Putting the first man on the moon was one thing, but putting humans on Mars is the next step and is proving to be a lot more difficult. Although we have had robotic exploration of Mars for over 40 years and had the first rover land on Mars in 1997, we still aren’t close to prepared to send humans to Mars. Human exploration of Mars begins with the low-Earth orbit around the International Space Station to test communication devices needed for deep space exploration and how to protect astronaut’s health in deep space. NASA’s next step which is stated on their website is to send robots to redirect an asteroid to orbit around the moon to explore it in the 2020’s. However, NASA isn’t expected to send people to Mars until at least 2027 which has come with some controversy.

Many people think that the mission should be given more time to avoid possible errors and safety hazards. Although despite controversy there have surprisingly been over 200,000 men and women to sign up around the world. Keep in mind that this is also only a one way ticket because when you sign up to go to Mars there is no coming back. This number has to obviously narrowed down to a select few to actually go to Mars and so there is a training and then selection of who gets to go. During this selection one of the finalists in the Mars One program accused the officials in saying that their process of choosing is flawed because the top candidates helped finance the program. What do you think about this mission, would you ever go to Mars? I would definitely not but obviously there are people here on Earth that are completely comfortable with living on Mars for the rest of their lives.

~Tyler