When Will We Venture to Mars ?

 by Ben Davis

(image: NASA)

Mars has, for a long time, been the next key milestone of human space exploration, with proposals to explore and colonise the Red Planet having been suggested for decades. But now, with the 21st century’s finest technological advancements, when will we reach Mars and how who will get us there ?

The prospect of manned missions to Mars has been on the table since the late 1940’s when Wernher Von Braun set forth his plans to send no less than 1000 spacecraft to the Martian surface in order to construct a colony. He envisaged using  ‘plane-like’ structures to glide down through the Martian atmosphere. We’ve since developed exponentially, perhaps most importantly realising that the Martian atmosphere isn’t nearly dense enough to support a horizontal ‘plane’ landing. Nonetheless, the aim to put humans on Mars persists.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and NASA are currently in pole position for sending humans to Mars. NASA’s Artemis programme plans to put people back on the Moon before constructing a lunar space station, dubbed ‘Lunar Gateway’ and eventually sending humans off to Mars. SpaceX’s plan aims to skip out the middleman (the moon) and head straight off to Mars, using its Starship spacecraft.

Who will get there first ?

NASA has a long road ahead before it even contemplates sending people off to Mars. The first Artemis mission, Artemis I, is due to fire its lift off to The Moon in November. This mission will be unmanned and performed entirely remotely. It will be used to to test the Orion spacecraft (the segment of the spacecraft that will be manned in future missions) and the SLS (space launch system) - the rockets. Providing Artemis I is successful, Artemis II will take a crew of four around the Moon in 2023. After a few more missions, when the moon has once again been set foot on and the Lunar Gateway constructed, will the attention turn to Mars. It is predicted that NASA will have put humans in Mars-orbit by the 2030’s. 

SpaceX on the other hand has a clearer path to Mars. It’s method of travel, Starship, is an interplanetary crewed spacecraft capable of carrying up to 100 people. SpaceX is still in the process of testing Starship, with prototype eight being tested in December 2020. Elon expects his rockets to be heading off to Mars by 2024/5 with ‘thousands of rockets carrying a million people to Mars’ by 2035. It must be said that while SpaceX is making unprecedented progress in Martian expeditions, Musk is of course biased in favour of the company and its swiftness to get off the ground and so it will likely take a little while longer than three years for the first Starship to bid farewell to Earth.

Given each company’s roadmap and considering the plethora of potential issues that may arise before a rocket has even left the ground, I would personally place an estimate on 2028 onwards as a potential launch date for one of these rockets. 

So to sum up, whilst you might not be able to buy a ticket to Mars for a good few years - there may well be a colony in development soon enough, with NASA looking to set foot on the Red Planet in the 2030s and SpaceX towards the end of the 2020s.