A future Mars colony may look similar to the one depicted in this illustration He thinks a mission to Mars would be inspiring By working to reach Mars people will develop new technologies and make scientific discoveries Building a colony on Mars would be a great adventure Musk said Musk also believes that problems on Earth are a big part of the reason why people need to go to Mars I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen he said Musk believes that people need to be able to live on other planets to survive if a major disaster occurs on Earth Meanwhile NASA has also announced a plan to send astronauts on a mission to Mars In 2015 NASA said it would send humans to Mars by the 2030s Their plan is known as Journey to Mars and it involves several steps of research and testing on the ISS and in deep space the area of space beyond Earth and the moon before people go to Mars Unlike SpaceX NASA does not plan to send people to Mars to live long term Instead NASA would make multiple visits to the Red Planet with several different crews of astronauts 6
Many people are skeptical about whether the missions will actually work They think sending people to Mars seems too expensive and dangerous On Earth people need water and oxygen to survive On Mars the air and soil are different from Earth’s From a distance Mars looks as if it is filled with red dirt not blue water Could these conditions ever support life This is a question people have been asking about Mars for years And it’s a question that scientists and astronomers have been working to answer ever since space exploration began They want to know what the Red Planet is really like This artist’s concept above shows astronauts using three space shuttles to begin a colony on Mars This illustration right depicts the beginning of a Mars colony with living quarters and a greenhouse 7
CHAPTER 1 OVERCOMING FAILURE This 2015 image shows the south pole of Mars covered by an ice cap made up of carbon dioxide Long before people sent spacecraft to explore Mars they wondered about the Red Planet In 1609 the scientist Galileo Galilei was the first person to look at Mars through a telescope Other astronomers looked at Mars and discovered white spots at the poles In 1719 an Italian astronomer named Giancomo Miraldi wondered if these spots could be ice caps It would be almost three hundred years before scientists could confirm whether Miraldi’s theory was correct Early astronomers drew maps of what they saw through their telescopes In 1877 an Italian astronomer saw dark grooves on Mars’s surface He called them canali meaning channels But 8
The first-ever close-up photo of Mars shown here was taken by Mariner 4 in 1965 the word was mistranslated as canals so some people began to think that intelligent beings had dug canals on Mars The fascination with Mars grew People wrote books radio plays and films about Mars and the idea that there could be life there Between 1960 and 2016 space agencies attempted to launch forty-four unmanned spacecraft to Mars Only twenty of these flights were successful Some failed to launch Others did not escape Earth’s orbit Problems occurred when solar panels did not open or radios stopped sending signals Some spacecraft failed to enter Mars’s orbit Mariner 4 reached Mars in 1965
