The first NASA astronauts who set foot on Mars will seek to create a research base, not permanently inhabited colonies. This was reported by representatives of the agency.
According to NASA’s current plans, the Martian outpost, which NASA staff hopes to create by the end of the 2030s, will serve as a center accommodating astronauts on a temporary basis. This was stated by Ben Bassi, the head of scientific intelligence at the NASA Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate for Research and Planning for Human Exploration and Planning.
The colony represents a “long way down. Nobody, on the part of NASA, thinks of this as a base for the permanent residence of people, ”said Bassi on Wednesday (March 16) during a presentation to the Future Space Operations (FISO) space agency working group.
“The idea is that we have our intelligence zones, which we have established for the first crew,” added Bassi. - After the departure of this crew, we will send another crew when the next good opportunity to launch appears. So they are not busy all the time, but they have been visited several times. ” The installation of a permanent settlement on Mars can eventually be realized from the manned activities of NASA. But for a number of other organizations, the colony on the Red Planet is a clear goal.
One of these groups is SpaceX, a US-based space flight company, founded in 2002 by billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has repeatedly stressed over the years that he created SpaceX primarily to help humanity discover many planets.
Musk suggests that in the near future, thousands of people will inhabit the Red Planet. The key to making this happen, he said, is to develop fast, reusable rockets that could reduce the cost of a space flight by a factor of 100 or more.
So SpaceX has been carrying out a series of increasingly large-scale tests of reusable rockets over the past few years. For example, the company has repeatedly tried to land the first stage of the Falcon-9 rocket back to Earth during launches.
Most of these attempts were unsuccessful. In several cases, the rocket stage successfully hit the deck with its target “autonomous spaceport unmanned ship” in the ocean, but eventually they overturned and exploded. But the Falcon-9 stage made a soft landing on land at a station in Florida, at Cape Canaveral Air Force last December. This is the first successful descent during the orbital launch. (Blue Origin, a space flight company created by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, also made rocket landings, but so far only during suborbital launches). The Netherlands-based nonprofit organization Mars One also targets the colonies of the Red Planet. The group seeks to land four pioneers on Mars in 2027, and then send more settlers every two years. (At the moment, no one is making plans to return anyone back to Earth.) Mars One seeks to raise this issue by arranging a global media event around the colonization process.
