will humans travel to mars

How NASA is planning to get humans to Mars

The upcoming Artemis II mission is the first step in a long mission

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NASA recently announced the crew of its upcoming Artemis II mission, which will be the first manned trip to the moon since 1972. The launch is being billed as the first step toward getting humans to Mars , but how does NASA plan to do that? Here's everything you need to know:

How will NASA get to Mars?

The journey will start with the Artemis program, which has the goal of establishing the first long-term human outpost on the moon. From there, NASA says , they "will use what we learn on and around the moon to take the next giant leap: sending the first astronauts to Mars."

In 2022, NASA unveiled a rough outline for its first crewed Mars mission, identifying "50 points falling under four overarching categories of exploration, including transportation and habitation; moon and Mars infrastructure; operations; and science." These objectives "will inform our exploration plans at the moon and Mars for the next 20 years," said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.

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These objectives include , among other things, "[Developing] a transportation system that can deliver large surface elements from Earth to the Martian surface," as well as "[developing] Mars surface power sufficient for the initial human Mars demonstration mission," and building "entry, descent, and landing (EDL) systems capable of delivering crew and large cargo to the Martian surface."

However, there is still a ton of work to be done, as making a human trip to Mars "will be challenging," Space.com writes. The distance itself will play a major factor. Earth and Mars are an average of 140 million miles away from each other, and it would take about 500 days round-trip to get between the two planets, "assuming the funding and technology come into play at the right time," the outlet adds. A lack of gravity would also pose a significant problem, so crews may have to live in a pressurized cabin during the mission to help acclimatize to the change.

If all goes well — and that is a big "if" — Space.com notes that NASA "envisions using a habitat-like spacecraft to ferry crew members to the red planet, using a hybrid rocket stage (powered by both chemical and electrical propulsion)." The initial mission would be made by four people, with two making the journey to the Martian surface. But since you can't live on a desolate planet by yourself, NASA estimates the crew would need at least 25 tons of supplies awaiting them on Mars, which will have been delivered by a prior rover mission.

How will Artemis II help accomplish this goal?

The mission, set to launch toward the end of 2024, will be the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft, the vessel that has been tapped to send humans to Mars. Both the Orion and the Space Launch System (SLS) associated with it "are critical to NASA's exploration plans at the moon and beyond," the agency writes .

The Orion capsule is specifically designed to keep humans alive during months-long missions, and "will be equipped with advanced environmental control and life support systems designed for the demands of a deep space mission," per NASA . The first step in proving that these systems are viable will be a successful Artemis II mission, which CNN reports will go beyond the moon and "potentially further than any human has traveled in history."

The upcoming mission is only a flyby, and while humans will not land on the moon until Artemis III, operating on the lunar surface requires "systems that can reliably operate far from home, support the needs of human life, and still be light enough to launch," NASA writes. As a result, "exploration of the moon and Mars is intertwined," with the moon providing a platform to test "tools, instruments, and equipment that could be used on Mars ."

When does NASA plan to go to Mars?

That could depend on how fast things develop. In 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an order directing NASA to send humans to Mars by 2033, and former President Barack Obama had set a similar goal of a mission in the 2030s, CNET reports.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pushed that date back slightly, saying the agency's plan "is for humans to walk on Mars by 2040," per CNN . Nelson added that the goal was to apply "what we've learned living and operating on the moon and continue them out into the solar system."

President Biden's budget proposal for the next fiscal year included an allocation of $27 billion to NASA, of which $7.6 billion would be used for deep-space exploration. However, negotiations on a budget deal are ongoing between Congress and the White House, so it remains to be seen how much of these potential NASA funds will actually see the light of day.

Who will go?

That probably won't be decided for years to come. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in 2019 that "we could very well see the first person on Mars be a woman," per Space.com , but no specifics regarding an astronaut class were given. Artemis III is expected to land both the first woman and first person of color on the moon, so it won't come as much of a surprise if a similarly diverse group heads to the red planet. Elon Musk, who has worked alongside NASA via his spaceflight company SpaceX, has said he believes humans will be on Mars by 2029 at the latest, but he hasn't provided any names either.

For now, though, the question of who will be the first person to place their boots on the Martian surface remains a mystery.

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 Justin Klawans has worked as a staff writer at The Week since 2022. He began his career covering local news before joining Newsweek as a breaking news reporter, where he wrote about politics, national and global affairs, business, crime, sports, film, television and other Hollywood news. Justin has also freelanced for outlets including Collider and United Press International.  

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February 20, 2021

America has sent five rovers to Mars—when will humans follow?

by Issam Ahmed and Lucie Aubourg

With its impeccable landing on Thursday, NASA's Perseverance became the fifth rover to reach Mars—so when can we finally expect the long-held goal of a crewed expedition to materialize?

NASA's current Artemis program is billed as a "Moon to Mars" mission, and acting administrator Steve Jurczyk has reiterated his aspiration of "the mid-to-end of the 2030s" for American boots on the Red Planet.

But while the trip is technologically almost within grasp, experts say it's probably still decades out because of funding uncertainties.

Mars is hard

Wernher von Braun, the architect of the Apollo program, started work on a Mars mission right after the Moon landing in 1969, but the plan, like many after it, never got off the drawing board.

What makes it so hard? For a start, the sheer distance.

Astronauts bound for Mars will have to travel about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers), depending on where the two planets are relative to each other.

That means a trip that's many months long, where astronauts will face two major health risks: radiation and microgravity.

The former raises the lifetime chances of developing cancer while the latter decreases bone density and muscle mass.

If things go wrong, any problems will have to be solved on the planet itself.

'It's the details'

That said, scientists have learned plenty of lessons from astronauts' missions to the Moon and to space stations.

"We have demonstrated on Earth orbiting spacecraft the ability for astronauts to survive for a year and a half," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer for the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The general ideas of how to execute a Mars mission are in place, but "it's the details" that are lacking, he added.

One way to reduce the radiation exposure on the journey is getting there faster, said Laura Forczyk, the founder of space consulting firm Astralytical and a planetary scientist.

This could involve using nuclear thermal propulsion which produces far more thrust than the energy produced by traditional chemical rockets.

Another could be building a spacecraft with water containers strapped to it that absorb space radiation, said McDowell.

Once there, we'll need to find ways to breathe in the 95-percent carbon dioxide atmosphere. Perseverance has an instrument on board to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, as a technical demonstration.

Other solutions involve breaking down the ice at the planet's poles into oxygen and hydrogen, which will also fuel rockets.

Radiation will also be challenging on the planet, because of its ultra thin atmosphere and lack of a protective magnetosphere, so shelters will need to be well shielded, or even underground.

Risk tolerance

The feasibility also comes down to how much risk we are willing to tolerate, said G. Scott Hubbard, NASA's first Mars program director who's now at Stanford.

During the Shuttle era, said Hubbard, "the demand was that the astronauts face no more than three percent increased risk in death."

"They have now raised that—deep space missions are somewhere between 10 and 30 percent, depending on the mission, so NASA's taking a more aggressive or open posture," he added.

That could involve raising the permissible level of total radiation astronauts can be exposed to over their lifetimes, which NASA is also considering, said Forczyk.

Political will

The experts agreed the biggest hurdle is getting buy-in from the US president and Congress.

"If humanity as a species, specifically the American taxpayer, decides to put large amounts of money into it, we could be there by the 2030s," said McDowell.

He doesn't think that's on the cards, but said he would be surprised if it happened later than the 2040s, a conclusion shared by Forczyk.

President Joe Biden hasn't yet outlined his Mars vision, though his spokeswoman Jen Pskai said this month the Artemis program had the administration's "support."

Still, the agency is facing budget constraints and is not expected to meet its goal of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, which would also push back Mars.

SpaceX wildcard

Could NASA be beaten to it by SpaceX, the company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, who is targeting a first human mission in 2026?

Musk has been developing the next-generation Starship rocket for the purpose—though two prototypes blew up in spectacular fashion on their recent test runs.

These might look bad, but the risks SpaceX is able to take, and NASA as a government agency can't, gives it valuable data, argued Hubbard.

That could eventually give SpaceX an edge over NASA's chosen rocket, the troubled Space Launch System (SLS) which is beset by delays and cost overrun.

But not even one of the richest people in the world can foot the entire bill for Mars themselves.

Hubbard sees a public-private partnership as more likely, with SpaceX providing the transport and NASA solving the many other problems.

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How NASA and SpaceX Will Get People From Earth to Mars and Safely Back Again

By Chris James, The University of Queensland April 25, 2021

This artist’s concept depicts astronauts and human habitats on Mars. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover carries a number of technologies that could make Mars safer and easier to explore for humans. Credit: NASA

There are many things humanity must overcome before any return journey to Mars is launched.

The two major players are NASA and SpaceX , which work together intimately on missions to the International Space Station but have competing ideas of what a crewed Mars mission would look like.

Size matters

The biggest challenge (or constraint) is the mass of the payload (spacecraft, people, fuel, supplies, etc.) needed to make the journey.

We still talk about launching something into space being like launching its weight in gold.

The payload mass is usually just a small percentage of the total mass of the launch vehicle.

For example, the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon weighed 3,000 tonnes.

But it could launch only 140 tonnes (5% of its initial launch mass) to low Earth orbit, and 50 tonnes (less than 2% of its initial launch mass) to the Moon.

Mass constrains the size of a Mars spacecraft and what it can do in space. Every maneuver costs fuel to fire rocket motors, and this fuel must currently be carried into space on the spacecraft.

SpaceX’s plan is for its crewed Starship vehicle to be refueled in space by a separately launched fuel tanker. That means much more fuel can be carried into orbit than could be carried on a single launch.

Concept art of SpaceX’s Dragon landing on Mars. Credit: SpaceX

Time matters

Another challenge, intimately connected with fuel, is time.

