After months of intense speculation, in 2017 NASA and Boeing finally revealed the details of the plan to reach Mars. Bill Gerstenmaier, of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, revealed a surprisingly ambitious timetable for the steps necessary to send our astronauts to the Red Planet.
After months of intense speculation, in 2017 NASA and Boeing finally revealed the details of the plan to reach Mars. Bill Gerstenmaier, of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, revealed a surprisingly ambitious timetable for the steps necessary to send our astronauts to the Red Planet.
First, after years of testing, the SLS/ Orion rocket will be launched in 2019. It will be fully automatic, carrying no astronauts, but will orbit the moon. Four years later, after a fifty-year gap, astronauts will finally return to the moon. The mission will last three weeks, but it will just orbit around the moon, not land on the lunar surface. This is mainly to test the reliability of the SLS/ Orion system rather than to explore the moon.
But there is an unexpected twist to NASA’s new plan that surprised many analysts. The SLS/ Orion system is actually a warm-up act. It will serve as the main link by which astronauts will leave the Earth and reach outer space, but an entirely new set of rockets will take us to Mars.
