NEW YORK: A new report about the planned Mars mission of National Aeronautics and Space Administration suggests that the space agency might be able to launch a manned mission to Mars by 2033. The manned mission might be able to get into the orbit of the red planet by 2039.
According to the report prepared by the Planetary Society, if NASA plans to conduct a mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, it might be able to do it by 2039.
“We believe we now have an example of a long-term, cost-constrained, executable humans-to-Mars program,” Scott Hubbard, a professor in the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of The Planetary Society’s board of directors said.
Aside from Hubbard, two other science experts spoke at the event: Planetary Society CEO (and former TV “Science Guy”) Bill Nye and John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at The George Washington University Space Policy Institute who is also a member of The Planetary Society’s board of directors spoke on the said event.
The Planetary Society is the largest nongovernmental space advocacy organization in the world.
Their statement was part of the “Humans Orbiting Mars” workshop that took place from March 31 to April 1 in Washington, D.C. the workshop talked about the technical feasibility, affordability and benefits of a proposed schedule to get humans into orbit around Mars and eventually onto the planet’s surface. There were 70 attendees during the workshop.
The idea was not created by the Planetary Society but rather was a proposal reported by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
