Colonization of Mars

Artist’s conception of a Starship spacecraft passing by the Moon.Image: SpaceXSpaceX has yet to send Starship to orbit, but that’s not stopping the company from selling rides aboard the future megarocket. Dennis and Akiko Tito are the first passengers announced for SpaceX’s second commercial spaceflight around the Moon. The pair, along with 10 others, will fly aboard the company’s Starship on a trajectory that will take the spacecraft through cislunar space. No date has been set for the mission, as a fully stacked…

Artist’s conception of an early Martian base. Image: NASANASA’s upcoming Artemis Moon program is serving as a stepping stone for an eventual crewed mission to Mars. A revised list of planning objectives details a strategy for accomplishing this daunting feat. The document, released Tuesday, servesas a blueprint for how we’ll eventually send humans to Mars. NASA has chosen to employ a “Moon to Mars” strategy, in which the space agency, with the assistance of commercial and international partners, will acquire the…

Mars: If the extreme temperatures and exposure to cosmic radiation don’t kill you, the unbreathable air certainly will. Now, a team of researchers has proposed a method of addressing the latter issue, by using plasma to split carbon dioxide—of which Mars has plenty—into carbon and oxygen.One of the biggest barriers to human habitation of worlds beyond Earth is in-situ resource utilization, or rather, the lack thereof. Until humans can reliably use what’s readily available on Mars to live there, our species can’t have an…

The Rosenberg Space Habitat is located within the school’s new, self-sustaining Future Park. Image: Institut auf dem RosenbergFor students at a boarding school in Switzerland, the curriculum now includes extraterrestrial architecture. The school has installed a 23-foot-tall, 3D-printed prototype of a space habitat that was designed with SpaceX rockets in mind. Exploring the universe and beyond is no small feat, but a major part of that adventure will involve building structures that are conducive to humans thriving in…

Artist’s conception of a Martian colony, with SpaceX Starship rockets in the background. Image: SpaceXIn a recent interview, Elon Musk repeated his stated goal of wanting to transport one million people to Mars by 2050. The SpaceX founder says the future of humanity is at stake, which, okay, but the timeline he offers is ludicrous, and here’s why.Before we plunge into this, I need to make it crystal clear that many of the challenges addressed in this article are not insurmountable. Technological feasibility is not my…