Missions that send spacecraft with no crew to the outer planets often travel complex trajectories around the Sun. They use what are called gravity assist maneuvers to effectively slingshot around different planets to gain enough momentum to reach their target.

This saves a lot of fuel, but can result in missions that take years to reach their destinations. Clearly, this is something humans would not want to do.

Both Earth and Mars have (almost) circular orbits and a maneuver known as the Hohmann transfer is the most fuel-efficient way to travel between two planets. Basically, without going into too much detail, this is where a spacecraft does a single burn into an elliptical transfer orbit from one planet to the other.

A Hohmann transfer between Earth and Mars takes around 259 days (between eight and nine months) and is only possible approximately every two years due to the different orbits around the Sun of Earth and Mars.

A spacecraft could reach Mars in a shorter time (SpaceX is claiming six months) but — you guessed it — it would cost more fuel to do it that way.

Mars and Earth have few similarities. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Safe landing

Suppose our spacecraft and crew get to Mars. The next challenge is landing.

A spacecraft entering Earth is able to use the drag generated by interaction with the atmosphere to slow down. This allows the craft to land safely on the Earth’s surface (provided it can survive the related heating).

But the atmosphere on Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. That means less potential for drag, so it isn’t possible to land safely without some kind of aid.

Some missions have landed on airbags (such as NASA’s Pathfinder mission) while others have used thrusters (NASA’s Phoenix mission). The latter, once again, requires more fuel.

Life on Mars

A Martian day lasts 24 hours and 37 minutes but the similarities with Earth stop there.

The thin atmosphere on Mars means it can’t retain heat as well as Earth does, so life on Mars is characterized by large extremes in temperature during the day/night cycle.

Mars has a maximum temperature of 30℃ (86ºF), which sounds quite pleasant, but its minimum temperature is -140℃ (-220ºF), and its average temperature is -63℃ (-81ºF) . The average winter temperature at the Earth’s South Pole is about -49℃ (-56ºF) .

So we need to be very selective about where we choose to live on Mars and how we manage temperature during the night.

The gravity on Mars is 38% of Earth’s (so you’d feel lighter) but the air is principally carbon dioxide (CO₂) with several percent of nitrogen, so it’s completely unbreathable. We would need to build a climate-controlled place just to live there.

SpaceX plans to launch several cargo flights including critical infrastructure such as greenhouses, solar panels and — you guessed it — a fuel-production facility for return missions to Earth.

Life on Mars would be possible and several simulation trials have already been done on Earth to see how people would cope with such an existence.

This illustration shows NASA astronauts working on the surface of Mars. A helicopter similar to the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is airborne at left. Ingenuity is being carried aboard the Perseverance rover; it was recently deployed to the Martian surface to test whether future helicopters could accompany robotic and human missions. Credit: NASA

Return to Earth

The final challenge is the return journey and getting people safely back to Earth.

Apollo 11 entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 40,000km/h (25,000 mph), which is just below the velocity required to escape Earth’s orbit.

Spacecraft returning from Mars will have re-entry velocities from 47,000km/h to 54,000km/h (29,000 mph to 34,000 mph), depending on the orbit they use to arrive at Earth.

They could slow down into low orbit around Earth to around 28,800km/h (17,900 mph) before entering our atmosphere but — you guessed it — they’d need extra fuel to do that.

If they just barrel into the atmosphere, it will do all of the deceleration for them. We just need to make sure we don’t kill the astronauts with G-forces or burn them up due to excess heating.

These are just some of the challenges facing a Mars mission and all of the technological building blocks to achieve this are there. We just need to spend the time and the money and bring it all together.

And we need to return people safely back to Earth, mission accomplished. Credit: NASA

Written by Chris James, Lecturer, Centre for Hypersonics, The University of Queensland.

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17 comments on "how nasa and spacex will get people from earth to mars and safely back again".

The main issue being ignored is the need for artificial gravity in route. Without artificial gravity in route the astronauts will have to crawl out of the spaceship once on Mars. A fully functioning astronaut is one who has been conditioned to the gravity on Mars, or Earth, during the journey. Treadmills be damned, use a revolving capsule to live and work in during the trip. Go into microgravity as required but not all of the time.

One way to get to Mars faster would be to go towards the moon, swing around the moon. Then use the Earth for gravity assist to Mars. Might then have to wait for the right time for the position of the moon.

Why? Why go there? Won’t we just start messing with the climate there, ruining the environment there like we’re doing here?

Not to mention all of the stellar and cosmic radiation that the crew would likely absorb in transit and on the surface.

So Chris, has the ‘Cabin Fever’ problem been addressed? You do know what I mean by that don’t you? Astronauts all cooped up and nowhere to go; to get away from each other, take a space stroll, some solitude, alone time. Anything to keep from killing each other. Eh?

No mention of the radiation issues. Both in deep space and on Mars. You may survive the mission only to be riddled with cancer on your return.

However…

“Space is the natural habitat of humans. A planet, is after all, is a object in space.” – Frank Herbert

So….. where’s the Boring tunneler? Clearly Elon’s companies on Earth are just a trial run and funding source for Mars. They’ll have an entire subterranean city and solar+storage farm built before anyone steps foot on the Red Planet.

Wouldn’t it be more secure to live be on Mars underground? Elon Musk’s borer would make short work of it. Especially if it could be done remotely.

Improve earth.stop spoiling earth.Lets make earth heaven again

What about if we all stop for a moment and better think about how to save our own planet earth 🌎 which is suffering due to our negligence! Let’s make our own paradise and then if you want to leave in Jupiter! Go ahead and do it! But let’s save our own planet first! Stop destroying it.

What about if we all stop for a moment and better think about how to save our own planet earth 🌎 which is suffering due to our negligence! Let’s make our own paradise and then if you want to live in Jupiter! Go ahead and do it! But let’s save our own planet first! Stop destroying it. Spending millions of dollars in stupid stuff while our beautiful sea lions’ home have been destroy due to climate change! WHAT ABOUT IF WE THINK FIRST HOW WE CAN RECOVER OUR MOTHER EARTH 🌎 FIRST!!!

I think this will never happen as there is no signs in any religion discussing life expect this planet. This will not happen.

If humans are sent to Mars it should be with the intention of it being permanent. Not like it was going to the moon and then not going back now going on 50 plus years. Just make the commitment like Kennedy did and do it! Life’s a dance, you learn as you go.

I agree there are lots of issues with traveling to Mars

Well the climate change is because of Joe Biden so lets thank him for killing all our precious animals effected by this stupid Presidential decision on f’ing with our climate change acting like there ain’t nothing at risk with trying to change it. honestly Trump is our only saviour and I’m Mexican and had family taken by immigration but Trump has more potential than Biden ever will. Biden is hurting us Mexican more than Trump ever had. by taking the jobs we came to the US 🇺🇸 for in the first place climate change is not what we need. And our presence on Mars should and will help the chance at further life on Mars even though death is a possibility and will happen but it will also help transforming Mars to a liveable planet in the process.

There are so many issues going there. The landing might be one of the trickiest since they need a lot of supplies with them. Enough food (edible and healthy), oxygen and water. And also having enough fuel to go back. I do not see this happening any time soon.

why cracking heads for what is not necessary knowing that death will still come. pls use your time For God.

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Space exploration

Will we ever set foot on Mars?

By Martin Redfern

It’s fascinated us for centuries, inspiring astronomers, science fiction writers and more than a few star-gazing entrepreneurs who have plans to launch their own missions to Mars. But will we really ever set foot on the red planet where a year lasts 687 days?

Mars beckons us. The nearest, most Earth-like world to our own, it shines with a reddish glow of reflected sunlight in the night sky, calling out to our curiosity and spirit of adventure. It has an atmosphere (of sorts) and, at noon on a summer’s day, ground temperatures can reach 25˚C. A day lasts about 24 hours, as on Earth... but there the familiarity ends. That atmosphere is 95 per cent unbreathable carbon dioxide, at less than one per cent of the atmospheric pressure on Earth, so there’s little insulation and winter nights can be -140˚C. Mars is a tenth of the mass of Earth, so gravity has only a third of the pull we experience.

More on Space

The next frontier

After the Apollo Moon missions in the 1970s, sending astronauts to Mars seemed the next logical step, but it would be a ‘giant leap’, politically and financially. Space is big: while it took the Apollo astronauts only four days to reach the Moon, with present technology it would take about nine months to reach Mars. By the time the planets align favourably for a return, a complete mission might last two or three years. Throughout that time, the astronauts would need food, water and oxygen, plus protection from radiation.

At this point, the success rate for robot missions does not inspire confidence. Russia has launched 21 Mars rockets to date, including five unmanned landers, but only two orbiters completed their missions. The US has been more successful, losing only five out of 23 missions. But there has yet to be a return mission. Clearly some more work is needed before we can contemplate sending humans to Mars. But, sooner or later, we will go. With the political will, it could be within 20 years. And one thing that can be done in the meantime is test human psychological resilience for such a mission. The current record holder for the longest spaceflight is the Russian astronaut Valeri Polyakov, who returned to Earth from Mir in March 1995 after 437 days in space. Such a feat tests the human body’s ability to withstand the muscle and bone loss associated with zero gravity, and is a psychological test of will and endurance. And while contact with astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) is simple, as it takes only a fraction of a second to relay messages to and from Earth, radio signals take 20 minutes to reach Mars, so astronauts there will feel much more isolated, adding to the psychological stress of confinement with a small team.

These testing conditions have been simulated on Earth in order to evaluate their effect on people. Mars 500 was a Russian/European/Chinese project between 2007 and 2011 in an isolation facility in a Moscow car park. It culminated in a 520-day stay by six male volunteers. They claimed to be in good health throughout, but some avoided exercise and hid from their colleagues, and four had difficulty sleeping.

