Enlarge / President Barack Obama delivers a speech at the Operations and Checkout Building at NASA Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday, April 15, 2010. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Given how far NASA lies down the food chain of White House priorities, it’s always welcome when a president engages in a discussion of space policy. And that’s what President Obama did on Tuesday when he authored an op-ed that appeared on CNN.com and called for America to take a “giant leap” by sending humans to Mars in the 2030s.

There wasn’t much new in the president’s call to action, as it wasn’t all that different from a space policy speech he delivered in 2010. The president said then at Kennedy Space Center, “by the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow.” The similarity of his words, spoken six years apart, gives us a chance to judge his administration’s space policy, and the verdict is pretty straightforward: Obama has set NASA and the United States on a course to Mars.

It is an easy thing to say “We are going to Mars,” however, and a far more difficult thing to do it. In reality, Obama has put NASA on an unsustainable pathway to Mars given NASA’s current resources and approach, and he is leaving the hard work of actually getting to Mars to his successors. In other words, right now, NASA is on a journey to Mars in name only.