After 50 years of moon landing why haven’t we been to Mars yet?

Here are some of the reasons

COST

It will be very expensive mission

so let’s start from the very beginning you’re gonna need a rocket to get there, the Saturn 5 rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon cost a little bit over six billion dollars in the 1960s which must over 41 billion dollars today but that was in the 1960s and engineering and rocket technology have improved since then but going through NASA to get to Mars might not be the best idea I mean they have to use the Russians to even put people into space but today with private space companies such as SpaceX reusing Rockets successfully the prices are seemingly only going to go down SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been rumored to be able to put one kilogram of material on the Mars for a little over 15,000 dollars this is good what would cost you over 1 million dollars just to put a single 70 kilogram person on Mars with nothing else no food no water no spacesuit the better alternative is SpaceX’s new Falcon Heavy rocket once completed this could do the same job but for just a little under seven thousand dollars so assuming you weigh 70 kilograms you could hitch a ride on the Falcon Heavy and get to Mars for only about four hundred sixty-two thousand dollars which musk eventually plans to get down to one hundred to two hundred thousand but that’s only just send you to Mars and chances are you’re gonna need some other things too at an estimated launch cost of ninety million dollars per launch the Falcon Heavy can transport up to sixteen thousand eight hundred kilograms of material to Mars must plans to establish a permanent self-sustaining colony on Mars but to do that you’re gonna need a lot of materials and a lot of infrastructure notice how he said self-sustaining meaning without outside influence in order to create this self-sustaining colony these first few trips would most likely be mostly or entirely just materials but although sixteen thousand kilograms of material sounds like a lot it really isn’t to put this into perspective suddenly about twice the size of an elephant so bringing in entire colonies worth of materials on thousands of Falcon Heavy rockets isn’t exactly the brightest idea this is where the ‘interplanetary transport system’ (ITS) comes in handy when completed the ITS will be the largest rocket ever created by mankind it will be capable of launching up to six hundred tons of material into Earth orbit whereas the Saturn 5 rocket could only lift 150 tons the ITS will be powered by 21 wrapped her engines which are three times stronger than the Merlin engines they currently powered the Falcon nine and the Falcon Heavy the ITS will first be launched into orbit around Earth and then with conditions of reusable rockets be refueled while in orbit about every two years or so Earth and Mars are an opposition of each other meaning that they are in optimal positions for a mission to the Red Planet if launched at this time the ITS could reach Mars in three to four months so that’s great we’ve made it to Mars successfully and landed without dying there’s just a small problem here we don’t have any fuel left but there’s an upside on Mars there is a ton of carbon dioxide actually about ninety-five percent of the atmosphere of straight-up CO2 now unfortunately we can’t breathe CO2 but when it is combined with hydrogen methane is produced which you guessed it is what the rocket is fueled by so we can get to and from the Red Planet without having to save fuel for the journey back musk plans to eventually set of thousands of these rockets to and from Mars with the intention of establishing a colony of up to 1 million people on the planet the first of which he optimistically says could be launched in 2024 in theory the idea of the ITS is great but that’s without looking at its flaws current estimates place the cost of building the ITS at about 10 billion dollars which isn’t exactly cheap and if you’re gonna be building thousands of these then you might want to start looking for some spare change current price estimates for the first manned mission to Mars range between 30 and 150 billion on top of that financial barrier there are many problems with the design and some engineering issues that need to be sorted out just recently musk had to cut off half of the prospective engines off of the ITS due to problems on such a lengthy journey radiation sickness and many other illnesses become problems as well and what happens with something on the ship goes wrong and honestly is it even going to be able to get into space they don’t exactly have the best track record with getting Rockets off the surface but that is about to change in June of 2018 SpaceX plans to send the human to the International Space Station aboard the Dragon capsule and in 2019 must cleanse to begin lunar tourism with two unnamed billionaires already selected to make the first journey around the moon there’s a long way to go until humans step on the Martian surface but each and every day progress is being made who knows who the first person to step foot on the dusty planet will be it might even be you reading this right now only time will tell.

SAFETY

We have to send the astronauts safely and bring them back. A trip to mars takes near 8–9 months one way and during that time the astronauts will be unprotected regarding cosmic radiation and possible particle storms coming from the sun, and if you were really unlucky and get hit by one of the solar storm then you would die very fast.

FOOD

what the astronauts will eat, drink, breath unless will find the way to getting that on Mars, Its water from atmosphere or ice cape something like that the astronauts will have to take everything with them to survive for a couple of years that’s a lot of water and food.