The latest simulation – Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, run for NASA by the University of Hawaii – took place in the Mars-like landscape of Hawaii, 2,500m up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano. A team of six emerged from a year in isolation there on 28 August 2016. They had been allowed out on simulated Mars walks, but only wearing a full space suit; the rest of the time they were living in cramped conditions in a 100sq m geodesic dome. The European Space Agency also performs regular evaluations of the crew at the remote Concordia station in Antarctica to assess the effects of confinement during the long, dark polar winter.

Mars Society president Robert Zubrin has a mission plan that, he believes, will be safer and cheaper than any other. It involves first launching an unmanned Earth Return Vehicle (ERV) that would land on Mars and use solar or nuclear power and imported hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen from Martian CO2. In other words, rocket fuel. This means that humans would set out only once they knew there would be a fuelled return vehicle waiting for them on Mars. The craft Mars Society president Robert Zubrin has a mission plan that, he believes, will be safer and cheaper than any other. It involves first launching an unmanned Earth Return Vehicle (ERV) that would land on Mars and use solar or nuclear power and imported hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen from Martian CO2. In other words, rocket fuel. This means that humans would set out only once they knew there would be a fuelled return vehicle waiting for them on Mars. The craft they fly out on, he says, would stay on Mars to provide future accommodation. A second ERV would be launched at the same time to provide back-up and, if all goes well, would be ready to bring the next team home two years later. In this way, a series of return trips would build up a number of living spaces on Mars for longer stays in the future. And because most of the fuel for the return trip would be made on Mars, Zubrin believes huge energy and cost savings could be made.

NASA’s own plans are more cautious. They involve moving long-duration human missions out from the ISS to orbit the Moon over the next 13 years, while continuing the scientific exploration of Mars; followed up with cargo delivery and an unmanned sample-return mission in the late 2020s. But, they say, it won’t be before the early 2030s that humans orbit Mars, let alone land on the planet. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, former PayPal entrepreneur and founder of SpaceX, has his own plans. He already has a NASA contract for delivering supplies to the ISS and hopes to be able to deliver cargo to Mars in 2018, in preparation for a human mission in the 2020s. ‘Mars is something we can do in our lifetimes,’ he says.

Xtra terrestrial

The SpaceX concept has been developed in some detail. Its present Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are already flying, delivering cargo to the ISS, with both sections returning to Earth for reuse. But the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) is much more ambitious. Whereas Falcon 9 uses nine Merlin rocket engines, the ITS will use 42 Raptor engines – the same size but with almost three times the thrust. These multiple engines mean that even if some of them failed, a mission could continue. The first test-firing of a Raptor engine went well in September 2016.

The launch rocket would be the most powerful ever built – taller than the Saturn V of the Apollo missions and massively more capable. It could launch 300 tons of cargo into orbit and return to land vertically on the launch pad, ready for reuse with minimal maintenance. As with the Mars Society plan, economies come from fuelling the outward craft in orbit and manufacturing fuel for the return trip on Mars itself. But Musk has his sights set on more than just cargo delivery; he has visions of a Mars colony, and a fleet of hundreds of such craft in the next century. He says he wants to ‘create a self-sustaining civilisation, not an outpost, so humans can become a multi-planetary species’. The orbits of Mars and Earth line up for an effective mission every 26 months, and Musk hopes to use them all from now on, starting with unmanned tests in 2018 and sending the first people to Mars in 2026. Funding might come from governments, private enterprise and even crowdfunding.

Then, far, far in the future, once there are first bases, then colonies, on Mars, comes the challenge of terraforming – making Mars like Earth. That might involve first boosting atmospheric pressure by melting polar carbon dioxide with nuclear power or solar reflectors, and adding to it with imported comets and asteroids. That would also raise temperatures and allow the return of liquid water. But it would need the protection of an artificial magnetic field. Then algae or cyanobacteria could start producing oxygen to make the atmosphere breathable.

The stuff of science fiction, yes, but as we’ve seen, so much of fiction becomes fact.

Featured photograph © Vadim Sadovski

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If we successfully land on Mars, could we live there?

It seems like everyone has Mars on the mind these days. NASA wants to send humans to the red planet by 2030, and SpaceX wants to get there even sooner, with plans to have people there by 2024.

Mars is a favorite theme in Hollywood, with movies like The Martian and this year’s Life exploring what we might find once we finally reach our celestial neighbor, but most of them aren’t addressing the biggest questions — once we get there, how will we survive long-term?

The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, the surface of the planet is too cold to sustain human life, and the planet’s gravity is a mere 38% of Earth’s. Plus, the atmosphere on Mars is equivalent to about 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. That makes getting to the surface tricky. How will NASA get there? How can we hope to survive against such odds?

Landing Ideas: Then and Now

Traveling to Mars is just the first leg of the journey — when Earth and Mars are closest to each other, the trip will take a mere 260 days. Once we get there, the challenge becomes landing on the planet’s surface. What type of landing system will get our astronauts and colonists safely to the surface?

Back in 2007, scientists considered four possible solutions to get astronauts to the surface. One idea was a Legged Landing System based off the Lunar Lander. This system could provide the option to both land and take off from the red planet. Secondly, the SLS System, or Sky-Crane Landing System, would use population systems to lower rovers and other equipment onto the surface. This system can unload cargo and take off again. The third design discussed was an Air Bag Landing System, which would rely on a rocket that cuts its thrust above the surface of the planet as well as an air bag for the equipment to land on. However, this wouldn’t be the best option for people. Lastly, scientists considered Touchdown Sensing. Equipment senses the surface and the landing site, and compensates accordingly.

Ten years later, scientists have other ideas on how to land manned missions to Mars. According to Richard (Rick) McGuire Davis, Jr., Assistant Director for Science and Exploration and co-leader of the Mars Human Landing Sites Study at NASA, “landers will have to dive deep into the Martian atmosphere and skirt closer to the surface than we have done in the past… [since] the Martian atmosphere is thickest near the surface.” When asked about the previous methods of technology mentioned above he said, “The lander is so heavy that many technologies will not work, such as airbags, sky-cranes and parachutes. In fact, to slow down, we will be heavily reliant on jets.” How heavy will the crewed missions be? This supersonic retro-propulsion technology is required to be able to deliver the “projected 20 metric ton” spacecraft to the surface of Mars. For comparison, the Curiosity rover was only 1 metric ton.

Once we make it to Mars, what comes next?

Habitation Built to Last

NASA is already considering what kind of habitation we’ll need to survive on the surface of Mars. Six companies began designing possible habitat prototypes in 2016, with completed prototypes expected in 24 months.

All these habitats will likely have a few things in common — they have to be self-sustaining, sealed against the thin atmosphere, and capable of supporting life for extended periods without support from Earth. To get an idea for what to expect, think about the ISS. “The International Space Station has really taught us a tremendous amount of what is needed in a deep space habitat,” said Davis. “We’ll need things like environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS), power systems, docking ports, [and] air locks so that crew can perform space walks to repair things that break or to add new capabilities.” Expect big robust equipment to travel across the stars to Mars during the first manned mission. Whatever the astronauts use must be up for the long journey.

Davis also posed an interesting question: how much space is needed for each crewmember? Could you imagine spending months in one location, surrounded by the same walls day in and day out? How far apart would they have to be to keep claustrophobia at bay? “In the days of the Space Shuttle, missions ran for 7-15 days, and there was not a lot of space for each crewmember. In a space station, where crewmembers are onboard for a much longer time (typically 6 months), we have found that crewmembers simply need more space.”  Based on this logic, it’s possible that habitable bases on Mars will require more square footage for inhabitants.

Science fiction also does a great job helping the public imagine what this future mission will look like. The recent film The Martian , portrayed the kind of habitats NASA is investigating for a Mars. Nine pieces of technology showcased in the movie are accurate to the kind of equipment astronauts on the planet will use.

Keeping the food and medicine supplies stocked on Mars is the best way to make a habitat self-sustaining, but with a thin atmosphere and reduced sunlight, it can be difficult to get anything to grow. Artificial leaves, designed to work in harsh conditions , could offer a solution for first aid.

These leaves, made of silicone rubber, can take a little bit of sunlight and turn it into enough power to fuel the necessary chemical reactions to make medicine and other compounds. Lead researcher Tim Noel, assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology said, “[The] device harvests solar energy and re-emits it to a wavelength region which is useful for the chemistry within the channels. [It has the ability to make the] reaction conditions…uniform wherever you are.”

In other words, it can use sunlight during the day on Mars, even though it is potentially exposed to more harmful UV rays. The channels inside the leaf are protected because your device can re-emit the energy it collects at a safer wavelength, which allows any chemical processes to take place. “This could be helpful when the irradiation on a certain planet is too energetic. [Since] light is basically everywhere … [theoretically] you can use that energy to start making the required molecules, whether they are pharmaceuticals, agrochemcials or solar fuels.”

Right now, methylene blue is being used as the photocatalyst to produce drugs. A catalyst’s job is to speed up a reaction, so the methylene blue allows the scientists to produce drugs faster than they could without it. Tim and his team are working hard now to make a diverse set of reactors. They hope to have the device onboard for the trip to Mars. Nature has given us the perfect tools to survive nearly anywhere. They just need a little bit of tweaking to survive off Earth.

Terraforming: It Won’t Be Quite Like the Movies at First

When you think of astronauts on Mars, what comes to mind? Did you picture a red planet turning green with time and continued human colonization? Unfortunately, those days are far in the future, if they even happen at all.  During the interview, Davis explained, “Terraforming has a connotation of humans making another planetary body, like Mars, Earth-like. But really, it’s about humans changing their environment to make it more supportive of our need.”  What does this mean?

The first few trips to Mars will only include the essentials. One of NASA’s first goals for its astronauts is to learn how to live on the planet. Since it differs greatly from Earth, survival is an important skill for astronauts to master. “The initial base will probably include a habitat and a science lab. [The inside of] these modules will be much like the space station, but there will be differences.” One example Davis gave included preventing toxic dust from getting into the habitat and lab. Microbial life is another threat to astronauts. Without more research on the planet, NASA can’t say for certain what dangers could threaten human life. With this in mind, all scientists involved with the Mars mission will take these and other potential risks under consideration.

