave as though those resolutions apply to it.”
The American Path: Neglect
NASA ALSO-2’s crew rotation had shrunk to a single four-person increment per year by 2060, and the agency’s FY2063 budget request was the smallest in real terms since before Apollo. NASA Associate Administrator Dr. Wendell Achebe said without editorializing: “We are not choosing not to go to Mars. We are choosing, every year, a slightly smaller version of staying at the Moon, and at some point those choices become the same choice.” No American company has proposed, let alone funded, a crewed Mars transit vehicle since the mid-2040s. Commercial launch providers have kept cislunar logistics functional; nobody is proposing more.
The North Korean Path: Brute Force
The essay’s most-discussed section concerns the Paektu-Sŏn programme, confirmed by 38 North imagery analysis in 2061 and obliquely acknowledged by Pyongyang the same year as “an independent path to the exploration of the fourth planet, requiring no reactor design assistance from any foreign power.” The Paektu-Sŏn vehicle is a nuclear pulse system in the Project Orion lineage — small fission charges detonated behind a pusher plate — a concept the US and USSR had both studied and abandoned in the 1960s on safety, treaty, and political grounds that North Korea, isolated from the postwar arms-control architecture, never observed.
Ramanathan’s framing: “It is, by any modern engineering standard, a crude solution, and it is crude in a specific way: it does not require Kuzmin’s eleven years of plasma physics, or even NASA’s decades of reactor materials science. It requires several hundred fission devices of a design North Korea has manufactured reliably since the 2000s, and a pusher plate, which is comparatively simple mechanical engineering. It substitutes a problem North Korea has already solved for a problem it has not.”
Pyongyang projects a Mars transit time of approximately one hundred days through sustained low-grade acceleration. Independent physicists called the figure “not physically impossible, and not something I would want to be aboard for,” citing unresolved crew shielding and structural fatigue questions.
The IAEA and a coalition of 41 states filed a formal protest with the Security Council in October 2061 — the first major test of the post-2052 Article 27 mechanism against a programme rather than a conflict. It produced no binding resolution, only a non-binding statement that Pyongyang’s mission declined to acknowledge.
The Closing
Ramanathan declines to pick a winner: “Kuzmin’s reactor is the only one of the three approaches that represents an actual advance in physics, and the only one built by a man who asked, on the record, for more time than he was given. NASA’s approach is not really an approach — it 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: because the country pursuing it had already paid, decades ago and for entirely different reasons, the one cost everyone else was still trying to avoid.”