Next Steps For Mankind — NASA’s Mars Journey

The space agency plans to send its first manned mission to Mars in the early 2030s with its Space Launch System and its Orion crewed spacecraft.

The Earth Independent phase will build on lessons learned from the ISS and deep space missions to enable human missions to the vicinity of Mars, possibly either low-Mars orbit or one of the planet’s two moons, and eventually to the surface of Mars.

The next big step for Mars (outside of extraterrestrial life) is actually getting there, and luckily for us NASA just released a 36-page plan detailing just how they plan to do that.

“NASA is closer to sending American astronauts to Mars than at any point in our history”, said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

NASA has a few really serious plans for sending people to Mars. Primarily operating in cislunar space-the volume of space around the moon featuring numerous doable steady staging orbits for future deep space missions-NASA will advance and validate capabilities expected for humans to live and operate at distances a lot farther away from our residence planet, such as at Mars.

But after missions began to be conducted in the 1960s “it was determined that Mars was an arid planet, analogous to Chile’s Atacama Desert, with extreme radiation and very low temperatures in which it’s impossible to survive”.

The goal, says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters, is “a future with a sustainable human presence in deep space”. The report is presented as a strategy that “charts a course toward horizon goals while delivering near-term benefits and defining a resilient architecture that can accommodate budgetary changes, political priorities, new scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs and evolving partnerships”.

The findings published Friday support the idea of Martian life, and confirm the conjecture about a year ago by NASA that ancient lakes may be found on Mars, and add to the developing story of a watery Mars.

He’s so concerned that he thinks we need to get off Earth and become a multi-planet species as quickly as possible, according to a post written by blogger Tim Urban called How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars.

The Proving Ground step will be especially key to ensuring the transportation and habitation capacities created will be suitable for the journey to Mars. If we want anything resembling the industry and infrastructure here on Earth, and ample genetic diversity, then we’ll need at least that many people to get things going.

Via our robotic emissaries, we have now been on and around Mars for 40 years, taking almost every single opportunity to send orbiters, landers, and rovers with increasingly complex experiments and sensing systems. Is it now? Could it be a secure property for humans one particular day?

Hence it would be little to no use at all to the “future humans” who will be fortunate enough to travel there.

Villanueva, who holds Argentine, Italian and USA citizenship, said people once thought that Martian civilizations existed, a belief that fed the imaginations of scientists, writers and filmmakers worldwide. This is a historic pioneering endeavor.