Since the dawn of space travel, scientists and astronauts romanticized about Mars being the “next Earth.” Now, humankind is more than capable to produce the technology needed to send a few select astronauts to colonize the Red Planet. The question is:  should we?  

For decades, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and their partners have been studying Mars with rovers, orbiters, and landers. Curiosity, a rover launched by NASA, arrived on Mars on August 5th, 2012 to study the environment of Mars. This technology has dramatically increased our knowledge about this planet, and has provided a solid foundation towards understanding Mars.

NASA has already begun their journey to Mars and intends to send people by the decade 2030. NASA and its partners have been constructing a three phase plan to ensure a future frontier for humanity.  The plan passes through three thresholds:  Earth Reliant, Proving Ground, and Earth Independent.

Earth Reliant is the first step to colonizing Mars. Focused on research aboard the ISS (international space station), NASA is testing technologies that advances human health and researches performances that will help with deep-space, long-duration missions. A few more missions being conducted in this stage are:  Human health and behavioral research, material flammability tests, extravehicular operations, environmental control and life support systems, and 3-D printing.

Proving Ground is the next, more intense stage of the three phase project. In this stage, NASA intends to learn how to conduct complex operations in a deep space environment that will eventually allow crews to return to Earth in only a matter of days. Primarily operating in cislunar space (the region between Earth and the Moon), they will advance and confirm skills required for human exploration and life on Mars.  

The last stage, Earth Independant, builds upon what NASA and partners have learned on the ISS and in cislunar space.  They eventually want to be able to live and work in temporary space habitats that support human life for years, but with only routine maintenance. Other projects needed for life on Mars are harvesting Martian resources (to create fuel, water, oxygen), and creating advanced communication systems that relay data from science and exploration excursions with a only a 20-minute delay.

There are about a million reasons why we shouldn't go to mars. Failure is foreseeable in just about every stage, it’ll cost billions of dollars, and astronauts may die pioneering Mars, but to them, it’s an honorable way to die. Likewise, there’s about a million reason that we should go to Mars. Sending a manned mission to Mars not only shows our human capabilities to capture those decade long curiosities of the red planet, but shows triumph in our technologies to secure human existence.

There will always be that pull, that unknown, that anticipation of adventure that drives humanity to seek new frontiers. Robert Zubrin, president of nonprofit organization, The Mars Society, said not so long ago, “We are far closer today to sending humans to Mars than we were to sending men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later.”  Humankind is on a journey, an endeavour we would be crazy to pass up. In the next few decades, all of our fantasies of Mars can be real. We have the plans, we have the technology, all we have to do is go.