How Many Years To Get To Mars

Image for representation, Credits: Reuters

While NASA's itinerary to Mars extends to the 2030s after it has done extensive research on the moon's surface and its orbit, a private company SpaceX aims to send humans to Mars by 2026 in its Starship.

Sixty years after the first human went into space, we are not so far from making a return trip to another world. While NASA's itinerary to Mars extends to the 2030s after it has done extensive research on the moon's surface and its orbit, a private company SpaceX aims to send humans to Mars by 2026 in its Starship. Here are the key challenges of a return trip and how SpaceX proposes to solve them.

Too heavy to travel

One of the key constraints of spaceflight is that rockets can launch a very little (1-7%) of their mass to space. Taking humans to Mars would need more equipment, making the payload much heavier. Heavier rockets would need more fuel, making them even heavier. SpaceX aims to solve this problem by sending separate rockets with fuel tankers to refuel the spaceship already arrived in space.

The commute time

The recent trip of NASA's Mars rover took seven months to reach the red planet. Both mars and the earth have elliptical orbits, which require a spacecraft to follow weird paths in space harnessing the surrounding gravity to save fuel. To go on a shorter path, a spacecraft would need more fuel. As you may guess, SpaceX has the same solution to this problem — refill.

Landing

Compared to earth, Mars' atmosphere is about 100 times thinner. This means less air drag and the landing spacecraft would need some kind of additional thrusters, which means more fuel.

Again, refill.

Inhabiting the red land

To survive on the red land where the temperature falls as low as -140℃ and the atmosphere is mostly CO2, humans would need to transform the climate.

For this, SpaceX has plans to launch many cargo spaceflights to carry all the infrastructure material. These would include greenhouses, solar panels, and a facility to produce fuel for the return missions.

Returning home

If infrastructure is developed enough to fill spaceship tanks on the red planet, then this step would not be that big a challenge. If spaceships could carry people to the earth, the landing is not something new for humans to achieve.

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