After the NASA base is well established and the astronauts learned survival basics, things get more interesting. “Eventually, since it costs so much to send things from Earth, we will want to farm on Mars. Such a farm will really be green houses to protect the plants against the challenging Martian environment,” said Davis. Keep in mind the Martian soil isn’t like the soil on Earth.  It lacks organics “[the] rotting biological materials that plants need.” Fortunately, it contains the minerals they require. Davis said that his team calls this soil regolith and it will need to be cleansed of some toxic materials. And NASA scientists can get the job done.

Detoxified soil isn’t the only thing astronauts will need to grow plants. They’ll also need to utilize the water from Mar’s ice-capped poles. Davis said, “Many anticipate that the first human base will be located adjacent to these billion-year-old ice deposits, so that humans can easily produce the volumes of water that they will need to support water intensive activities like farming.” As of yet there is no word about which pole will be more beneficial, if there’s a difference at all.

Before speaking to Davis, I believed that future Martian farms would be equivalent to greenhouses here on Earth. It seemed logical. That’s how people control plant growth here. However, while the plants will need a higher pressure to grow, the plants “[don’t] have to be [at] an Earth-like pressure. In fact, we can pressurize the greenhouse with carbon dioxide, which is the main component of the Martian atmosphere.” This sounds like a win-win for both the scientists and the plants. Instead of the astronauts having to wear cumbersome space suits, they could “just wear lightweight oxygen masks” in the greenhouses. The key takeaway is that the planet doesn’t have to transform into Earth2.0. Maybe one day it will, but for the time being, it just has to function for NASA scientists to live and work.

Time Will Tell

Mars has captured the imagination of humans for decades. These plans are just the next step in the process of getting the Mars Mission from the ‘drawing room floor’ to a funded mission with a launch date. NASA isn’t the only ones with their eyes on Mars. Others are already coming up with their own plans for the red planet. Scientists and enthusiasts have speculated on everything from nuking the planet into habitability to creating a magnetic shield around the planet to encourage it to ‘grow’ its own atmosphere.

Mars is hopefully just our first step into the universe. Once we’ve dipped our toes out into the solar system, it will be easier to expand out into the asteroid belt and beyond. Mars’ low gravity provides the perfect platform for constructing and launching other deep space vehicles. After we’ve got that foothold, the only thing holding us back is our technology. As it is technology is the Achilles heel of the mission now. We might have a way to get to Mars before we have a means of safe exploration.

Those of us who have grown up watching the Apollo missions, space shuttles take-off and now the Falcon rockets climbing through the atmosphere likely won’t see Mars colonized in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t negate the wonder we all feel every time one of those rockets soars into the sky. It’s not just a rocket, but a source of inspiration for generations to come – one of which will step foot on Martian soil.

Megan Ray Nichols is a freelance science writer and the editor of Schooled By Science. When she isn’t writing, Megan enjoys hiking, swimming and going to the movies. She invites you to follow her on LinkedIn and subscribe to her blog here .

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Why we explore Mars—and what decades of missions have revealed

In the 1960s, humans set out to discover what the red planet has to teach us. Now, NASA is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the 2030s.

Mars has captivated humans since we first set eyes on it as a star-like object in the night sky. Early on, its reddish hue set the planet apart from its shimmering siblings, each compelling in its own way, but none other tracing a ruddy arc through Earth’s heavens. Then, in the late 1800s, telescopes first revealed a surface full of intriguing features—patterns and landforms that scientists at first wrongly ascribed to a bustling Martian civilization. Now, we know there are no artificial constructions on Mars. But we’ve also learned that, until 3.5 billion years ago, the dry, toxic planet we see today might have once been as habitable as Earth.

Since the 1960s, humans have set out to discover what Mars can teach us about how planets grow and evolve, and whether it has ever hosted alien life. So far, only uncrewed spacecraft have made the trip to the red planet, but that could soon change. NASA is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the 2030s—and several new missions are launching before then to push exploration forward. Here’s a look at why these journeys are so important—and what humans have learned about Mars through decades of exploration.

Why explore Mars

Over the last century, everything we’ve learned about Mars suggests that the planet was once quite capable of hosting ecosystems—and that it might still be an incubator for microbial life today.

Mars is the fourth rock from the sun, just after Earth. It is just a smidge more than half of Earth’s size , with gravity only 38 percent that of Earth’s. It takes longer than Earth to complete a full orbit around the sun—but it rotates around its axis at roughly the same speed. That’s why one year on Mars lasts for 687 Earth days , while a day on Mars is just 40 minutes longer than on Earth.

Despite its smaller size, the planet’s land area is also roughly equivalent to the surface area of Earth’s continents —meaning that, at least in theory, Mars has the same amount of habitable real estate. Unfortunately, the planet is now wrapped in a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and cannot support earthly life-forms. Methane gas also periodically appears in the atmosphere of this desiccated world, and the soil contains compounds that would be toxic to life as we know it. Although water does exist on Mars, it’s locked into the planet’s icy polar caps and buried, perhaps in abundance, beneath the Martian surface .

Today, when scientists scrutinize the Martian surface, they see features that are unquestionably the work of ancient, flowing liquids : branching streams, river valleys, basins, and deltas. Those observations suggest that the planet may have once had a vast ocean covering its northern hemisphere. Elsewhere, rainstorms soaked the landscape, lakes pooled, and rivers gushed, carving troughs into the terrain. It was also likely wrapped in a thick atmosphere capable of maintaining liquid water at Martian temperatures and pressures.

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Somewhere during Martian evolution, the planet went through a dramatic transformation, and a world that was once rather Earthlike became the dusty, dry husk we see today. The question now is, what happened? Where did those liquids go, and what happened to the Martian atmosphere ?

Exploring Mars helps scientists learn about momentous shifts in climate that can fundamentally alter planets. It also lets us look for biosignatures, signs that might reveal whether life was abundant in the planet’s past—and if it still exists on Mars today. And, the more we learn about Mars, the better equipped we’ll be to try to make a living there, someday in the future.

Past missions, major discoveries

Since the 1960s, humans have sent dozens of spacecraft to study Mars . Early missions were flybys, with spacecraft furiously snapping photos as they zoomed past. Later, probes pulled into orbit around Mars; more recently, landers and rovers have touched down on the surface.

But sending a spacecraft to Mars is hard , and landing on the planet is even harder. The thin Martian atmosphere makes descent tricky, and more than 60 percent of landing attempts have failed. So far, four space agencies—NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)—have put spacecraft in Martian orbit. With eight successful landings, the United States is the only country that has operated a craft on the planet’s surface. The United Arab Emirates and China might join that club if their recently launched Hope and Tianwen-1 missions reach the red planet safely in February 2021.

Early highlights of Mars missions include NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft , which swung by Mars in July 1965 and captured the first close-up images of this foreign world. In 1971, the Soviet space program sent the first spacecraft into Martian orbit. Called Mars 3 , it returned roughly eight months of observations about the planet's topography, atmosphere, weather, and geology. The mission also sent a lander to the surface, but it returned data for only about 20 seconds before going quiet.

Over the subsequent decades, orbiters returned far more detailed data on the planet's atmosphere and surface, and finally dispelled the notion, widely held by scientists since the late 1800s, that Martian canals were built by an alien civilization. They also revealed some truly dramatic features: the small world boasts the largest volcanoes in the solar system, and one of the largest canyons yet discovered—a chasm as long as the continental United States. Dust storms regularly sweep over its plains, and winds whip up localized dust devils.

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In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 became the first spacecraft to successfully operate on the planet’s surface, returning photos until 1982. They also conducted biological experiments on Martian soil that were designed to uncover signs of life in space—but their results were inconclusive , and scientists still disagree over how to interpret the data.

NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission , launched in 1996, put the first free-moving rover—called Sojourner—on the planet. Its successors include the rovers Spirit and Opportunity , which explored the planet for far longer than expected and returned more than 100,000 images before dust storms obliterated their solar panels in the 2010s.

Now, two NASA spacecraft are active on the Martian surface: InSight is probing the planet’s interior and it has already revealed that “ marsquakes” routinely rattle its surface . The Curiosity rover , launched in 2012, is also still wheeling around in Gale Crater, taking otherworldly selfies, and studying the rocks and sediments deposited in the crater’s ancient lakebed.

Several spacecraft are transmitting data from orbit: NASA’s MAVEN orbiter , Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter , and Mars Odyssey ; ESA’s Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter ; and India’s Mars Orbiter Mission .

Together, these missions have shown scientists that Mars is an active planet that is rich in the ingredients needed for life as we know it—water, organic carbon , and an energy source. Now, the question is: Did life ever evolve on Mars , and is it still around?

Future of Mars exploration

Once every 26 months , Earth and Mars are aligned in a way that minimizes travel times and expense , enabling spacecraft to make the interplanetary journey in roughly half a year. Earth’s space agencies tend to launch probes during these conjunctions, the most recent of which happens in the summer of 2020. Three countries are sending spacecraft to Mars during this window: The United Arab Emirates, which launched its Hope spacecraft on July 20 and will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere and weather patterns; China, which launched its Tianwen-1 on July 23 , and the United States, currently targeting July 30 for the launch of its Perseverance rover .

Perseverance is a large, six-wheeled rover equipped with a suite of sophisticated instruments. Its target is Jezero Crater, site of an ancient river delta , and a likely location for ancient life-forms to have thrived. Once on the surface, Perseverance will study Martian climate and weather, test technologies that could help humans survive on Mars, and collect samples from dozens of rocks that will eventually be brought to Earth. Among its goals is helping to determine whether Mars was—or is—inhabited, making it a true life-finding Mars mission.

All of the robotic activity is, of course, laying the groundwork for sending humans to the next world over. NASA is targeting the 2030s as a reasonable timeframe for setting the first boots on Mars, and is developing a space capsule, Orion , that will be able to ferry humans to the moon and beyond.

