KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – Modernization of NASA’s launch infrastructure facilities at the Kennedy Space Center supporting the new SLS/Orion architecture required to send astronauts on a Journey to Mars in the 2030s, has passed a comprehensive series of key hardware reviews, NASA announced, paving the path towards full scale development and the inaugural liftoff by late 2018.

The facilities and ground support systems that will process NASA’s mammoth Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and next generation Orion manned deep space capsule at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida successfully completed a painstaking review of the plans by top agency managers and an independent team of aerospace experts.


SLS will be the most powerful rocket the world has ever seen. It will propel astronauts in the Orion capsule on deep space missions, first back to the Moon by around 2021, then to an asteroid around 2025 and then beyond to the Red Planet in the 2030s – NASA’s overriding and agency wide goal.

This is possibly the least relevant post ever, but my cat's name is Mars!

Lammastide said:

This is possibly the least relevant post ever, but my cat's name is Mars!

Hi Lammi.

Your post is just fine. Mars the cat.

MARS COLONY WILL HAVE TO WAIT, SAYS NASA SCIENTISTS

Establishing a human settlement on Mars has been the fevered dream of space agencies for some time. Long before NASA announced its “Journey to Mars” – a plan that outlined the steps that need to be taken to mount a manned mission by the 2030s – the agency’s was planning how a crewed mission could lead to the establishing of stations on the planet’s surface. And it seems that in the coming decades, this could finally become a reality.

But when it comes to establishing a permanent colony – another point of interest when it comes to Mars missions – the coming decades might be a bit too soon. Such was the message during a recent colloquium hosted by NASA’s Future In-Space Operations (FISO) working group. Titled “Selecting a Landing Site for Humans on Mars”, this presentation set out the goals for NASA’s manned mission in the coming decades.


Established in 2006 by the then-active FISO Working Group, the FISO lecture series is intended as an innovative outreach effort, helping leaders in the fields of science, technology, engineering and space exploration connect with the public. Held on March 16th, the colloquium touched on a number of issues which were raised at the the First Landing Site/Exploration Zone Workshop for Human Missions to the Surface of Mars – which took place in October of 2015 at the Lunar Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, TX.

...

While the establishment of an EZ would involve the creation of a habitation site that would serve as a base for multiple crewed missions, said crews would only be there on a temporary and rotating basis. A permanent settlement, in which humans landed on Mars and remained there indefinitely, is simply not on the books, as far as NASA’s plans for a manned-mission are concerned.

Or, as Dr. Bussey was quoted as saying by Space.com, a Mars colony is “a long way down the road. No one’s thinking of, on the NASA side, like a permanent human base. The idea here is that you would have your exploration zone that you set up for the first crew. And that crew would leave, and then you send another crew at the next good launch opportunity. So it isn’t permanently occupied, but it is visited multiple times.”





McMurdo Station, the only enduring human presence in Antarctica, pictured at night. Credit: m.earthtripper.com




Mars One, is supposedly still moving forward.