President Obama Says We’re Going to Mars. If Only It Were That Easy

As far as historians know, John Quincy Adams never promised to get Americans to Mars. That hardly made him uncommon among U.S. Presidents—at least the first 32 of them. But all that changed with President Eisenhower, who pushed for the creation of NASA and got the country's great space bender going.

Ever since then, Mars has been squarely in America's sights, with most Presidents calling it out explicitly as a sort of 21st (and before that 20th) century extension of Manifest Destiny.