Do you want to be the first pizza parlor owner on Mars? Well, Elon Musk thinks you should do it.
The SpaceX founder, who has a reputation for making off-the-cuff remarks about the future of humanity, robots and more, thinks that Mars could be an amazing place for entrepreneurs of all kinds to set up shop. If the cost of flying to Mars were affordable, that is.
Musk says that affordable travel to Mars could create incredible business opportunities for humans willing to make the journey.
A European probe in orbit around Mars just photographed two deep blue patches on the Martian surface, but while they might look like lakes to the untrained eye, don’t be deceived. The spots are actually layers of dark, volcanic rock that appear blue in the photo taken by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. From possible blue auroras to a blue sunset, this photo is just the latest in a series of “blue” images of the red planet.
It takes a certain type of person to willfully leave behind life on Earth forever in hopes of colonizing a new planet.
Filmmaker Peter Savodnik and his short-form documentary company Stateless Media set out to explore such a mindset by telling the stories of three of the 660 people vying for a one-way trip to the Red Planet as part of a worldwide competition called Mars One. Putting technical and scientific considerations aside, the 10-minute film, If I Die on Mars, delves into the lives of three far-flung candidates. It focuses not just on their intense enthusiasm for the prospect of exploring Mars, but also the sense of longing and frustration that fuels their urge to escape their own planet.
“We’re alternately fascinated and a little bit troubled by the idea of people wanting to go away forever,” Savodnik told Mashable. “I think it’s fair to say that everyone involved felt like we learned a great deal about these people and how they think.”
In the coming decades, NASA has big plans for Mars, including intentions to blast a fifth rover onto the planet’s surface by 2020 and send a manned mission by 2030.
But long before humans step onto Mars’ barren terrain, scientists and researchers from around the world want to understand more about its potential to support human life. They’re especially interested in the possibility of growing plants on Mars, a more efficient process that would partially remove the need to ship expensive freeze-dried rations to the planet. Allowing crops to grow there that produce oxygen and scrub carbon dioxide there would make Mars a more livable environment.
“For a long-term settlement, there is probably no other option than growing food on Mars,” says Angelo Vermeulen, a Belgian artist and scientist who was the crew commander of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation Site (HI-SEAS), a six-person, NASA-funded team that spent four months last year on the hills of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii to study and experiment with ways to prepare foods on Mars.
Mars One may be grabbing headlines for pushing one-way manned missions to Mars, but buried deep in NASA’s photo archives lies proof that the agency has been thinking about the journey for decades.
Commissioned by NASA, these artists’ concepts show how the agency (unofficially and very loosely) once envisioned putting humans on the Red Planet. While some technology in the imagery evolved as NASA scientists learned more about Mars, many of the concepts still hold true in the agency’s modern-day mocks for a 2030 manned mission.
Abigail Harrison, who operates under the online persona “Astronaut Abby,” has already amassed an impressive following. \Harrison’s niche celebrity, though, wasn’t her original intention. It all started with an eighth-grade project she was doing about the ISS.
“My mom helped me set up Twitter to get in touch with NASA employees for quotes,” she says. “So I started sharing pictures of projects I was working on and writing about my dreams.”
NASA and other influencers in the space community took notice and helped fill her plate with projects. Harrison now travels around the country promoting space and STEM careers in schools. She’s introducing a pen-pal program in which she’ll send readers personal emails about her experiences. This August, she will speak at a convention for the Mars Society about her No. 1 love: the importance of putting a human on the Red Planet.
Early explorers risked their lives to reach the ends of the world, but not purely for the advancement of mankind. In reality, their bravery was motivated by one very powerful prospect: the possibility of wealth, be it treasure or land.
Today, Mars is our land beyond the horizon — a territory that can only be reached by plunging off the edge of our flat, incomplete map. But just like setting sail to the unknown West, sending a human to Mars is enormously expensive, not to mention dangerous, perhaps even deadly.
But even with the clear risks, people are sinking millions into private Mars colonization projects. Will they eventually pull a King Ferdinand and claim Martian land as their own?
When Jane first met John, she knew that they would spend the rest of their lives together — literally. The pair spent more than eight years in space flight training before leaving Earth without the possibility of return.
As members of the first Mars colony, Jane and John naturally gravitated towards each other because they share the same future of an isolated life on a new planet. And as their mental bond grew, so did a fervent, passionate physical urge for each other. Now they face an obstacle for which they never trained: sex on the Red Planet.
Jane and John are fictional characters. But if a handful of Mars colonization projects have their way, their lives could be a reality in just 10 years.
By the end of this year, a bigger and smarter rover will be on its way to Mars. Called Curiosity, NASA‘s six-wheel-drive, 9-foot-long robotic research vehicle will be delivered to the planet’s surface using the most unusual method yet, which you can see in the video above. Unlike its predecessors that landed on Mars inside huge balloons that bounced along the surface until they came to a halt, the heavier Curiosity will be suspended by a tether from a crane-like rocket platform that gently lowers the robot to the surface. Then that platform will fly away and crash elsewhere into the surface of the Red Planet while Curiosity gets its 687-Earth-day (1 Mars year) mission underway.