Private spaceflight companies such as SpaceX are also getting into the Mars game. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said that humanity must become “ a multiplanetary species ” if we are to survive, and he is working on a plan that could see a million people living on Mars before the end of this century.

Soon, in one way or another, humanity may finally know whether our neighboring planet ever hosted life—and whether there’s a future for our species on another world.

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SpaceX's 1st crewed Mars mission could launch as early as 2024, Elon Musk says

"If we get lucky."

SpaceX's first crewed mission to Mars could be just four years away.

Company founder and CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Dec. 1) that he's "highly confident" SpaceX will launch people toward the Red Planet in 2026, adding that the milestone could come as early as 2024 "if we get lucky."

Musk made the remarks during a webcast interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German media company Axel Springer SE. The two spoke at Axel Springer's Berlin headquarters as part of a ceremony honoring Musk, who won this year's Axel Springer Award .

"And then we want to try to send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years," Musk told Döpfner. (The two-year target intervals are dictated by orbital dynamics: Earth and Mars align favorably for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months.)

Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing vehicles in images

The vehicle that will make these Mars trips is the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) Starship, which will launch from Earth atop a giant rocket known as Super Heavy. Both of these craft will be fully and rapidly reusable; Super Heavy will return to Earth for vertical touchdowns shortly after liftoff, and Starship will be able to fly from Earth orbit to Mars and back again many times, Musk has said. (Starship will be powerful enough to launch itself off both Mars and the moon, which have much weaker gravitational pulls than that of Earth.)

SpaceX is iterating toward the final Starship via a series of prototypes, the latest of which, SN8 ("Serial No. 8"), is gearing up for a big test flight. SpaceX aims to launch the three-engine SN8 to a target altitude of 9 miles (15 kilometers) this week, Musk said recently . 

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That's far higher than any other Starship prototype has flown to date. Three single-engine variants — Starhopper, SN5 and SN6 — reached a maximum altitude of about 500 feet (150 meters) on their test flights, which occurred last summer and this past August and September, respectively.

The final Starship will sport six of SpaceX's powerful new Raptor engines, Musk has said. Super Heavy will sport about 30 Raptors.

Musk has long stressed that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help humanity become a multiplanet species . He reiterated that goal during his conversation with Döpfner and also doubled down on another previously stated desire: He wants to die on Mars .

"Just not on impact," Musk joked. 

Tuesday's discussion was wide-ranging, touching on a number of Musk's ventures and passions. For example, Musk expressed confidence that his electric-car company, Tesla, will introduce a fully autonomous driving capability next year (though he stressed that it's unclear when regulators will approve fully autonomous driving).  

The annual Axel Springer Award "is given to outstanding personalities who are particularly innovative, and who generate and change markets, influence culture and at the same time face up to their responsibility to society," company representatives wrote in a description of the award . It's a "prestige prize without prize money," the description adds.

Previous Axel Springer Award winners include Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who also runs the spaceflight company Blue Origin (2018), World Wide Web inventor Timothy Berners-Lee (2017) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (2016).

Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with  Space.com  and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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Elon Musk Swears He'll Send Humans to Mars by 2026. That Seems Impossible.

But if anyone can make it happen...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us?

• This timeline has Musk taking off for Mars when NASA is just reaching the moon again . (Maybe.)
• We can't ignore the countless unanswered questions about Mars travel and habitation.

At an awards ceremony this week, Elon Musk said he believes he can start sending humans to Mars with SpaceX by 2026 at the latest, or 2024 “if we get lucky.”

🚀 You love Elon Musk's crazy ideas. So do we. Let's nerd out over them together.

Was Musk talking up his timeline to a group that just awarded him for innovation (the SpaceX founder won this year's Axel Springer Award ), or does he actually believe this? It's hard to say. But the timeline is, to put it mildly, unlikely.

SpaceX has partnered with NASA on several projects, including making a customized lunar shuttle to travel between the moon’s orbit and surface for the Artemis series of missions. NASA’s Artemis program wants to put people on the m oon by 2024 , and even that mission’s plans are called “an aggressive timeline” by NASA administrators .

NASA says the moon goal is critical to the next phase of traveling to Mars, but the agency hasn’t set any timeline for that phase. The 2024 goal was imposed from outside by Vice President Mike Pence (it was originally 2028).

In the meantime, the rocket Musk is relying on to get to Mars as soon as 2024 is about to complete a big test . Later this week, SpaceX is set to launch SN8, its latest Starship prototype , to a target altitude of 9 miles (15 kilometers)—easily the highest a Starship has ever flown . SN8 has three engines, and that's still 27 fewer than the 30 engines that will power the Starship that Musk ultimately plans to send to Mars.

Even with a capable spacecraft in hand, a lot of the problems with a Mars journey haven't even come close to being solved. The trip to Mars takes six months on Musk’s planned timeline, meaning anyone inside the ship will be exposed to cosmic radiation for almost that entire time.

Blocking—or even reducing—that radiation would mean adding weight to an already unproven craft on an untried human journey. Volunteers have spent that much time in simulated flight conditions, but no real people have actually made the real and dangerous journey.

🔭 The Best Telescopes for Seeing Mars and Beyond

Gskyer AZ Astronomical Refractor Telescope

With more than 19,000 reviews on Amazon and a 4.4/5 rating, it's not hard to see why the Gskyer telescope is a fan favorite. This option features a 70mm aperture and fully coated optimal lenses to offer a crisp, clear view of the night's sky. Tech savvy stargazers will appreciate wireless remote, smart phone adapter, and the additional Barlow lens that triples the magnification of each eye piece. Thanks to its adjustable, aluminum alloy tripod, this telescope is suitable for every member of the family.

HEXEUM HEXEUM Telescope 70500

If you're looking for a telescope for kids, or if you're a beginner, this HEXEUM model is a high-quality choice. It comes with an 70mm aperture, plus two eyepieces at 10mm and 25mm each. You'll particularly love that this telescope comes with a phone adapter, which means you can attach your phone to the eyepiece and finally get an amazing photo of the night sky.

ECOOPRO 70mm Astronomy Refractor Telescope

Easy to set up and compact, this telescope comes with a 70mm aperture, two eye pieces, a finder scope, and a tripod. Perfect for astrology or even bird watching, you can set it up on a tabletop with the tripod set to 15 inches, or extend the legs as long as 47 inches. It also comes with a map of the moon and stars for easy reference.

ESSLNB ESSLNB Kids' Telescope

ESSLNB's telescope is a great choice for kids or beginners. It features a built-in reversing lens, which means that none of the images you see will ever be upside down. Its 70mm lens gives you a wide range of vision, and the telescope's brightness makes everything easy to see. Plus, you can connect your phone and finally take a decent picture of the night sky.

Emarth Telescope

Beginner stargazers will find a lot to love about Emarth's Telescope. Using it is easy: All you need to do is point the tube in the direction of the desired object and take a gander. With two high-quality eyepieces (70mm and 360mm) that provide low- and high-power views of celestial objects, you'll be able to satisfy your stargazing wishes with ease.

NASA Lunar Telescope for Kids

Consider NASA Lunar Telescope the perfect option for avid adventurers or kids who are yearning to spontaneously stargaze. Clocking in at a little over two pounds, this option is lightweight enough to stow in the trunk of your car. This telescope features a multi-coated, extra-low dispersion optical glass to ensure you'll score a clear, perfectly contrasted view of the night's sky.

Celestron 70mm Refractor Telescope

Great for beginners (and priced accordingly), this option features a wide, 70 millimeter aperture that will make stars and constellations appear bright and clear. With two eyepieces—10mm to 20mm—it's suitable for a range of stargazing experiences. Download the SkyPortal app to help you find specific sites, or use Celestron's Starry Night software—both are free. To top it off, the telescope comes with a tripod, a finder scope, and a backpack to carry it all.

So let’s say humans make the six-month trip with all the supplies they need, touch down on Mars, then immediately return to Earth. The ship will either need to have the full round trip worth of supplies or be able to refuel and restock using some kind of technology to recycle or harvest resources from what Mars has available.

This is easy in the world of science fiction, where creators have posited “matter recyclers” that make extremely clean, reusable atoms. In the real world, however, we can barely recycle plastic with efficiency.

And Musk plans for these people to stay on Mars , not just travel. That means finding safe shelter that, again, protects the Mars settlers from cosmic radiation. They’ll need clean water, a way to produce energy, a very secure air supply and containment, and much more.

Musk has suggested using a nuclear reactor at several points in this journey, from on the ship itself to shorten the trip, to on the Red Planet’s surface as a generator. That, too, could have radioactive consequences for the settlers—but without it, it’s even harder to imagine how this situation can be made livable.

Musk seems to be relying on a combination of comparative optimism and techno-optimism. “Comparative optimism can be defined as a self-serving, asymmetric judgment of the future,” researchers explain .

The term has come up in 2020 as people decide to go out without masks, have social gatherings that are against public health guidelines, and engage in other behaviors that fall under a general umbrella of “we’ll figure it out, it will be fine.”

It’s hard to imagine how the many and major obstacles between today and a human Mars flight will be resolved by 2026. But then again, Musk has proven everyone wrong before.

Now Watch This:

Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She's also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all. 

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Want to travel to Mars? Here’s how long the trip could take.

Nuclear engines or not, you're gonna need a lot of PTO to get to the Red Planet.

By Eva Botkin-Kowacki | Published Feb 21, 2023 6:00 AM EST

Despite what Star Trek’s warp-speed journeys would have us believe, interplanetary travel is quite the hike. Take getting to Mars. Probes sent to the Red Planet by NASA and other space agencies spend about seven months in space before they arrive at their destination. A trip for humans would probably be longer—likely on the timescale of a few years. 

