A Brief Look at the Countries, Companies, and Technologies Heading to Mars
Artist rendering of SpaceX’s Starship on Mars
Article Published in The Zesty Press, Edition 3 on May 6, 2021
It is highly likely that we will put humans on Mars before 2030. It may surprise you that it might not be a governmental organization that gets astronauts to Mars. The private sector in the space industry is on the rise with companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX, whose rockets are already being used in missions to the ISS, the International Space Station. However, governments are also getting on the move with multiple countries with a plan to send robots and humans to Mars.
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX says it is highly likely that SpaceX can put humans on Mars by 2026. Spacex’s Starship rocket is the key to making it to Mars. Starship's first prototype was unveiled in 2019; however, the development of more rockets is moving slowly. Musk estimated that Starship would reach orbit in March 2020, but it is now most likely going to happen in late 2021 to early 2022. Even if that happens within the allotted time, Musk made the lofty goal to send an uncrewed Starship to Mars in two years. The final product will be fully reusable and able to carry up to 100 people at any given time plus cargo.
If SpaceX does not manage to get humans to Mars, don’t worry, there is still NASA, which is developing its own spacecraft along with many other technologies to get to Mars. First of all we need a way to power the rockets; that is why NASA is developing a few propulsion systems such as nuclear electric which is less powerful but more efficient and nuclear thermal propulsion. Both use nuclear fission, the splitting of an atom, and both will reduce the time it takes to get from Earth to Mars and vice versa. NASA also plans to use nuclear fission as primary a source of energy on Mars, and because of the endless dust storms, it will be a more reliable source of energy than solar power.
The Orion spacecraft, named after the constellation Orion, is NASA’s deep-space mission shuttle which will take us to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Orion will have a crew capacity of up to six and will be able to carry up to 286,000 pounds of cargo. Orion is scheduled to make its debut on the Artemis 1 mission in early 2022. Even though Orion will (hopefully) be ready for flight in 2022, we will still have to wait until at least the early 2030s for Orion to go to Mars. NASA’s first goal with Orion will be to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon.
Multiple other countries have expressed interest in Mars. China, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and the USA sent probes to Mars in the summer of 2020. China’s mission, Tianwen-1, which launched on July 23, 2020, entered Mars’s orbit in early February and is scheduled to touch down in mid 2021. The UAE’s Hope Probe was launched in Japan using a Japanese rocket on July 19, 2020, and entered orbit February 9, with that the UAE became the fifth country to successfully get a spacecraft to Mars orbit. The third craft arriving with that group was NASA’s mission included Ingenuity, the first man-made object to achieve powered flight on Mars.
The next launch window for spacecraft heading to and from Mars will be in 2022 when Earth and Mars align in the perfect place. It may be surprising why we have to wait this long to send spacecraft between the two planets. It all has to do with the distance between Earth and Mars. It would be much harder to get from Earth to Mars when we are on opposite sides of the Sun; it would cost billions more dollars, take longer and with current technology we wouldn’t even have the capacity to carry enough fuel to get to the red planet if we aren’t close enough. Therefore, we wait until the planets are closest to each other which only happens about once every two years. It is hard to tell what sort of things we will be sending to Mars in the next launch window, so we'll just have to wait and see how science will blow our minds.
Works Cited
Garcia, Mark, editor. "Orion Overview.” NASA, 23 March 2021. Accessed 4 May 2021.
Hall, Loura, editor. "6 Technologies NASA is Advancing to Send Humans to Mars." NASA, 17 July 2020. Accessed 4 May 2021.
Palca, Joe. "It's A Good Time To Head To Mars." NPR, 16 July 2020. Accessed 4 May 2021.
Sheetz, Michael. "Elon Musk wants SpaceX to reach Mars so humanity is not a 'single-planet species’.'" CNBC, 23 April 2021. Accessed 4 May 2021.
