NASA To Put Up Mars Space Station Soon, First To Send Manned Mission To The Red Planet

By 2028, being a certified Martian is not science fiction anymore as Lockheed Martin, an aerospace company, proposed to NASA to build a space station to our red rocky neighbor, Mars. This was made possible by the series of unmanned space explorations conducted by NASA through the years. This time NASA and Lockheed Martin, together with several international partners and private industries, would like to conduct a comprehensive exploration to the hostile planet.

According to the report by Space.com in relation to Mars Base Camp, NASA is developing a capsule called Orion and a huge space launch system to launch the astronauts to Mars. The plan is to build  massive central space station made up of two Orions with two science laboratories.

The team will consist of 6 crew members who are experts in different fields and trained to become astronauts. This way they could maximize every potential information they can retrieve from the mission as compared to sending astronauts with a little training in other science fields. They crew will sign up to a yearlong exploration program to conduct further analyses of samples in the rocky red planet. Aside from the planet, a month long study will also be devoted to the twin moons of Mars--Phobos and Deimos.

It is estimated that the funding for the entire exploration will cost $50 billion to $80 billion. Steve Jolly,chief engineer at Lockheed Martin said and I quote ""We envision a series of missions using the same architecture, and the next one, or the one right after that, goes to the [Martian] surface," he said. "We're not ready to talk about that today, but we wanted to make sure that the community listening realizes this wasn't a one-off concept." The multibillion space exploration hopes to gain fruitful information about Mars and a better understanding of the space beyond our world.