Word: marse
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While it's easy for a President to talk about going to Mars in the run-up to an election, it's terribly, terribly hard to get there. Before astronauts can even think of suiting up and taking off, a host of problems have to be solved.
The first and most obvious challenge is to design and build a Mars-worthy spacecraft. Winged ships like the shuttle are clearly out--useless in the wispy Martian atmosphere and unreliable even close to home, as two shuttle disasters have shown. That means a return to something closer to the...
Far thornier than the design of the spacecraft is the problem posed by all the fuel, food and water such a mission would require. The Apollo flights to the moon were gas-up-and-go trips that lasted no more than 12 days. You could fill the tank and the...
The answer is to manufacture a lot of what you need on-site. If any of NASA's unmanned Mars ships do find accessible water on the planet, it will be very big news, and not merely because of what it means for the possibility of Martian life. Martian water...
"One scenario," says John Hoffman, a physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas who is working on a 2007 Mars probe, "is to send rockets up two years before people go, then robotically make water for an 18-month stay and fuel for the return. Only when it's...