Maybe the quad’s red-tiled roofs had something to do with it, but the fifty aerospace experts meeting at Stanford this week just could not stop talking about the red planet.

A resolve to put humans on Mars was the result of a two-day workshop co-hosted by the space interest group the Planetary Society and the Stanford Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in spite of sharp criticism from NASA.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has been personally critical of the workshop and its goals, arguing, “the questions to be raised at this conference have [already] been asked and answered.”

The organizers of the conference did not have many kind words for Griffin and the current state of affairs in Cape Canaveral.

“Where NASA is today, in the implementation of the vision and the other things that it is chartered to do, has led us to a point where the nation’s space program is in peril,” said workshop organizer Scott Hubbard, consulting professor at Stanford’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and former director of NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory.

A major source of conflict between the workshop attendees and NASA lies with the future of human presence on the moon. While NASA has been pushing for a long-term outpost on the moon, the workshop group insisted that the moon only be used as a stepping stone to Mars.

“We really emphasized that [the moon] should be at most a research outpost that leads us on to Mars,” Hubbard said. “We had a consensus that Mars is up there as our next major destination for people.”

The workshop’s overwhelming desire to get to Mars over the moon has irked Griffin and NASA.

“I regard that as foolish, frankly,” Griffin told Aviation Week in response to pre-conference rumors that the workshop favored skipping the moon and heading straight to Mars. “The moon is three days and a quarter-million miles from home. When we return to the moon, we will have not been there for 50 years.”

Perhaps because of the heavy criticism levied by Griffin before the workshop, not all involved were as anti-moon as previously suggested.

“I came here as a Mars direct proponent, but I have changed my mind,” said workshop organizer Kathryn Thornton, a former astronaut. “The moon as a stepping point is a prudent decision. I didn’t recognize that before I came here.”

But drumming up political support for the space program, domestically and internationally, was the biggest reason the workshop organizers were so adamant about getting to Mars.

“It is my view that if you want to get political support, Mars must be there,” said Executive Director of The Planetary Society Louis Friedman, the third organizer of the workshop. “The French president, Sarkozy, called for an international collaboration on going to Mars for the space-faring nations. That’s remarkable.”

Instead of launching a Soviet-era competition, Friedman emphasized the need for cooperation with other space-faring nations.

“It was the consensus of the room that there is no space-race that should be or could be invoked as a reason to drive us to additional budget and additional speed in any of these programs,” Friedman said. “There is a strong geopolitical interest in nations working together.”

The political benefits of a collaborative mission to Mars were cited by the organizers as even more important than the scientific merits of the project.

“It was extraordinary that this group would agree that human exploration should be taken for national and international interests,” Hubbard said. “The group, which represented all these points of views, was remarkably cohesive. Even the scientists said that human exploration is what we do, science goes along.”

The group identified several factors contributing to the poor performance of President Bush’s 2004 vision to send people to the moon and then Mars, a project recently dubbed “Constellation.”

“There are three ways to fix this bind we’re in — you can change the schedule, you can change the budget or you can change the requirements,” Hubbard said. “You’re probably going to end up changing all three.”

Increasing NASA’s budget was a major topic of concern for the group.

“It is a historical fact that with a few exceptions NASA has been asked to do more with less for the last 20 years,” Hubbard said. “NASA’s budget is short on something of the order of 3 billion a year.”

The organizers, however, were careful to avoid explicitly demanding a big slice of the already bloated federal budget.

“The important point is that the consensus was [that] you’re not talking about doubling NASA’s budget to do everything that is mandated,” Hubbard said.

“NASA is 0.6 percent of the budget — what we recommend would not take it to 0.7 percent,” Friedman added.

NASA’s heavy criticism of the workshop virtually guarantees that its findings will not be implemented under the current administration.

Instead, the organizers hope to influence the presidential candidates and influence the next Administration’s space policy — aides to Senators Obama (D-IL) and Clinton (D-NY) were in attendance.

“We very carefully couched all of our output as consensus statements aimed at the next administration,” Hubbard said. “The next budget will be prepared by a new administration; we are trying very hard to not make this a critique, but a statement of where we are going from here.”