One way to get to Mars faster would be, according to a new NASA hypothesis, to exploit the asteroids, hooking one and decreasing the travel time (about nine months at normal things) and therefore the amount of cosmic radiation to which the astronauts would be subjected. More practicable, however, is to use SpaceX’s Starlink, with all the problems that the journey will entail.
What puzzles me is all this obsession with Mars. It was a good time: from an ancient divinity, when the sky was full of divinities, to when Schiapparelli, in 1877, published a detailed map of the Martian soil and due to a translation error the “canals” became artificial structures, and the myth of the Martians was born . Now we know that there are no more Martians, but we have sent very sophisticated probes, robots, rovers that take photographs, shoot videos, analyze the soil in search of bacterial life forms (having to be careful not to bring them ourselves, in the meantime, which is why it must be all carefully sterilized before being launched to the red planet). This all makes sense.
Conversely, the idea of transferring humanity to Mars seems very far-fetched to me, or rather in the space of probabilities that will concern us very little. It is a cold desert without oxygen, without water, a planet without a magnetic field and with an atmosphere that does not protect from cosmic radiation, in comparison moving into Chernobyl is a luxury. Getting there by spaceship or by clinging to an asteroid doesn’t seem like the point, the problem is making it livable. In technical terms “terraform” it.
I mean, we want to terraform Mars, and we can’t reduce CO2 emissions on Earth, which we’re slowly marsforming.
There will be the first man on Mars, sooner or later, although the date continues to be moved (now to 2027, don’t believe it). I imagine the first astronaut to land, what can he say? “One small step for a man, one big step for humanity, but here is the same crap we saw in thousands of photos, guys.”