MARS ON EARTH

In 2019, China’s space agency successfully landed the first spacecraft on the far side of the moon. NASA plans to again put humans on the Moon as part of a strategy to reach Mars by the 2030s. A flight to Mars will take up to 333 days, and will carry an international, mixed-gender crew of scientists on a spaceship built with an intricate array of public and private technology from numerous nations. It is a new space race, but the end result this time around will be collaborative.

Today, there are several billionaires in the private space business , but this project is interested in the lesser-known figures in contemporary space exploration. For the past three years I have been closely following advancements in space research in China, USA, Japan, India, and Europe, by space architects, doctors, farmers, engineers, as well as homemade rocket-builders, and startups developing sustainable space habitats. I have visited C-Space, an analogue Mars base in China’s Gobi Desert, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, the Lunares base in Poland, and AEL company in Tokyo which has developed a satellite that can create an artificial shooting star.

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