Mars is a difficult target despite its proximity to Earth, and establishing whether life ever
existed on Mars is one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time.
Only roughly 20 out of 49 missions have succeeded in reaching Mars as of December 2020. All
these failures were attempts by newbies or early endeavors.
In 2016, the Schiaparelli Mars Explorer of the European Space Agency (ESA) crashed on
the surface of Mars. In addition, continued technical challenges have pushed ESA and its
Russian partner Roscosmos to postpone its next mission, ExoMars, since 2021.
If all goes according to plan, SpaceX will hit a significant milestone on its journey
to Mars this year. The business is working on a massive rocket called Starship that will
aid in the colonization of Mars and a range of other ambitious exploration projects.
To date, Starship prototypes have only made a few low-altitude jumps from Earth’s surface,
but the vehicle is on track to acquire orbital wings in the near future. Elon Musk is optimistic
that they will get to Mars this year. SpaceX’s Starship will transport people
and cargo to Mars, the Moon, and other deep-space destinations.
The system consists of two components: the Super Heavy first-stage booster and the Starship
upper-stage spacecraft. The Super Heavy and the Starship are built
to be fully and rapidly reusable, a cost-cutting innovation that Musk and SpaceX think will
transform spaceflight and exploration. If all goes well, each Starship vehicle will
be able to launch from Earth’s surface every six to eight hours, and each Super Heavy will
be able to launch every hour or so on missions delivering up to 150 tons of payload to orbit.
With such high flight rates, per-mission costs would be drastically reduced.
China plans to launch its first crewed expedition to Mars in 2033, followed by regular follow-up
missions, as part of a long-term strategy to establish a permanently inhabited base
on Mars and extract its resources. After China landed a robotic rover on Mars,
the ambitious plan, which would intensify a race with the US to plant humans on Mars,
was revealed in detail for the first time. Prior to the crewed trips, China will deploy
robots to Mars to investigate potential sites for the base and develop systems to gather
resources, such as extracting water beneath the surface, producing oxygen on-site, and
generating electricity. China’s Mars plan foresees fleets of spacecraft
shuttling between Earth and Mars, as well as massive resource development.
In addition to typical chemical propellants, spaceships would have to tap energy emitted
by nuclear processes in the form of heat and electricity to reduce travel time.
China would have to complete round trips that would take a few hundred days to accomplish.
Around 2030, China plans to establish a base at the Moon’s south pole and send robotic
expeditions to asteroids and Jupiter. The European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s
Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, inked a formal agreement to collaborate on the ExoMars mission.
The spacecraft was to launch this year, but it seems like it will probably be delayed.
This is due to the current war between Russia and Ukraine, and the resulting sanctions imposed
by the ESA’s member states. The ExoMars program, which consists of two
missions, aims to discover if there has ever been any form of life on Mars.
In 2016, the program was officially launched. The second leg was supposed to launch in September
this year, but it is highly unlikely to happen before the end of the year.
The second mission will launch a rover from Kazakhstan that will carry a drill and other
exobiology and geochemistry equipment. Exobiology and geochemistry are fields concerned
with the search for life beyond Earth and the chemical makeup of Earth's rocks and minerals,
respectively. The race between several countries and private
companies, however, is far from over. SpaceX, China, and Russia aren’t the only ones who
want to explore Mars. Countries such as the United Arab Emirates
and India, as well as USA’s space agency, NASA, have plans to travel to Mars. Now, all
we have to do is wait to see what they discover on Mars.