Mars has been a popular destination since space exploration began – and there are plenty of people who’d love to go there.
Mars has been a source of myth, lore and inspiration since antiquity. It is also an interesting place to research – a legitimate candidate for us to find some form of alien life.
Modern exploration of Mars Since 1960, there have been 50 missions with scientific and technical objectives related to Mars. Thirty-one of these have been deemed successful, which is not a bad strike rate. A typical interplanetary space mission costs at least a billion US dollars, so the world’s major space agencies have spent no less than US$50 billion on Mars over the years. And this is just to send cameras, rovers and landers. To send people to Mars would be next level. A better way to do business? NASA is starting to explore different ways to undertake space missions.
NASA’s current roadmap involves going “back to the Moon” to re-establish a human presence with the Artemis program, then on to a human presence on Mars. In this roadmap, the concept of leveraging commercial providers has taken hold.