Fiction and reality are intertwining, as humanity edges closer to launching a manned mission to Mars. Before the International Space Station crew enjoyed their advanced screening of The Martian, a film about an astronaut stranded on Mars, the story’s novelist Andy Weir attended a Nasa event in which administrator Charles Bolden said we are now closer than ever to setting foot on the Red Planet.
“We are farther down the path to sending humans to Mars than at any point in Nasa’s history,” Bolden said at Nasa HQ in Washington D.C. on Thursday. “We have a lot of work to do to get humans to Mars, but we’ll get there.”
At the event, the space agency’s personnel discussed details of the Mars mission, including the development of the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System megarocket, the most powerful launch vehicle to date. The two will fly together as part of an unmanned test flight in 2018.
Some preliminary work will be conducted by Nasa’s next Mars Rover, to be launched in 2020. The rover will carry the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment, or MOXIE, which turns carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into breathable oxygen and carbon monoxide. In addition to allowing humans on Mars to breathe, the oxygen could also be used as fuel for the flight home.
“We’re going to make oxygen on another planet – the first time ever to make oxygen on another planet,” said NASA deputy administrator Dava Newman. “These experiments — they’re real, they’re here.”
Nasa projects that humans will arrive on Mars sometime in the 2030s. The journey would involve more than a dozen major components, beginning in low-Earth orbit in the International Space Station, where astronauts recently grew and ate lettuce as part of an experiment to better understand the production of food crops away from Earth.
The space station allows for a better understanding of how the human body changes in space and what health risks for which to prepare.
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