Why the First Humans on Mars Will Never Return
A one-way ticket to the red planet. No return ship waiting in orbit. No fuel to come back. The first astronauts who land on Mars will die there. NASA knows it. SpaceX knows it. The volunteers signed up anyway.The physics of returning from Mars is brutal. A round trip requires launching a fully fueled rocket from Earth, landing it on Mars, then launching another rocket from the Martian surface back to Earth. The fuel alone would weigh over 600 tons—impossible with current propulsion technology. The alternative is in-situ resource utilization, manufacturing methane fuel from Martian ice and…
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