Why doesn't Thomas Pesquet want to go to Mars anymore?

Search engine suggestions often turn a nuance into a renunciation. The French astronaut has never announced that he was turning his back on Mars: he distinguishes between desire, which he has never denied, and feasibility, which he discusses as an engineer. Two ideas recur in his public statements: a trip with no planned return does not interest him, and the Mars timelines announced by some industry players strike him as optimistic.

A Mars flight has nothing in common with a stay in low orbit. The crew leaves the shelter of Earth's magnetic field and absorbs cosmic radiation for years, with no possibility of medical evacuation and a communication delay that rules out any real-time assistance. Celestial mechanics then requires waiting for the right planetary alignment before heading back, meaning a very long stay on site. Finally, masses far greater than anything that has reached the Martian surface so far must be landed, and water, oxygen, and return propellant must be produced or carried along. No agency has yet qualified these building blocks.

For a member of ESA's astronaut corps, the question is also contractual. European crewed spaceflight today focuses on the International Space Station, then on lunar missions and the station due to be assembled in orbit around the Moon; no crewed Mars programme is funded, either in Europe or elsewhere. Preferring the Moon is therefore not a disavowal of Mars, it is the only destination an active European can realistically envisage. Pesquet has, in fact, repeated that he would volunteer for a lunar flight.