If it seems like many governments all over the world are very concerned with the idea of humans getting to Mars one day, you’re not imagining things: that’s exactly what is happening as we speak.
The space agencies of various countries have been attempting to get equipment and other assets to Mars since all the way back in the 1960s. In October of 1960, the Soviet Union became the first country to attempt a flyby of the planet – although a launch failure stopped those actions in their tracks.
A decade later, in November of 1971, the Soviets did successfully get an orbiter to our intergalactic neighbors. It operated for 362 orbits – though the lander and rover that were sent at the same time ultimately crashed into the surface and were never to be recovered. This was also right around the same time that the United States got an orbiter of our own to the planet – one that deactivated just over 500 days after entering the atmosphere.
Flash forward to today, and it’s still clearly a top priority to make Mars a major focus. The United Arab Emirates, for example, launched a spacecraft in July of 2020 that will study Mars’ weather patterns and atmosphere. China is also attempting to send a rover to the surface of the planet with sophisticated instruments that will tell us more about the surface than ever before.
And all of this is before you begin to touch on the advancements that private spaceflight companies are making all the time, with SpaceX being chief among them.
Privatizing the Trip to Mars
Out of all the companies that are working hard to assist our collective efforts to get to Mars, SpaceX is perhaps the most notable. The company has become famous for its eccentric – and controversial – CEO, Elon Musk. Over the years, Musk has repeatedly indicated that if human beings are going to survive whatever the future might hold in terms of climate change, we need to become a “multiplanetary species” sooner rather than later. That idea is a big part of what inspired him to start working on a plan that he insists could see a million people living on Mars safely by the end of the current century.
All told, Elon Musk thinks it’s possible to start sending thousands of people from Earth to Mars at some point within the next decade. Again, it’s not about sending everyone to Mars – it’s about becoming multiplanetary in the safest and most effective way possible. Once that groundwork has been laid, work can then begin on creating a self-sustaining colony of roughly a million people or so on the surface of the planet. Once that possibility has been achieved, there really is no limit to what we may be able to accomplish as a society.
Musk has indicated that the way he sees it, human beings are currently headed in one of two directions. Either we do branch out and inhabit another planet like Mars (which we can only get to as a direct result of continued space exploration), or we remain on Earth until some type of natural extinction event takes place. He says that the event itself is not a matter of “if”, but “when.” Therefore, he wants to do his part to help us collectively take that first path so that we can continue to prosper – albeit elsewhere.
But maybe the most important of these efforts takes the form of the Commercial Crew Program, otherwise known as CCP for short. It’s a joint program operated by NASA, Boeing and SpaceX. Right now, the program is handling crew rotations between the various expeditions that are taking place as a part of the International Space Station program. Looking ahead, however, it’s easy to see what an important role programs like this are going to play in just about everything to come.
To successfully get human beings first into a colony on the moon and then to Mars, it’s going to take a significantly larger amount of money than NASA has access to right now. The hope is that private companies like SpaceX will be able to step in and pick up some of the slack.
In the end, one of the major reasons why all of this is so important is because it helps get people excited for and inspired by the possibility of the future. It’s something that we saw during the 1960s at the height of the Space Race, and we may very well be starting to see it again, too. People have once again started to realize that there is very little we can’t accomplish when we really put our mind to it. Today, it happens to be sending humans to Mars.
If we’re able to successfully get that done, it’s truly exciting to think about what we may set our sights on next.