Learn about when will we get to Mars

After the Viking missions, in the 70's, talks about sending humans to Mars continued, but talk was nothing new. Scenarios of this sort have a long tradition, dating back to Wernher von Braun's legendary 1952 newpaper "The Mars Project," the first realistic proposal for mounting a human expedition to the red planet. Countless other drawing-board jouneys followed, and by now all of the scientific and government reports that have outlined how, when, and why human missions to Mars should take place could fil a good-sized bank vault.

NASA's very first long-range plan in 1959 nimbly skirted the actual mention of a manned mission to Mars. It simply assigned the idea to nameless futures that would emerge after 1970. But it was tacitly agreed that Mars would be the planet astronauts would most likely visit. In 1969, just two months after Apollo 11, a new report issued by a blue ribbon panel called the Space Task Group saluted a NASA plan to keep up the momentum that had been generated by the lunar voyages. It called for a manned misssion to Mars in 1981, continued lunar explorations, the construction of an orbiting lunar base, the deployment of an Earth-orbiting space station that would eventually be occupied by fifty to one hundred astrunauts, and somehitng called a shttle craft to ferry personnel and equipment back and forth from orbit to Earth. The new document showed the influence of von Braun, and much of it bore a suspicious resemblance to scenarios that he had outlined in his famous Collier articles, written shorly after "The Mars Project."

By 1986 only the shuttle had been built, and President Reagan, like Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon before him, asked another blue ribbon panel, the Nation Commission on Space, to once again map out the future. Their report called for plans to construct a space station, return to the moon, and build a lunar base and a space-transportation system between an Earth station and a Mars outpost, a kind of interplanetary trolley system that would deposit and return people and material betwen the two worlds. The lunar outpost would be completed by 2004; the Mars outpost by 2016. A fully operational base (really the fisr fully blown Martian colony) would be established by 2027.

Facinating as they all were, the reports had not changed much during the precious thiry-five years. However on July 20th 1989, the twentieth annivesary of the first Apollo moon landing, President George Bush appeared to take Sally Ride's report's recomendations to heart when he declared that the United Sates would set up a permanent base on the moon and mount a series of missions to Mars that would culminate in a human outpost being established there no later than 2019. At last, the Mars missions became official.

However from another point of view, the Soviets are talking about joint U.S - U.S.S.R missions that could land on Mars between 2005 and 2010. Michael Collins quoted in his book missions to Mars that a launch in 2004 and landing in 2005 to be promising.

None of these dates are likely to be exact, however they give us an outline of when these missions will take place. However, NASA, having shown that small spacecraft can be inexpensive and effective, plans missions in the next three launch windows of 2001, 2003, and 2005. It will also cooperate with Russian on a joint mission in 2001. The European Space Agency is hoping to use spare instruments from the unsuccessful Russian Mars '96 probe for its own Mars Express missions.