HARD LANDING

Landing on Mars is easier said than done. Over the last 50 years, spacecraft have landed on more than half a dozen worlds including Venus, Saturn’s moon Titan, a comet, and more. But nowhere has proven more treacherous than the Red Planet, Mars. To date, only 40% of attempted landings have been successful. But just looking at it, Mars seems pretty harmless, right? It doesn’t have toxic clouds like Venus and there’s plenty of flat, stable places to land. Unlike a comet. But here’s the thing. It’s not what you can see that’s the problem. It’s what you can’t. It’s the atmosphere. Mars' atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Because Mars' atmosphere is so thin, it makes parachutes less effective. 10 times less effective, in fact. So let’s say you can skydive on Mars. And let’s use the same-sized parachute as one you would use on Earth. On Earth, skydivers' chutes slow them down to about 20 miles per hour. But on Mars, even with a parachute, you would still be falling at 200 miles per hour. Which, obviously is not good. Now you could make your parachute larger and slow down even more and that’s partly what NASA does. For example, its Curiosity rover used the largest supersonic parachute at the time when it landed in 2012. But even that couldn’t slow Curiosity down enough. To see why let’s go back to the skydive. If you wanted to slow down at the same landing speed on Mars as on Earth, you would need a parachute that’s 10 times wider. Or about 110 feet in diameter. Wide enough to cover the length of two and half school buses. Now here’s the catch. NASA’s Curiosity rover weighs about 13 times more than the average person. Which means to slow down at the same speed, it would need an even bigger chute. One that is about, oh boy, 400 feet in diameter. But in reality, Curiosity’s parachute was nowhere near that size. It was only 70 feet in diameter. Why? Because the bigger the chute gets, the greater chance it will rip. In fact, the largest parachute ever built and tested was just 150 feet wide. So in the end, it’s physically impossible to build a parachute big enough. Which makes landing on Mars risky at best. So how do space agencies do it? Well, very carefully. First, the spacecraft deploys a giant parachute to slow down as much as possible. Usually around 200 miles per hour. Then, it fires retrorockets to take it the rest of the way and that might not sound so hard but if the parachute doesn’t deploy at just the right time, or the rockets don’t fire at just the right height, it’s all over. To date only three space agencies have ever tried to land on Mars. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the former Soviet Union. None have a perfect record. So if landing on Mars is so hard, why do we keep doing it in the first place? Besides the moon, Mars has more artificial instruments on and around it than anywhere else in our solar system. And you could say that’s because Mars is close by or that it might be the best spot to search for signs of alien life. Or it could be that with each successful new landing, we come one step closer to the grandest ambition of all. To become the first species ever to inhabit a world beyond our own.

POLITICS

We could’ve been on Mars 30 years ago. At the peak of the Apollo era in the early-‘70s, NASA was already planning its next step into the unknown. Its plans included building multiple space stations, continued trips to the Moon, and its first crude mission to Mars by the 1980s. Can you imagine watching astronauts walk on Mars the same time the Walkman came out? But of course, NASA never sent humans to Mars in the ’80s. And here we are, 30 years later, still dreaming of the possibility. But the reason isn’t necessarily a matter of technology or innovation. It actually comes down to politics. As a government agency, NASA’s goals are determined by the executive branch. Since its inception, NASA has served under 12 presidents. And it was clear near the start that not every president would support NASA equally. By the end of the Nixon Administration in 1974, NASA’s budget had plummeted from 4% of the federal budget to less than 1%. Fully funded Apollo missions 18 and 19 were abandoned, along with Apollo 20. At the same time, Nixon pulled NASA’s focus away from the Moon and Mars and instead towards low-Earth orbit. His parting gift was to sign into effect what would eventually become NASA’s Space Shuttle Program, but this was just the beginning. — So, what’s happened throughout all of space history after the Apollo program was over was we had this start-stop-start-stop-cancel. So, a president comes in, like President Bush comes in and says we’re gonna go to the Moon, back to Mars, and then the next president comes in and cancels that. And the next president sets their objective, and the next president comes in and cancels that. The agency’s unable to sustain consistent funding long enough to do anything. It wasn’t until the Space Shuttle Program was nearing its end that a crude mission to Mars was finally considered and funded by a US president. George W. Bush, in 2004, announced “We will give NASA a new focus and vision for future exploration. We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the Moon.” As a result, NASA’s Constellation program was born. Never heard of it? That’s because it was canceled a few years later. It aimed to send a crude mission to the Moon in 2020 and land the first humans on Mars by the 2030s. By the time Obama was sworn in, the Constellation program was behind schedule and over-budget. One year later, Obama canceled 100% of the program’s funding. — All that has to change. And with the strategy I’m outlining today, it will. Obama shifted NASA’s focus from sending people to the Moon and Mars to ultimately just Mars. In the process, Obama asked Congress to increase NASA’s budget by $6 billion over the next five years. As a result, NASA launched its Journey to Mars initiative in 2010, with a goal to send humans into orbit around Mars by the early-2030s. And until recently, NASA, for the most part, was on track. But then, this happened. — President Trump has relaunched the National Space Council and at the council’s inaugural meeting in October, we unanimously approved a recommendation to instruct NASA to return American astronauts to the Moon, and from there to lay a foundation for a mission to Mars. Oddly enough, the space policy under Trump and Obama look nearly identical, except for 63 words. In those 63 words, Trump’s administration has shifted the focus once again to a Moon-first, Mars-later initiative. NASA isn’t new to this. It’s learned to recycle old projects to fit new missions. For instance, the Orion capsule was first developed for Constellation and has since been redesigned for a journey to Mars. But even that can’t prevent the unavoidable changes NASA programs now face under the new president. As such, we’re also gonna realign the organizational structure to best meet this new exploration focus. As NASA pushes on, a new possibility has grown on the horizon. Privately-owned space companies like SpaceX have also set their sights on the Red Planet. The scientists and engineers at NASA are amazing and they’ve done extraordinary things, but there’s still a risk aversion that doesn’t allow us to do things that are new and novel and on the edge. It’s these entrepreneurs willing to take risks and put everything on the line. The race for Mars is on. While NASA has closely partnered with SpaceX and other privately-owned space companies in recent years, ultimately it might not be NASA who writes the next chapter in human space exploration.

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