A manned mission to Mars is closer than ever

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former space shuttle commander, said that the dream of sending a manned mission to planet Mars is closer to reality than ever before.

“We are farther down the path to sending humans to Mars than at any point in NASA’s history,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said at an event last week, according to Space.com. “We have a lot of work to do to get humans to Mars, but we’ll get there.”

Some of this work includes developing a capsule called Orion and the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket to help get astronauts to deep-space destinations. Orion and the SLS are scheduled to fly together for the first time, on an unmanned test flight, in 2018.

The next Mars rover, planned for a 2020 launch, will carry the Mars Oxygen ISRU experiment. MOXIE, as it’s known, will take carbon dioxide out of the thin Martian atmosphere and produce oxygen, the space agency said.

“We’re going to make oxygen on another planet — the first time ever to make oxygen on another planet,” said NASA deputy administrator Dava Newman, according to The Space Reporter. “These experiments — they’re real, they’re here.”