NASA engineer: Moon settlement comes before Mars in space exploration roadmap

On a Wednesday afternoon in São Paulo, as part of the city's innovation week, a NASA engineer named Ivair Gontijo sat down to talk about the future of human space exploration—and he had something to clarify about the order in which we'll leave Earth.

Gontijo works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's primary hub for robotic space missions, and he's spent years watching rovers land on distant planets. He knows the timescale of this work intimately. A single rover project, he explained to the audience gathered at FAAP, takes a decade from the moment it's approved until the moment it touches down on Mars. That's ten years of engineering, testing, problem-solving, and waiting. When the first images from Mars arrived back on Earth in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Gontijo was the one coordinating the moment those pictures came through. "We knew it had worked," he said, "but we hadn't actually seen anything yet." Then the images arrived, and suddenly the work became real in a way that numbers and timelines never quite could.

But Mars, Gontijo made clear, is not where humanity's next footsteps will land. Before we send people to the red planet, NASA intends to establish something more fundamental: a permanent human presence on the Moon. The Artemis program is the vehicle for this strategy. The Moon comes first. It's a staging ground, a testing ground, a place to learn how to live and work beyond Earth before attempting the far longer journey to Mars. This isn't a detour. It's the logical sequence.

Gontijo shared the stage with Marcelo Gleiser, an astrophysicist who has won the Templeton Prize and teaches at Dartmouth College. Gleiser raised a question that haunts any effort to bring samples back from Mars: contamination. If NASA succeeds in collecting Martian soil and rock and returning them to Earth, how do we ensure that terrestrial bacteria don't contaminate the samples and ruin the science? Gontijo explained that the answer lies in rigorous sterilization protocols—procedures so exacting that they have to account for every possible vector of contamination. It's a problem that sounds abstract until you realize what's at stake: the integrity of our first real look at whether life ever existed on another world.

What emerged across the conversation was a larger point about why any of this matters to people living their ordinary lives on Earth. Space exploration isn't separate from earthly concerns. The research that goes into these missions produces direct scientific advances in biology, physics, and climate science. Gontijo put it plainly: we are connected to the universe in ways we often forget. The iron in your blood, the red color of it, was synthesized in stars. The technology we develop to survive in space often finds its way back to solving problems here. The spinoffs are real.

Looking further ahead, Gontijo painted a vision that stretched across centuries. If technological progress continues at its current pace, humanity might eventually inhabit not just the Moon and Mars, but the frozen moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. We would become, in his phrase, a multiplanetary species—not confined to one world, but distributed across the solar system. It's a future that sounds like science fiction, but it emerges logically from the work being done now, one rover, one protocol, one mission at a time.