Learn about what spacecraft will we use to get to Mars

Project Apollo solved in miniature many of the probems facing the designer of Mars equipment. The fundamental scheme is to design a mother ship with a lander attached: the two will then separate in orbit around the destination planet. There are also profound differences. The Moon is three days away, Mars nine months. The Apollo lander served as base camp. The Mars much more elaborate equipment should be desployed, leading eventually to a permanent colony. In consideration of these differences two mother ships and two interdependent landing craft should be employed. The primary reasons for two round-trip vehicles is safety: if something should go critically wrong with one, an emergency transfer to the other could save lives and salvage the mission. Having landers provides safety of a different sort, and permitting the separation of cargo and crew into more easily managed packages: two smaller, more maneuverable craft rather than a single massive one. The first will land cargo, and the crew will follow in the second.

Since the Mars mission takes such a long time, reliability then becomes a key issue. This is the same quality that we prize in television sets and automobiles, the factor that seems to be giving the Japanese preeminence today. "Mars-quality" on a product will mean a new level of reliability has been archieved.

The landers like the Apollo lunar module, have a very specific task and will have to be designed from scratch. For example, their landing gear should be built to withstand the shock of landing on a planet whose gravity is 38 percent of that on Earth. No more, no less. The mother ships, on the other hand present design problems that can be solved by adapting or building upon existing space machinery. They simply have to operate in space for a long time. That time, with minor modifications, might be spent in orbit around Earth, Moon, or Mars.

The space craft that will take our astronauts to Mars will have to solve water, air, and food problems that we face in long duration flights. THese problems are serious, yet can be solved by using a system called CELESS. It is a totally self-contained ecological system inside a space craft.

Having considered all the factors above, designers have come up with large amounts of designs that researchers look into today.