There are a lot of things that a human crew needs to survive that robots don’t, such as food, water, oxygen, and enough supplies for a return—the weight of which can slow down a spacecraft. With current technology, NASA calculations estimate a crewed mission to Mars and back, plus time on the surface , could take somewhere between two and three years. “Three years we know for sure is feasible,” says Michelle Rucker, who leads NASA’s Mars Architecture Team in the agency’s ​​ Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate .

But NASA aims to shorten that timeline, in part because it would make a Mars mission safer for humans—we still don’t know how well the human body can withstand the environment of space for an extended period. (The record for most consecutive days in space is 437.) The agency is investing in projects to develop new propulsion technologies that might enable more expeditious space travel. 

A crooked path to Mars

In a science-fictional world, a spacecraft would blast off Earth and head directly to Mars. That trajectory would certainly make for a speedier trip. But real space travel is a lot more complicated than going from point A to point B.

“If you had all the thrust you want, you could ignore the fact that there happens to be gravity in our universe and just plow all the way through the solar system,” says Mason Peck , a professor of astronautics at Cornell University who served as NASA’s chief technologist from 2011 to 2013. “But that’s not a scenario that’s possible right now.”

Such a direct trajectory has several challenges. As a spacecraft lifts off Earth, it needs to escape the planet’s gravitational pull, which requires quite a bit of thrust. Then, in space, the force of gravity from Earth, Mars, and the sun pulls the spacecraft in different directions. When it is far enough away, it will settle into orbit around the sun. Bucking that gravity requires fuel-intensive maneuvers.

[Related: Signs of past chemical reactions detected on Mars ]

The second challenge is that the planets do not stay in a fixed place. They orbit the sun, each at its own rate: Mars will not be at the same distance from Earth when the spacecraft launches as the Red Planet will be, say, seven months later. 

As such, the most fuel-efficient route to Mars follows an elliptical orbit around the sun, Peck says. Just one-way, that route covers hundreds of millions of miles and takes over half a year, at best. 

But designing a crewed mission to the Red Planet isn’t just about figuring out how fast a spacecraft can get there and back. It’s about “balance,” says Patrick Chai, in-space propulsion lead for NASA’s Mars Architecture Team . “There are a whole bunch of decisions we have to make in terms of how we optimize for certain things. Where do we trade performance for time?” Chai says. “If you just look at one single metric, you can end up making decisions that are really great for that particular metric, but can be problematic in other areas.”

One major trade-off for speed has to do with how much stuff is on board. With current technology, every maneuver to shorten the trip to Mars requires more fuel. 

If you drive a car, you know that in order to accelerate the vehicle, you step on the gas. The same is true in a spacecraft, except that braking and turning also use fuel. To slow down, for instance, a spacecraft fires its thrusters in the opposite direction to its forward motion.

But there are no gas stations in space. More fuel means more mass on board. And more mass requires more fuel to propel that extra mass through the air… and so on. Trimming a round-trip mission down to two years is when this trade-off starts to become exponentially less efficient, Rucker says. At least, that’s with current technology.

New tech to speed up the trip

NASA would like to be able to significantly reduce that timeline. In 2018, the space agency requested proposals for technological systems that could enable small, uncrewed missions to fly from Earth to Mars in 45 days or less . 

At the time, the proposals didn’t gain much traction. But the challenge inspired engineers to design innovative propulsion systems that don’t yet exist. And now, NASA has begun to fund the development of leading contenders. In particular, the space agency has its eye on nuclear propulsion.

Spacecraft currently rely largely on chemical propulsion. “You basically take an oxidizer and a fuel, combine them, and they combust, and that generates heat. You accelerate that heated product through a nozzle to generate thrust,” explains NASA’s Chai. 

Engineers have known for decades that a nuclear-based system could generate more thrust using a significantly smaller amount of fuel than a chemical rocket. They just haven’t built one yet—though that might be about to change.

One of NASA’s nuclear investment projects aims to integrate a nuclear thermal engine into an experimental spacecraft. The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations , or DRACO, program, is a collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and aims to demonstrate the resulting technology as soon as 2027 .

[Related: Microbes could help us make rocket fuel on Mars ]

The speediest trip to Mars might come from another project, however. This concept, the brainchild of researchers at the University of Florida and supported by a NASA grant, seeks to achieve what Chai calls the “holy grail” of nuclear propulsion: a combination system that pairs nuclear thermal propulsion with an electric kind. 

“We did some preliminary analysis, and it seems like we can get pretty close to [45 days],” says the leader of that project, Ryan Gosse, a professor of practice in the University of Florida’s in-house applied research program, Florida Applied Research in Engineering (FLARE). One caveat: That timeline is for a light payload and no humans on board. However, if the project is successful, the technology could potentially be scaled up in the future to support a crewed mission.

There are two types of nuclear propulsion, and both have their merits. Nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses heat, can generate a lot of thrust quickly from a small amount of fuel. Nuclear electric propulsion, which uses charged particles, is even more fuel-efficient but generates thrust much more slowly.

“While you’re in deep space, the electric propulsion is really great because you have all the time in the world to thrust. The efficiency, the miles per gallon, is far, far superior than the high-thrust,” Chai says. “But when you’re around planets, you want that oomph to get you out of the gravity well.”

The challenge, however, is that both technologies currently require different types of nuclear reactors, says Gosse. And that means two separate systems, which reduces the efficiency of having a nuclear propulsion system. So Gosse and his team are working to develop technology that can use the one system to generate both types of propulsion.

NASA’s Mars architecture team is also working with a bimodal concept that uses a chemical propulsion system to maneuver around planets and solar-powered electric propulsion to do the thrusting in deep space.

“What we are developing is different tools for the toolbox,” says NASA’s Rucker. “One tool isn’t going to be enough to do all of the exploration that we want to do. So we’re working on all of these.”

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Table of Contents

When it comes to our solar system, t here aren’t a lot of great options for humans to live . Currently, humans can only live on Earth because no other planet in the solar system can support life as people know it on Earth. The other planets, including Venus, Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter, are either too hot or too cold and are mostly made up of toxic gases that would kill any human that may land there.

Will humans ever set foot on Mars?

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and it appears faintly reddish when viewed in the night sky. It is for this reason that it is referred to as the Red Planet. There are many similarities between Earth and Mars. Scientists think that Mars would be the easiest planet outside Earth for humans to live on , when compared to the other planets. The question then is: If Earth and Mars are similar, why haven’t humans set foot on Mars yet?

The Moon is the farthest place that humans have gone beyond the Earth. NASA has, however, been able to deliver a spacecraft , called New Horizons, to explore as far as Pluto. Many spacecrafts have landed on the surface of Mars, but no person has ever landed there. Instead, the topic of humans visiting Mars has been part of science fiction since the 1880s.

The possibility of humans setting foot on Mars has been a fascinating subject. Private and public space exploration companies have long wanted to launch their own missions to Mars. Various nations and organizations, including NASA, Russia, Boeing, and SpaceX, have intentions to send humans to Mars.

When can the first humans land on Mars?

Several timelines for when the first humans will land on Mars have been planned. NASA is planning to land humans on Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s, but Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, proposed that humanity could reach the Red Planet before the end of the 2020s. Responding to one twitter user who asked him when humans will be able to go to the Red Planet, Elon Musk said, “I must admit to being congenitally optimistic (SpaceX & Tesla wouldn’t exist otherwise), but I think 5 years is possible and 10 years is highly likely.”

Some challenges need to be overcome before humans can set foot on Mars

While the possibility of humans landing on Mars is exciting for many space enthusiasts, making this vision a reality will be challenging. Many obstacles would need to be overcome before sending humans to Mars, or before humans could start living on Mars and call it home.

The first challenge that astronauts need to bear in mind is that the trip to Mars cannot be accomplished in just a few days. NASA has calculated that it can take about nine months to reach Mars with the current technology, and a round-trip, including the time spent on Mars, might take astronauts between two to three years.

The second challenge is that there are a lot of supplies that astronauts will need to survive on their journey and stay on Mars. They will need enough food, water, and oxygen, and also protection from radiation. Currently, there is no technology that astronauts can use to harvest resources for water, fuel, and building materials from Mars. They will have to take everything they need from Earth. But if they have to carry too much supplies, the weight of the supplies could slow down their spacecraft.

Readability: 60.2

Flesch Kincaid Grade Level: 9.7

Astronaut: a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft.

NASA: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research

Spacecraft: is a vehicle or machine designed to fly in outer space.

Botkin-Kowacki, E. Published February 21, 2023. Want to travel to Mars? Here’s how long the trip could take. https://www.popsci.com/science/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars/

Kundu, K. When Are Humans Going To Mars? Here’s Everything We Know. Published March 18, 2022. https://screenrant.com/when-are-humans-going-to-mars-nasa-spacex/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars#:~:text=NASA%20is%20under%20presidential%20orders,bricks%20from%20pressurized%20Martian%20soil

Staedter, T. Published November 8, 2020. Mars Exploration? 3 Problems Science Needs to Solve First. https://now.northropgrumman.com/mars-exploration-3-problems-science-needs-to-solve-first/#:~:text=Accessing%20water%2C%20dealing%20with%20a,the%20biggest%20hurdles%20to%20overcome .

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Rock sampled by nasa’s perseverance embodies why rover came to mars.

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Edge of the Crater’s Rim

More about the mission, news media contacts.

The 24th sample taken by the six-wheeled scientist offers new clues about Jezero Crater and the lake it may have once held.

Analysis by instruments aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover indicate that the latest rock core taken by the rover was awash in water for an extended period of time in the distant past, perhaps as part of an ancient Martian beach. Collected on March 11, the sample is the rover’s 24th – a tally that includes 21 sample tubes filled with rock cores, two filled with regolith (broken rock and dust), and one with Martian atmosphere.

“To put it simply, this is the kind of rock we had hoped to find when we decided to investigate Jezero Crater,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “Nearly all the minerals in the rock we just sampled were made in water; on Earth, water-deposited minerals are often good at trapping and preserving ancient organic material and biosignatures. The rock can even tell us about Mars climate conditions that were present when it was formed.”

