Perceptions of a Crewed Mission to Mars: Appraising Public and Industry Support

Perceptions of a Crewed Mission to Mars: Appraising Public and Industry Support Christian Yeara Herrero and João Souza Diaz Garcia Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU), Daytona Beach, FL, 32144, United States A human-crewed mission to Mars is a technically demanding and financially intensive undertaking that will require sustained public, political, and industrial commitment and support. This study uses large-scale text mining and sentiment analysis to assess the level of support from two key stakeholders in U.S. media discourse. The general public is one stakeholder, with general news outlets serving as a proxy for public perceptions; the other stakeholder is the industry, with aerospace trade press serving as a proxy for industry perceptions. A corpus of 25,921 articles published between January 2014 and September 2025 was collected via a news aggregation service and analyzed using the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) to compute net sentiment scores for each article. Descriptive statistics, Welch's corrected independent-samples t tests, effect size estimates, and a Mann–Whitney U test were applied to compare mean sentiment across outlet types and to assess robustness. Both groups expressed positive sentiment toward a crewed mission to Mars, with general news outlets reporting a mean score of 7.31 and trade press outlets a higher mean of 9.21. The between-group difference was statistically significant but had a small effect size. Reliability checks on the highest-volume outlets produced consistent results. Overall, the findings suggest that public and industry conversations are broadly aligned and positive, indicating a favorable media environment for long-term planning, strategic communication, and policy development supporting a future crewed Mars mission. Nomenclature API = Application Programming Interface N = number of articles S = net sentiment score per article M = mean sentiment score for a group SD = standard deviation of sentiment scores SE = standard error t = test statistic for the independent samples t-test U = Mann–Whitney U statistic p = probability value α = significance level d = Cohen’s d effect size g = Hedges’ g effect size VADER = Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner I. Introduction Since the early humans raised their gaze into the stars, a red marble dashing across the night sky has sparked wonder, awe, fear, and fascination. This mysterious crimson sphere was, and still is, Mars in its nightly pilgrimage through our skies. Over the past six decades, robotic missions have explored only a small portion of the planet, yet that exploration has remained remote and vicarious, without any human presence. Early spacecraft, such as Mariner 4, which performed the first close flyby of Mars in 1965, and Viking 1, which completed the first successful landing on another planet in 1976, demonstrated that Mars is both accessible and challenging, a destination for science and exploration [1,2]. Subsequent orbiters, landers, and rovers have built a detailed picture of Martian geology, climate, and surface conditions, including recent reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover detected potential biosignatures in ancient lakebed deposits [3]. While robotic explorers have expanded human knowledge, they are constrained by limited mobility, communication delays, and the difficulty of performing complex field science. A human-crewed mission to Mars would enable in situ decision-making, flexible and more in-depth scientific research, and the construction of surface infrastructure that current robotic systems cannot match. At the same time, such a mission would be technically demanding and financially intensive. It would require sustained investments in space transportation, long-duration life support, entry, descent, and landing systems, and surface operations over a multi-decade campaign. Government agencies and private companies have already demonstrated key enabling technologie