• Question: Why haven't people been to Mars yet rather than going to the Moon all the time?

    Asked by AmethystGlimmer to Andrea, Charlie 🚀, Col Op, Kirsty, Vinita on 13 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by 754tch52.
    • Photo: Kirsty Lindsay

      Kirsty Lindsay answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      Unfortunately we don’t get to go to the Moon all the time- 12 Apollo astronauts got to go in the 1960-1970’s, but no one has been back since.

      Going to another planet- even a little one like the Moon which is quite close, is very hard- it’s dangerous and expensive and takes lots and lots of people, time and stuff.

      Mars is much further away from the Moon, and the flight is a lot more dangerous as the astronauts are outside the protective bubble of the Earth’s magnetosphere ( the magnetic field that makes compasses point north, the ISS actually flying inside this field which keeps it safe) this means they might get hit with solar flares or cosmic radiation. These is very fast moving particles which are quite damaging if they hit you or your computer. The astronauts would also be floating around for a long time and they would get quite weak- at the moment we don’t know enough to keep them safe and well on that kind of flight.

      At the moment flying to Mars is considered to dangerous and too expensive for people, so only robotic probes are sent. I hope this will change in the future when we know a lot more 🙂

    • Photo: Andrea Boyd

      Andrea Boyd answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      You can reach the moon with 3days space travel but Mars takes about a year travel if you go the fast way and you only have a chance at that once every two years! The radiation level for humans on that trip though is deadly so need to work on better protection. There was an experiment called Mars500 where they tested a crew locked underground as if they were on a trip to Mars and it went very well. The ESA participants are both my awesome colleagues – one works on the Moonwalker project and the other does Crew Support and spacefood for the ISS.

      That said, we haven’t had any humans on the Moon since the 70s and no one’s been to Mars yet. ESA’s Moonvillage plans and SpaceX’s Mars plans will change that 😀 We are already building Moon training facilities at the European Astronaut Centre and have a team working on storing energy with lunar regolith, 3D printing with lunar regolith, growing crops in Moon greenhouses and more.

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