The presence of these specific minerals is considered promising for preserving a rich record of an ancient habitable environment on Mars. Such collections of minerals are important for guiding scientists to the most valuable samples for eventual return to Earth with the Mars Sample Return campaign.

Nicknamed “Bunsen Peak” for the Yellowstone National Park landmark, the rock – about 5.6 feet wide and 3.3 feet high (1.7 meters by 1 meter) – intrigued Perseverance scientists because the outcrop stands tall amid the surrounding terrain and has an interesting texture on one of its faces. They were also interested in Bunsen Peak’s vertical rockface, which offers a nice cross-section of the rock and, because it’s not flat-lying, is less dusty and therefore easier for science instruments to investigate.

Before taking the sample, Perseverance scanned the rock using the rover’s SuperCam spectrometers and the X-ray spectrometer PIXL , short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry. Then the rover used the rotor on the end of its robotic arm to grind (or abrade) a portion of the surface and scanned the rock again. The results: Bunsen Peak looks to be composed of about 75% carbonate grains cemented together by almost pure silica.

“The silica and parts of the carbonate appear microcrystalline, which makes them extremely good at trapping and preserving signs of microbial life that might have once lived in this environment,” said Sandra Siljeström, a Perseverance scientist from the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) in Stockholm. “That makes this sample great for biosignature studies if returned to Earth. Additionally, the sample might be one of the older cores collected so far by Perseverance, and that is important because Mars was at its most habitable early in its history.” A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that could be evidence of past life but may also have been produced without the presence of life.

The Bunsen Peak sample is the third that Perseverance has collected while exploring the “Margin Unit,” a geologic area that hugs the inner edge of Jezero Crater’s rim.

“We’re still exploring the margin and gathering data, but results so far may support our hypothesis that the rocks here formed along the shores of an ancient lake,” said Briony Horgan, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. “The science team is also considering other ideas for the origin of the Margin Unit, as there are other ways to form carbonate and silica. But no matter how this rock formed, it is really exciting to get a sample.”

The rover is working its way toward the westernmost portion of the Margin Unit. At the base of Jezero Crater’s rim, a location nicknamed “Bright Angel” is of interest to the science team because it may offer the first encounter with the much older rocks that make up the crater rim. Once it’s done exploring Bright Angel, Perseverance will begin an ascent of several months to the rim’s top.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology , including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

DC Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-9011 [email protected]

Karen Fox / Charles Blue NASA Headquarters, Washington 301-286-6284 / 202-802-5345 [email protected]  /  [email protected]

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• Perseverance (Rover)
• Mars Sample Return (MSR)

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Will It be Safe for Humans to Go to Mars? Maybe Not.

Our limitation isn't technology, it's our own human physiology

We’ve long had a fascination with going to Mars. The manned trip back to the Moon in late 2024 is the first step in getting humans to the Red Planet. But as planning for manned visits to Mars continues, researchers keep studying risk. Interestingly, it may not be technology that limits our exploration, but our own human physiology.

When Will Humans Go to Mars?

How long does it take to get to mars, read next.

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However, we’re getting way ahead of ourselves with the travel plans.

Can Humans Survive a Trip to Mars?

As of now, researchers are looking at the risks to the human body and whether humans are even capable of surviving a trip to Mars.

Results from astronauts who’ve spent a long time on the International Space Station ( ISS ) show good reason for concern about space travel’s medical consequences. 

1. Bones and Musculoskeletal Effects

After extended time in weightless conditions, bone and muscle vanishes at 1% per month, and some of the loss is irreversible. During the Apollo missions, astronauts were so weak after eight days that they had to be pulled from their landing capsules. 

But even after the ISS astronauts started exercising during their six-month stays, many astronauts suffered back pain after returning to Earth because of the deconditioning of small muscles that supported their vertebrae. Bones aren’t just a framework; they are living matter that grows, repairs itself, and responds to gravity loads on Earth. 

Astronauts might look like they’re happily at the gym up there, on the treadmill in their underwear, but space is just not good for you. 

2. The Heart and Cardiovascular Effects

The low gravity and radiation in space also has caused circulatory problems for astronauts when they returned to Earth.

Hearts shrink in size, cardiac capacity goes steadily downhill, and there is an increased risk of heart attack later in life. Lower gravity in space causes the arteries to become thinner, perhaps because the lower gravity needs less blood pressure for circulation. Astronauts returning to Earth do not get enough blood to their brain.

3. Immune System Affects

Things really get bad when you leave Earth orbit and pass outside our magnetosphere, which guards us from solar and cosmic radiation.

Apollo astronauts all saw flashes of light resembling shooting stars cross their visual fields about once a minute, as ions ripped through their eyeballs and brains.  Their radiation exposures were not trivial and, years later, Alan Shepard wondered whether his time in space gave him the leukemia that ultimately took his life in 1998. An intense solar mass ejection occurred just four months after the Apollo 16 astronauts returned to Earth. Had they still been off-planet, the 400 rem radiation dose could easily have killed them. 

Over half of the Apollo astronauts had some sort of immune problem. The immune system of an astronaut can resemble that of the elderly. In space, immune system changes happened after 30 minutes instead of 30 years.

However, recent studies of radiation hormesis surprisingly suggest that very low exposures may be harmless or even beneficial for health, and if verified could change the assessment about the long-term risk of hanging out on the Red Planet. 

Nonetheless, brain neurons would get destroyed by Martian surface radiation. One biologist estimates that during a two-year Mars mission an astronaut might lose between 13% and 40% of his brain cells, which greatly exceeds the 5% annual neuron necrosis suffered by some Alzheimer’s’ patients. 

Still Want to Travel to Mars?

People often talk of having colonies on Mars. But realists know that it’s a fairly high radiation place with no breathable air. Mar’s atmosphere is 100% carbon dioxide with a pressure just one percent of ours. 

My guess is that the “colonization” talk never stops because no other planet is even possible. Our other neighbor Venus is way too hot, as is Mercury, and the other planets are gaseous, with no surface to land on. So it’s Mars or nothing, so far as planets are concerned. The solution might be living underground there, as unpleasant as that sounds to this writer. If you decide it’s more prudent to simply observe Mars from here on Earth, the next close Martian visit begins in December, next year. 

Learn more fascinating facts about Planet Mars .

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All I can say is: regardless of whether or not they will succeed, interplanetary travel still interesting to think about!

It really is!

I was doing research on this and found out something interesting recently: a spacecraft that’s nuclear-powered is in the works and will be tested in a few years. It’ll get people to the Red Planet in just 45 days instead of 7 months! While it’s still not without dangers, of course, that would be better.

I disagree that technology isn’t entirely our limitations; there are still things that need to be developed to protect people.

Also, I was looking up artificial gravity and one idea appears to be a part of a spacecraft that spins. They’d need something like that for a longer trip!

But observing the planets from down here is enough for me. 😉

Hi : Can you please explain to me how can there be pictures of the Mars Lander's when you can,t see any arms , cables or anything holding a camera that takes to picture of itself ? I see many many pictures of the lander's that does not show how these pictures are taken . Can you show the public just how this is done ,maybe there are little people up there and we asked them to do the snaping LOL LOL LOL . Thanks R,B,Lowell

Good question. The pictures were taken before the landing. They are artist renderings showing the real lander in the environment. However, now that we are getting photos sent back by the CubeSats, you can see some real images of Mars. Just go here: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/images/

With so much poverty here on Earth, I can never understand the need to spend trillions of dollars exploring a planet that is definitely not fit for human habitation. What a waste of scarce resources.

While I don’t have a problem with space exploration, as it is fascinating, yes, more does need to be done about our own problems.

No life there; Never has been. Created by God about 6000+ years ago.

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Eric Berger, Ars Technica

Elon Musk’s Latest Mars Pitch Has Potential

Elon Musk has been talking publicly about his sweeping vision for Mars settlement for nearly eight years now, dating to a speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September 2016.

This weekend, at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, Musk once again took up the mantle of his "making life multiplanetary" cause. Addressing employees at the location of the company's Starship factory, Musk spoke about the “high urgency” needed to extend the “light of consciousness” beyond Earth. That is not because humanity's home planet is a lost cause or should not be preserved. Rather, Musk said, he does not want humanity to remain a one-planet civilization that will, inevitably, face some calamity that will end the species.

All of this is fairly familiar territory for spaceflight enthusiasts—and observers of Musk. But during the past eight years he has become an increasingly controversial and polarizing figure. Based on his behavior, many people will dismiss Musk's Mars comments as those of a megalomaniac. At least in regard to spaceflight, however, that would be wrong. Musk's multiplanetary ambitions today are more credible because SpaceX has taken steps toward doing what he said the company would do.

SpaceX has real hardware today and has completed three test flights. A fourth is possible next month.

"It’s surreal, but it’s real," Musk said this weekend, describing the audacious Mars vision.

The Booster and Ship

As part of his 45-minute speech, Musk spoke about the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and the company's plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization.

If thousands of launches seem impossible, Musk noted that SpaceX has completed 327 successful Falcon launches and that 80 percent of those have involved used boosters. This year, he said, SpaceX will launch about 90 percent of the mass sent into orbit from the planet. China will launch about 6 percent, he added, with the remainder of the world accounting for the other 4 percent.

This kind of performance has given Musk confidence that reusability can be achieved with the Super Heavy booster that powers Starship. On the vehicle's next test flight, possibly in May, the company will attempt to land the booster on a virtual tower in the Gulf of Mexico. If that landing is precise enough, SpaceX will try to catch the booster on the fifth test flight with the chopstick-like mechanisms on Starship's massive launch tower.

"That’s very much a success-oriented schedule, but it is within the realm of possibility," Musk said. With multiple test flights occurring this year, Musk said the odds of catching the booster with the launch tower this year are 80 to 90 percent.

