Planning Our Route to Mars | MARS: How to Get to Mars

Before we get through the first half of this century, humans will be living and working on Mars. We can do it with the kinds of technology we either have today or know how to build today. Let's think about how we go about this thing, okay? This journey to Mars will involve a series of robotic exploration steps.

You send those probes in advance; you land them. We've seen orbiters to look remotely, robotically, at its atmosphere and at its surface. So, it would be like an exploration that you will do before you decide on the human location. Well, pre-positioning is really the only plausible way to do a manned mission to Mars.

So, we can send ahead of time or they put them and the food and the return vehicles. Some of that will have to be land at first; may have to be robotically put together. Well, that's it. Gonna put these little components together.

Now put it all up or it may be underground. That's when you bend the humans. The humans are gonna go and verify all the stuff that the robots told us. If you're going to Mars, you're not just gonna stick around for three days. You're gonna be there for months and months, and you need a lot of supplies, and you need large living accommodations.

The first humans who go will probably descend to the surface, and they'll go and check into the habitat. Then, you have a series of robots that the astronauts will be using to expand search perimeter. We may have to do it in stages where humans get down on the ground, live in a particular area, begin to become acclimated, and then begin to really start a daily vigil of work.

I envision that we would explore Mars in that you'll have one location like a station, and we'll talk together after a number of these things are done. We have a string of bases, and after a little while sending people to stay, we can build, in our time, the first human settlement on a new world.

There's nothing in this that is fundamentally beyond technology. All it takes is some focus, through a little bit of moxie. We can do this!