Folks on Mars is still quite a ways away. Not impossible or pointless by any means but it will require significant advancements in many domains before we can really do it safely.
Folks on Mars is still quite a ways away. Not impossible or pointless by any means but it will require significant advancements in many domains before we can really do it safely.
As an aside, this is why the original Moon missions used simple aluminum. One of the typical angles people who don't think we landed on the Moon used is that to safely get through the Van Allen Belts we would have needed massive lead shielding on the craft, when in reality it was shielded by a pretty thin layer of aluminum, precisely to minimize secondary radiation. If you put that thick lead shielding on the craft that people intuitively think you'd need, it very well could have killed the astronauts.