It will take longer to land and begin reusing Starship's upper stage, which must survive the fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere. This vehicle broke apart and burned up during its attempt to return through the atmosphere during a flight test in March. On the next flight, Musk said, the goal for Starship's upper stage is to survive this heating and make a controlled landing in the ocean. At some point this year, he expects SpaceX to achieve this milestone and then begin landing Starships back in Texas next year.

Building More, Building Bigger

SpaceX is also building additional ground-based infrastructure and making design upgrades to Starship.

Musk said the company will construct a second launch tower in Texas to facilitate additional developmental test flights. And by the end of 2025 it intends to have two Starship launch towers in Florida to begin supporting operational launches. Initially, these are likely to support Artemis lunar landing missions for NASA.

Andy Greenberg

The company plans to build six additional Starship vehicles this year and increase that production in 2025 as a new factory comes online at the Starbase facility.

Starship will also get bigger, primarily by expanding its length. Musk outlined the company's plans for a “Starship 2,” capable of launching 100 tons to low-Earth orbit in fully reusable mode, and "Starship 3," with a capacity of 200 or more tons. If this seems unrealistic, consider that SpaceX performed four major block upgrades to the Falcon 9 rocket from 2010 to 2018, more than doubling its performance.

These larger vehicles will be necessary to reduce the number of refueling missions required to load a vehicle in Earth orbit for a trip to the Moon or Mars. Musk said the goal is to reach a configuration such that it will only take five or six refueling missions to support a Starship that can land 200 tons on Mars.

The final Starship 3 vehicle will be about 500 feet (150 meters) tall, about 20 percent larger than the current vehicle. This will allow for additional propellant to increase lift capacity. Musk said the company should be able to launch Starships for less than the original price of the Falcon 1 rocket, which was $6 million. Starship would carry 400 times the payload, however.

"These are unthinkable numbers, but we’re not breaking any physics to achieve this," Musk said.

Millions of Tons to Mars

Ultimately, Musk's goal is to seed a civilization on Mars as humanity's first step toward becoming a multiplanetary species. To accomplish this, he believes Mars will need a population of about 1 million people, with many millions of tons of supplies so that settlers can mine and build and grow things on Mars to become self-sustaining.

This will require an absurd amount of launches, 10 per day, and the dispatch of a fleet of hundreds of vehicles to Mars during the short-trip trajectory window that opens between Earth and the red planet every 26 months. Ultimately, while it is challenging, Musk believes that humans could terraform a "fixer-upper" planet like Mars.

How much you buy into this vision will undoubtedly depend on your predilection toward Musk and your sense of the difficulty of forging habitable communities on an uninhabitable world like Mars. The engineering challenges are extraordinary. But people have been underestimating SpaceX for years. Generally, the company's talented employees have done what Musk has said they would do. Why stop now?

Eight years ago, when Musk first outlined his Mars plans, I characterized them as "audacity, madness, and brilliance." I still believe all three adjectives apply. If anything, the vision is more audacious. But as of today, with SpaceX having proven that rocket reusability is a very viable thing and with a vibrant Starship factory at hand, they do seem a little less mad.

"We can do this," Musk told his employees this weekend. I'm not sure he's wrong.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica .

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SpaceX Starship will be 500 feet tall to prepare for Mars missions, Elon Musk says (video)

S paceX's Starship, the largest rocket in the world, will get even bigger as the company continues to target Mars missions in the future.

Elon Musk , the billionaire founder of SpaceX , told employees on April 4 that Starship will eventually be as tall as 500 feet (150 meters), roughly 20 percent higher than the massive system aboard the Super Heavy rocket right now. 

What's more, advances in reusability will have each launch cost roughly $3 million each, Musk predicted; that's less than a third of what a (much smaller) Falcon 1 rocket launch cost in 2004 when inflation is taken into account. (The figure two decades ago was $5.9 million, according to NBC , which is roughly $9.5 million in 2024 dollars.) 

"These are sort of unthinkable numbers," Musk said in the Starship update, released publicly April 6, roughly one month after the third and last test flight to date . "Nobody ever thought that this was possible, but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this. So this is within the bounds, without breaking physics. We can do this."

Related: SpaceX fires up huge Super Heavy booster ahead of 4th Starship test flight (photos, video)

Musk tends to deliver Starship updates at least once a year to highlight progress the company is making toward its long-term plans of settling Mars . Indeed, the last year has seen three Starship launches, so there has been progress made recently. Musk didn't, however, address delays in launching Starship that have contributed to pushing back the launch date for the first moon landing under the NASA-led Artemis program .

SpaceX was named the vendor for the Artemis 3 landing mission that, until recently, was set for 2025. In January, NASA elected to hold the launch date another year, to 2026, due to a range of technical issues . Aside from Starship not being ready — the agency wants many successful launches before approving it for astronaut flights — Artemis 3 was also delayed due to slow progress on spacesuits and problems with the mission's Orion spacecraft , among other factors.

However, Musk's words about Artemis, to employees, focused on Starship's future capabilities: orbiting the Earth and refilling its tanks, both of which have yet to be proven on its three test flights.

"This will ... be very important for the Artemis program for the NASA to get back to the moon," Musk said of those capabilities. He also envisions a "Moon Base Alpha" that would include ships "specialized for going to and from the moon", meaning there would be no heat shield or flaps due to the lack of atmosphere.

Related: NASA celebrates SpaceX Starship's 3rd test flight, but more work needed ahead of Artemis moon missions

Musk's 45-minute speech touched on the usual themes for his Red Planet updates, focusing on how to send a lot of cargo out there for eventual settlers. He noted that would take thousands of launches to do; for perspective, Musk said the company has completed 327 successful Falcon series launches and about 80 percent of those had reused boosters (a key factor in reducing cost.)

SpaceX is by far the most active launching entity on Earth, and Musk forecasts the company will send roughly 90 percent of orbital mass aloft this year compared to China's 6 percent (the second-largest entity.) 

Starship's next and fourth spaceflight attempt, expected to take place in May, aims to have the first stage of Super Heavy land "on essentially a virtual tower" in the Gulf of Mexico, Musk said. Once the company safely gets that done, they will consider using the launching area at Starbase, in south Texas, for future landings as soon as Flight 5. (Musk pegged the chances of success on Flight 4 at 80% or 90%.)

Musk also wants to perform two splashdowns of the upper stage of Starship in a row, in a controlled fashion, before sending it to Starbase on a future flight. "We do not want to rain debris over Mexico or the U.S.," he said. "My guess is probably next year when we will be able to reuse Starship."

Overall, Musk plans for multiple Starship launches to take place this year, and suggests SpaceX will build an additional six spacecraft by the end of 2024. A new rocket factory for the company should be available in 2025, which would make production even faster. 

Future versions of Starship will include a "Starship 2" to send 100 tons of payload to low-Earth orbit and the 500-foot "Starship 3" for 200 or more tons. Bigger vehicles, Musk stressed, will mean fewer (four or five) refueling missions in low Earth orbit to get a Starship ready for the journey to Mars someday. 

Of these milestones, Musk said it would be "very much a success-oriented schedule." His speech did not mention the Federal Aviation Administration, which must approve each one of the launches, nor ongoing criticism of the environmental impact of Starship on the ecologically sensitive area near Starbase.

That impact may continue to grow, as Musk said it would take roughly 10 launches a day to send hundreds of vehicles to Mars every two years (when the planet is closest) to make a long-term settlement feasible. As for the number of Mars-bound people, that would be roughly a million folks, he said — that matches predictions he made at least as far back as 2017 . Musk also says he wants to get the settlement going "in 20 years." He said the same thing in 2011 .

SpaceX plans to leave the first humans on Mars stranded with no way home

Spacex has presented some key details for its upcoming missions to mars and how the company will navigate the journey with starship..

SpaceX has conducted a presentation at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, revealing some key details about its upcoming Mars missions that will feature the world's most powerful rocket, Starship.

The company's CEO, Elon Musk, has taken to stage to discuss what fans of SpaceX can expect out of the company in 2024 and what will be involved in creating a sustainable presence on the surface of Mars. Musk said that this is the first time in human civilization that Earth is capable of making the species multiplanetary, and all of this hinges of the success of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket ever created.

Musk outlines that mass to orbit is a key factor in achieving a Mars base, and when Starship is complete, it will be capable of taking 200 tons to orbit while being fully reusable. The SpaceX CEO explains that once Starship is in orbit, it will need to be refueled by a tanker that's also in orbit. This new technology will be called Ship to Ship Propellent Transfer, and for every trip to Mars, Starship will need to be refueled six times, so a ratio of 5 to 1. Musk said that SpaceX plans on demonstrating Ship to Ship Propellent Transfer sometime next year.

" You actually want to use the ship. Take a part the ship and use it for raw materials on Mars. Because the ship materials will be so valuable, most of the ships you won't want to bring back, you would just want to use them for raw materials. Eventually we will want to bring ships back and I think we will want to give people the option of coming back because they're more likely to want to go if there's some option of coming back. But I think most of the people that go to Mars will never come back to Earth, " said Musk during the presentation (skip to 23:00)

Additionally, Musk said that Starship's ship will be turned into scrap metal once it lands on Mars as its parts will be extremely valuable to the pioneers living on the Red Planet. Ultimately, the company plans on creating a Starship that is capable of making a return trip back to Earth, but initially Musk believes most people who sign up for a trip to Mars will not return to Earth.

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Jak joined the TweakTown team in 2017 and has since reviewed 100s of new tech products and kept us informed daily on the latest science, space, and artificial intelligence news. Jak's love for science, space, and technology, and, more specifically, PC gaming, began at 10 years old. It was the day his dad showed him how to play Age of Empires on an old Compaq PC. Ever since that day, Jak fell in love with games and the progression of the technology industry in all its forms. Instead of typical FPS, Jak holds a very special spot in his heart for RTS games.

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